For five weeks we've watched agents get names, budgets and safeguards. This week the story turned to what happens when making things gets cheap. Roblox says more than 500,000 people have tried its tool that turns a typed idea into a game, and two games made almost entirely with AI reached
Blindside
5 structural threats the market isn't pricing — and where each one sits on the scale.
Podcasting & Audio
AI tools can shrink an hour-long podcast to a few lines. Text publishers already lost a third of their clicks to the same trick. If listeners read the point and skip the show, podcast ad money — up to $204m a year — goes with it.
I have made the FASTMaster Database freely available for all.
Gen Z doesn't have a fried attention span; their brains simply demand multi-layered sensory stimulation. From Sludge Content and Lore Dumps to Reacts and Fancams, discover the six hyper-kinetic video formats dominating youth watch time and learn how legacy media can weaponize them to win back CTV.
The 30-second trailer is dead. Audiences don't want to watch your commercial; they want to play it. Summer Walker's "No Wac-Man" web game proves gamification is the future of entertainment marketing. It captures first-party data and kills ad-skipping. Here is the playbook to build your own.
The Paramount-WBD and TikTok integration kills the traditional marketing playbook. To win Gen Z, studios must stop buying trailers and start weaponizing their 15,000-title vault through Sludge, Lore, and React formats. Here is the $100M blueprint for cultural immortality.
The race for FAST scale has backfired. Zombie inventory is depressing ad rates and poisoning the ecosystem. With supply outpacing demand, hitting 600 channels isn't growth—it's devaluation. To restore profitability, platforms must embrace scarcity over volume and kill the long-tail bloat.
Why do we rewatch "The Office"? It isn't laziness; it's anxiety management. I explain the Unified Theory of the Habit Economy to explain why Library depth beats Originals, why "Weekly" beats "Binge," and why the Creator Economy is the only bridge to the audience you’ve already lost.
Navigate the structural evolution of media. Discover emerging trends. Enjoy the analysis. Views expressed here are my own and do not represent the views of my employer.
Audiobooks have tripled their share of the listening day since 2016, quietly pulling hours away from ad-supported podcasts. The podcast ad market is still growing — and hasn't noticed yet.
Carmakers and the phone giants are seizing the screen in your car — and they earn more pushing their own services than the radio dial. We estimate about $586 million of in-car radio and satellite revenue is at risk each year.
Electric cars are dropping AM radio from their dashboards, quietly cutting off the pipe that talk radio depends on to reach drivers — and a rescue law has only one-in-three odds of passing.
Episode 05: Belt and Braces. Last week, agents got pocket money. This week the question became what still holds when the first safeguard fails? Walmart will give every shopping agent its own profile inside a customer's account, with its own spending limit and an off switch, and the agent n
Podcast advertising rests on one number — the download count — and it can be faked. With 39% of new feeds now machine-made and online fraud at 21–32%, the model sees $253 million a year at risk.
5 structural threats the market isn't pricing — and where each one sits on the scale.
Top podcasters are selling access straight to fans and keeping nearly all the cash. As marquee shows move behind paid walls, the open ad market loses its most valuable inventory — about $214M a year at risk.
Podcasting's most valuable product — a trusted host personally vouching for you — is being sold like cheap automated ad space. About $107 million a year of premium is quietly draining away, even as total ad revenue booms past $3 billion.
Smart speakers were meant to become shopping machines. Instead people set timers and play music. Shipments are falling and makers are retreating — yet the growth forecasts for voice shopping haven't moved.
Automatically-sold podcast ad slots are multiplying faster than advertisers can buy them. Mid-sized shows take the hit while top shows stay protected — and pre-agreed deals hide the slide. We put $158m a year at risk.
Podcasting charges a premium for ads read by a trusted human host. Cheap voice cloning can now fake that voice, and no US law protects it. We see $194m a year at risk — and the market hasn't priced it.
Last week, agents got names of their own. This week, some of them got pocket money. On 13 October, Shopify opened its catalogue of more than a billion products, and its checkout, to any AI agent that can connect, with no partnership needed. Shop now lets a shopper give their agent a weekly
