Like It or Not, We’re All in Media Now

Every company is now competing for attention in a media environment. Your competition isn't just other companies. It's MrBeast (or this week's MrBeast knockoff) with the latest stunt. It's a micro-influencer with 50,000 followers breaking down fall fashion trends. It's a dad in his garage reviewing power tools to 2 million subscribers.

I’ve seen too many companies running a YouTube channel that’s just product demos with 47 views. Or, a LinkedIn page that's “look at us!” press releases reformatted as posts. Or, a podcast where two VPs interview each other about Q2 priorities.

If you're not showing up in a media-native way, with content specifically built for capturing attention on the platforms where your customers actually spend time, you're just creating very expensive noise.

If you think real, platform-native content is a vanity project that doesn't generate ROI, you will lose in the medium term. Forget about the long term.

Your Product Won’t Save You

You can have the best product in the world. But if no one knows about it — or no one cares about it — it does not matter.

It’s even more true with AI. Whatever product you build, or whatever service you offer, someone else can replicate it quickly. Differentiation that used to last years now lasts months.

Your product or service alone won't save you.

So, what's left?

Audience.

You need an audience that doesn’t just know about you … but that actually likes and trusts you. An audience that will not just stick with you through future product flops but will rave about you to their friends. An audience that behaves less like customers and more like fans of a personal brand.

The people who figured this out first were, in fact, personal brands. Marie Kondo with organizing. Ramit Sethi with personal finance. Arianna Huffington with Thrive Global. Jon Favreau with Pod Save America. They built media empires around their expertise and perspective.

The playbook is simple: Build a personality around a compelling perspective for a hyper-niche audience. Companies caught on. HubSpot acquired The Hustle. Pendo acquired Mind the Product. Robinhood acquired MarketSnacks (their first acquisition ever).

Build the audience, earn the trust, own the relationship.

Follow The Attention

Consumer attention has fully moved away from legacy platforms. This isn't just that distribution shifted away from Savannah Guthrie and her TODAY show friends. The pie grew, and almost all of that growth went to YouTube and social.

1. Streaming surpassed broadcast + cable combined for the first time ever in May 2025. As of November, streaming now represents 47% of total TV viewing. Broadcast + cable combined: 44%. (Nielsen, CNBC)

2. YouTube is now the #1 TV distributor in America, capturing 13.4% of all TV watch-time.That's more than Disney (9.4%), Netflix (8.8%), or any traditional network. YouTube's share has increased 62% since July 2021. (Nielsen)

3. The average person now spends 2 hours and 21 minutes per day on social media, up from 90 minutes in 2012. That's a 57% increase in just over a decade. Weekly, social media users spend nearly 19 hours on these platforms. (Statista, DemandSage)

4. 55% of Americans are now monthly podcast listeners, the first time it's crossed a majority. Podcast listeners spend an average of 7 hours per week listening. YouTube is now the #1 platform for podcast consumption, used by one-third of listeners. (Edison Research)

5. Trust in traditional media hit an all-time low of 28%, down from 68% in 1972. Institutional media is now the least trusted institution Gallup measures. (Gallup)

But here's what most companies miss: Showing up isn't enough. You can post on YouTube. You can start a podcast. You can launch a newsletter. That doesn't mean anyone will care. Audiences on these platforms don't follow company brands. They follow the people representing these brands.

That's why the YouTube channel with product demos gets 47 views while the guy in his garage gets 2 million. Same platform. Completely different relationship with the audience.

The Solution: Authority-Led Growth

The solution is much more than “better” content marketing, brand marketing, influencer marketing, or pick-another-prefix marketing. The solution is building a self-reinforcing growth engine around trusted, authoritative individuals who earn attention as a proxy for the product or service.

Remember: People follow people, not corporate identities.

I call this authority-led growth. Rather than leading with company branding or paid advertising, build visibility and credibility through the people running the business and the business’ customers. When done well, it creates inbound demand: prospects reach out because they’ve earned a high know, like, and trust factor; conversion rates increase; and the cost of customer acquisition decreases.

The mechanics follow a four-stage flywheel:

Followers: Capture attention. Attention leads to market power. Founders and team members show up with a clear point of view on social platforms, at industry events, and through other earned channels.

KPIs: Audience size, reach, engagement

Subscribers: Convert attention to trust. Followers are rented land; subscribers are an owned audience. Newsletters, lead magnets, and other gated content give you a direct line to prospects.

KPIs: Email marketing contacts, open rate, CTR

Customers: Transform trust into revenue. Subscribers nurture into conversations; conversations convert to deals. When a prospect is ready to buy, they already have conviction you're the right choice.

KPIs: Pipeline contribution, revenue growth

Evangelists: Clients become distribution. Happy clients share your content, refer others, and talk about you in rooms you're not in. This compounds visibility, generating more followers for another turn of the flywheel.

KPIs: Share of voice, client-sourced referrals

We’re Building the Flywheel at Luxury Presence

Luxury Presence is the growth platform for real estate’s top performers. What started as a website company became a marketing company, and we’re now expanding into CRM and beyond. The product keeps getting better, solving more problems for our audience. And so is everyone else’s.

So, in addition to accelerating product investment, we’re also accelerating investment into what AI cannot replicate: brand, community, distribution, and industry authority. We call the initiative Presence Media.

We're building a talent network of top-producing agents and industry personalities who become the recurring faces of our media ecosystem. They host shows, create content, speak at events, and amplify the brand across their own channels. We're creating YouTube series and platform-native short form content that will look more like an influencer’s channel than a corporate brand. And, we’re writing a real newsletter with sharp, original perspectives on agent growth, AI, and branding.

AI will assist creating all of it, but it simply can’t (yet) hallucinate its way to the textured authority only true experts bring to the conversation.

Every piece of media feeds the flywheel. Shows and social content build followers. The newsletter and gated content convert them to subscribers. Subscribers become customers of the Presence Platform. Customers become evangelists through our community and VIP initiatives, and they extend our reach into rooms we're not in.

Choose Your Competition

Many companies still believe they’re competing against alternative feature sets.

They no longer are.

They're competing against every piece of content fighting for their customer's attention. And, they’ll continue to be more of it with the cost of content creation nearing zero.

The product comparison only matters if you make it to the consideration set. You don't make the consideration set by having better features. You make it by being known, liked, and trusted before the buyer ever starts looking.

The companies that win through the end of this decade will be the ones that build audiences, not just products. They’ll curate trusted voices, not just faceless content. They’ll show up where attention lives, not where it once was.

If you’re running a company, you have a choice. You can keep posting "look at us" content on social media that gets twelve likes from highly-engaged employees. Or, you can accept that you're in the media business now, whether you like it or not, and start producing content audiences actually want to consume.

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