There have been some recent articles pointing to an emerging and profound paradigm shift in the technological and business architectures storytelling. I am tying them to two some recurring themes from the past two months of essays on The Medium. That essay will need a little more structuring and editing than I had anticipated.
So, the publication of today's essay will be postponed to next week.
In the meantime, it is worth sharing those stories:
This week, The Information reported on Inkitt, “a startup that lets writers self-publish books and uses artificial intelligence to edit, distribute and sell the most promising works on its Galatea app.”
Last month, The Hollywood Reporter reported on a product launch from Emmy-winning San Francisco startup Fable Studio for Showrunner, a platform the company says can write, voice and animate episodes of shows it carries.
They confirm my take from April’s “How Valuable IP Will Succeed Beyond The Walled Gardens of Media Conglomerates” that we can expect viable "back to the people" business models are emerging in the generative AI space.
The Bigger Picture
A conversation I had earlier this week inadvertently helped me to realize that the next generation of media business models lie somewhere in the Venn diagram overlap between these news stories, YouTube's Partner Program model (which I wrote about in "Is It Time to "YouTube-ify" Apple TV+?") and the freemium model of online gaming platforms (like Fortnite and Roblox).
In other words, future media business models are going to evolve past the simplicity of subscription-only or ad-supported-only. Instead, they are going to evolve towards something much more product-driven and user-imagination-driven, especially in generative AI. The economics and the storytelling models will follow and evolve accordingly.
Marshall McLuhan's phrase "The medium is the message" has been repeated so often that it would seem a key point he made has beenforgotten: Media environments are invisible but there are "groundrules, pervasive structures and overall patterns" elude our "easy perception."
The two stories above highlight how we may be missing how YouTube and Fortnite are the new structures for media business models. But, they may still be invisible to us. Generative AI models seem to be revealing their significance.
That is the essay I am writing. More to come next week. Have a good weekend!