Every media wave produces new winners. They all did two things right: a new way to create, and a new way to watch.
Over the past twenty years, media has evolved in waves, each one driven by new technology, new tools, and new culture. Every wave produces new winners. If you see it early enough, you can build for it. If you're late, you spend the next wave catching up.
The first wave was user-generated content in the social graph. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogs. Your identity became a feed and your friends decided what you saw. Content spread through connections, and that era built trillion-dollar companies.
Then Instagram came along and made media creation effortless. Just point your phone, add a filter, and share it with the world. The algorithmic feed replaced the chronological one, and for the first time, independent voices could reach millions of people without a studio, publisher, or distribution deal.
But they also couldn't get paid. So the platforms tried to fix that through new ad models and partnerships. For the first time, you could earn money from your content, but it all depended on someone else's ad business. You were earning a living inside someone else's store, and the platforms controlled the shelf space, the foot traffic, and the rent.
Then TikTok broke everything. The algorithm stopped caring who you followed and just decided what you saw. Which is amazing for discovery, but it's also terrible for building a real audience. You go viral on Monday and be invisible by Friday. You have millions of views, but zero subscribers.
And now, those same platforms are failing the people who built them. When you post on Instagram today, only 4% of your followers will see it. And that number dropped 18% in a single year. Facebook is even worse, below 2%.
Think about what that means. You spent years building an audience of 100,000 followers. You post something you're proud of, and then the platform shows it to 4,000 of your followers. The platforms that promise connection are delivering less of it every year.
In the meantime, global podcast listenership has grown to 584 million people, and YouTube has now over a billion monthly viewers of podcast content. Users streamed 700 million hours of video podcasts on their TVs in October 2025 alone, nearly doubling compared to the year before.
The format is changing, the audience is changing, and the shows that people used to listen to they now watch. Long-form, direct, built on real relationships between a voice and the people who follow them, and the exact opposite of the algorithmic feed.
The same social platforms that drove podcasts to video to grow reach and retention are now trying to catch up to YouTube and fight for long-form content.
If you look at this over two decades, the pattern is clear. The format keeps getting richer, from text to photos to short videos to long video. The distribution keeps getting more direct, from social graph to algorithm to direct subscription. The relationship between the publisher and the audience keeps getting deeper, from anonymous viewers to followers to paying subscribers.
And now we're at the subscription pivot.
This is the shift that has big impact because subscriptions don't just change how money flows. They change what gets made.
When the audience pays directly, the incentives flip. You don't optimize for clicks, you optimize for trust. And you don't chase volume, you chase quality and long-term relationships. The business model becomes the editorial strategy.
Substack proved that this works. Over 50 writers earn more than a million dollars a year on Substack alone. They have 5 million paid subscriptions and are growing. That's no longer just a niche, that's a viable business model for independent media.
But Substack started text first and is now trying to catch up to video creation and distribution. On top, they make very questionable choices in the content they host and promote.
YouTube is a 50 billion a year ad business. They can't pivot to direct subscriptions without cannibalizing the model that feeds them. TikTok is optimized for dopamine and not depth, as Spotify is bolting video onto audio as an afterthought. Patreon connects supporters to people they follow in a great way, but also goes very wide to support artists of all kinds, making it harder to build a great experience for your audience.
None of them can build what we're building, because doing so would undermine the business model that pays their bills.
There was also another important accelerant for each of the winners in the past waves. Every platform that won did two things right: they combined a creative insight that made making content feel new, and a novel viewing experience that made people keep coming back.
Instagram had filters and the feed. TikTok had remixing and the For You page. YouTube had one-click upload and subscribe. The creative tool gets people in, and a great viewing experience attracts and keeps your audience. You need both. That's the gap, and it's wide open.
We're building better tools to share your best stories and a viewing experience across video, audio, and text that meets you where you are.
