🗿 Mainstream Media Is Dead

After Polymarket and Rogan effortlessly out-predicted and outperformed legacy polling and journalism, it's safe to say mainstream media is dead. It's not some right-wing fantasy. It's an objective reality.

Author

Jared @ Supernova
November 08, 2024

In partnership with

GM. After Polymarket and Rogan effortlessly out-predicted and outperformed legacy polling and journalism, it's safe to say mainstream media is dead. It's not some right-wing fantasy. It's an objective reality.

☕ *knuckle cracks* ☕ Let’s get into it.

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First thing’s first, media election ratings were way down from 2020

CNN's election coverage reached a total 5.1 million viewers, a 44 percent decline in total viewership from 2020, according to Newsweek. Fox News led the mainstream pack at around 10.3 million views between 8 and 11 pm. MSNBC sat around 6 million, beating CNN on an election night for the first time.

Numbers overall were down. Why? People aren’t watching on TV anymore – they’re watching online.

MSNBC’s youtube channel had its strongest day on record – with 30M views.

Let’s double click on that last part. MSNBC’s highest performing channel was Youtube.

This is the kiss of death for legacy networks. The reason is simple. Youtube is a level playing field. It’s place for anyone in the world to create content – it’s not like network television – where you need millions of dollars and tier 1 connections to broadcast.

The only thing mainstream networks had left to differentiate themselves from your favorite indie creator? Institutional-grade trust. They were supposed to be the so-called “experts”. But they eroded any semblance of rooted credibility, lying to the public again and again.

One can only imagine who and what the world will be reading, watching, and listening to in 2028 when the next US presidential election comes around.

In 2024, we got a sneak preview into the future.

Once fringe corners of the internet, independently-operated shows and podcasts with limited special interest hosted presidential candidates with ratings that doubled the largest 60 Minutes ever (Obama as president-elect hit 25M views in 2008, Rogan-Trump hit 48M views in a week).

Beyond podcasts, I want to examine prediction markets (like Polymarket) – I think they represent the final-blow in the dismantling of traditional media

Election day transaction volume reached a whopping $300 million and 20M website views on Polymarket. Their team tweeted throughout the day calling shot after shot – and ultimately backed their claims with accurate outcomes that aligned better than any poll in the world.

Polymarket called the election before any major network, predicting Trump’s odds of winning as high as 95% before official calls were made.

Late Thursday, Polymarket called out the AP for still not calling Arizona or Nevada, despite having him at a 99% chance of winning those states for over two days.

This was the first big election we got to monitor alongside a prediction market. Because of that, we didn’t know if they were going to be right. And it’s possibly part luck that prediction markets put all their chips on the table so early.

But the more I sat and mediated on the mechanisms behind how prediction markets work, the clearer it became that they are more than just passive speculation.

They are signals. Prediction markets are the material manifestation of putting your money where your mouth is. And if the house wins, as it tends to do, betting prices will track accurately alongside likely outcomes.

It’s not prediction markets we should be wary of. It’s legacy media. Follow the incentives. The media wants you to watch for as long as possible so they can maximize their ratings and advertising revenue.

The incentives of Polymarket? Create accessible and robust prediction markets so users feel comfortable trading and suppliers feel comfortable providing liquidity. Polymarket depends on having robust technology, if their product wasn’t reliable, they wouldn’t last.

Prediction markets do not rely on computer algorithms or historical data. They are purely based on opinion and a user’s willingness to place a bet.

When you aggregate that data across millions of users, the statistical outputs start to tell a story that’s much richer than paid surveys and polling data from out-of-touch, compromised researchers.

Polymarket’s CEO Shayne Coplan went on CNBC yesterday to discuss the role of prediction markets in the 2024 election:

Apparently, Trump’s team cited Polymarket as a first indication that Trump was going to win.

Prediction markets represent the death of mainstream media

While Polymarket can’t replace political commentary, it does serve as a reliable peer-to-peer source of truth.

In comparison to polling data and speculation from so-called experts, when compared to news organizations who receive ballot counts and try to make authorized decisions on states based on statistical likelihoods, Polymarket simply moves faster and more precisely.

To top it off, you can monitor it on an easy-to-digest dashboard, in real-time, on a mobile app.

In 2028, we won’t need Fox or CNN to tell us who’s winning or who’s going to win. We’ll just listen to our favorite creators and commentators on Youtube or X to editorialize coverage. We’ll jump between our chosen prediction markets and search engines to stay up to date (who will use AI to neatly summarize real-time data).

We won’t miss a beat – with reliable data and coverage from a creator who feels more like a trustworthy, authentic, relatable, and frankly entertaining friend than a talking head in a suit telling you what to think behind a fancy studio and earpiece.

Mainstream media is dead, and there’s no coming back

It’s over. I really don’t see what the mainstream media can do at this point to revive themselves from certain death. There’s no growing market demand for that form of news and entertainment.

Legacy media lost its credibility by consistently lying and getting caught in lies and showing no remorse or regret about lying (if I have to list out the lies and explain them to you, you aren’t paying close enough attention, but I’m happy to do so). They lost their integrity by choosing partisanship and corporate special interest to big industry over real investigate journalism and reporting.

Despite all this, even if legacy media was capable of reviving its trust, social media opened the possibility for quite literally anyone in the world to turn on a camera and provide globally competitive entertainment … in seconds.

It’ll be interesting to see what new products, networks, and creators emerge in the coming 4 years. Who and what will become pivotal factors in future elections?

In 2016, Trump shocked the world by using Twitter as a home to share policy decisions. Everyone thought he was nuts. In 2019, TikTok was for dancing 13-year-olds… until it wasn’t.

Stay on the lookout for the next big thing, because odds are you’re already laughing at it.

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