2025 Will Break Media’s Addiction to Ads

Here is what comes next...

I’m increasingly convinced that 2025 will mark a decisive turning point in digital publishing’s turbulent evolution. The industry stands at an inflection point where the misalignment between advertising-driven models and sustainable media organizations has become untenable. What we’re witnessing isn’t another down spiral— it’s the end of advertising-only media as we know it.


The Terminal Diagnosis of Advertising Dependency

The advertising-supported model that has long dominated digital media hasn’t just failed—it has actively corroded the foundations of sustainable publishing. Programmatic networks and tech platforms have monopolized revenue distribution, leaving publishers chasing exponential audience growth while their economic leverage systematically erodes.

This crisis is most starkly illustrated by the collapse of once-celebrated digital natives like BuzzFeed News and Vice. Their trajectories underscore a harsh reality: massive audience reach cannot compensate for the systematic degradation of ad value. These weren’t merely business failures; they were inevitable casualties of a fundamentally broken model, especially when dependent on advertising that publishers neither own nor control.

Generative AI: The Accelerant

The contemporary digital publishing landscape faces a pivotal transformation as generative AI targets its most prevalent yet vulnerable component: commodity news. This content—comprising a bulk of many news sites' output—represents rewritten versions of existing stories. These articles, while well written, add no substantive reporting, insights, or analysis to the original source material. Their value has been derived purely from distribution mechanics—mastery of SEO, social media algorithms, and traffic acquisition strategies that could help the site outperform its competitors. Generative AI technological capability in the hands of tech platforms like Google and Facebook— where many people discover this commodity content— doesn't merely pressure the commodity content model—it systematically eliminates its economic viability. When machines can instantaneously generate unlimited variations of basic news coverage, the marginal value of human-written commodity content approaches zero.

The strategic implications for publishers are profound: survival now depends on shifting focus toward elements that resist algorithmic replication—original reporting, distinctive analysis, and unique editorial perspectives that transcend mere information relay. This transformation forces a fundamental reevaluation of news content economics, pushing publishers toward models that derive value from unique intellectual capital rather than distribution expertise — and I say this as someone who’s built their career on the latter.

From Content Economics to Consumer Value

The path forward emerges with unusual clarity: consumer revenue models provide the architectural framework for systematically capturing the value of human-differentiated content. This alignment of economic incentives with fundamental value creation enables publishers to escape the commoditization trap that has systematically eroded advertising-based models.

The strategic shift toward consumer revenue thus represents more than tactical adaptation—it enables a fundamental reinvention of publishing's economic architecture.

The Consumer Revenue Imperative

This transformation manifests through three critical dynamics that systematically reshape media organizations:

First, consumer revenue models radically simplify value creation mechanics. When readers directly fund content, organizations can focus exclusively on delivering substantive value rather than orchestrating complex arbitrage plays across digital ecosystems. The New York Times' transformation from struggling legacy publisher to digital powerhouse demonstrates the model's superior unit economics: their subscription revenue hasn't merely surpassed advertising—it has enabled the emergence of a fundamentally different kind of media organization. This same type of shift has been replicated over and over at metro dailies across the country.

Second, this economic realignment catalyzes profound structural changes that ripple through the entire publishing ecosystem. Direct reader funding naturally favors sustained value creation over endless attention capture. Organizations architect their operations around product more than viral distribution, leading to fundamentally different product and editorial decisions.

Third, and most significantly, consumer revenue models blunt many of the effects of platform intermediation. When success derives from reader value rather than distribution hacks, organizations can escape the daily street fight for commodity attention—a battle increasingly dominated by algorithmic content generation.

The market validation for this transformation extends across the entire publishing spectrum. From institutional players like CNN and Reuters pivoting toward direct reader relationships, to independent journalists building sustainable newsletter businesses—the pattern remains consistent: readers will fund quality content when it delivers clear, differentiated value.

This convergence around consumer revenue models creates a clarifying moment for publishers: the path forward demands not just tactical adaptation but a fundamental reimagining of how media organizations create and capture value in a post-advertising-dominant era.

The ideas, insights, and arguments presented in this post are entirely my own. However, I utilized various LLMs to make my words suck less.