The Race to Own the Future

written by Lisa Talia Moretti for Charismatic.ai

This article highlights how technological advancements, such as the printing press and the internet, drastically altered production scales and access to information, creating new industries and business models. The rise of social media and streaming platforms led to a shift in attention and advertising revenue, resulting in industry consolidation and the emergence of influencers. This evolution has also caused significant disruptions, including job losses and labor disputes stemming from new business models and the integration of AI.

Can It Scale?

It’s difficult to imagine that once upon a time, in medieval Europe to be precise, bookmaking was a handmade craft. Written and copied by hand, scribes sat hunched over ruled parchment copying texts and artists – called illuminators at the time – painted pictures and decorations. In order to scale production, bookmaking needed more people. It wasn’t long before this craft became a multi-stakeholder industry. At first, the work took place in a scriptorium by monks in their monasteries but soon extended to include lay scribes and illuminators who worked in a variety of environments including universities along with royal and aristocratic courts. Despite the growing enterprise that bookmaking became at the time, the number of books made during this time could be counted in thousands.^[1] Access, even if you were among the very few who were able to read, was extremely limited. Then, the invention of the printing press changed that.

Invented in Germany around 1440, scriptoriums were no longer needed as information could be written down once and mechanically duplicated thousands of times. Access to the same copy of information expanded exponentially.^[2] This time, scale came from replacing scribes and illuminators with machines and it wasn’t long before demand turned printing and publishing into a business. To scale, printers and publishers needed to generate more money. To increase profits, various innovations soon followed.

Pocket editions with their smaller format and font, thinner paper and abbreviated text became a hit among new readers. Printing more, rather than less, was soon calculated to be far more profitable for printers and so printing editions of 1,000 instead of the usual 250 began in earnest. It was also discovered that it was more economical to print using italic text because you could get more words on a page, and so many printers began favouring this text format.^[3] The printing press meant scribes and illuminators lost their jobs in book making; however, the value that the printing press brought to the world was invaluable and perhaps cannot be exaggerated enough.

Francis Bacon reflected in 1620 that the three inventions that forever changed the world were gunpowder, the nautical compass and the printing press. The printing press influenced the development of a global news network, new information formats, countless new job titles and jobs, allowed journalism to develop and thrive, influenced the development of libraries, improved literacy rates and is even credited with powering the scientific revolution because findings and data could be shared more easily with a wider audience.^[4]

Hundreds of years later, an individual is a scribe, illuminator, printing press and distributor thanks to hardware they can easily buy, code they didn’t write and apps they didn’t build. To scale, you need to capture, and hold, attention.

Web 2.0 - A Timeline Of Disruption

Technology and digitisation hasn’t just shaped and reshaped the media and creative industries, it’s come to define and redefine them. How did we get here? To borrow, and tweak, the title of a 2011 essay by Marc Andreesen, software is eating the creative industries.^[5]

Launched in 2003, MySpace was the first social network to gain global success. Centered around music, users could create a profile and furnish it with photos, their music interests and a bespoke wallpaper design.^[6] It was the first of many. In the same year LinkedIn, Last.FM, Hi5 were launched. In 2004, Facebook launched on Harvard campus. In 2005, Yahoo! 360, YouTube and Reddit went live and Bebo relaunched.^[7] In 2006, Facebook allowed anyone over the age of 13 to set up an account. Twitter arrived on the scene that same year and Amazon launched a video streaming service in the US, which will become Prime Video years later. ^[8] 2007 was another bumper year – Netflix launched their streaming service, Tumblr became the new blogging darling and Steve Jobs took Apple to new heights by introducing the world to the first iPhone.^[9] In 2008, Spotify went live and so too did Apple’s App Store with the first 500 apps which introduced everyone to a new way to engage with brands, games and each other.^[10]

At this stage, the media industry includes platforms, social networks, apps, services and streamers. But perhaps the biggest change of all is that with the help of an algorithmic boost and a camera in nearly every pocket, an individual has the potential to become a media brand. Welcome to the party, influencers. This collective force brings with it an ever infinite amount of content to entertain us, bore us and enrage us. ‘Us’ is now known as users who were formerly known as readers, listeners and viewers.

