However, in the meantime, the new media strategy is AI-empowered creators as the face of the brand, with relatively few staff building out bundled product offerings. Email moves from the strategy to just another tool. The future is owning relationships with audiences—and serving as many of their media and software needs as possible.
New social networks have typically struggled to monetize due to their small audience sizes, as they are unable to achieve the scale to make meaningful revenue from advertising. Paid communities, however, supply an engaged and paying audience, providing an alternative route to sustainability for independent social networks.
“The stream has dominated our lives since the mid-2000s,” Caulfield says. But it means people are either posting content or consuming it. And, Caulfield says, the internet as it stands rewards shock value and dumbing things down. “By engaging in digital gardening, you are constantly finding new connections, more depth and nuance,” he says.
It’s ultimately up to the platform to decide what type of content gets recommended, not the social graph of the person producing the content. In contrast to social media, recommendation media is not a competition based on popularity; instead, it is a competition based on the absolute best content.
How can we make the web more natural and human-first rather than computers or institutions? How do we wish to interact with the internet beyond "browsing?” How would we shape the internet and our container for inhabiting it (currently, our browsers) if they were our neighborhoods and homes?