Big Media's Structural Disadvantage
How Platforms Exploit Our Default Minds and How Traditional Media Can Fight Back
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A few weeks ago, I wrote a post called Fan Surplus, HYBE, and the Science of Fandom. The main idea is that media companies’ success will increasingly depend on their ability to better foster, cultivate, and monetize fans. I gave two reasons: 1) the battle for attention is a zero-sum game that traditional media can’t win; and 2) fans want to engage more and are willing to spend more. Historically, the goal of mass media was selling to more. But the future is selling more to fewer.
In this post, I explore another reason why traditional media can’t possibly win the time game and consequently why fostering and cultivating fandom is so important. “Big media” is at a huge structural disadvantage against platforms that take advantage of our biological tendency to make default decisions. The only way to fight back is by creating and nurturing fans.
Tl;dr:
Massive amounts of consumption are moving to low-production-value content. These days, most of the growth in video is social video; in gaming, it’s lo-fi Roblox; in music, it’s functional music.
This is happening for two reasons: the consumer definition of quality is shifting away from high production values; and social apps make consuming addictive and effortless.
Much has been written about dopamine-driven reward loops that keep us hooked. Just as powerful, though, is how these platforms—through both luck and design—exploit our biological drive for cognitive efficiency: that is, our tendency not to think.
Behavioral economists describe two modes of thought. Our default mode is System 1, which processes information reflexively and effortlessly. System 2, which is more deliberative and metabolically expensive, is only called on when it matters.
Social apps capitalize on System 1 by being mobile-first, so they are constantly accessible and habit forming; offering short form and easily skippable content, which requires no commitment and has no consequence; collecting vast amounts of personal data, which yield personalized recommendations that feel intuitively familiar and easy; and using all kinds of techniques—like one touch, infinite scroll, and no stopping cues—to eliminate launch, selection, and exit friction.
Consuming on social is reflexive, not reflective. Traditional media can’t fight that battle. The only way to fight back is to recruit System 2 by giving consumers something to care about deeply. In other words, to cultivate and nurture fans. I offer a sketch of what that means in practice, but a key element is that media companies should be organized around franchises, not distribution channels.
Why Are People Consuming Low-Production-Value Stuff?
In the Apple show The Studio, a central tension is that studio head Matt Remick (Seth Rogen) wants to make “prestige” films but the studio needs to make money. It’s an old story. Art predates commerce, but ever since there’s been commerce, there’s been tension between the two. (You can draw a straight line from the Medicis to Shakespeare to not-so-real housewives flipping tables.)
The traditional debate about high art vs. low commerce is philosophical: is art meant to express some timeless truth or make money? It is usually about aesthetics, elitism, cultural value, craft, lasting impact, meaning, authenticity, predictability, formulaicness, accessibility, stuff like that. It is not generally about technical production values. (A big budget blockbuster often has much higher production values than an arthouse film; the same goes for a highly-produced pop album and a lo-fi indie record.)
That’s why the current shift toward creator and independent content confuses many in traditional media. The old debate was about substance; this one is about production values. The logic goes, “OK, we know people sometimes like trashy, but this is garbage!”
Before getting into why this is happening, let’s ground ourselves with a few charts (some of which I’ve shown in other posts). They clearly show that consumption is shifting away from high-production-value content, across the media business.
It is clear that consumption is shifting to low-production-value content and away from high-production-value content, across media—and many in traditional media can’t grasp why.
Last year, an estimated 1/4 of all video viewing by U.S. adults was social video, mostly YouTube, TikTok, and Reels (Figure 1).
Figure 1. About 1/4 of All U.S. Video Viewing is Social
Source: Maverix Insights MIDG data, Nielsen, The Mediator analysis.
Spotify data shows that the major labels and Merlin, the largest collective of independents, lose share of music streams every year. In 2017, they had almost 90% of streams and last year it was closer to 70%. Some of what’s taking share is functional music, like ambient, background, and study music. (Figure 2).
Figure 2. The Majors Lose Share of Spotify Streams Every Year
Source: Spotify.
