we’ve watched this shift build for years. founders lost trust in traditional media, need to control and breakthrough, and went direct. they built audiences on twitter, substack, podcasts. what started as necessity became strategy.
now tech companies are following with real budgets. if you believe startups signal where tech is headed… what they build, how they market… then bigger companies will always catch up. founders pioneered direct-to-audience because they had to. companies are scaling it because it works.
what we’re seeing is the collapse of the traditional paid/earned/owned media framework. instead of treating these as separate buckets, companies are combining them… investing paid-level budgets into owned channels while using those properties to earn coverage elsewhere. the lines have blurred completely.
the smartest companies aren’t abandoning traditional media entirely… they’re repositioning it as an amplification layer for content that originates from their owned properties. rather than pitching stories to journalists and hoping they land, companies like stripe create definitive content themselves, then use media relationships to discuss and reference that original work. they become the source that outlets cover, rather than subjects hoping for coverage.
but building an owned media strategy only works when you still respect traditional media. media relations remains core to any pr strategy and it has never been a drive-through. it’s built on relationships and trust developed over time. the best overarching strategy encompasses both owned and earned media without alienating the pillar that’s supported pr for centuries. treating journalists as mere amplifiers rather than partners is a recipe for failure.
this shift solves the frequency problem inherent in traditional pr’s discrete campaign cycles. audiences expect consistent engagement, and owned channels allow companies to maintain a steady drumbeat of content between major announcements. companies are essentially building their own networks, treating traditional media as distribution partners rather than gatekeepers.
the result is that every tech company is becoming a media company that happens to also have a core product. in a crowded (ai) market where technical superiority alone isn’t enough, the companies that master both engineering and storytelling are the ones capturing outsized mindshare, talent, and ultimately market position.
other examples are proliferating across the ecosystem. the bootstrapped podcast network (tbpn) runs daily 3+ hour video podcasts that generate endless social media content… every conversation becomes dozens of founder soundbites distributed across platforms. shopify built an entire content empire around entrepreneurship that extends far beyond e-commerce. openai regularly publishes research that functions as both technical documentation and thought leadership. y combinator transformed from an accelerator into a media powerhouse with their podcast, blog, events, and video series that shape startup culture itself. the collison brothers built a pub studio for a stripe founder interview series!
these companies have realized that in the attention economy, owning the conversation is more valuable than vying for access to it.