The connection economy

At the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month, The Rebooting partnered with EX.CO for a series of video podcasts on macro trends for 2026.

See all the videos on The Rebooting’s new YouTube channel. 

In a recent LinkedIn post, Sean Griffey, co-founder and ex-CEO of Industry Dive, proposed a successor to the pageview economy that dominated consumer digital media for a generation: the connection economy. 

The connection economy prioritizes audience relationships over ad impressions. The last generation of media was often operated at a distance. I often hear grousing from industry veterans about newsrooms tethered to their desks. Metrics are important, but looking at dashboards is not going to develop the kinds of relationships where value is created. Doing things that don’t scale has moved from a necessary evil to a fundamental building block of sustainable media businesses.

Yesterday morning, The Rebooting gathered executives from a dozen leading publishers, supported by our partners at Omeda, for a breakfast salon to discuss how they’re adapting their strategies to benefit from the connection economy. We hold these salons under the Chatham House Rule. 

Based on what I heard, I see the connection economy at play across several nodes.

Putting audience first. Publishers can no longer treat audiences as natural resources to be exploited. I sometimes go through demos of new tech designed to drive engagement on webpages. I want to be optimistic about these tools, some of which are very clever, only when they are implemented outside a demo, they will join an absolute riot on publisher webpages. These junked up pages betray a prioritization that leaves the audience several spots from the top.

Several participants described intentionally stepping back from aggressive page-level optimization, not because it doesn’t work in the short term, but because it corrodes the relationship they’re trying to build. 

“It’s really damaging to just chase the things that happen to do well with a broader population,” noted one participant.

Build direct connections. You have no shot at connecting to an audience through third-party traffic. The ComScore game ended long ago, and while publishers need to continue playing the traffic game for their legacy businesses, they will need to build out their email, app and other less intermediated connections.

That means value is shifting from clicks to relationships. In many models, the gravity of economic value is shifting from “what you know” to “who you know,” and the interplay between the two. Few publishers will be able to simply rest on their expertise alone. They must build audience relationships.

“It’s about how do we get people into the ecosystem and how do we identify the high value people from the people in the ecosystem and get them down to the event side,” said one B2B publisher. “That’s where all of the value is to us.”

Simplify the business. Many publishers are trying to manage declines in legacy businesses while building new businesses – and doing it with a more with less mandate from their owners. I’ve noticed over the years that we would often have very vibrant meetings about what new things to do rather than meetings about what to kill. Many publishers still have an identity crisis of not knowing who they are, or having conflicting mandates. Grow pageviews but also grow subscriptions. Maintain programmatic but also build a new events business. Loyalty is critical but we can’t forget Google Discover.

This shows up in an inability of organizations to coalesce around a North Star metric, whether average revenue per user or lifetime value per user. 

“[Leadership] couldn’t finish speaking the sentence, ‘We’re not going to focus on pages anymore,’ before bitching about [traffic declines] in that exact same breath. They couldn’t just pick a lane and stick with it.”

The pivot to talent. Like Sean, I dislike the creator economy term, which gained traction to separate OnlyFans models and Instagram influencers from the chaotic assortment of individual-dependent publishers. What’s clear is individuals have an upper hand in the marketplace by naturally establishing connections with the audience that are stronger than faceless brands that have seen their trust erode for years. 

One news publisher related how it is explicit with new journalist hires that they are expected to be comfortable on video and at events. 

“It creates a very good connection with the audience because they're used to seeing them talk,” the exec said. “They want to read their stuff then.”

Much of the above, I have to admit, is common sense. Media has been and will continue to be an execution game. These businesses are not like tech startups looking to invent a completely new way of accomplishing a task. As Sean has astutely pointed out with The Washington Post’s travails, there is the clear lack of an overarching strategy in its floundering but also an alarming lack of attention to details that simply can’t exist in this environment. If you cannot execute on the details, your strategy is irrelevant. Send me a note with feedback by hitting reply.

Send me your feedback by hitting reply or emailing me at [email protected]

For partnership information, see how we work with partners.