Roblox, with its blocky graphics, now has more monthly active users than Switch, PlayStation and Xbox combined (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Roblox Has More MAUs than the Consoles, Combined
Notes: Nintendo is “annual active users” 2023, PS includes PC users, and Xbox is console only. Sources: R Track, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, SteamDB, Roblox, via Epyllion.
Though still relatively small, the rise of short-form or vertical dramas is another example of exploding demand for low-production-value content. The content on short-form drama apps is unapologetically campy, with titles like Homeless Billionaire Baby Daddy, and low budget, with production budgets on entire films running ~$100,000 or less. According to a state-controlled Chinese media association, revenue from short-form dramas generated almost $7 billion in China last year. And according to Owl & Co., it will be a $3 billion business outside China this year.
So: back to the mystery. Why is this happening? There are two reasons.
A Shifting Definition of Quality
The first reason is one that I’ve written about many times before: the consumer definition of quality in media is changing. (For a detailed discussion, see Quality is a Serious Problem, one of my most most-read posts.) I’m defining quality here as revealed preference, not a Platonic ideal or value judgement. Quality is what people choose.
Based on what they choose and the reasons they give for choosing, we can infer that the attributes that influence consumer choice in media are changing. High production values, big budgets, and well-known professional talent used to be the key markers of quality. Today, for many consumers—at least some of the time, in some use cases— their definition of quality now includes new attributes, like authenticity, relatability, snackability, and social currency. Here’s a slide I show in every presentation:
A Structural, Biological Advantage
But let’s turn to the second reason, which is the focus of this post. Social apps have a big structural advantage attracting and holding attention because they exploit our biology.
Last year, Ted Gioia published a widely-read article called The State of Culture, 2024. His argument was that we have moved into a post-entertainment media culture, dominated by distraction. Platforms hook us with short dopamine loops—the variable rewards on social apps that flood our brains with dopamine, hijacking the brain’s addiction circuitry. Figure 4 below was reprinted and posted a bunch of times.
Figure 4. From Culture to Addiction
Source: Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker.
But it’s not just dopamine loops. Social apps capitalize on our tendency not to think by making choosing as mindless as possible.
Platforms That Hack System 1
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman outlined two types of thought, which he and his colleague Amos Tversky called System 1 and System 2.
These “systems” aren’t really systems in the sense that they correspond to specific brain structures, but instead describe modes of thinking. System 1 is the default mode. It is reflexive, fast, and effortless. System 2 is only called on when System 1 gets stumped or it perceives that there are serious consequences for getting it wrong. It is more deliberative and requires mental effort, and it is what we generally mean when we talk about “thinking.” The two systems refer, respectively, to the “fast” and “slow” in the book’s title.
We evolved to think as little as possible.
Why does the brain work this way? We evolved to think as little as possible for two good reasons:
Thinking is metabolically costly. We evolved to preserve calories. 150,000 years ago, it was harder to go to the supermarket to buy Oreos. Calories were scarce. We have not evolved much since. Brains are especially calorically expensive. The human brain is commonly believed to take up 2% of body weight but consume 20% of calories. Plus, the area of the brain most closely associated with decision making—the prefrontal cortex—has an even higher metabolic rate.
We don’t have a lot of bandwidth. Our capacity to process information is much smaller than the amount of information we receive as input. According to various sources, we receive about 11 mbps from our senses, but conscious thought operates at only 10-50 bps—or only 0.0005%. We function by compressing and discarding a lot of information. If we tried to process all the information we receive, we’d melt down.
Put differently: System 1 is the default because thinking costs a lot and we couldn’t possibly think about everything anyway.
This isn’t just logic and conjecture. There is a long list of things that brains actively do to minimize mental processing. For instance:
Myelin sheaths. When you learn a new habit or skill—or a rat learns to navigate a maze—brains form something called myelin sheaths around the associated neuronal pathways. These are fatty cells that act like insulation. They speed the electrical impulses the next time you do the same thing, enabling you (or the rat) to do it with less effort. When you do something by habit without thinking about it—or when you enter a flow state and it feels like you can do something effortlessly—in both cases you really are exerting less neurological effort.
