4: Breaking from the legacy of mass thinking

The era of pervasive mass media is past even if the ability to gather scale transnationally enables some of the old business practices. A consistent problem across a lot of contemporary thinking is an assumption that ‘hits’ function as mass media once did. This is rarely the case. Most media content produced by legacy conglomerates is now mid or micro media in reach, and a considerable component of people’s media diets is micro media because so little content from any source gathers previously common scale. The personal media streams we build on social media (see 10) make it easy to fail to appreciate how individualized our consumption and awareness of media has become – we assume others experience what we do (this may be tied to technology generation, see 9). We may exist in micro media taste communities that also share some overlap in our media diets, so it can still feel like what we see is widely shared by the people around us, but this is rarely the case.

A fair bit of the challenge of properly appreciating media scale derives from the transition from national to transnational media as the dominant sector structure in recent decades and the lack of functionally consistent metrics that date to the predigital age to offer context. The limited available data hides the relative poverty of scale now common. Multi-territory streamers are now a major source of series and movie consumption. The available data tell us about consumption among global subscribers, but the historical norm was national households. Also mechanisms of counting and reporting differ (minutes attributed to a title without regard for whether a title is a 120-minute movie or 6 seasons of 20, hour-long episodes). Likewise, public YouTube data is delivered at a global scale for which we have no context – we’ve never had simultaneous global availability, of course the audience scale will seem vast. Such metrics are rarely debunked or contextualized by the click-trolling that passes for contemporary media industry journalism.

A mass-media era hit like The Cosby Show provided extensive concentration of viewing in a single country. As the most watched US show in the mid-1980s, The Cosby Show reached roughly 80 million US viewers a week (34% of US population per 1985 figures).[1] In comparison, Nielsen estimated 27.1 million US viewers of Squid Game’s second season, which was the most watched title for the 2024–25 season (across linear and streaming, based on 35 days). Clearly the ‘hit’ of the year (by a sizable 8.1m margin) and one of very few titles to have significant awareness outside its viewer base, it still reached just 10% of US adults (per 2020 census figures).

Even Netflix titles reaching tens of millions on a global scale does not necessarily make for a mass media phenomenon as we’ve known them. In the predigital era, global consumption was less simultaneous and viewing data was not aggregated, but how many people around the globe watched an episode of The Simpsons or Friends on a television channel in their country on a given night in the 1990s? We have no idea, but that is the comparison for Netflix and YouTube videos that matters.

The key takeaway here is the necessity of cordoning many of our assumptions of how media operate in society and the logics supporting that operation built in the twentieth century into a box marked ‘historical context’ and storing it on a shelf in our brains. Sometimes the insight in that box is useful, but that is not our world anymore. We must not assume ‘hits’ equate with the industrial and societal reach of mass media, and we must build understandings of mid and micro media logics that are as robust as those of mass media.

We ‘know’ very little about the business of making sustainable mid and micro media. Again, pluriformity means we need to understand multiple coexisting dynamics rather than look for a single answer about how ‘media’ operate: we will live in a world of some mass and mid media, but mostly micro media. There isn’t a way to return to mass media conditions unless some force of scarcity is recreated. Instead we need business structures optimized for micro media. 

What are micro media logics?
Developing more robust micro media logics is a useful alternative to media organizations trying – and mostly failing – to balance escalating budgets, content, and diminishing audiences according to mass media logics of making something acceptable to many.

Mass media logics involve intentional overproduction and making up for the majority of losses with one lucky hit. Mid and micro media logics must rely on lower margin but reliable return and consistent profit. This isn’t new to most industries but has been peripheral to media because of how scarcity enabled mass reach; for example, the model of low-to-mid budget films that recoup investment as success or the recorded music industry’s reliance on a portfolio strategy that includes development across wide-ranging genres.

Some aspects of media business operation remain unchanged in micro media. Media industries are still peculiar relative to many other goods sectors. They have high first-copy/sunk costs and low-to-no marginal costs; they are risky businesses (per Harvard economist Richard Caves) as consumer desire is unpredictable – this is the same whether mass or micro, although the strategies for dealing with these features may vary. The principles of Econ 101 continue to apply – bluntly, goods need to produce more revenue than the cost of making them to be sustainable. The availability of opportunities for bundling, loss leaders, or portfolio strategies that have offset high failure rates make these less effective or viable responses (unless you are a distributor built precisely on delivering different content to different users). And finally, there are still quite different media making conditions for those goods seeking advertiser support and those reliant on consumer funding. This is an important distinction of media industry operation that went under considered in video businesses because of the decades of uniform advertiser (or government) funding (see Portals and Netflix and Streaming Video).

