The State of Media 2026

In 2026, first-time founders don’t want to get on TechCrunch. They want TBPN.

The Decline in Numbers

News publications are down on traffic and laying off people because readers’ habits are changing and there’s harsh competition. This might sound new, but people were saying this in 2009. What’s different now?

Most media publications are fighting to stay relevant while struggling to contain costs, which directly shapes their editorial policies. Practically all of them have put up paywalls to compensate for falling ad revenue, which means most people just can’t read what they publish easily. Just recently, both X and Threads were filled with stories from people who were saying they no longer read The Verge because of its paywall.

Growtika reviewed the traffic to the largest news media websites. Most major tech publications like Wired, CNET and Tom’s Guide lost 58% of their monthly visits since their peaks. This is only organic search traffic — nobody else has other figures. It might be a long-standing industry trend that publications started compensating long ago through apps, email newsletters and other methods. But it’s undeniable they’re losing relevance to new visitors. And social media has been dead as a traffic source for many years, even before Elon bought Twitter.

The numbers are even more dramatic at the individual level: Digital Trends lost 97%, The Verge lost 85%, ZDNet lost 90%. I want to stress that this is an external estimate of the search traffic alone and news publications could be adjusting their strategy and focusing on managed channels like newsletters (more on that later). We have data from the Reuters Institute that says Google’s organic search traffic to 2,500+ publisher sites went down by 33% between Nov 2024 and Nov 2025 and publishers expect an additional 43% decline over the next three years. Only 38% of media leaders say they’re confident about journalism’s prospects in 2026, down from 60% in 2022.

Josh Constine, formerly of TechCrunch, diagnosed the industry: tech blogs collapsed by under-rewarding star writers, chasing social over owned audiences, paywalling bland content, and adopting a relentlessly pessimistic tone. Meanwhile, digital ad revenue concentration among the top 10 tech companies reached 80.8%. Infinite personalized feeds are a far better ad medium than a news website, so this is where the money goes.

What’s Different This Time

The main problem for the media is that there are exactly two scenarios for information consumption in 2026.

First: specific requests. You go to a chatbot like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and get your answer there. In 2020, I wrote that the product that will dethrone Google Search won’t be a search engine — instead of links, it will simply provide you with answers. LLMs are exactly that. Even when they show sources, few people go in there. Several of our clients are now getting up to 50% of their leads from ChatGPT while their search visits are falling — but what they care about is sales. This doesn’t work for the media, which are getting far fewer visits from people they can monetize.

Even when you Google things today, what you see at the top of the page is an AI Overview. They’re known to be laughably wrong sometimes because the LLM they use is small and cheap to run, but they will only improve — just look at AI Mode as a reference, which is built by the same people. The steepest traffic decline in H2 2025 correlates directly with AI Overviews expanding to more queries. The media isn’t just losing to new competitors but also to its biggest existing traffic source. The fact that they’re this bad and still killing traffic is even scarier.

Second: curiosity. You have hobbies and interests, and you’re a professional in some specific area. Then you go directly to the sources. You have YouTube and TikTok, which are extremely engaging, and most professional media organizations struggle to get views there. If you’re in growth or product management, you subscribe to Lenny Rachitsky because the interviews he produces are much deeper and more interesting for you than anything the legacy media can produce. There are people like him for most industries. And most importantly, he and his fellow creators have a vastly different cost structure and either operate alone or with extremely lean teams while earning comparable advertising and subscription revenue.

There’s a third mode of passive consumption we have to acknowledge: scrolling through short-form videos, but for our purposes, it’s the extension of the second one. The best bits from interviews and product videos get clipped and shared as short-form videos on Instagram, TikTok, and X.

Social, along with search and aggregators, is now the primary online source of news. And although we still ultimately consume content from news outlets, we do not do so directly. Which is understandable, since reading their websites directly is often an atrocious experience, especially without an ad blocker.

The Rise of the Alternative Media Ecosystem

A giant alternative media ecosystem emerged, comprising newsletters, Substacks, and podcasts. This isn’t new per se but we’re at the point where many of them have larger audiences and more clout than most online news media outlets.

