Five Guaranteed Ways To Succeed As a Thought Leader In The Next Era Of The Internet

Something weird is happening on the Internet!

Have you felt it?

The web is undergoing a seismic shift right before our eyes, and it's reshaping everything we thought we knew about what the digital world would become.

I started feeling this shift about two years ago.

I could feel that what I was doing was no longer working like it used to, but I had no idea why.

So, I started to pull at threads.

Gradually, confusion was replaced by understanding. And understanding was replaced by action.

In the end, I’ve spent hundreds of hours mourning the loss of what I thought the Internet was, understanding what it was actually becoming, and then crafting a way to succeed as a thought leader in it.

Let me show you what I learned…

#1. Trusted media institutions that were once pillars of society have lost trust and are in decline

These two charts say it all…

Source: Azeem Azhar of Exponential View

These shifts are making it harder for us to collectively make sense of what’s happening in the world and agree on the truth.

#2. Search engine traffic to third-party websites is dropping off a cliff

Google released AI Overviews, which provide the answers to billions of daily searches at the top of the search results page rather than 10 blue links. Said differently, Google now creates billions of pages of AI-generated content every day, and that number may increase to hundreds of billions as it rolls out the feature to more searches. It is estimated that this could cause publishers to lose 25% of their traffic on the low end.

Below is a search I just did to exemplify my point. At the top of the page is an AI Overview. Underneath it is a relevant snippet from a page on the Internet. Combined, the AI Overview and Snippet reduce the need for users to actually visit the pages that the content is based on.

#3. Social media has gone to shit and may cut creators out

Social media companies have filled their newsfeeds with ads, become walled gardens, and started censoring posts without disclosure.

Famous thinker Cory Doctorow calls the larger process enshittification. I agree.

Moving forward, it’s not hard to imagine a world where social media platforms copy Google’s strategy. A harbinger of this future is Grok’s AI story feature, which summarizes tweets on the same topic into a long paragraph at the top of the page. Similar to Google’s AI Overview, people’s actual tweets are pushed to the bottom of the page.

#4. AI companies stole our content and are using it to compete with us—all while talking about changing the world

Almost all of the data collected for AI is pulled without permission from content creators. After suing the AI companies, major media companies are now inking lucrative deals with AI companies to license that content, but small creators receive nothing. If smaller creators are ever compensated due to legal action, it will probably be too late as the AI companies will already be so big that they don’t need individual creators as much and the damage will already be done.

Then, speaking out of the other side of their mouth, the same companies talk about how AI will create so much abundance for everyone that they or the government will either offer Universal Basic Income to everyone.

But, how are we supposed to believe them when they didn’t pay content creators until they were threatened with legal action?

How are we supposed to trust the promise of a company like OpenAI when it didn’t keep its promises to its AI Safety team, which then caused the team’s senior leaders to leave?

How are we supposed to have faith that debt-ridden governments will suddenly have an abundance of money to pay all of its citizens significant dividends when these countries are only solvent because they can print money and debase their currency?

Bottom line: While I do think that AI is an incredibly powerful tool, I do have concerns about the mismatch between the rhetoric of these company’s legal / safety practices. While I think a lot of abundance could be created by AI, I don’t believe that it will be spread out through society as evenly or cleanly as AI companies give the impression that it will.

#5. The subscription economy has taken off, but it’s still in its infancy, and it has a major problem to contend with

One of the most exciting recent developments in the creator economy is that readers are now willing to pay for content subscriptions. As a result, a new breed of creator platforms are emerging that view creators as customers and help them own, reach, and impact their audience.

On the other hand, I’m not sure the Internet has the ability to support livelihoods for hundreds of thousands of paid content subscription creators any more than it does to support hundreds of thousands of TV/moving streaming services like Netflix and Apple TV.

This chart says it all:

The brutal reality of the subscription economy may be that it turns into yet another winner-take most market where a small number of creators make millions and most people earn a small side income.

