Hey, I’m Isaac 👋 I founded Pistachio, a growth agency working with B2B brands like Atono and Clay to build trust, relationships and loyalty with their current and future customers.
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The evolution of media
When the printing press was invented around 1450, there were roughly 30,000 books in all of Europe. More information than that will be published online before you finish reading this article.
For most of the almost six centuries between those two facts, controlling the flow of information was the most valuable position in business.
When the channel was everything
Before the printing press, information moved at the speed of a person. Ideas spread through word of mouth and hand-copied manuscripts, and what you knew was determined almost entirely by who you knew. Gutenberg's printing press, around 1450, changed the volume of what could be reproduced. Within 50 years, the number of books in Europe had grown from thousands to millions. A single press could produce in a day what a scribe produced in a year.
But print still required physical delivery. Information was now reproducible, but it moved at the speed of a horse or a ship. Centuries later, radio and then television changed that. For the first time, information could travel at the speed of light, and whoever owned that distribution infrastructure held something extraordinarily valuable.
The commercial logic was airtight. Every company in every industry had no alternative but to go through these gatekeepers to reach audiences. Brands paid, publishers profited. The model sustained long-form investigations, foreign correspondents, and expensive editorial operations because both information and distribution commanded genuine value.
Two complementary areas of value were locked in simultaneously. Audiences depended on these channels to access information. Advertisers depended on them to reach those audiences.
The internet broke the infrastructure moat
Then came the internet, and the cost of publishing dropped to basically zero. Anyone with a laptop could reach a global audience. From 2002-2005, the ‘blogosphere’ grew by 30x. The infrastructure barrier had evaporated.
This was where content marketing started emerging as a discipline because any company could now publish directly, without paying for placement in someone else's channel.
The remaining challenge was reach. Building an audience still required SEO, backlinks, editorial authority, and years of consistency.
I used to lead paid subscriptions at Mamamia. For those outside Australia, Mamamia is the country's largest independent media brand. They reach around 7 million people monthly and have a team of about 150 people. Mia Freedman started it as a blog in 2007, from a laptop in her living room.The remaining challenge was reach. Building an audience still required SEO, backlinks, editorial authority, and years of consistency.
I used to lead paid subscriptions at Mamamia. For those outside Australia, Mamamia is the country's largest independent media brand. They reach around 7 million people monthly and have a team of about 150 people. Mia Freedman started it as a blog in 2007, from a laptop in her living room.
Certainly never thought this photo would see the light of day.
When the flagship podcast released a new episode, it was essentially guaranteed to hit a certain number of listeners immediately, because of the infrastructure they’d compounded over years. Other shows producing content that was just as good, if not better, still couldn’t get close. The old distribution moat had simply translated from broadcast frequencies into audience databases.
But inside the business, the model was already showing signs of disruption. Running subscriptions meant I got to understand more than what the audience would click on, but what they’d actually pay for. The answer was, not much. The one exception was content directly attached to Mia Freedman herself. What converted subscribers was their relationship with her specific voice.
The advertising partnerships pointed to the same conclusion. The premium product was host-read ads, where a specific person delivered the message in their own voice. What brands were increasingly paying for was borrowed trust and association. The distribution channel was a secondary benefit.
The algorithm broke whatever was left
People think TikTok’s major innovation was vertical video. Every major platform copied their format. Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Snapchat Spotlight, even LinkedIn launched a Video tab. But that’s all surface level. TikTok’s real innovation was the For You page. It was the very first feed that showed content based on what users engage with rather than who they follow, building around an interest graph instead of a social graph. An account with 50 followers could reach 5 million viewers overnight. Distribution was already free, but it became targeted and instant.
Every brand with a content team suddenly had access to the same infrastructure. The gap between a well-resourced media publisher, a company marketing team, and an average teenager had suddenly narrowed to almost nothing.
The knock-on effect completely reshaped audience behaviour. Follower counts stopped reliably predicting reach. The compounding advantage of building a large following, the thing that had made years of Mamamia's infrastructure defensible, started to erode. Younger audiences began saying "I trust my algorithm" instead of curating accounts to follow.
I moved from Mamamia to be Head of Growth at The Daily Aus, a media startup built in this new age. Founded in 2017 as purely an Instagram page, without even a website, it proved that an algorithm alone could deliver information to a large, loyal audience at zero distribution cost.
Then, Meta turned off news in Canada. There’d been a lot of tension, so when they threatened to do the same in Australian it wasn’t a surprise. But it changed a strategic question into an existential one. We were looking at a potential 50% revenue cut overnight, from a decision made entirely outside our control.
Well before Meta made that call, we'd been building channels we actually owned. Newsletter became a priority, and by the time I left that list had grown to around 200,000.
But that is what a “borrowed” or “rented” audience means in practice. Social media algorithms made free, targeted reach available to everyone and anyone, which also meant it could be revoked at the platform's discretion.
This was people in Canada saw then visiting our Instagram page.
If everyone has access to it and no one controls it, you cannot build lasting value on top of it. The algorithm era both democratised distribution and stripped it of value, all in one move.
The next disruption is already starting
The scarcity era lasted more than 400 years, from Gutenberg to the internet. The internet era lasted roughly 30 years before algorithms arrived. The algorithm era lasted about a decade. Each disruption arrived faster than the last, and the next one is already here.
It’s still early, because as fast as technology can change, consumer behaviour change is always much slower. Most people still go looking for information, like we’ve done since before the printing press.
Between May 2024 and May 2025, the share of searches that end without anyone clicking through to a website jumped from 56% to 69%. Since Google’s AI Overview appears at the top of a results page, 93% of searches now end without a click. Just 1% of users click the sources an AI Overview cites. Google referral traffic to publishers fell 33% globally in 2025 and 60% for smaller publishers. CNN is down 27%, Business Insider 55%, Forbes roughly 50%. NPR has called it an "extinction-level event".
Media publishers feel this most directly, but any marketing team relying on content to drive inbound is seeing the same impacts. B2B content marketing was built on the assumption that creating useful things would bring the right people to you. Now, AI is answering the questions. People don’t need to come to you anymore.
The only moat that compounds
What this all means is a change in what content is actually for. Reaching people was always a means to an end, building some kind of association, trust, and relationship with them. AI is removing the means, but it’s leaving the end.
Both sides of media's value have now collapsed.
On the audience side, information is infinite and frictionless. Accessing a specific source carries no inherent value when any question can be answered without going anywhere.
On the commercial side, brands can reach audiences directly. The gatekeeper premium is gone, and what the host-read ad was already pointing toward a decade ago is now the rule. Brands are paying for association with a trusted voice.
What remains, in both cases, is the emotional layer. It is what makes someone choose to read your content instead of having it summarised, or preference your products when brand choice has become an outsourceable decision.
That is brand equity. It is the only thing that compounds rather than commoditises, because it is built on depth rather than breadth.
All this media talk might have you thinking this doesn’t apply to you. But today, every company competes for attention, runs content channels, and operates in the media business whether or not it intended to. Any business relying on expertise or proprietary knowledge as its primary differentiator, with no emotional layer underneath, is only one capable AI model away from being irrelevant.
The companies that thrive through each disruption are the ones their audiences actually want to hear from. It’s a test every marketing team can run right now. Would your audience seek you out if the algorithm stopped surfacing you?
After a career watching every distribution layer get disrupted and devalued, I started Pistachio with a clear answer to that question. The brands that invest in earning their audience's attention will compound through every disruption that follows.
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