This is why founders want to go on TBPN. It’s the clout and recognition that were previously only accessible through the media. Plus, it’s a unique opportunity to control the message, which is why Travis Kalanick’s Atoms gave an exclusive to TBPN even though they could have gone anywhere. This enabled a great interview that became a single source of truth for other publications that reported on the quotes. And this is a complete inversion of how it worked five years ago. Then you’d pitch the WSJ exclusive, and podcasters would discuss it afterward.

There’s a range of top-tier individual authors like Lenny Rachinsky, Gergely Orosz, Eric Newcomer, Alex Konrad, all of whom started as one-person blogs and many have grown into mini-media companies with multiple writers and other staff members. But unlike the publications they left, these have radically lower cost structures yet deeper audience loyalty. And this is a very profitable combination. The IAB says U.S. creator ad spend hit $37B in 2025, growing 4x faster than total media, and WPP’s mid-2025 analysis found that creator-generated content ad revenue surpassed professional media for the first time.

Nothing exemplifies that better than The Free Press, which started in 2021 as Bari Weiss’s Substack newsletter “Common Sense,” launched after her resignation from the New York Times. It quickly grew into one of Substack’s top paid publications, raised outside capital, and was ultimately acquired by CBS News for $150 million.

In total, Substack now has more than 50 creators who are making millions of dollars per year on the platform. They boast 500,000 creators, more than 5 million paid subscribers, and have about $45 million in annual recurring revenue. Their domain got more traffic than The Wall Street Journal and CBS News in June 2025.

Another new format that went mainstream in the past year is live video. TBPN, a daily live show on technology hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, reaches 50k unique live viewers across platforms. Their podcast version is #2 in the US Technology chart. They were profiled by NYT/Vanity Fair/New Yorker/The Information, sold out ad inventory for the year and signed with CAA. They basically invented the format that is now being adopted by alternatives from both traditional media like The Information’s TITV and creators in other regions and verticals such as ETN. The best part of the live TV format for comms is that it expands the medium for brands and companies: there’s a place to get both in the traditional press and on the same day’s live show.

Podcasts are valuable since 56% of weekly podcast listeners say podcast hosts are the type of influencer who matters most to them, nearly triple the share who say the same about social media influencers, and 67% of global podcast listeners have made a purchase because of a podcaster. This is what brings these authors power.

But here’s the kicker. Getting on these newsletters and podcasts is often far harder than TechCrunch. The creators are naturally more selective because their audience trust is their entire business model (and apart from TBPN, they produce much less content than a news reporter). A bad guest damages them more than a bad article damages TechCrunch.

How Legacy Media Is Adapting

To compensate for losing star talent and to rebuild their direct connection with the audience, media publications are now growing writers internally and launching their own newsletters. The Verge with Notepad, Optimizer, Installer and others. Business Insider, in addition to being the owner of Morning Brew, recently launched their own lists Vibe Mode, Work Shift, Side Hustles, etc. 76% of media leaders plan to encourage staff to behave more like creators in 2026; half want to partner with creators to distribute content.

Publications always had star writers who attracted the most readers, but it wasn’t as transparent then. Now, authors can get a good benchmark on their actual star power and potential income if they break away. I’ve been told that Substack’s guaranteed offers and examples of authors are being widely used in media salary negotiations. Single writers now get so much power that they can partner with entire news organizations on their own — like Joanna Stern launching her newsletter in partnership with NBC News.

And by launching newsletters, media outlets also partially get around the atrocious website experience problem: reading their emails is a much better experience.

One potential direction the media is looking at is partnering with AI labs to license their ongoing content. Meta secured a multi‑year licensing agreement paying News Corp up to about $50 million annually to train its models and power Meta AI responses, and also partnering with CNN, Fox News, People Inc., and USA Today Co . OpenAI has expanded its network to nearly 160 news outlets, including News Corp, The Atlantic, Vox Media, Condé Nast, Hearst, Prisa Media, and Axios, typically combining content licensing with access to OpenAI tools for newsroom product development. Google has a pilot program with the Associated Press. Perplexity signed revenue‑sharing or licensing deals with TIME, Fortune, the Los Angeles Times, and a long tail of digital outlets. But it’s unclear if these payments would be sufficient, and while ChatGPT leads are growing, it’s not enough to offset the search declines.

Squeezing the Middle

Each wave of disruption squeezes the middle. The top survives on institutional authority — the NYT, the FT, the WSJ aren’t going anywhere, they can charge premium subscription prices and amortize their fixed costs most effectively. The bottom has radical cost efficiency: most of their costs are their own salaries (or profits).

