Is media continuing to shift from institutions toward independent self-publishing creators?

Katherine Boyle · Oct 1, 2020

Creator-led companies like Substack and Patreon will win because creators can make more money there than inside bloated institutions, and much more infrastructure will be built for this devolution trend

The combination of personality-driven news, bloated legacy business models, and the inability to say what you believe pushes creators out of institutions

30:39 20VC: What Is Founder Narrative Fit and How to Detect and Invest In It, How To Avoid Consensus Thinking When Investing, Price Sensititivity; When To Pay Up vs Stay Disciplined & From New York Times To General Catalyst; Why Venture and Journalism are Not S

Emad Mostaque · May 17, 2023

No news outlet is genuinely fair and balanced — every publication has its own bias and angles — and traditional news consumption has already fallen dramatically as people consume news through social networks and groups

He has personally been the subject of many hit pieces, and consumption has shifted to social networks and groups

30:21 20VC: Why the AI Bubble Will Be Bigger Than The Dot Com Bubble, Why AI Will Have a Bigger Impact Than COVID, Why No Models Used Today Will Be Used in a Year, Why All Models are Biased and How AI Kills Traditional Media with Emad Mostaque, Founder & CEO @

Victor Riparbelli · Jan 15, 2025

We are finding our way toward a media ecosystem driven by citizens and experts rather than journalists and politicians, while retaining some of the quality control of the corporate-newspaper era

Humans always invent new things and learn as we go, absorbing the negative consequences along the way

Scope: acknowledges there are real negative consequences; expressed as optimism about the trajectory

44:13 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia

Mike Mignano · Jul 6, 2026

The world is moving steadily toward self-publishing where creators control their own distribution and monetization, and Substack has executed on this better than anyone except X

Eight years of the trend continuing, with creators increasingly controlling their own destiny in media

56:17 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV

Harry Stebbings · Apr 21, 2023

Content providers will not be able to build sustainable businesses in a chat-based internet, because unlike Google's redirects ChatGPT scrapes their content and retains the user, leaving no way to monetize — and almost no one is thinking about this

Google sends traffic to the original page whereas chat interfaces absorb the content and keep the user on their own site

Scope: framed as his concern as a European

43:16 20VC: Who Wins in AI; Startup vs Incumbent, Infrastructure vs Application Layer, Bundled vs Unbundled Providers | From 150 LP Meetings to Closing $230M for Fund I; The Fundraising Process, What Worked, What Didn't and Lessons Learned with Tomasz Tunguz

Emad Mostaque · May 17, 2023

Media publishers are right to be worried: search aggregators are increasingly disintermediating them and AI is massively disruptive to media and information businesses

Google's new search page with a language model is just synthesized text with no clicks, echoing what AMP did to publisher pages, and people will become used to synthesized input; GPT-4 can write a news article customized to any reader

29:20 20VC: Why the AI Bubble Will Be Bigger Than The Dot Com Bubble, Why AI Will Have a Bigger Impact Than COVID, Why No Models Used Today Will Be Used in a Year, Why All Models are Biased and How AI Kills Traditional Media with Emad Mostaque, Founder & CEO @

Harry Stebbings · Sep 18, 2023

Large news publishers say ChatGPT is taking away their visitors

60:12 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate

Miles Grimshaw · Sep 18, 2023

LLMs will centralize trust, advantaging established media brands like The New York Times as arbiters of trustworthy new information

Generated imagery and language put trust in question, and subscription businesses have huge economies of scale

Scope: specific to media rather than software

59:03 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate

Harry Stebbings · Sep 18, 2023

AI will be a net positive for existing media brands

59:44 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate

Harry Stebbings · May 17, 2023

Libel exposure is the real constraint on AI-generated content and will overwhelm providers like OpenAI with cases

You cannot survive a thousand libel cases a day

30:09 20VC: Why the AI Bubble Will Be Bigger Than The Dot Com Bubble, Why AI Will Have a Bigger Impact Than COVID, Why No Models Used Today Will Be Used in a Year, Why All Models are Biased and How AI Kills Traditional Media with Emad Mostaque, Founder & CEO @

Harry Stebbings · Sep 18, 2023

A major media magnate believes LLM providers will never be able to displace news organizations because of libel exposure

Libel liability protects news publishers

Scope: source unnamed

60:37 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate

Kevin Systrom · Feb 22, 2023

A trusted tech-publisher partnership could spawn an entire generation of independent publishers by giving them access to an audience they couldn't otherwise reach

Building something great that supports the publishing industry gives independents distribution

60:23 Trusted platform publisher partnerships can give independent publishers audience access they couldnt reach alone

Harry Stebbings · Jul 6, 2026

Large legacy media organisations are misallocating resources by building expensive podcast studios and teams for shows nobody listens to, because they don't understand where the game has moved

He visits these houses and sees insane production facilities and ridiculous team sizes for pods with no audience

57:16 Legacy organizations are building for a game that already moved

Mike Mignano · Jul 6, 2026

Independent media is nowhere near its peak and television is still in the process of being massively unbundled

He thought the opportunity was baked when he left Spotify in 2022, but in only four years huge media personalities have migrated to self-publishing on YouTube and Spotify

57:32 Independent media far from peak tv still unbundling

Harry Stebbings · Jan 15, 2025

Specialist creator content on venture capital is roughly 10x better than what journalists or large publications produce

It's his full-time job — he lives and breathes the subject day in, day out, unlike generalist journalists

44:57 Niche creator expertise produces far higher quality content than generalist journalism