Today’s conversation: We wrap up the year on People vs Algorithms with the PvA Awards.
This is the final issue of The Rebooting for 2025. Thank you for reading and listening this year. I have ambitious plans for 2026, with more in-person gatherings a particular focus. I also want to expand the purview of The Rebooting to go beyond the institutional media sector to examine the niche models that are working and the challenges for global businesses operating in a decentralized information ecosystem.
We are kicking off the year with a pair of activations in Las Vegas during the Consumer Electronics Show.
On Jan 6 at 5:30pm, The Rebooting is partnering with Index Exchange to host Innovators Unscripted, a candid conversation with the changemakers who are shaping the agentic future of advertising. I’ll be joined by Index Exchange CEO Andrew Casale and Dentsu chief trading officer Ant McDonagh. We will have cocktails, snacks and mingling from the Index Exchange suite at the Cosmopolitan. Please register your interest for one of the spots.
On Jan 7 at 11am, The Rebooting is partnering with EX.CO to host a series of rapid-fire conversations about what to expect in the year ahead across AI, streaming and the creator economy. I’ll be joined by EX.CO CEO Tom Pachys, Vox Media president Ryan Pauley, Uber had of ad products Manah Mittal, Fuse chief business officer Patrick Courney and more. Please register your interest for one of the few spots we have available.
Hope to see you in Las Vegas.
Email engagement report for Q3 2025
Curious about how your team’s email marketing efforts compare to others in the media industry? Each quarter, Omeda releases aggregated, anonymized data from client emails sent from our platform so you can understand how your emails are performing. We analyzed 1.98 billion emails sent in Q3 2025 to bring you the latest email engagement insights and metrics for media operators and publishers.
Covered in this report:
Email marketing benchmarks for emails sent in Q3 2025
Performance benchmarks by email type: newsletters, promotional/ads, events, surveys/research
Advanced click bot suppression numbers
Unpacking rising unsubscribe rates
This week’s People vs Algorithms pulls back to examine how quickly the media terrain is shifting as algorithms become the primary editors of modern life. We get into the rise of the clippers, the collapse of shared context, and why the unit economics of attention are rewarding fragmentation over cohesion. Troy lays out his case for why the “algorithm as gatekeeper” is the real story of the year, while Alex argues that the nerds officially won 2025. I try to connect this to the broader sovereignty theme: the widening gap between high-agency operators who can adapt to the machine environment and institutions still running 2015 playbooks. We also talk about prediction markets’ rebranding of gambling as epistemology, the industrialization of media into content slurry, and the counter-reaction emerging around human presence and craft. It’s a tour through the information space as it exists now — open, chaotic, and increasingly shaped by automated intermediaries.
The Information Space in 2025
The institutional media sector’s decline came into focus this year. influence continued to leak to the fringes. Individuals continued to claw attention from mainstream media. Even the late-year flurry of attention for the Olivia Nuzzi drama and Bari Weiss’s hostile takeover of CBS News were a blast from the past. All this over a book that sold 1,200 copies and a ham-fisted town hall that drew the audience of a modest YouTube show? Here are the macro trends that shaped the decentralized Information Space in 2025. Send me your feedback: [email protected].
The algorithm as gatekeeper. The algorithm has emerged from a necessary sorting mechanism to an all-powerful hegemon. The atomization of digital media means that rather than use to sort links, the algorithm is fragmenting media into bite-sized chunks that are matched to individual interests. The rise of the clippers in 2025 highlighted just how much the media environment has shifted to a unit economics game. For professional publishers, the strategy shift is to smaller, more duable audiences, only the reality of most of these businesses is that they are just as dependent on algorithmically mediated distribution via channels like Google Discover. In 2026, expect publishers to increasinbly bifurcate between those who embrace algorithmic middlemen and those who seek to establish their own degree of sovereignty through direct relationships.
The end of shared context. The rebranding of gambling as prediction markets will go down with rechristening direct marketing as performance marketing. These prediction markets are in many ways the tech response to the collapse of shared facts. Engineering Brain sees “truth” as an engineering problem that simply requires more data. What can go wrong with financializing every human decision? The Tech Right couldn’t stand the idea of elite gatekeepers, particularly if they went to good schools in the Northeast and studied humanities. The resulting Information Space, under the dominance of tech platforms, has created incentives to drift to the conspiratorial extremes. This year saw the start of a civil war among Extremely Online right wing infopreneurs. I’ve been struck by how formerly mainstream conservative news figures like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson have become more strident and more fringe. This is not a change in heart; it’s attention discovery in the Information Space bazaar. In 20226, new efforts will emerge to marginalize the Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens crowd, only they will founder because institutional safeguards were toppled.
Synthetic-driven repricing. Say this for tech: It’s historically almost always deflationary. Marc Andreessen like to make this essential point. Compare the cost of tech goods and services over the years to, say, higher education and health services, and you’ll be ready to give the keys over to Silicon Valley. This year saw the anticipated “tsunami of crap,” only the flood of synthetic AI-created content landed more with a dud. The extra fingers problem has been mostly solved, only most AI content feels off. Bosses get excited by the idea that a robot will write content marketing emails. That’s fine. The AI image generation engines are fine. The collective output of these machines is mostly unimpressive. Merriam Webster named “slop” the word of the year. This year marked three years since the release of ChatGPT. That’s enough time for a reputation to settle in, and Silicon Valley made a major marketing faux pas in focusing on nerdy and esoteric measurements of Artificial General Intelligence rather than real world applications that address real problems that real people have. Instead, the tech is synonymous with job loss fears and goofy memes. In 2026, expect the predicted AI bubble bursting to be more of a deflation, as the tech continues to advance and a tempering of the animal spirits brings needed focus on solving real problems and driving productivity growth.
The triumph of narrative. Silicon Valley likes to rediscover basic things every now and again, give them a new name and bask in their brilliance. This year, Engineering Brain awkwardly embraced humanistic values they’ve worked so hard to undermine. Vibes became a catchall for the unpredictable ways culture moves that has little to do with the right-brain ethos of tech. Storytelling is suddenly a competitive advantage as “intelligence” becomes commoditized. The year marked tech companies fully embracing being media companies themselves. After false starts to operationalize the Go Direct mantra, they made real traction in developing their own ecosystem of owned media outlets like Andreeesen’s podcast network, as well as an array of preferred media like TBPN, All-In, Dwarkesh Patel, Founders and more. None of us had free snacks until Silicon Valley decided the office should be more like kindergarten. The same will be at play here in 2026, as corporations pattern match and follow Silicon Valley’s lead.
The great retreat. In March, Jonathan Haidt published “The Anxious Generation,” presenting the case that childhood has been irrevocably changed with smart phones and virtual interactions replacing real world connection – with disastrous consequences. The book was part of an overall reckoning that taps into a ground truth: An elite consensus emerged that our fractured attention spans and dopamine-driven attention economy are public health issues. The internet has mostly ceased to be fun. It’s more of a chore, an adversarial environment of conflict, anxiety, outrage and misinformation. Moves to ban phones in schools gained, and Australia became the first country to ban social media use by children. Being Extremely Online again returned be being Extremely Uncool. In 2026, expect more grassroots efforts to unplug from the increasingly synthetic and manipulative to embrace real world and tangible human experiences.
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