Stop Rubbernecking—The Market Signals You Missed While You Were Watching Traditional Media Burn

How AI fair use rulings and streaming platform pivots are reshaping IP economics right now

I am just back from holiday and slowly getting back into the swing of things.

I actively tried not to think about business or writing over the holidays, but three related headlines caught my eye.

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The “ Great Tragedy” of Media

Just before my holiday break, I caught this episode of People vs. Algorithms from Cannes with this doozy of a quote from Dotdash Meredith CEO Neil Vogel:

“The great tragedy of media is how it covers media. Everyone is navel gazing. All people can talk about are the same seven companies that have terrible business models, and people have confused it with this being a bad business. It's not.”

If we pull back into a broader macro lens, he is making another version of the case I have been making: While media focuses on legacy failures, AI and streaming are rewriting the rules of intellectual property monetization—creating new winners and losers in the process.

“Rubbernecking” better captures Vogel's point than “navel gazing”. If the term doesn’t sound familiar, it is often used by TV and traffic radio reporters to describe “people that are on the other side of the highway of the site of a car accident and turn their neck to look over, usually slowing down a bit and causing traffic on the other side” (via Reddit).

Both the slow-moving “traffic apocalypse” now hitting traditional media websites and the disruption of Hollywood by streaming and AI are like a multi-car pileup happening in slow motion. It is a continuous accrual of mistakes, accidents and deaths of profitable businesses, historic brands, notable careers and once-invincible intellectual property.

This slow-motion disaster invites rubbernecking, distracting us from the road ahead. Vogel says we and the media we rely upon are looking in the wrong places. I think he’s right.

But it’s so hard to look away.

Part of that is because of schadenfreude, the German word for rejoicing at the misfortune of highly, if not excessively, compensated CEOs. Also, like any car accident, it reflects our own fears about technological disruption impacting our careers and the relevancy of our skillsets.

Vogel argues that we should not be so caught up in rubbernecking or cynicism:

“For the last a hundred years, if you have brands that people care about, you make content that is necessary to somebody, essential to somebody important to somebody. You can build great audiences and then you can make money any number of ways and you'll be fine.

However, the challenge presented by recent developments is that it is harder to monetize intellectual property that is necessary to somebody.

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