2030

Greetings from October 2030!

Today, everything that AI can generate is infinite and close to free: content, ad creatives, reach. And the quality keeps improving. For humans it is impossible to distinguish AI generated content.

But the revenue of those media companies that thrive comes from four things that AI cannot generate.

First, premium advertisers.

AI improved the creatives, the processes and the workflows, but it cannot multiply the brands that belong in a premium advertising environment. You cannot AI generate a Ferrari, a Rolex, a Louis Vuitton. 

So, while on the supply side the amount of "good enough" utility content has become  infinite, on the demand side the premium has remained the same. Researchers found that, by mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted, with no statistically significant evidence of a decline in factual accuracy. The pool of premium advertisers grows at the speed of the real economy, not of an AI model.

As a result, digital advertising has finally split into the two tiers that I proposed in 2023. By 2026, media companies had not fully embraced the alliance for the premium tier.

The programmatic open marketplace has now become “agentic advertising” and runs by itself: agents buy from agents, display ads made by machines appear on AI-generated utility content. And audiences broadly don’t mind, as long as the content is accurate. They are transient and anonymous: visit for a reason, then leave.

Then, the premium tier. It sells a media company’s whole environment, not impressions. It is direct, scarce by choice, and run on the standards of the companies that own it, not of intermediaries’. 

Be ready to pick a lane, because a premium environment sold piece by piece, its assets decoupled, gets the open marketplace’s popcorn prices.