Synaptic pruning. The brain deletes infrequently used synaptic connections to reduce cognitive load.
Predicting sensory input. The cortex is constantly predicting sensory input so it doesn’t have to process everything coming in. There are some estimates that 80% of visual perception is memory and only 20% is input from the eyes.
There are a lot more. People are hard-wired to be as cognitively efficient as possible. The path of least resistance is to not think.
To be clear, this is neither an accusation that all social apps are intentionally manipulative nor that creator content has no redeeming value—my point is that they have a big structural advantage over traditional media because they make consumption cognitively effortless.
Many modern media apps like TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram—and even, to a degree, Spotify—benefit from our biological tendency to operate on autopilot.
To be clear, this isn’t meant as a moral indictment or accusation. These platforms can be manipulative by design, but the line between user-friendly and manipulative is thin. It is also not a criticism of creator content. While much short-form content is silly, much of it is also clever, funny, poignant, and educational. And, as I explained in detail in The Relentless, Inevitable March of the Creator Economy, there are a whole bunch of reasons why I think creator content will continue to take share of time and money from corporate media that are unrelated to this post.
The point isn’t that creator content has no redeeming value, but that social platforms—through both design and luck—enjoy a structural advantage: they eliminate three kinds of friction simultaneously—launch, selection, and exit.
Native mobile means constant access. Today, every media property or channel has a mobile app. But social media apps are optimized for mobile or are mobile-first. Because they were built for native mobile, these apps minimize “launch friction.” They’re always a thumb-click away, and habitual access reinforces the behavior.
Massive usage leads to daily habits. According to Guggenheim Securities, in 1Q2025 in the U.S., the average daily time spent was 108 minutes for TikTok; 87 minutes for YouTube; 63 minutes for Facebook; and 48 minutes for Instagram. Online, there is an oft-repeated stat that the average TikTok user opens the app 19-20 times per day. I can’t find a reputable source, but sounds right. Opening these apps becomes reflexive and autonomic—many (many) times per day.
Short form. They deal primarily in short-form content and make it easy to skip. There is almost no opportunity cost for consumers—there’s nothing at stake and no commitment. (According to this, viewers decide within 3 seconds whether to watch a Reel or skip past. Meta claims that people spend 1.7 seconds on average with a piece of News Feed content on mobile. Based on this study, one-quarter of all songs on Spotify are skipped within the first 5 seconds.) There’s also no reason to recruit System 2 to waste energy by reflecting or deliberating.
More data means better recommendations. The combination of massive daily usage and short-form content means they get a ton of signals from users. That enables them to provide a more personalized feed that is more likely to trigger cues that encourage more swiping.
Low/No Choice. There are many features and techniques that encourage consumption without explicit choice. These include auto-play, infinite scroll, one-gesture interfaces, curated playlists (such as Daily Mixes or activity-based background music on Spotify), and no natural endpoints, all of which make it effortless to access content without thinking.
These design choices effectively remove decision-making, keeping users in System 1 mode. Consuming is reflexive, not reflective.
Traditional media is fighting with one hand behind its back. Choosing traditional content still requires intentional choice. Consuming content on a lot of social apps requires no choice at all.
Traditional media is fighting with one hand behind its back. Whether you choose art or commerce, in traditional media environments, you still need to actively choose. When you walked into a Blockbuster, you could stroll to the Action section or walk a few feet to Foreign films. When you launch the Netflix app, you need to choose between Beasts of No Nation and Love is Blind. When you browse Amazon or a physical bookstore, Finnegan’s Wake and 50 Shades of Gray are equally accessible. The New York Times and The New York Post sit next to each other at the newsstand.
Today, by contrast, the media business is being overrun—and consumer time is increasingly being dominated—by platforms that virtually eliminate choice altogether.
The Only Way to Fight Back: Create Fans and Recruit System 2
So, traditional media is at a huge structural disadvantage. If you cannot win on habit and you cannot win on friction, the only option left if to override System 1 and invoke System 2 by making your product meaningful. The best way to make people care is by making them fans.
