This is the draft seventh 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.
Google has a well-worn origin tale. Larry Page and Sergey Brin became fast friends at Stanford, had a better idea for a search engine, worked out of Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park, took a check from a VC made out to “Google Inc.” before they even had a bank account, and the rest is history. Let’s focus for a moment on the prescience of its name. A googol is a big number, 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google is a big company.
Today, Google processes over 5 trillion searches per year, or 160,000 searches per second, and as of 2022 handled about 15% of global internet traffic. Parent company Alphabet employs over 180,000 people across more than 60 countries. It is, as of this writing, the 4th largest market capitalization company in the world. Its annual revenue would rank it around 40th among countries by GDP, placing it between Eqypt and the Czech Republic. Google’s Android operating system powers over 70% of the smartphones in the world. The Oxford English Dictionary recognized the word “google” as a verb in 2006 and it is now a word in multiple languages.
More to the point, Google is the world’s most powerful media company. According to WPP, last year it generated by far the most advertising revenue of any company, about one-fifth of the world’s advertising. Over 2.5 billion people use its YouTube streaming platform every month, or about one-third of the global population, and creators upload about 300 million hours of video each year. YouTube is also the single largest streaming service in the U.S. to TVs, with about the same share as Disney+, Hulu, Tubi, Paramount+, Max, Peacock, Pluto, and Roku, combined.
Are you a Swiftie? Whether you are a fan of Taylor Swift or not, you knew what I meant by the question.
It is hard to overstate her dominance of the music business or cultural impact. She has the most Grammys for Album of the Year, American Music Awards and Billboard Music Awards of any artist. Her 2023 Eras Tour was the highest-grossing tour ever, pulling in almost $2 billion, and her film of the tour grossed another $270 million, the highest grossing concert film of all time. Her net worth is now estimated at greater than $1 billion.
Her influence extends well beyond music. She has over 280 million followers on Instagram and more than half of all U.S. adults reportedly consider themselves as fans. In 2023, she began dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and attending games. According to one marketing firm, her association with the Chiefs generated over $300 million in brand value for the team and the NFL. Forbes called her the “most powerful voice in politics.” In 2023, Time Magazine named her as person of the year.
Hold up. Over the last few chapters, I’ve described how the internet lowered the barriers in media and pushed both power and attention to the edges: individual creators/creatives (and, for that matter, consumers) are gaining agency and power as traditional middlemen cede it; and consumers’ attention is fragmenting across a seemingly infinite supply of songs, articles, movies, shows and games. Yet these little descriptions of Google and Taylor Swift tell a very different story. There is, apparently, still great power in the center and there are, apparently, still big hits.
In this chapter, I’ll examine the last of our tectonic themes, concentration, and reconcile this apparent contradiction. It occurs because the internet did more than “just” lower the cost and barriers to distribute content. It also connected everyone on a big network. And networks are subject to positive feedback loops that make strong things stronger.
A Two-Way Street
Prior to the internet, the distribution of media was local, siloed and one-way. Media products were delivered through local, format-specific outlets (movie theaters, retailers, local TV and radio stations, local newspapers), as described in Chapter 3. Consumers had no feedback mechanism, other than voting with their pocketbooks or attention.
Today, most media is consumed on global, universal, two-way information networks.1 That includes social networks (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat), of course, but any site or app that has a data return path (whether an active return path, such as the ability for consumers to like, comment or share, or a passive return path through data collection) is a network. Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, cable systems, Apple News, and The New York Times’ website are all networks. (The New York Times print edition is not.)
Let’s unpack global, universal, two-way.
As I discussed last chapter, the reach of these networks is “global” because they aren’t bound by geography.
They are “universal,” in the same sense I used the word in Chapter 3: since all information goods have been reduced to bits, these networks can distribute any kind of media. (Apple and Amazon, for instance, distribute newspapers, magazines, books, software, games, TV shows, films, and music.)
Most important is the term “two-way.” On networks, the behavior of every participant—or what are called “nodes” in network speak—can affect every other node. That results in powerful positive (also called “reinforcing”) feedback loops.2
For media, these positive feedback loops manifest on both the supply side and the demand side—and both have profound implications:
Supply side: network effects. One type of positive feedback loop is network effects, which lead to winner-take-all (or most) outcomes, concentrating power and value in a few platforms. Combined with these networks’ global reach and universality, that means traditional media companies are now contending with distributors or competitors with unparalleled scale, resources, and the ability to cross-subsidize losses indefinitely. Creators and consumers are grappling with new gatekeepers.
Demand side: power laws. Another type of positive feedback loop is cascades that concentrate attention. On networks, hits are self-perpetuating because people interpret popularity as a signal of quality (information cascade) and/or social currency (reputational cascade). This results in power law-like popularity distributions: a small number of outsized hits (in the “head”), a skinny “middle,” and a vast number of misses (in the “tail”). These extreme distributions act as a counterweight to the fragmentation I discussed in Chapter 4. They also have important implications for the economics of media businesses. They are shifting bargaining power to the top talent in the head, hollowing out the once-lucrative middle, and, maybe most important, increasing the risk of making content.
Let’s roll up our sleeves on both.
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