My current bet is that bundling will become more common as creators realize that combining their publications into a super bundle will allow them to make more money individually. Furthermore, I think that many larger publications will end up commissioning articles from writers, similar to how media publications do today.

#6. The most respected news media company is becoming an entertainment company

For example, somehow, most of the New York Times engagement comes from games rather than news:

This chart reflects that from an economic perspective the New York Times is becoming more and more of a gaming company that does the news rather than vice-versa.

What does it say about the state of things that arguably the most serious news organization in the world is increasingly an entertainment company?

The situation reminds me of famous media critic Neil Postman’s prescient observation that the fundamental purpose of TV medium was entertainment. It appears that the same thing may be true for the Internet on some level as well. Postman eloquently explains his “amusing ourself to death” theory in the short video below:

#7. AI happens to be incredibly good at creating content

We’re already at a stage where most humans can’t tell the difference between writing from AI and writing from a human. Given that AI is the fastest evolving technology in history, it may eclipse many top writers in ability level in the not-too-distant future. The implications of this shift are that we could see an explosion of high-quality content in the coming few years as a result of AI:

On the other hand, for at least a few years, the best online writing will be done by humans who augment their abilities with AI.

#8. The Internet has consolidated into a few powerful platforms, and they are the new gatekeepers

In many domains, the last generation’s freedom fighters turn into the next generation’s dictators.

The same is true with the Internet.

Google’s motto was “Don’t be evil.” Now, it’s slowly becoming evil.

OpenAI was started as a non-profit to pioneer AI safety. Now, it’s a for-profit that’s pushing the world toward Artificial General Intelligence more than any other. It started to create AI safety bbut then, last month, the entire AI safety leadership team quit in a united act of “no confidence.”

Social media was created to bring us together, and it’s tearing us apart.

It all reminds me of a quote from the Dark Knight:

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

I became an adult just as the first wave of Dotcom mania swept the world.

At the time, the premise of the Internet was that it was a democratizing force. The reality back then:

• A few mega corporations dominated most of the media (books, magazines, newspapers).

• To get published, you had to convince one of these companies that you were worthy of being published.

• With the Internet, you could avoid gatekeepers.

For a while.

But fast forward 30 years…

There are a few Internet platforms that dominate content on the Internet. We still have gatekeepers. They’re just algorithms now, not people.

Rather than being a source for democratization, the Internet has become the greatest centralizer of attention in human history.

The harsh reality didn’t really hit me until I read Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu’s epic book, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. One line in particular bought real estate in my head and hasn’t moved out ever since:

By the mid-2010s, attention merchants had achieved something unprecedented: a small number of corporations were effectively able to seize and hold more human attention than any collection of media companies had in the past.
—Tim Wu

It took me a long time to process this shift, because I grew up reading and being inspired by the biographies of the founders of today’s top Internet companies.

At first, I explained away any specks that shaded the rosy pictures I had of these companies. Then, slowly, but surely, the specks took up more and more of the picture.

Now, I’ve read enough chapters of the Internet’s story to confidently see the bigger picture of what’s really happening.

Ok. Now, Let’s Zoom Out For A Sec

We are experiencing several major shifts at once that are fundamentally changing the nature of the Internet:

• The decline of trusted mainstream media.

• The drastic reduction in traffic from the two main sources of the creator economy.

• The enshittification of social media platforms and the rise of creator platforms.

• The rise of AI-generated and AI-augmented content without paying the creators that the content is based on.

• A new business model and platform designed for creators is emerging, but it is still in its infancy.

These profound shifts beg one question…

What The Heck Is Happening? Here’s The Answer From What I’ve Been Able To Gather

The best explanation of the shift that I’ve come across is Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification theory that explains the platform decline step-by-step:

Phase #1: Scale

• Attract Creators: Provide free organic traffic to creators in return for free content.

• Attract Users: Raise lots of money in order to offer an incredible, free user experience that packages the creator’s content to the largest user base.

