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Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next
The founder of Platformer on the crisis facing the media industry.
And so, if you thrived on the platform, Substack’s bet was always, “You will be making essentially so much money that you will not even notice the fact that we are taking 10 percent, but our network that we’re going to build is so powerful, and it’s going to drive so much paid conversion, that that is how we will keep you forever.” Because Substack is an ideological project, the people who participate in it need a villain, and then they can say, “The mainstream media is out to get us” or “This is what they don’t want you to hear” or “They’re mad because we’re going to replace them.” I’ve heard all this stuff about The Verge for a long time from YouTubers. This is happening in the context of the old model getting completely upended by generative AI on one side but basically the end of distributing webpages by every platform on earth, including Google Search, which, when that domino falls, there is no more web business.
Or read this on The Verge