The middle has neither advantage, as they have large editorial teams, office space, and infrastructure, but they don’t have the brand gravity and are stuck paying legacy costs while competing for an audience that’s leaving in both directions.

Yet the middle is where most tech media lives, specifically the kind of outlets that used to cover products and launches by startups from Seed to Series B. TechCrunch, The Verge, Wired, Business Insider — these are the publications the tech industry grew up reading, and they’re the ones most exposed right now.

We’ve seen this pattern before. Before the Internet, every city had a few major news publications. They were excited about serving not just their city but everyone on the internet. But this also meant competing with everyone on the Internet and turns out most people would rather read The New York Times, which turned them into a juggernaut with $800 million in digital subscription revenue alone.

Local media have also been reimagined through newsletters and influencer accounts with radically smaller cost structures. People still care about places where they live, but the supply side has changed. 6AM City, The Mill, and Inbox Scoop are good examples of modern, newsletter-first local media companies. 6AM City reaches millions across 30+ US markets with hyper-local daily emails and has over $10M in annual revenue.

With AI, we will see this supply-side transformation on a far larger scale.

Internet killed local papers → survivors consolidated → social media killed mid-tier blogs → survivors consolidated → AI is now killing the mid-tier publications that survived social.

The Trust Economy

There are now two kinds of credible media: institutional trust and personal trust. The only publications that will hold attention will be those that can build trusted relationships with their audience.

But here’s the thing — it’s far easier to build a parasocial relationship with a personality rather than a faceless news organization. And by promoting a specific face, the media always risks those people leaving to launch their own Substack or a YouTube channel.

It’s not like the media publications lost all relevance. Of course, they didn’t. There’s a reason some of the largest startups like Cursor announce their funding rounds on Forbes and The New York Times, and not just post on X. There’s brand value in there, recognition among enterprise buyers, and another source of truth you leave for your next campaigns.

What changes is the composition of the media space. There are now two kinds of credible media: institutional trust (NYT, Forbes, FT) that you tap for the stamp of legitimacy, especially for enterprise and investor audiences, and personal trust (Lenny Rachitsky, Eric Newcomer, TBPN) for depth, audience access, and authenticity. Brands and companies need both, but for different things.

Let’s get back to the Atoms launch we discussed earlier. If TBPN is good enough for an exclusive launch for Travis Kalanick, are you sure traditional media would deliver the best results for your brand? As a founder or a comms professional, you need to be open to a wider spectrum of possibilities.

Trust is the only durable currency. Especially right now, when AI-generated slop content is flooding every channel and raising the noise floor. This environment is making both creators and the media even more powerful.

What This Means for Comms

The era where comms meant “news media relations” is over. Most comms agencies still primarily do media pitching. The ones that survive will be the ones that can produce content, manage creator relationships, run a founder’s LinkedIn, and also pitch journalists when that makes sense.

The goal is the same as it ever was — tell your story to the world, and “we got a TechCrunch article” is no longer sufficient. What did that article drive? We live in a world where a top-tier podcast appearance might generate a more qualified pipeline than a Bloomberg feature. When one of our clients went on Joe Rogan’s Experience a few years ago, people started recognizing him in airports.

When we work on a major funding announcement these days, we still care about where it lands, of course. We plan for an extensive, exclusive profile in a top-tier outlet and pitch secondary targets afterward. But we dedicate as much attention to building out the messaging, preparing graphics and content, blogs, X and LinkedIn posts, securing a live show for the same day, as well as various newsletters and podcasts we can tap into in the next few weeks to build a strong, sustaining presence.

The question is: what should you do when you’re an early-stage company with little to show? Maybe you raised $1-2M in Seed funding, but you don’t come from the team that was building Claude Code, you don’t have many customers yet, and you have no celebrity investors or some other crazy story to share. What then? You could try local publications, such as Built in SF or Tech.eu, but honestly, the answer might be to focus on your own channels. Launch a newsletter, keep sharing the exciting updates on the company and your product, and interact with key experts and influencers in the space. I have a guide for this.

Comms people now need to think like content strategists, not just media relations specialists. You need to produce, not just pitch. You need to understand distribution and communities, not just publications. You need to be a master of everything.