• Craft Narrative: Craft narrative about being the white knight disruptor who changes the world.

• Become A Monopoly: Be the first to reach critical mass where it’s nearly impossible for new platforms to get a foothold and difficult for users to switch platforms.

Phase 2: Monetize

• Attract Businesses: Start prioritizing businesses by introducing ads.

• Prioritize Revenue Over User Experience And Creator Traffic: This means filling the newsfeed with ads, prioritizing advertisers, becoming a walled garden, and censoring content that is not advertiser-friendly. This leads to a worse user experience and less organic traffic for creators.

And the final phase, which I would add to the Enshittification process is this:

Phase 3: AI

• Train AI On User Data. Use free data on the platform created by users to train their AI.

• Edge Out Creators. Give the best real estate on the platform to AI summaries first, sponsors second, and creators third.

As a metaphor for our current moment, I’m reminded of an altercation between the co-founder of Uber, Travis Kalanick, and an Uber driver who blamed Uber for him going bankrupt. The driver had invested $97,000 in a high-end car in order to charge more via Uber’s high-end option, and then Uber dropped their prices. This squeezed his margin and ruined him. In short, the foundation upon which Uber drivers were building their business shifted underneath their feet.

Another tension was Uber pushing hard to replace all drivers with autonomous cars in the future at the same time it needed drivers in the present. In a shocking and rare admission, Kalanick is brutally honest in a 2014 interview at the Code Conference. He says that in order to stay competitive, Uber MUST replace all it drivers with AI or the company will get disrupted:

Sometimes, I wonder if we, as creators, are in a similar situation with regard to Google and social media platforms.

If we were, we would never know. Google and the platforms, of course, will give platitudes about how important creators are. That is just until it disrupts us.

In both examples above, Google and Uber, creators/drivers ARE important. But, they are important in the sense that a critical supplier is important, not in the sense that a customer is. And the problem with our position is that over time, we are moving from a critical asset to a commodity that can easily be replaced.

The situation left me wondering:

Will the handful of Internet platforms that dominate the Internet today eventually take humans out of the loop in order to “remain competitive”?

Are we the Uber drivers of the creator economy? The last of a dying breed?

Realizing that I as a creator was a commoditized supplier to social media companies, not a customer, convinced me to switch my Internet home to Substack in 2023. I don’t want my home to be a platform that is incentivized to replace me in order to stay competitive. With Substack, I now have a direct relationship with my audience that I own (e.g. emails, paid subscriptions).

The Future Of The Internet And Creator Economy Are At Stake

In my most fearful moments, I’ve wondered:

Holy shit! Does this mean the end of the creator economy?

Are we moving toward a future where advanced AI from Google and social media create the majority of the content on the Internet at a level of quality and distribution that even top creators, writers, and thought leaders can’t match?

In other moments, I’ve felt excited by the potential. I’ve wondered:

How can I use AI to create my best, most authentic work ever in a process that brings me joy?

While a lot about the future is uncertain, it feels like we can say a few things confidently:

• We’re entering a new era of the Internet.

• It will bring new opportunities and threats

• Along with new winners and losers.

• All the changes that are happening don’t represent a shift of degree, they represent a shift of kind. A new paradigm in which we as creators need to think in a fundamentally new way.

• If we dont’ wake up now to the dystopia that the Internet could become, it is more likely to happen.

All of this begs a simple question…

What The Hell Do We Do As Creators?

After spending the last year assembling and putting together the various pieces of the puzzle of what was happening, I then had to actually start the real work.

After all, it’s true that a problem half-understood is a problem half-solved. But, it’s also true that a problem 50% solved is a problem that is unsolved.

So, I set out to answer the following question…

On a practical level, what should my strategy for the future be?

