Infinite Content: Chapter 2

How Media Works

This is the draft second chapter of my book, Infinite Content: AI, The Next Great Disruption of Media, and How to Navigate What’s Coming, due to be published by The MIT Press in 2026. The introductory chapter is available for free here. Subsequent draft chapters will be serialized for paid subscribers to The Mediator and can be found here.

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On a typical day, you might wake up, unplug your phone, and amble over to the bathroom. Maybe you scroll through the latest headlines on Apple News or flick through LinkedIn as you brush your teeth. You climb into your car and turn on the radio or pull up that Tim Ferriss podcast that inexplicably still has two hours to go.

While at work, you dutifully focus on that spreadsheet or file that expense report or resect that bowel or try to locate that delivery address, but you might be listening to Spotify most of that time. Maybe every now and then you steal a few minutes and scroll through the For You page on TikTok or try to beat your record on Subway Surfer. On the way home, you bounce between your two or three favorite stations on SiriusXM.

Once home, you flop on the couch and glance at your phone to see whether you got any important texts, DMs, or maybe emails, but after that you reflexively pull up Instagram and, dozens (or hundreds) of reels later, are horrified by how much time has ticked by. If you’re lucky, you eat dinner with your family or, if you’re alone, maybe you sit with your phone propped up, watching YouTube videos or try to get into that new prestige drama on Max, Netflix or Apple TV+ that everyone’s talking about. After dinner, you go back to try again to beat that boss in Elden Ring. You plug in your phone on the nightstand. You don’t dare look, but if you did, you’d see a screentime of 5, 6 or maybe 7 hours. You get into bed and aspirationally pick up the physical book you just started in your effort to avoid screens right before bed. You give up after a few pages.

The next day, you do it all again. (None of this is autobiographical, pinky swear!)

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You—ok, fine, we—are not alone. The average adult in the U.S. spends 13 hours per day with media, as I mentioned in the introduction, or more than 75% of waking time. According to consulting firm Activate, that looks like Figure 5: more than five hours with video, almost three with audio, two playing video games, etc.

Figure 5. The Average U.S. Adult Spends 13 Hours Per Day With Media, >75% of Waking Time

Note: * Social video is included in Messaging and Social. Source: Activate.

Whether it feels like it or not, each of these “media products”—that podcast, article, videogame, song, or show—share many similarities in how they were made and reached you. They traverse a similar product development process and value chain and share similar economic properties and, as a result, business models.

It turns out that those properties and business models are unlike most other goods and services in the economy. Media products are digital, experience, non-rivalrous, information goods—all concepts I’ll explain below. They are, in essence, ideas. That means they can theoretically last forever; an unlimited number of people can experience them simultaneously; and they can be adapted, extended, manipulated, and modified in countless ways. It is also possible to represent them in bits, which effectively means there is almost no cost to produce and distribute the next copy. None of these things are true about Big Macs, Teslas, or H&R Block tax preparation services.

In this chapter, my goal is to provide a minimal viable primer (a MVP) of the media business. I’ll explain what makes media businesses different. We’ll walk through the lifecycle of a media product, who does what, and how media’s unique economic properties shape unusual business models. These differences matter. Understanding them will set the stage for us to explore why media has been susceptible to disruption and how the next disruption may play out.