By 2010 Americans were spending more time online and surveys started to record how media habits were changing. More people were getting their news online from email or social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as opposed to traditional broadcast and print channels.^[11] This trend cascaded throughout the world and it’s not long before it’s not only the Americans spending more time online.^[12]

Then came Pinterest and Instagram in 2010, Snapchat and Twitch in 2011, and Twitter launched Vine in 2012. Netflix’s first original series, House of Cards, debuts in 2013.^[13]

Access to content is everywhere and everyone trying to ‘make it online’, needs the same thing: eyes on site. In order to scale, you need to capture and hold attention.

The Pivot To Video

Turns out, holding attention is easier when people are engaged with video content as opposed to a still image. In 2015, more than 1.5 billion people were logging in monthly to Facebook. That year, the company made the strategic decision to prioritise video including live streaming and long-form formats. The company’s switch to video influenced the entire online media ecosystem. Twitter, off the success of the short-form video platform Vine clearly saw the same data because they acquired and launched Periscope in 2015 too. In 2016, a new app called TikTok launched and it is nothing but an infinite sea of short videos and Apple began producing and distributing original content. In an attempt to stay in their own game, multiple news outlets including Mic, Vox Media, Mashable, The Outline and LittleThings, make journalists redundant in 2017 in order to focus on video production. However, despite the cuts, many don’t make it and disappear altogether.^[14]

Around the same time, the music streamers have caused their own noise. In 2016, it was reported that Spotify subscriptions, Pandora Internet radio and YouTube videos made up 34% of music industry sales. At the time, this totaled $2.4billion. In comparison, CD sales made $1.5 billion in 2015 – a drop of 84% in 10 years.^[15]

By 2019, Facebook had captured the attention of 2.3 billion people and won first prize for the world’s biggest social network.^[16] Then the broadcasters tried to play catch up with the video streaming services. Disney+ launched at the end of November 2019, HBO Max in 2020 and Paramount+ in 2021.

Attention Is Money

With more attention moving online, so too does advertising dollars and with it, many traditional media titles and entertainment spaces first stutter and then have to shut shop including many newspapers, magazines and cinemas. For many, getting bought out becomes a life line and consolidation across tech and media hits like a tidal wave. Novelist, journalist and technology activist Cory Doctorow summarised this consolidation in a single line in a blog writing, “... we live in an era of extreme market concentration in every sector, including entertainment, where we deal with five publishers, four studios, three labels, two ad-tech companies and a single company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks.”^[17]

In a 2023 special issue of the The Nation which analysed the “the media monopoly crisis”.^[18] They document the shrinking ownership of the creative industries in the following way.

There are now six media companies: Disney owns ABC, CBS, General Electric which owns NBC, News Corp which owns Fox, Time Warner which owns CNN, and Viacom which owns MTV, Paramount, and DreamWorks. Book publishing is down to five major companies including Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette and Penguin Random House. It would have been four had the sale of Simon & Schuster to Penguin Random House not been blocked on antitrust grounds. The legendary big six film studios, the likes of 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros., have been whittled down to two: Disney and Netflix. And they don’t just dominate film but television too. Comcast and Sony now find their competitors are Apple and Amazon.^[19]

Remember Love Film in the UK? Amazon swooped that one as well as Twitch and Audible.^[20] Instagram and WhatsApp are part of Meta.^[21] Google acquired YouTube and has a dominant position in the ad-tech sector.^[22] Microsoft owns Xbox and video game company Activision Blizzard.^[23] Amazon’s billionaire founder Jeff Bezos bought the Wall Street Journal in 2013. Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Steve Jobs, is a billionaire philanthropist who owns The Atlantic. Another tech billionaire, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, has owned Time magazine since 2018. X, formerly Twitter, is owned by X Corp which is owned by Elon Musk; yet another tech billionaire.^[24] These are just a few notable mentions of where tech founders and companies have moved into the media and creative industries, there are many others.

This Is Not Kansas

All this, whether you want to call it disruption or innovation, is not without consequence.

Our media habits and behaviours have changed. Since 2019, there’s been a 30% decline in UK cinema attendance and television audiences.^[25] One out of four newspapers that existed in 2005, no longer does.^[26] The family TV is now just another screen connected to the Internet and has become the device of choice to watch YouTube at home.^[27] In the 2024 Digital News Report by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, found that audiences pay more attention to celebrities, influencers, and social media personalities than journalists on social network platforms and 20% of 18 – 24 year olds use TikTok to access the news.^[28]

Money flows have changed too. Advertising budgets have shifted to social media making it the largest channel worldwide in terms of ad spend.^[29] But it’s not just about the ad money but investment money too. Over 70% of foreign direct investment (FDI) projects in the UK creative industries were in IT, software and computer services in 2023. The remaining share of inward FDI projects is distributed predominantly across two sub-sectors: advertising and marketing (10%) and film, TV, radio and photography (7%).