In the end, I think there are five steps we as online creators can all take now to set ourselves up to succeed in the next era of the Internet:

1. Make Substack your home on the Internet.

2. Understand AI with mental models now. Then use it to create your best work.

3. Share your story, not just your expertise.

4. Create blockbuster content.

5. Collaborate with others.

Step #1: Make Substack your home on the Internet

In my Why I'm All-In On Substack post, I explained four reasons why I doubled down on Substack as my new home on the Internet:

• Substack has a unique, vibrant, rapidly growing, and collaborative community.

• The timing is right.

• Substack provides paid features for free.

• Substack gives you long-term compounding growth.

Social media platforms can be powerful distribution channels for your ideas, but they are shaky foundations on which to build anything over the long run.

On the other hand, you get the most freedom by using a mixture of tools like Wordpress and Ghost, but the problem with these is that they don’t send you traffic, can be complicated to set up and maintain, and traffic from search engines is likely to decline over time.

So, Substack offers a happy middle ground that I think is the best fit for most online writers and thought leaders. Not only that, if in the future, you determine you want to use another platform, then Substack allows you to move your emails and paid subscribers. This portability is a profound shift.

It is because of Substack’s importance that, for the first time ever, I co-created a program to help people succeed on a specific platform.

Tom Kuegler

and I created Substack Campfire 🪵🔥 ⛺ as a one-month Notes-writing and commenting community-based challenge, which starts on July 1.

Step #2: Understand AI with mental models now. Then use it to create your best work.

There are many well-intentioned movements to promote "human-made” content. For example, Beth Spencer has created a human intelligence badge that creators can proudly put on their profiles:

But, if AI keeps on anything close to its current pace even just for another year or two, it will be viewed as higher quality than even top creators, and it will be promoted by platforms. Therefore, I’m begrudging the philosophy, “If you can’t beat them. Then join them!” Rather than running away from AI, I believe that creators need to run toward it and use it to create the best, most authentic work.

To come to this conclusion, I went through a few hundred hour education process…

Rather than blindly believing in AI hype or critiques, I wanted to get a more fundamental understanding.

First, I spent my time understanding whether AI was likely to continue evolving rapidly or hit a plateau. My reasoning for this focus was as follows:

• If AI is likely to plateau in the next few years, it is not as important to focus on AI now.

• If AI keeps evolving at the same pace, it may be one of the most important things we can focus on right now.

After deep diving on the predictions of top experts in the field and understanding the AI Scaling Law, I determined that it was not only worth understanding AI, it was worth making it one of my top priorities.

My next question was:

How can I better understand AI?

At first I spent all my time prompting, reading news, and digesting thought leadership on the topic. But, soon it felt like a lot of what I was reading was repetitive and not incrementally valuable.

That’s when I embraced the power of mental models, which I talk about in this article:

This Is Exactly How To Train Yourself To Be Smarter About AI [TOP 100 AI MENTAL MODELS]

I spent the months collecting the 100 most valuable mental models. Then, I created a series of live classes to teach them. You can access the recording of the first four sessions below:

• Artificial Super Intelligence: Understand the #1 implication of AI that most people aren’t even aware of (June 20)

• AI Second-Order Effects: How to more accurately predict the future of AI so you can plan accordingly (June 13)

• AI Thought Leader: Understand the opportunity to become the first AI thought leader in your niche. Access via the video above (June 6)

• AI 100: How to use multiple mental models to think smarter about AI (May 23)

The last class will be July 11 at 1pm EST. Paid members of this newsletter can attend for free.

In the end, I suggest understanding AI as the first step to using it, because without truly understanding it, it is hard to be strategic.

Step #3: Share your story, not just your expertise

In 1997, IBM’s AI supercomputer Deep Blue won a six-match series against world champion Chess player Gary Kasparov.

Nearly 30 years later, AI has far surpassed the best human players in the world.

Yet, something interesting happened along the way.

Rather than the sport of human chess being eclipsed by AI chess, human chess is actually more popular than ever.

At a fundamental level, humans like relating to other humans.

This bodes well for online content that goes beyond just sharing information and shares people’s journeys.

