Media companies turn to communication apps and services instead of websites for distribution
The Next Internet Is TV — I was talking to someone who works on one of those half-dozen or so apps that we tend to associate with teenagers: the ones that were built around some novel concept …
Context & Ripple Effects
Writing in 2015, 'The Next Internet Is TV' argued that media companies were abandoning their own websites for distribution inside communication apps — a bet made just as Pew data showed the entire net growth in digital advertising happening on mobile, with Google and Facebook controlling half of net mobile ad revenue. The piece essentially predicted that whoever owns the surface owns the economics, and publishers would rent rather than own.
The decade since reads as the thesis being tested in both directions. When Facebook pivoted away from news and Twitter decayed, outlets were forced back toward homepage traffic, while sites like The Verge rebuilt themselves to feel like social platforms. Now the loop is closing on the biggest screen: X shipped a beta TV app to court advertisers and creators, and Instagram and TikTok are building TV-screen versions of their apps following YouTube's success there.
First-order effects
- Publishers who moved distribution into communication apps gave up direct audience relationships and ad inventory to the platform owners — the same Google-and-Facebook concentration Pew documented capturing mobile ad growth.
- Audiences under 35 shifted discovery to creators who report and aggregate news on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, bypassing outlet destinations entirely.
Second-order effects
- When those same platforms pivoted away from news, media companies had to reverse course back to homepage traffic — a whiplash between rented and owned distribution that the 2015 app bet set up.
- News sites responded by absorbing social-media mechanics into their own properties, competing with the feeds they once depended on.
Third-order effects
- If Instagram and TikTok's TV builds hold, the living room becomes the next consolidated distribution surface after mobile, and X's TV app shows every major platform racing to occupy it before publishers can establish independent reach there.
The trend: Media distribution keeps migrating toward whatever surface platforms control next — from feeds to phones to the TV screen — with publishers repeatedly trading owned audiences for platform reach.