BoSacks Speaks Out: What If All Media is Marketing? (No Paywall)

Doug Shapiro recently published a sharp and provocative piece on Substack titled What If All Media Is Marketing? (No Paywall), exploring the logical consequences of collapsing creation costs. He’s not waving red flags or predicting extinction. He’s mapping the terrain, and it’s shifting fast. While I don’t think his conclusions apply universally across all media, the pattern he outlines is already visible in the wild.

Here’s the core idea: when content creation costs collapse, the margin doesn’t disappear, it relocates. The money shifts to the companion product.

What is a companion product? It is the thing sold beside or beyond the content, the ticket linked to the livestream, the product endorsed by the review, the membership that grants access, the seal that certifies quality. Think razors and blades, printers and ink, concerts and albums. Content is the appetizer; the companion product is the entrée. Publishers who cling to charging for appetizers will go hungry. Publishers who master companion products will feast.

The Evidence Is Hiding in Plain Sight

Amazon’s SEC filings call Prime Video an “effective marketing tool.” Translation: it’s not a studio, it’s a coupon. The movie is the lure; the cart is the catch. You came for the Bond film, you stayed for the bulk toilet paper.

Box office tells the cautionary tale. Domestic grosses rebounded post-pandemic, then stalled. Price sensitivity plus abundant alternatives equals a race to marginal cost. Theaters felt it first. Popcorn still costs $14, but the ticket price is gasping for air.

Music flipped years ago. The recording is the brochure. The stage is the business. Pollstar’s 2024 report reads like a stadium tour of sold-out arenas. Streaming fights for pennies; live shows print dollars. If you’re still betting on the album, you’re playing vinyl in a Spotify world.

Creators are the loudest proof. MrBeast’s Feastables sold roughly $250 million last year with eight-figure profit. The video is the funnel. The candy is the cash register. CAC (Customer Acquisition Costs) never tasted so sweet.

Magazines, this is not theoretical. Condé Nast now calls commerce a core engine. Vogue World sells access, prestige, and scarcity. The livestream is content. The ticket is the companion product. You’re not watching fashion; you’re buying proximity.

Closer to home, the Good Housekeeping Institute turned trust into a seal, a lab, and a licensing business. In the U.K., it became a material share of brand revenue. That’s what happens when content price deflates and companion products hold the margin. The test came first. The logo followed. The revenue smiled.

Red Bull is the archetype. The drink is the profit center. The media, films, magazines, space jumps, is the perpetual ad. They are a media company that sells caffeine, not a caffeine company that dabbles in media. If your brand doesn’t have wings, it better have a business model.

What This Means for Publishers Who Want to Keep the Lights On

Shapiro’s point is not that journalism dies. It’s that value formation moves. When creation cost collapses and supply explodes, price follows. The margin lives in the companion product. If you’re still trying to squeeze rent from the old product, you’re playing last decade’s game. And last decade called, it wants its CPMs back.

The Practical Playbook

Own the proven companion products:

Consumer Products: Turn brand authority into SKUs with margin. Monocle built shops and cafés. You don’t need a café, but you do need products people will pay for. If your editorial voice can sell a tote bag, it can sell a toolkit.

Live Experiences: Stage what only you can stage. Economist Impact runs paid events across verticals. Vogue World sells cultural proximity, and sells out. If your brand can throw a party, make it profitable.

Accreditation and Testing: If your brand can certify quality, make the seal scarce and auditable. Good Housekeeping did it. You can too. Just don’t slap your logo on a toaster unless you’ve tested the toast.

Create new scarce companion products:

Scarcity doesn’t mean fewer articles. It means gated status and genuine access. Think tiered memberships with real benefits: private forums moderated by editors, quarterly salons with sources, factory tours with artisans, limited-run print objects with provenance numbers. When the feed is infinite, the velvet rope is the product. If you’re not selling exclusivity, you’re selling noise.

