Content as Community

So, are existing publishers doomed?

Well by-and-large yes, but that’s because they have been doomed for a long time. People using AI instead of Google — or Google using AI to provide answers above links — make the long-term outlook for advertising-based publishers worse, but that’s an acceleration of a demise that has been in motion for a long time.

To that end, the answer for publishers in the age of AI is no different than it was in the age of Aggregators: build a direct connection with readers. This, by extension, means business models that maximize revenue per user, which is to say subscriptions (the business model that undergirds this site, and an increasing number of others).

What I think is intriguing, however, is the possibility to go back to the future. Once upon a time publishing made countries; the new opportunity for publishing is to make communities. This is something that AI, particularly as it manifests today, is fundamentally unsuited to: all of that content generated by LLMs is individualized; what you ask, and what the AI answers, is distinct from what I ask, and what answers I receive. This is great for getting things done, but it’s useless for creating common ground.

Stratechery, on the other hand, along with a host of other successful publications, has the potential to be a totem pole around which communities can form.

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The digital environment, thanks in part to the economics of targeted advertising, the drive for engagement, and most recently, the mechanisms of token prediction, is customized to the individual; as LLMs consume everything, including advertising-based media — which, by definition, is meant to be mass market — the hunger for something shared is going to increase.

We already have a great example of this sort of shared experience in sports. Sports, for most people, is itself a form of content: I don’t play football or baseball or basketball or drive an F1 car, but I relish the fact that people around me watch the same games and races that I do, and that that shared experience gives me a reason to congregate and commune with others, and is an ongoing topic of discussion.

Indeed, this desire for a communal topic of interest is probably a factor in the inescapable reach of politics, particularly what happens in Washington D.C.: of course policies matter, but there is an aspect of politics’ prominence that I suspect is downstream of politics as entertainment, and a sorting mechanism for community.

In short, there is a need for community, and I think content, whether it be an essay, a podcast, or a video, can be artifacts around which communities can form and sustain themselves, ultimately to the economic benefit of the content creator. There is, admittedly, a lot to figure out in terms of that last piece, but when you remember that content made countries, the potential upside is likely quite large indeed.