Media trends of 2025

Today’s conversation: Axios media correspondent Sara Fischer and Breaker muckraker Lachlan Cartwright joined me to break down what we learned about the media business in 2025.

The end of the year is a time for rest, reflection and preparing to go to Las Vegas for CES. The Rebooting is holding a pair of gatherings/activations there this year. 

I’ll also be kicking off the TRB Backchannel from CES. This is a way to receive in-the-moment updates via SMS. It’s powered by Subtext, which works with publishers to build direct connection through texting. This is a TRB Pro benefit. To get a preview, sign up for more information about our CES activations and you’ll get the updates of the oddities and scuttlebutt from Vegas.

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The final podcast of the year looks at what 2025 actually meant for the media business. I’m joined by Axios’ Sara Fischer and Breaker founder Lachlan Cartwright to make sense of a year defined by decentralization turning into outright fragmentation. Lachlan talks through the reality of building an independent media product — the stress, the hustle, and why consistency is the only real moat — while Sara maps the bigger forces shaping the industry, from regulatory volatility to a merger cycle that’s dragging Hollywood and Washington into the same frame. We get into the fatigue inside legacy newsrooms, the rise of personality-driven outlets, and why the next chapter is less pure unbundling and more selective rebundling as creators look for infrastructure and institutions look for juice. It’s a snapshot of a business in transition, with the old model fading and the next one still being assembled in real time.

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It wasn’t a dull year, that’s for sure. Trump’s return to office, tariffs, AI mania and Google Zero made for another tumultuous year in a business that is at this point used to navigating massive change. The underlying difference is that, beyond politics or consumer trends, many of the shifts in how media is made, distributed and monetized are structural. In part 1 of my media trends of 2025, I’m taking a lot the media business. In Part 2 on Tuesday, I’ll address the wider Information Space. Send me your feedback to [email protected]. 

The decline of webpages. The webpage was always an awkward artifact of a previous era. The commercial web was designed based on print formats. For most publishers, the atomic unit of what they made was a webpage. It was the center of publisher strategies in the Traffic Era. The game was getting people onto pages and showing them ads, often sourced indirectly through programmatic exchanges. This year marked the acceleration of the end of that model. Webpages are not going away, but they’re becoming more peripheral to publisher strategies as search referrals decline. In 2026, expect more shifts to audio, video and live events.

AI falls flat. AI is in its trough of disillusionment phase, as even leading AI pioneers like Ilya Sutskever lament how large-language models are excelling at beating benchmarks and failing at capturing the same real world impacts. The story is the same at publishers. Early attempts at using AI to provide differentiated user experiences, while laudable, have yet to present a compelling user proposition. The Washington Post’s buggy new AI-driven audio personalization feature highlight the continued tension between journalism’s caution (accuracy is kinda important in this business) with tech’s need to throw pasta against the wall. In 2026, expect more failed experiments but at least a couple tangible advances.

Wholesaling takes hold. Some big publishers were able to strike a smattering of deals with AI companies for access to their content. Publishers continued to battle what they see as bad actors – ahem, Perplexity – and sought leverage in combat with bots. The biggest issue: The lack of buyers. You can’t set up a marketplace unless you have willing buyers, and the incentives right now say why pay for content when you can buy more compute. In 2026, expect Google to finally come up with a sure to be widely criticized framework that will imperfectly compensate publishers.

The end of the Hollywood model. Netflix’s move to buy Warner Bros while leaving aside the cable assets is a landmark in the complete capitulation of the media industry to tech. Control of the interface means control of distribution and therefore the commanding heights of the decentralized media ecosystem. The high-cost Hollywood model is not a good fit for a time when UGC is triumphant. The economics of creator economy output are better. It’s fitting that the Oscars will now be on YouTube. In 2026, expect tech to make further moves to own content assets themselves.

Peak individual. I am a firm believer in the pendulum theory that we frequently see shifts in a new direction that go to an extreme before being corrected. The shift from institutions to individuals is a case in point. The energy of the media business remained concentrated in personalities, creators and small-scale operators. This kind of decentralization – think about how many media newsletters there are – feels untenable or at least unattractive in the long term. In 2026, expect more traction in media collectives that will attempt to find a middle ground between the feral independent path and institutional media structures.

Coming on Tuesday: The macro shifts to the Information Space that accelerated in 2025.

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