Not really. Just a post about sponsors. Even if you don’t run a media company, the way media companies run matters. That’s because media shapes our culture and how we spend our time. There are three kinds of ad models, and it’s easy to confuse them. The most common and historically powerful is the traditional…

Moving is physical, travel is an emotional journey. Moving takes us from one place to another, one job to another, one situation to another. But if we seek to insulate ourselves from the emotional labor of travel, we can build a cocoon around our experience and discover nothing. Once we choose to see what’s actually…

With the rapid growth of generative AI, businesses, educators, and publishers are asking a critical question: how can we tell what’s written by humans and what’s produced by machines? The answer: it’s possible, but not foolproof. Here’s how to approach… Read more ›

You’ve probably heard that Google’s AI search features are tanking organic traffic. In April, we reported that click-through rates dropped by 35% across 300,000 keywords. Now, a Pew Research study has revealed that just 1% of articles cited in AI… Read more ›

As the founder of AI newsletter Mindstream, I’m constantly thinking about scale, especially when it comes to content. For me, video was the bottleneck. I wanted to show up consistently, but I didn’t want to spend hours filming, editing, or setting up gear. That’s what led me to explore AI avatars. At first, avatars were…

The initial adoption of new technology follows a regular pattern. The first group are hobbyists, people looking for a fascinating way to spend time. But that’s a small group–ham radio operators, for example, or theremin musicians. It’s the second group that gets the rest of us to take notice. They use technology to save time…

Perplexity is the outlier: nearly 1 in 3 of its citations point to pages that rank in the top 10 for the target query. We analyzed four AI assistants—ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity—to measure how often the URLs they cite… Read more ›

Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) are wired to want proof, not promises. While we marketers light up at impressions, and engagement — excuse the stars in my eyes — CFOs focus on revenue, risk, and return. This clash of professional love languages can create friction in budget conversations, performance reviews, and board meetings. I’ve experienced this…

A useful way to understand an evolved organism or system is to ask what it wants. What actions does it need to evoke to survive or thrive? The flower wants bees to visit, the berries want to be eaten by birds. Obviously, they don’t have conscious intent, but this desire guides their progression through the…

Each day, I have about 8 hours of tasks to do. Empty the dishwasher, bring in the paper, answer emails, queue up a blog post… it’s a very long list. I’m sure you have one as well. If we’re good at the chores, we’ll be offered new ones. And of course, it’s possible to find…