When I worked in traditional media, we knew the internet was going to change our business. But I don't think we fully understood what it was going to change.
We thought it was going to change how we delivered our content.
After all, media companies had been through changes like that before. Radio moved from AM to FM. Television went from broadcasting over the air to delivering programming through cable.
So when the internet arrived, it was easy to see it as the next evolution in that progression. Newspapers would publish articles online. Radio stations would stream their audio. Television stations would put video on websites.
We just needed to figure out digital distribution.
The Digital-Native Companies Were Supposed to Win
If distribution were the problem, companies built for digital distribution should have had an enormous advantage.
And for a while, it looked like they did.
BuzzFeed and HuffPost didn't have printing presses, broadcast towers, or decades of legacy infrastructure to drag into the digital age. They were built for the internet.
Yet this week, HuffPost's National desk was reduced to just three reporters as part of another round of layoffs. The desk had seven reporters before the cuts and 14 a little over a year ago. BuzzFeed, which owns HuffPost, announced plans last month to eliminate roughly 180 positions across BuzzFeed, HuffPost, and Tastyā€”about 35% of its workforce.
BuzzFeed's financial results show the larger problem. During the first half of 2026, revenue fell 17.7% to $67.9 million, while the company posted a net loss of $27 million.
These weren't traditional media companies that failed to adapt to digital distribution.
They were digital media companies.
So perhaps distribution wasn't the biggest change the internet brought to the content business.
The Internet Destroyed the Barrier to Entry
Before the internet, producing and distributing content to a large audience was difficult and expensive.
If you wanted to operate a television station, you needed a broadcast license, studios, transmitters, employees, and a lot of capital. Newspapers needed printing presses and distribution networks. Radio stations needed licenses and towers.
Those barriers limited the number of organizations that could distribute content at scale. That meant there were relatively few places where audiences could get their news and entertainmentā€”and relatively few places where advertisers could reach those audiences.
Content was scarce. Access to large audiences was scarce.
The internet changed that.
Suddenly, you didn't need a printing press to publish something people around the world could read. You didn't need a broadcast tower to distribute audio. You didn't need a television station to reach millions of people with video.
Today, a creator with a laptop and a phone can compete for the same attention that once belonged almost exclusively to large media companies.
The revolutionary change wasn't that content became digital. It was that content stopped being scarce.
That's a Business Model Problem
Changing distribution is a technical problem. Eliminating scarcity is a business model problem.
When content becomes abundant, it becomes harder to build a profitable business around producing it.
That's especially dangerous for businesses built around Content Revenue: businesses where content itself generates the revenue through advertising, subscriptions, sponsorships, or other forms of monetization.
The problem isn't that people stopped consuming content. They consume enormous amounts of it. The problem is that there is now an effectively unlimited supply of people willing and able to produce it.
That's why this isn't simply a story about legacy media companies failing to understand the internet. BuzzFeed and HuffPost understood the internet. They were products of it.
They didn't inherit the wrong distribution model. They inherited the same underlying assumption about what made the content business valuable: scarcity.
And the internet eliminated that scarcity.
If Content Isn't Scarce, What Is?
Creating more content doesn't restore the barrier to entry. Neither does publishing on more platforms, adopting the latest format, or getting better at using AI.
The more important question is: What can you create that is still scarce enough for people to value?
That's the question we'll explore in my Beyond Content workshop.
You'll look at the audience and assets you already have, identify where you may be able to create value beyond content, and find opportunities to turn that value into new sources of revenue.
Because the next sustainable business model won't come from finding another way to distribute content.
It will come from figuring out what you can create beyond it.
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