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Media, Built is a newsletter about how modern media actually works. I break down how distribution, format, and systems shape what reaches people and what doesn’t. Drawing from operating experience across media, I focus on the gap between what gets made and what actually travels.
Greetings from 30,000 feet, where I am really struggling with airplane WiFi (looking at you, Viasat) to get this out. I am on my way to London for The Podcast Show this week. If you are attending, drop me a line. Would love to grab time. And with that, let's move to one of the big media stories from last week, the upfronts.
The gravitational shift of the upfronts plays out like a microcosm of the content ecosystem. I remember my first upfront at Carnegie Hall, the 2022 Paramount one. It would be the last - the company swapped the format a few months later for a series of more intimate dinners. Yes, it was long (very long) and sometimes stilted and we were packed in and packed out, but it was also a bit magical. Here was everything Paramount was doing for the year, packaged up and glitzy and full of surprises, themed around 60 Minutes, with a fun Survivor bit (love me a good Survivor bit). Then the after-party with colleagues and talent and food and booze, and it felt like what I thought Hollywood, or the NY version of Hollywood, should feel like. I left buzzing.
Today that energy still exists but it lives with the brands that 10 years ago, even 5 years ago, would have been hard to imagine as the creative center of gravity for the entertainment business. YouTube wrapped The New York Times print edition this week (small group of people who still get that physical paper, but I certainly noticed) and a majority of the Upfronts headlines focused on the work YouTube was doing.
The headline that did not get quite as much focus but is worthy of a lot of it - the mechanisms driving the upfronts, the actual measurement mechanics underneath what everyone is trying to sell. Because while the upfronts remain all about sales and the razzle dazzle, what we measure and how we measure it is the structural question underneath every pitch on stage. It is the lever that determines which of these bets actually gets a buy behind it. And in the middle of all that spectacle last week, one Amazon executive named the gap directly in a Digiday interview (credit to Alyssa Mercante).
Angie More runs creator advertising partnerships at Amazon. At the May 11 Upfront, the company laid out its Wondery pitch around an Oprah Winfrey deal: video podcasts are no longer fringe, they are the new home for talk formats, and they are competing for TV budgets rather than complementing them.
(fully aligned and co-signed on that one)
In the Digiday interview the same week, More named the issue underlying the pitch. The biggest thing Amazon needs to address over the next couple of years, she said, is measurement, and it is hard to unify experiences when the company does not own most of the platforms where audiences actually show up.
My pov - that is the most useful sentence from a major platform this Upfronts season. It is also a recurring theme from both past newsletters and current work with Sine Wave clients.
More is right. What she named is bigger than Wondery. Cultural attention continues to shift across surfaces, and every platform competing for it - YouTube with its Creator Shows slate, linear networks with creator and video podcast integrations, Wondery with its 360-degree franchises - everyone is racing to give buyers a clean way to follow the audience.
Three Buyers, Three Currencies, One Show Without a Price
A video podcast, a creator show, a linear hybrid that integrates either, carries at least three different inventory definitions depending on who is buying it. To a podcast advertiser it is audio inventory, priced on downloads and host-read endorsements. To a CTV advertiser it is connected television inventory, priced on reach, frequency, attention, and attribution. To a brand marketer working out of a creator budget it is creator inventory, priced on conversion, affinity, and trust. One show, three buyers, three currencies, and no clean way to price it as a single product because the buyers are not buying the same thing.
It is, has been and remains one of the more stubborn unsolved issues our industry faces.
The Triton Digital 2025 U.S. Podcast Report makes the consumption ambiguity concrete. Just 7% of podcast consumers watch only, while 80% both watch and listen. Audiences are using both, often in the same week, often with the same show. Every operator chasing this shift, at a podcast network, a streaming platform, or a linear TV company, faces a version of the same problem.
Pick the Buyer Before You Build the Dashboard
A real positioning decision is unambiguous. The show is a CTV property. Or a creator property. Or a premium audio property. Once that decision is made, the measurement stack falls into place. Each of those measurement stacks already exists. The hard part is being asked to run all three at once and produce a single buyer-friendly story.
Markiplier got this right with Iron Lung in January. He had 38 million YouTube subscribers, plenty for a reach pitch. He went with a conversion pitch instead, and built the entire release around proving how many of his fans would actually show up at a theater on opening weekend.
The shows that win the TV budget will be the ones that decided early TV budget was the goal and built the measurement story to match. The shows trying to win every pool with the same deck will…not.
For now, the takeaway is narrower. The shift in cultural attention is real and visible. Wondery's measurement admission was the most candid framing of what that means. The question for any operator chasing the new buyer pools is whose budget pool they are actually trying to win, and what they are willing to give up to win it.
That decision is harder than it sounds. I have yet to meet an operator who picked one buyer pool and felt great about the trade, but the ones who picked tend to look back at it as the move that generated real results.
Thanks for reading and if this was useful, feel free to forward it to someone who should be thinking about this. Join a growing group of operators, creators, and strategists focused on how media actually works.