Like the first printers who emerged as a result of the printing press, streaming platforms have become big business. And with the desire to boost the bottom line, they’ve reinvented business models and payment terms. Creators used to get paid creation fees and residuals but now these have given way to just flat fees. Platforms also hold the power to take down a show and with it, pull a creator from the market after one series.^[30]

With more money, comes greater ability to take risks and invest in R&D. In the world of tech, money has been poured into accelerating artificial intelligence tools that have been marketed as having the ability to make you more efficient, more productive and now, more creative.

This reinvention of business models, new payment terms and the challenges that AI introduces to the creative labour market did not go unnoticed. A massive backlash kicked in from July to November 2023. Actors, artists and writers from SAG-AFTRA (formerly the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) went on strike and lasted for 118 and 148 days respectively. When the strikes finally ended, actors had secured an increase to minimum payments, a greater share of streaming revenue, improved benefit plans and protections against the use of AI in recreating performances. The writers' deal was similar and included increases in wages and residuals, minimum staff in television writers rooms, payments based on success of streaming shows and protections against the use of AI.^[31] While new contracts have been agreed for some, the strikes aren’t over yet for others. In a yet unresolved dispute between games studios and video game actors, more than 2,500 performers have been on strike since late July 2024 to secure a new contract that would prevent games studios from using generative AI to recreate performers’ likeness.^[32]

But life for those in the creative industries is hardly rosy despite the improved terms negotiated post the strikes.

The Deadline reported that “the summer of Hollywood strikes had cost the economy of Southern California an estimated $6.5 billion and the loss of 45,000 jobs.”^[33] These numbers are ever more depressing when reading about the last two years of mass layoffs, unemployment and consolidation in the media and entertainment industry, with more expected in 2025.^[34]

It seems a lot of these job losses stem from a decline in content creation budgets. According to the Drum, post the actors’ and writers’ strikes, “average per-series budgets have declined, number of ordered originals declined, and total investment in content, including licensed content, only increased by 2%.”^[35] It was estimated that in 2024 original content was a third of 2022 levels.”^[36] But that doesn’t mean that there is less content. Easy access to hardware, software and users in the billions on social networking sites, influencers are driving the creator economy contributing to vast amounts of content across every format and medium: text, video, audio and games. More content however doesn’t mean more time spent with content. Macro media trends show that time spent with media (US data) has flatlined since around 2020 resulting in global media revenue not growing on a real basis but more money being funnelled toward creator media revenue.^[37]

Despite major consolidation across media and tech, digitisation and automation are resulting in a media and content industry that seems more fragmented than ever.

AI Generates an Uncertain Future

AI, which can perform competently as well as autonomously, is set to completely change the interactions that humans have with machines across all jobs. In the Future of Jobs Report 2025 compiled by the World Economic Forum (WEF), it’s reported that “today, 47% of work tasks are performed mainly by humans alone, with 22% performed mainly by technology (machines and algorithms), and 30% completed by a combination of both. By 2030, employers expect these proportions to be nearly evenly split across these three categories/approaches.”^[38]

In an ironic twist of events, the same report names Creativity as a core skill, listed fourth among a list of 26 other skills, rising 68% in importance. These skills were decided on by a panel of employers not the WEF. But for Creatives, this is not translating into bigger pay cheques or more opportunities. For Creatives, scale won’t come from past tactics that center ‘more’ or ‘better’ at the heart of growth strategies: getting more people, inventing better tech or capturing more attention. At this point in history, scaling the creative industries feels much more like an intellectual and ethical exercise that includes redefining the creative partnership between human and machine and building a new set of specialist skills and job roles. However, it cannot be done alone. If governments, and all of us, are serious about supporting the arts and see them as a national strength, then they must be protected. We can do this by championing and implementing a rights-based approach to protecting creative works so that they are able to hold their value in a saturated marketplace and provide financial returns to their creators.

But, no one knows exactly what this future looks like yet.

