The seven ages of media
And how 2025 is 2005 all over again
In The Seven Ages of Man, William Shakespeare wrote that;
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages”
The same seven ages from birth to death can be seen in technologies and formats in media, particularly in publishing formats. The stages are;
Launch - usually with a new technology as the catalyst for publishing innovation
Scale Audience - users adopt the new platform in accelerating numbers
Scale Revenue - revenue trails behind, but grows as inflection points are reached in scale of adoption, first as experimental media and gradually as recurring spend
Peak - the point when audience and revenue stop growing organically, usually with a replacement format launching that is diverting attention
Harvest - a very profitable period after the peak when a combination of price increases, upselling and reduced investment sustains high profits
Squeeze - a more aggressive phase when price is driven, product is degraded and costs are more ruthlessly trimmed
Niche - there can be a long tail of loyal buyers who will pay a premium price for a niche media format which can be be a small but sustainable business (see vinyl).
Plotted against attention and time it might look something like this
In 2025 we are watching three of these cycles happening at once with each publishing format at a different stage of their development.
First the longest running cycle, that of masthead print publishing. Print for newspapers was supercharged commercially in 1810 with the invention of the steam press in London. Automation generated a 5x improvement in printing speed and reduction in costly manual labour. When The Times was first printed using a steam press in 1814, it was kept secret from print labourers because of the obvious threat from the new robots.
News volume steadily grew, and an advertising boom from the mid 1950’s scaled revenue. In hindsight it looks like print revenue peaked around 2005. The harvesting years have seen volumes decline while cover prices rose steeply, and ad volumes decline while yield largely held up.
We are now entering the final squeeze phase and from 2030 onwards I would expect only premium price niche print editions to survive.
The next format was Aggregator Platform Publishing, which we’ll narrow to Google (search) and Meta (social) as the winner-takes-all victors in their respective markets.
By publishing here I mean ‘making public to users scale information’, so both professional and user generated content in Meta’s case, consumer and business information in Google’s. News and magazines were just some of the publishers using this format.
Launch in the early 2000s built on the new technology of the commercial internet, both then also caught the wave of the growth of smartphone usage. Both platforms benefited from financial innovation in the form of venture capital funding that allowed a much longer audience build phase before revenue needed to be scaled.
Audience growth through 2008-2016 was spectacular but naturally slowed from 2020 onwards - there were very few new users in mature markets that weren’t already users of one or both of the services.
Revenue growth trailed to start with, but moved from a combined $12bn in 2008 to $127bn in 2016 to $515bn in 2024.
Both Google and Meta remain phenomenally profitable, as the quarterly earnings reports show. However I would argue that both have now passed their Peak. If users are not growing, and the numbers show that ad load, ad pricing and diversified revenues (e.g cloud services) are really driving revenue growth, then the core service is in the decline phase.
Multiple regulatory interventions will accelerate this. Platform Publishing revenues are likely to get smaller as a result of forced divestments, or seeing more constraint on pricing due to restrictions on preferencing their own products, or being forced to share data with competitors.
In truth, much of Google and Meta’s attention will be on trying to make their own successful transition into the next format. Just as print publishers have been working on the transition to digital since their own peak, the digital giants are now clearly working on the transition to an AI driven future.
That platform is Generative Platform Publishing. This is considered here as only the products and services that connect consumers to information. We are not concerned here with general purpose AI technology use cases like software automation, public sector, defence or healthcare optimisation.
Generative Publishing launched in the public mind in 2022 as OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT. Now the market is made up of a number of pureplay players like Perplexity, Anthropic, Mistral, plus numerous Chinese competitors.
Add to that legacy platform players like Meta / Google / Microsoft, who will now be both Platform Publishers and Generative Publishers at the same time while one market waxes and the other wanes.
In this new format, audience growth is accelerating. ChatGPT just announced a billion users in one of the fastest adoption curves in history. The other players are reporting much smaller numbers now but are investing and promoting hard. We are still very much in the audience scaling phase.
Revenue numbers are much harder to pin down. OpenAI say ChatGPT made $2.7bn in 2024, but does not break out revenue into different markets. Other players show revenue but don’t split consumer revenues from B2B users, where use cases are more obvious and more valuable.
Most consumer users at this stage are using for free and monetisation models for casual users are still being formulated - see the Open AI Shopping release this week as an example.
For now let’s assume generously that the consumer market in terms of subscribers paying for Generative Publishing services is moving towards $5bn. That’s just 1% of the revenue from Platform Publishing and even 5 times less than where I would estimate global Print Publishing revenues to be at this stage.
However, this is about potential and audience momentum. Compare 2005 and 2025, as shown below. In 2025 Generative Publishing is about where Platforms were 20 years ago. Platform publishing far exceeded the heights of print, but is subject to the same gravity and starting to fall to earth. Print has held on better than many would have predicted, but is headed one way only.
There are three predictions that can be made from looking at the market through this lens.
Firstly, Print is moving through squeeze into niche. A seven day print subscription to The Times is over £800 a year and rising. Sustaining daily frequency and full national retail distribution is under pressure. DTC models for weekly editions look like the niche play.
Secondly, as Platforms move from Harvest to the Squeeze phase expect more aggressive price rises for ads plus more ad load, and even less traffic leaving the platforms to go to other publishers.
For Google and Meta, generative publishing tools are already being blended in alongside the traditional Search and Social publishing models, as they hope one model can emerge from the other like a snake shedding its skin.
New G&M apps and product may launch but they will leverage the data and search / social graphs that built the previous business models. The Meta AI app follows this playbook, incentivising connection to your Insta and Blue app social graph.
Thirdly, Generative Publishing consumer business models are still forming. The leading indicator of thinking here is the product roadmap and audience habit building. We can almost ignore revenue at this stage.
Shopping / Concierge / Personalisation / Agents will all play a part but the biggest decision is whether to double down on consumer subscriptions or to gradually blend in ad models and target the $500bn post-peak platform spend.
All to play for. Or as Shakespeare put it;
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Brilliant analysis and framing Chris.
I wonder what the Bard would made of it all, Chris? (Or indeed of the Bard debacle!) His work has survived many rounds of publishing transformation already.
I’d like to think that quality work will always win out over the publication platform or means of consumption. But we’ve become so obsessed with measuring and monetising attention, and not rewarding the people whose work actually earns it in the first place.
That’s not to knock your analysis, which is spot on. I think invoking Shakespeare just made me wonder why the ‘content’ always feels second fiddle to the wrapper these days.