I think the next form of media group will be loose collections of like-minded individual creators, whose content is curated and amplified using that group’s shared brand.

Example:

“Subscribe to Time Travelers: A group of individual thinkers who write about the future of tech…”

So it’s actually a set of creators (influencers in today’s parlance) who have a shared set of interests, and a few of them decide to see up the shared brand.

That way people can subscribe to the individual people, or to the brand.

2/n

Eventually, after some of these become large enough, when you subscribe to one—say about the future of tech—you’re essentially subscribing to a newspaper in the sense that:

1. You have vetting through curation of the writers
2. You get the advantage of many writers

3/n

The incentives are interesting in that individual creators can be part of multiple groups, based on interest and quality.

Some groups may require you to be exclusive.

And the thing that keeps people coming to the group (and not the individual) is trust of the curation.

4/n

Because if the group’s curation starts to fail, or gets compromised by money or some other foreign influence, the creators will simply go to another group and/or the followers will stop following the group and just follow their favorite individuals.

5/n

So if we look at this model vs. the current media model, there are a few advantages.

1. It’s not gatekeeper-based: each subscriber and creator are already free to have a personal relationship without the curator groups
2. This model would be supported by people, not ads

6/n

@jhaddix and I have already been thinking about something similar for hacking content. And I’ve been thinking about the decentralized next step for media for a few years already.

I think this is the model.

Anyone want to brainstorm next steps?

7/n

I’m curious about naming because it forces you to think about what the thing really is.

Content Federations
Creator Federations
Federations
Perspectives
Co-ops
…

Thoughts?

8/8

The interesting thing about this is that you can still do sponsorships and product placements and swag and all that branding-oriented stuff, as a Content Federation.

It’s up to the Federation what is on-brand, and up to the sponsor as well.

The problem of content creators not being willing to say certain things largely goes away because they’re being paid by their direct subscribers, not the Federation.

This presents some technical challenges, but they seem approachable.