Who Actually Creates the Value?

The debate about how media organisations sustain themselves is a legitimate one. Yes, journalism costs money. That's more honest than pretending your data isn't a form of currency. But the argument tends to stop exactly where it starts to get interesting.

Because the problem that media companies describe — audiences consuming content without paying for it — applies to social media in an even more fundamental way. And there, the logic is actually upside down.

On social platforms, you are the content

On a traditional media site, the exchange is at least legible: you pay — with money or data — for content someone else produced. On Facebook, YouTube, or TikTok, the logic is different. You are the content. The users themselves — the creators, the commenters, the people who just share something they found funny — are building the value that the platform sells to advertisers.

Meta and Alphabet provide the infrastructure. The community fills it. But the money flows in two directions that consistently bypass the people who made it worth showing up for. Advertisers pay for your data. Then, if you'd prefer not to have your data sold, you can pay a subscription fee to opt out. Money comes in from both sides while the person who actually made the content you came to see earns a fraction of a fraction of what their contribution generated.

This isn't a broken system. It's a working one — working exactly as designed. The model is dependent on noise because noise generates clicks, and clicks are the only thing the model actually measures. The incentive structure points away from quality and toward whatever triggers the strongest reaction. That's not a side effect. It's the mechanism.

Are media companies becoming redundant intermediaries?

There's a question the media industry tends to avoid: are traditional publishers becoming unnecessary middlemen? It's no longer hypothetical. Journalists with established readerships are leaving newsrooms and going directly to their audiences via Substack and newsletters. They keep more of the value they create. Their readers know exactly who they're supporting.

The disintermediation of media is happening not because readers don't value journalism, but because the systems that used to connect journalists to readers extracted too much from both sides. When a better direct connection becomes available, people use it.

The same dynamic applies across the creator economy. A fitness instructor who built their audience on Instagram, a musician who grew on YouTube, a writer who found readers on Twitter — all of them built something real, and all of them built it on someone else's infrastructure, under terms that could change at any moment, with earnings that bear no relationship to the value they actually created.

What if money followed the content?

The real answer isn't better consent forms or new ad pricing models. It's systems where money actually follows the content — directly from the people who valued it to the people who made it.

That would do more than improve the economics. It would send a completely different signal about what's worth making. Right now the signal is: make something that provokes a reaction, any reaction. In a system where income is tied to genuine value delivered to real people, the signal changes: make something worth paying for. The content gets better. The relationship between creator and audience becomes honest. And the platform stops needing manipulation to function.

The infrastructure for this exists. There are no technical obstacles. The question is whether the people building platforms are willing to design them around the interests of creators and audiences rather than advertisers.

Originally published in Norwegian in Kampanje on May 11, 2026.