The best way to make people care is by making them fans.
Above, I explained that System 2 only gets involved when System 1 needs it—when it can’t handle it or the consequences of getting it wrong are serious enough to pay the cognitive cost.
The reason it works this way, as I wrote above, is because we are evolutionarily hardwired to be as cognitively efficient as possible. But there are other biological, evolutionary imperatives that justify the cognitive cost. Two of these are social cohesion and identity reinforcement.
Social cohesion. We’re social animals. An antelope that gets separated from the herd runs a much greater risk of becoming lunch. The same goes for us, at least metaphorically, whether on the playground or the conference room. So, it’s not surprising that we have evolved to have a physiological need to conform to the group. When your kid acts like getting those new Uggs is a matter of life and death, that’s because to her it is. Research has shown that when we deviate from the group it triggers our amygdala, the area of the brain that mediates fear. Some of the most famous experiments in the social sciences illustrate our desperate need to conform, such as Solomon Asch’s experiments in the ‘50s. (They showed that a large proportion of subjects will give a clearly incorrect answer to a question when the rest of the group, who are confederates of the researchers, gives that wrong answer first.)
Identity and self-affirmation. We develop a sense of self very early—by age two, toddlers can recognize themselves in a mirror, use self-referential language (that’s mine!) and express the concept of ownership. That’s also evolutionarily beneficial. It increases the likelihood we will take actions to protect ourselves and otherwise act in our own interests. A psychologist named Claude Steele first proposed something called “self-affirmation theory” in the 1980s. In a nutshell, the idea is that we construct a cohesive and usually positive narrative around ourselves and we take steps to reinforce this perceived identity when we can. Some research has shown that reaffirming our self-image activates reward regions of the brain.
And—you know where I’m going here—how does a media company associate its content with social cohesion and identity affirmation? By creating fans.
In 2017, the now-defunct research group Troika published a year-long study called The Power of Fandom. You can no longer find it online, but here was its main finding:
At its core, fandom is driven by three basic human needs: identity, self-care, and social connection. By tapping into these needs, brands can begin to understand their consumers on a much deeper level and use these insights to engage them in more meaningful ways.
Fandom is not trivial. At its root are fundamental human needs. There are a slew of other sources that support this idea. For instance, in their book Fans Have More Friends, Ben Valenta and David Sikorjak make the case that “the driving force motivating all fan engagement is social connection.”
Traditional media can’t out-scroll a social platform, but it can out-matter it.
Traditional networks and streamers can’t out-scroll TikTok or out-frequency Reels. Their content is too long and the consumer opportunity cost is too high to hook people with autoplay. This content requires investment, so it is critical to make that investment (biologically) worth it.
That is what fandom is: a biological override—a social-binding and identity-affirming relationship strong enough to justify effort in a world increasingly designed to eliminate effort. It’s another reason for the statement I made at the very beginning: the history of media is about selling to more, the future is about selling more to fewer.
What Does Cultivating Fandom Mean in Practice?
Saying that big media companies should prioritize fandom may sound either hand-wavy or patently obvious—of course every media company wants people to love their content!
I mean something more specific, though: structure the company around fandom. Some media businesses already do this, at least to a degree, like music labels, video game publishers, and creator businesses. Film and TV companies don’t. Here’s a sketch of the idea:
Deeply understand your fans
Most media companies know their audiences, but they don’t necessarily understand their fans: why they are fans and how they behave. Figuring this out is easier said than done because it probably requires a first-party relationship with fans. In Fan Surplus, HYBE, and the Science of Fandom, I wrote about Korean music label HYBE and their fan-engagement and monetization platform Weverse. Western media companies have mostly ceded the fan conversation, social interaction, and commerce to third-party platforms, like Instagram, Reddit, Discord, Amazon. But why couldn’t Disney+ be the fan engagement platform for Disney? Why wouldn’t Netflix be the hub for all things Netflix?
