The most transformative consumer revolutions rarely begin with industry leaders. They erupt when people reject entrenched systems and get a taste of something better: we don’t want to pay $20 for a CD, compete for a taxi, wait three days for a bank transfer. These acts of refusal trigger not just destruction, but rebirth. Napster didn’t just break music, it led to Spotify. Uber didn’t just disrupt taxis, it redefined mobility. Coinbase is in the midst of seriously challenging the banking stack. These weren’t just new tools but rather rewrites of what consumers value; convenience, agency, affordability. 

What comes next is always shaped by how people want to engage, not how companies wish they would.

The same arc is repeating with today’s digital media. Every time the industry falls on its sword, it searches for a way to underwrite the loss, and retrofit strategy to survival. Craigslist gutted classifieds, Search commoditized information, Social fragmented attention, and Creators pulled power to the edges. Still, publishers adapted by retooling SEO, building brands on platforms they didn’t own, learning to meet users “where they are.” But AI presents a different kind of challenge. Platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity don’t just shift distribution, they erase the path home. No one is clicking the source links. There is no user journey to optimize. The very model of media as a destination is cooked (for most).

This is the slow death of the link economy which was a foundational shift in how content was surfaced, consumed, and valued. I believe ChatGPT resembles Wikipedia in its structure in that it synthesizes answers, gives context in citations, and even produces an original tone. But like Wikipedia, I believe it’s going to generate minimal outbound traffic. Now scale that 100x. The difference? The online publisher business was built on monetizing traffic. But what if traffic is no longer the asset? What if provenance, not reach, becomes the metric of value? We’re moving from a world of distribution to one of extraction. The platform doesn’t need to send the reader to you, it only needs to reference you.

The media business has always been forced to adapt to new forms: print to web, web to social, social to mobile. But the AI wave isn’t just a new medium. It’s a new mode of consumption. The under-discussed truth is that AI isn’t just changing how we create, it’s changing how and where people consume. It’s not just less traffic. It’s fewer interfaces, fewer clicks, fewer moments of active engagement. In this, you can imagine that the future of news may not be a homepage, but rather an agent you speak to, that you prompt, that knows your context and helps you reason through what matters. Not passive scrolling, but active conversation. A UI shift that can be considered as big as the browser or mobile. 

So what now? The short-term win is figuring out monetization in this new environment like licensing deals, API integrations, maybe even embedding agents within publisher products. But the long-term win? That comes from leaning into the new consumer behavior. Maybe it looks like a Spotify for text based media: a subscription layer that pays writers and publishers by the amount they are consumed (see: stablecoins). Maybe it’s a new form of embedded provenance, where value accrues to original reporting in ways we haven’t yet built. I firmly believe the next frontier of consumption enables users to choose their own adventure. No longer having publishers recommend and navigate for them, but agency for them to dig deeper and get informed in any direction they so choose. The hard truth is that most publishers won’t make this leap. They’ll go from destinations to distributors to wholesale content providers, whether they choose to or not.

But for those willing to experiment, to build past the link, I really believe a new media blueprint is emerging. One rooted not in traffic or pages, but utility. The next revolution isn’t just about what gets created. It’s about who provides the experience that consumers are asking for, and acting on.