---

^[1] https://www.glastonburyabbey.com/blogs/the-glastonbury-bible-project/an-introduction-to-the-medieval-scriptorium.php, https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/scriptorium/,

^[2] https://www.britannica.com/topic/publishing/The-age-of-early-printing-1450-1550

^[3] https://www.britannica.com/topic/publishing/The-age-of-early-printing-1450-1550

^[4] https://www.history.com/news/printing-press-renaissance

^[5] https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/

^[6] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Myspace

^[7] https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/article/13/1/210/4583062?login=false, https://online.maryville.edu/blog/evolution-social-media/

^[8] https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/twitter-launches, https://newsroom.pinterest.com/company/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Prime_Video

^[9] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/how-tumblr-became-popular-for-being-obsolete, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/apple-iphone-pictures-steve-jobs-first-phone-definitive-history/, https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-42787047

^[10] , https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2018/07/app-store-turns-10/, https://investors.spotify.com/about/

^[11] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-media-has-changed-in-the-last-decade-2019-11?r=US&IR=T#in-2010-americans-were-spending-more-time-online-and-social-networks-like-facebook-and-twitter-became-mainstays-for-staying-up-to-date-1

^[12] https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media

^[13] https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/twitter-launches, https://newsroom.pinterest.com/company/, https://online.maryville.edu/blog/evolution-social-media/, https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-42787047

^[14] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/11/29/pivot-video-couldnt-save-mic-news-outlet-has-laid-off-most-its-staff/

^[15] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-media-has-changed-in-the-last-decade-2019-11?r=US&IR=T#since-2010-the-rise-of-streaming-platforms-has-led-a-large-chunk-of-young-adults-to-cut-the-cord-and-get-online-subscriptions-5

^[16] https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media, https://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-media-has-changed-in-the-last-decade-2019-11?r=US&IR=T#in-2010-americans-were-spending-more-time-online-and-social-networks-like-facebook-and-twitter-became-mainstays-for-staying-up-to-date-1

^[17] https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/19/gander-sauce/

^[18] https://www.thenation.com/article/society/media-consolidation-monopoly-big-5/

^[19] https://www.thenation.com/article/society/media-consolidation-monopoly-big-5/

^[20] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28930781, https://www.bbc.com/news/av/business-12242660, https://time.com/6252698/don-katz-audible-interview/

^[21] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/051815/top-11-companies-owned-facebook.asp

^[22] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/google-abusing-ad-tech-uk-cma/, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna15196982

^[23] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67080391, https://www.reuters.com/article/business/microsoft-to-buy-linkedin-for-262-billion-in-its-largest-deal-idUSKCN0YZ1FO/

^[24] https://www.investopedia.com/billionaires-who-bought-publishers-5270187

^[25] https://www.statista.com/statistics/238215/cinema-admissions-in-the-uk/

^[26] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/technology/news-media-industry-dying.html

^[27] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/media-use-and-attitudes/media-habits-adults/gen-z-swerves-traditional-broadcast-tv-as-less-than-half-tune-in-weekly/

^[28] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/fewer-people-trust-traditional-media-more-turn-tiktok-news-report-says-2023-06-13/

^[29] https://www.campaignasia.com/article/social-overtakes-search-for-adspend-in-landmark-global-shift-warc-media/495836

^[30] https://www.npr.org/2023/07/24/1189240124/the-streaming-model-is-cratering-heres-how-thats-hurting-actors-writers-and-fans

^[31] https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2023-09-26/writers-strike-deal-wga-amptp-takeways-ai-pay-residuals, https://apnews.com/article/actors-strike-ends-hollywood-5769ab584bca99fe708c67d00d2ec241

^[32] https://news.sky.com/story/video-game-performers-are-on-strike-heres-what-you-need-to-know-13186848

^[33] https://deadline.com/2023/10/actors-strike-talks-friday-optimism-1235584425/

^[34] https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/reality-bites-gen-x-executives-career-pivots-layoffs-1236249357/

^[35] https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2024/10/08/streaming-tv-has-finally-become-profitable-returning-the-cable-playbook

^[36] https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2024/10/08/streaming-tv-has-finally-become-profitable-returning-the-cable-playbook

^[37] 28 Days of Media Slides by Ben Shapiro https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Nk7W5mifZmMYCeeOkL3wdNlKKktxLpYM/view?usp=sharing

^[38] https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_Report_2025.pdf