Organize around franchises, not distribution channels
The object of fandom, also called a “franchise,” is usually either a storyworld (like K-Pop Demon Hunters or The Wizarding World of Harry Potter), consistent narrative frame or format (like The Bachelor), persona or artist (Taylor Swift), or sports team. To maximize fan engagement, media companies should view the franchise as the business and everything else—distribution channels or franchise extensions—should act in service of the franchise, not the reverse. This means that the franchise has its own general manager (GM) with ultimate responsibility for the success of the franchise, its own P&L, and its own dedicated functions or access to centralized centers of excellence (COE).
This is already standard practice in the music business. The atomic business unit of a label is the artist or group, supported by an A&R lead, product manager, and liaison with the COE at the label (creative services, marketing, social, streaming, comms, analytics, etc.). (Same thing at management companies, which are also organized around the artist and handle touring, merch, community engagement, etc.)
It is also how most gaming publishers are run. Each top title or universe functions like its own business, with some sort of GM that owns the P&L, product vision (shared with a game director), and go-to-market, etc., and oversees teams that run the studio, live ops (if relevant), economy and monetization, analytics, community, engagement, and platform relations. Creators also run their businesses franchise-first, for the obvious reason that in most cases, the creator is the franchise.
Film and TV companies are not currently organized this way. Some have franchise managers for key franchises, like Disney, but usually these franchises live inside one of the distribution business units. (E.g., a franchise that originated at the studio is owned by the studio, a franchise that starts in the parks is owned by the parks.) Establishing management and separate P&Ls for key franchises would be a big shift.
Stand up “fan experience” functions
This means having a team that owns all elements of the fan experience, other than the creative: community engagement, UGC enablement, commerce and events, access, etc.
Everything is a live-op
Fans want to engage continuously, not only when a new season, installment, or album is released. Franchise management should think of every franchise as a “live-op”—not in the sense of constantly releasing new content, a la Fortnite, but making sure fans continuously have opportunities to engage. That means mapping out a calendar: exclusive access to events or content (like behind-the-scenes), ongoing communication from talent, merch drops, pop-ups, or whatever keeps fans involved.
Encourage fan creation
This is arguably a subset of standing up a “fan experience” function, but I call it out because I think it’s critically important. For the last few years (see IP as Platform from February 2023 as an example), I’ve been making the case that as GenAI democratizes creation tools, IP owners should capitalize by enabling and encouraging their fans to create using their IP, within appropriate guardrails, and curate that content for other fans. It could strengthen their relationships with their most ardent fans and attract new ones; engage fans on a continuous basis (in keeping with the live-ops point above); provide free marketing; possibly source new stories and talent; and maybe even boost revenue.
I’ll end by picking up where I left off in Fan Surplus, HYBE, and the Science of Fandom. The fight for attention is a zero-sum battle that traditional media cannot win. They’re being swamped by a tsunami of creator and independent content—one that will only grow as GenAI tools improve. And because traditional media almost always requires active choice, it faces a structural disadvantage against platforms that make consumption effortless.
Maybe there will be a backlash and people will put down their phones. Maybe we’ll look back on this time the way that we currently look back on smoking in the 1950s and ‘60s. There are some weak signals this is happening, as I wrote in Trust is the New Oil:
You can see evidence of backlash everywhere: “digital detox” movements; the rise of minimalist phones and digital hacks to limit screen time; memes about digital burnout and doom-scrolling; subtle rejection of modernity by younger consumers (who are embracing vinyl, film cameras, and vintage shopping); and, thanks to efforts by people like social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, a broader push to ban phones in school.
Alternatively, maybe eventually we’ll all use personal recommendation agents to select our content and that tilts the balance of powera. It’s not hard to image that these agents would know us intimately—prior content choices, tastes, current context, maybe even our mood—and recommend content accordingly. Maybe that would level the playing field for traditional media by reducing decision friction: if the agent does the choosing, the distinction between active choice and passive feed might disappear. Maybe.
But barring some mass cultural shift away from personal devices (mobile, wearable, injectable, whatever) or towards recommendation agents, traditional media probably won’t ever see a level playing field again. The only way to fight back against platforms that don’t require people to care is to make them care a lot about something.