Therefore, I am very bullish on the skill of narrative storytelling.

That’s also why we’ll be practicing narrative storytelling every day during the Substack Campfire Notes challenge.

Step #4: Create blockbuster content

There is one chart that influences my understanding of thought leadership more than any other:

IP Credit: Mark Shaefer, Visual Credit: Camille Ulmer

I first became aware of this chart ten years ago, and there is one core implication that I took away:

Quality is all that matters long-term and the bar for quality is increasing.

Based on this very basic insight, I decided to do something very counterintuitive. For every article I wrote, I aimed to create the best article that had ever been written on that topic. I write about the philosophy in:

Blockbuster 2.0: The #1 Mental Model For Writers Who Want To Create High-Quality, Viral Content

More recently, I have realized that AI puts the importance of quality on steroids:

Realizing the importance of quality, I decided to go all in on improving as a writer. Starting around 2014, I literally spent thousands of hours:

• Breaking down the 100+ micro-skills of thought leadership.

• Finding the top experts in the various micro-skills and paying for their consulting.

• Analyzing the content of the top performers and uncovering underlying patterns.

• Performing 4,000+ A/B tests on Facebook to test the patterns.

• Deliberately practicing the skills one-by-one.

I wrote about the process in the following article:

Blockbuster Blueprint: The Most Comprehensive Map Of Thought Leadership (Based On Thousands Of Hours Of Development)

In short, being deliberate and using the Blockbuster philosophy worked:

• 2013-2015: My average Forbes article, over time, was read 50,000 by people, which was 50x the average Forbes article at the time.

• 2015-2023: From there, I started publishing on Medium and my average reach increased by 4x to 200,000. This era lasted for nearly 8 years.

• 2023-2024: I’m on track to earn 6-figures in revenue on Substack after approximately one year.

• And more importantly than metric, over the years, I’ve gotten hundreds of comments saying that one of my articles was one of the best they had ever read on the topic on the Internet.

Step #5: Collaborate with others

In my Why I'm All-In On Substack post, I point out that Substack optimizes for collaboration more than any other social media or creator platform in history.

It does so through the following mix of features:

1. Co-author posts with other writers

2. Co-create publications with other writers

3. Engage with each other’s short notes or longer publication posts

4. Cross-post content to each other’s newsletters

5. DM other writers on the platform

6. Share discounts to each other’s paid newsletters

7. Recommend other writers

8. Provide testimonials to other writers

9. Interview each other and post it as a podcast/video post

10. Find collaborators via a director of creators on the platform

While these 10 features may not sound significant, together they change everything.

Rather than a change of degree, these features represent a degree of kind. A new kind of creation logic for creators on the Internet.

Cumulatively, these features shift the incentives of creators to win-win collaborative dynamics where people in the same niche can co-create and co-market each other’s content thus improving the quality and reach of their work.

When you co-market with people you really resonate with, you provide a trusted recommendation that helps that person increase their readers. Over time, you build a way to get discovered that doesn’t depend on Google or social media.

I also believe that collaboration will become necessary on a deeper level because of Subscription Shock. There are only so many subscriptions that people will subscribe to, and I believe that more and more creators in the same niche will bundle their publications into larger, affordable publications that provide a better value for the money than their individual publications. I will post more about this in the next week.

Conclusion

Welcome to the new era of the Internet, where the rules of engagement are being rewritten daily.

As trusted media crumbles, AI-driven search reshapes our browsing habits, and social media platforms prioritize profit over people… creators stand at a crossroads.

The game has changed, but so have the tools at our disposal.

By making platforms like Substack our home, harnessing the power of AI, and crafting blockbuster, story-driven content, we can not only navigate but thrive. And by collaborating, we can go much farther than we could ever go alone.

It's time to embrace the chaos, innovate, and reclaim our digital destinies.

The future isn’t just happening to us—we’re shaping it.

But, I’m not sure we can much longer.