Evan Shapiro and Geoff Bennett explore the future of media on 'Settle In'

Transcript

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Amna Nawaz: Well, the media industry has been navigating substantial turmoil in recent years, from big mergers to layoffs to accusations of government censorship.

On a recent episode of our PBS News podcast “Settle In,” Geoff Bennett explored all this upheaval with Evan Shapiro. He’s an award-winning producer who now writes about the industry for his Substack Media War & Peace.

Here now is a clip of that conversation.

Evan Shapiro: I do think we have this perception that very few people control the media. That is less and less true on an ongoing basis, especially when you consider that YouTube is now the biggest channel on TV sets in the U.S. and everyone says, well, they’re the big tech. They control so much voice.

In reality, YouTube is 4.6 million different channels. And a million of them control a lot of the voice there, but that’s still a million channels. So, in my mind, fragmentation is now the most important factor in media.

I like to say that, when I was rising up in media, it was a lot easier because your competition was a few other channels. Now your competition is everybody, all seven billion people on the planet Earth with a smartphone.

The good news is that, back when I was coming up in media, there were only a few buyers of the stuff that you would make. Now there are seven billion, eight billion buyers of the media you make. So the control has shifted from these ivory towers, who think they’re still in charge, to the consumer themselves, who really do control the media in their system settings whenever they touch that piece of glass that they pick up first thing in the morning.

Geoff Bennett: You recently gave a talk called “The Year of Change or Die,” which is pretty — pretty stark framing. What did you mean by that?

Evan Shapiro: So this is the year that the combination of the creator economy and mainstream media will really intersect in a way that they hadn’t before.

And you see this in Procter & Gamble producing a microsoap for TikTok and Instagram. You see this in MrBeast being on Amazon, Ms. Rachel being on Netflix. And so the folks who operate their businesses by the vanity metrics of eras past, they’re going to find it more and more difficult to succeed.

The best example I will give you is, last year, all premium streamers on the face of the Earth — so these are the paid streaming platforms like Amazon Prime and Netflix and Disney+ and Hulu and the rest — they gained 175 million new subscribers. Hooray. They also lost 158 million subscribers.

The retention has been — it’s a third of what it was five years ago. It’s half of what it was four years ago. They’re going to get to a zero retention in the next couple of years, and then suddenly, premium streaming, this thing that was going to save television, right, is going to be in the same place cable is, losing subscribers, revenues shrinking, instead of growing.

And, in reality, at the same time, these social media platforms, social video, things like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snap, these are now where people under the age of 50, not under 30, not under 20, under the age of 50, they’re spending much more time there than they are on other platforms.

The fastest growing segment of viewers of YouTube on television are people 55-plus.

Amna Nawaz: And you can watch that full conversation and all episodes of “Settle In” on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.