Despite those similarities, there are differences. The biggest owes to the inability to take advantage of scale. The peculiarity of low-to-no marginal costs drove the extraordinary profitability of media in an environment in which scarcity enforced mass attention. Micro media need budgets appropriate to scale and have less financial capacity for intentional over production.

Micro media are often supported by more varied revenue streams (multiple revenue sources and a greater variety of them). This isn’t clearly tied to a difference in mass versus micro so much as additional revenue streams were less necessary in under mass conditions; though it is worth noting how a blend of ad and consumer funding changed the content available on television with the advent of cable/satellite systems.

Finally, a growing amount of micro-media making involves hosted distribution that has much different dynamics of risk and reward in the relationship between makers and distributors (see 5). The content licensing contracts that undergirded those relationships were much more bespoke in mass conditions. There was significant variation among contract terms, and makers required agents, lawyers, and often managers. Maker/distributor relationships in hosted media are far more standardized (Terms of Service/standard platform ‘licenses’ largely stand in as contracts but terms are non-negotiable) and importantly, leave the maker bearing the full risk of content creation. Despite this lack of risk for distributors, they still receive a considerable share of revenue for the attention they sell against creators’ work and often, all the revenue.

Attention to content on YouTube and social media have made clear that production values and spending is secondary to resonance when it comes to what users value. Costly features such as stars and spectacle regarded as crucial in mass media logics don’t as reliably drive value, or at the least, stardom operates differently (a universe of micro stars for each micro community).

The key to sustainability in micro media logics is alignment between cost and revenue from available reach. Endless growth, or even substantive growth past maturity may be unlikely. [A lot of the thinking here aligns more to media made in an ongoing model, like television and magazines offered and ‘creators’ aspire to, rather than media that make discreet goods such as albums or books. But music and book publishing have been running micro media components of their businesses for a long time; former ongoing sectors should have a look].

Micro media logics cannot prioritize scaling content reach in the way mass media logics do. As a result, content has to compete on delivering value in ways different than accomplished by escalating budgets – the most used tack of mass media logics. Scale is limited at a content level, but possible for media businesses that support a range of makers and share a minor stake in their success. The investor-grade play is still in distribution.

The ultimate model for an investor-grade business is likely aggregation by using managerial strategies based on federation as illustrated by the approach of record labels, book publishers, or CondeNast at its peak (not centralization, or only centralization of non-creative functions). To date, hosting platforms (YouTube, Substack) have illustrated a version of this strategy that is exceptionally beneficial to the hosting platforms. They succeed because of the micro attention gathered by the many media makers they distribute. The key here is in adjusting the dynamics of a hosted relationship to afford media makers a more robust support structure in terms of business operations, especially among media makers not chasing scale (see 5 and 6 for some key sector distinctions). Some of this has been tried in various iterations of the YouTube Partner programs and with MCNs that were arguably too early (and greedy). We barely understand the range and dynamics of micro media logics now; efforts a decade ago believed they were operating under mass media logics. Such federated scale also bears commonality with the relationship structure of agents and managers but involves a different range of tasks – or value to the media maker.

The biggest challenge of micro media logics is discovery, although this is now a challenge for all media, those licensed by dominant services just have an advantage. The dynamics of the business based on timeliness (that were part of scarcity) also need rethinking. Rather than having to perform strongly on ‘opening weekend’ micro media can afford the slow build and keep attention on delivering value to those who have discovered the maker/their content. The persistence of content offers opportunities unavailable with ephemeral distribution technologies, although that also adds to the abundance that makes discovery a challenge.

I have more questions than answers about micro media. Evidence is scarce and finding enough data to investigate for patterns is even more difficult. We have trouble building understanding of micro media because we can’t see their operation in society beyond our own interests and lack data about things that aren’t the most consumed.

Fit-for-purpose strategy requires understanding user preference in a world where mass, mid, and micro media coexist. We likely remain in the early innings in terms of the availability of micro media relative to what may exist in the future. We’ll have deeper insight into micro media logics when we begin to understand what makes micro media sustainable over time, instead of assuming the only end goal is scaling or evolving into other core revenue.

[1] The math here requires some estimation. In its second and third seasons (1985-87) Cosby earned a household rating of 33/34. There were 85m TV households in 1985, so a 33 rating would be 39m households. Given The Cosby Show was an 8p family comedy, it would likely be fair to assume more than an average of 2 viewers per household, but a conservative 2 gives us 78 million viewers. The Nielsen Squid Game data is reported in viewers not households. The Cosby Show viewers are averaged against the full population of 239.2 million, while Squid Game is figured against US adults given the difference in the content.