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Today: With social networking deader than dead, analog media has an opening. Hear me out.
Why TIME’s email engagement is soaring
TIME’s newsletters reach millions of readers every week. But until recently, they were stuck with clunky workflows, limited insights, and flat engagement. After migrating 13 newsletters and millions of subscribers to beehiiv (with zero downtime) things changed fast. Open rates on “Inside TIME” jumped 63.8%. Click through rates across their portfolio increased to 11.7%. Editors now publish faster, with better tools and real-time insights. TIME proves that even the most established media brands can evolve and thrive when they own their email strategy.
“People don’t want AI-generated content experiences”
One of the oddities of modern NYC is the lines. There are queues of young people all over swathes of the Lower East Side, Nolita and Soho. These lines used to be for merch drops at Kith or Supreme, but are more likely now to be for a cupcake or some kind of Instagrammable matcha drink. Mimi’s had a line of 75 on Saturday. Somehow, Blank Street has a rope line and raised at $650 million to be a “daily luxury” brand. We didn’t take the cronut phenomenon seriously enough. It was a warning.
There’s a jumble of reasons behind this strange culture of waiting in a city with near limitless options that aggressively brands itself as impatient. Underpinning it is a desire to get out from behind screens, even if the outing comes with social proof that can be leveraged on Instagram and TikTok.
AI’s impact on the economy has vindicated economists. The tech guys huffed and puffed about widespread job loss while raising money, only to walk those claims back when AI diffused turned out to be far more gradual, as the majority of economists assumed. Sam Altman acknowledged getting this wrong recently, even if he chalked it up to corporate “inertia,” while adding that AI will add value to some sectors like sports and live events.
“The world’s not going to be that different with superintelligence,” he now says. We’ve come a long way from his embrace of AI erotic friends.
The opportunity for analog media is being the gateway to the real world. Building scaled digital content platforms with display advertising as a core business model has failed. Very analog businesses like music festivals, corporate events and movies are seeing growth. Movie attendance bottomed out and is on the rise again – and is being led by young audiences, who are even hitting the theater to see reality TV shows. Hollywood is seeing a mini-boom at the box office as young people return to the theater.
Geoff Schiller is a media veteran, who went from ad sales roles at Hearst to a roster of digital media pureplays, from PopSugar to Group Nine to Vice Media to Vox Media. His prognosis for “legacy” digital media is grim.
“If you have arbitraged your traffic for the last 10 years and now, in a world of Google Zero, that model no longer works, you’re done,” he told me on The Rebooting Show. “And if you don’t have a real community that will seek you out in a direct-to-consumer way, then you’re done.”
Now as CEO of movie theater ad network Screenvision, Geoff is glad to be free of the opacity of digital media in favor of media driven by literal butts in seats.
“All the things that were headwinds for me in my prior life are tailwinds here,” he said. “Our screens are 40 feet to 100 feet tall. They’re clearly in view, it’s a captive audience, they’re 100% non-skippable, and there is no ad fraud because people are paying for tickets.”
Movies make sense to me as a beneficiary of a K-shaped economy. The habit of “little treats” is a trend that will continue, even if wealth continues to pool with older demographics. In this light, waiting in line for a $9 matcha makes much more sense. So does spending $16 on a movie theater ticket to get out with friends.
Weirdly enough, watching a movie in the short-form video era is probably the equivalent of reading a book. Hollywood is having its best year since the pandemic.
“AI is having an opposite reaction where people don’t want AI-generated content experiences,” Geoff said. “They want human activity. Being in a dark room with 300 people watching a Nolan movie, Avengers: Doomsday or Dune is a way to detoxify themselves from that AI of it all.”
We are seeing signs of social networking again moving analog. The legacy social networks have little to do with socializing anymore. They’re mostly short-form entertainment platforms, optimized to deliver jolts of dopamine and in the case of X, cortisol. The need for social networking hasn’t gone away. It’s just retreated to group texts in the service of going into the real world.
“This is no longer social media,” Alex noted on PvA. “It is entertainment with content made for free by a horde of teenagers. There’s nothing social about it. The feeds went from being 90% your friends and family to now maybe it’s like 8% people you know.”
My optimistic view of AI’s impact is it will fully reveal the vacuousness of life spent mostly if not entirely behind a screen. As authentic connection to humans becomes impossible digitally in a sea of bots and AI avatars, people will return to the real world for connection, as the social networking era fades into memory.
Big Tech has left behind social networking in favor of algorithmic entertainment. Connection is moving to smaller networks, group chats and real world communities.
Troy: “Premium moves to more human, harder-to-fake things—to things that are verifiably human: events, tastes, group chats, podcasts, newsletters, all that.”
Me: “Social media failed. We’re coming to terms with that failure every day. It’s now some weird algorithmic machine that is based on manipulation.”
Alex: “The biggest question is whether AI content replaces human content so the platforms don’t have to give anyone a penny or deal with all the bullshit. Once the content is free and generated, a lot of people see this as a surface for advertising. The more content you have, the bigger that surface is.”
To discuss these issues and more, join PvA Field Notes, our social network for those who are connecting the dots of the rapidly changing information ecosystem. Highlights of the week so far:
The NYT’s turning to AI search is unlikely to save the webpage. “Just let me ingest my own news sources with my own paid subs and let these models build a better context around me so it can show me what’s relevant when i ask,” JLW noted.
Why Slack is often an anti-productivity tool
The PE-ification of sports
Making sense of AI’s slow-drip economic reordering
The second-order impacts of anti-AI populism
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