Bundle the companion products:

Bundles are not just content. The New York Times bundle works because it mixes utility, habit, and perks. You should bundle content with member-only shopping, ticket presales, and accreditation discounts. Lock-in beats unique visitors every time. Loyalty is the new traffic.

Measure like a retailer:

Track CAC to each companion product: commerce, tickets, courses, licensing, accreditation. Attribute content to margin, not just pageviews. Optimize for lifetime value, not one-off CPMs. If a feature sells $20,000 worth of cookware, log it, pay for it, repeat it. If your analytics dashboard still thinks clicks are currency, it’s time for a CFO intervention.

Industrialize top-of-funnel content:

Let AI handle outlines, briefs, variants, and promo snippets. Spend human talent on reporting, taste, and standards. You’re not replacing editors with robots. You’re replacing waste with a factory that points to high-margin companion products. The robots write the scaffolding. The humans build the cathedral.

Two Magazine-Grade Moves to Copy by Monday

Testing as Product: Build an in-house lab for your niche. Publish the methodology. Sell licensing of the seal. Offer pro workshops. Bundle an annual buyers club with negotiated discounts. Good Housekeeping wrote the playbook. You just need to read it, annotate it, and monetize it.

Signature Annual Event: Package your industry’s tentpole as a show, not a conference. Borrow Vogue World’s scarcity and spectacle. Add your editorial voice. Multiple price tiers, a heavy sponsor ladder, and a collectible print program that becomes the year’s trophy. If your event doesn’t have a waiting list and a merch table, it’s not an event, it’s a meeting.

Risks and How to Dodge Them

Do not turn your brand into a flea market. Every companion product must be on-brand, quality-controlled, and finite. Licensing can scale fast, and destroy trust faster. Track returns, complaints, and seal misuse with the same rigor you track traffic. Hearst’s long game worked because the test came first, the logo second. If your seal ends up on a knockoff air fryer, you’ve got bigger problems than pageviews.

The Competitive Angle You Can Exploit

Platforms will flood the market with cheap video, audio, and text. Let them. Your moat is community plus credibility, tied to things that are not free to copy: seats, seals, friendships, provenance, and real-world experiences. When creation costs drop and distribution gets noisy, companion products become the quiet store where money changes hands. If your brand can’t be pirated, it can be profitable.

The Margin Has Moved: Why Great Content Is the Spark, Not the Finish Line

For decades, publishers treated content as the final product. The article was the asset. The video was the deliverable. The newsletter was the business. But the margin has migrated. It no longer lives in the story itself. It lives in what the story enables: the tote bag, the ticket, the seal, the membership. That is where scarcity meets credibility, and credibility becomes cash flow.

This shift is not theoretical. It’s operational. The New York Times doesn’t just sell journalism; it sells access to The New York Times Cooking, The New York Times Games, Wirecutter, and The Athletic. Each vertical is a monetizable product with its own gravitational pull.

The Financial Times has turned its reporting into enterprise infrastructure through tiered memberships and B2B licensing. The New Yorker’s tote bag isn’t a novelty; it’s a cultural signal. The Information built a high-priced membership model around deep tech reporting, then layered in exclusive Slack communities and career tools. Bon Appétit and Vogue have transformed lifestyle content into branded cookware, fashion collaborations, and ticketed experiences.

These publishers understand that content is ignition. The real fire, the durable, monetizable flame, is the companion product. This is not a side hustle. It is the business model. And yet, let me be unequivocal: content is not optional. Without great, addictive content, none of the above works. No tote bag sells. No membership renews. No seal earns trust. Content is the spark that lights everything else. If it doesn’t burn bright, the rest is just smoke.

Meanwhile, many legacy publishers remain stuck in the old margin. They cling to ad models and daily churn, ignoring the monetizable halo around their archives, journalists, and local influence. They treat merchandise as swag, not strategy. A mug with a logo is not a product unless it carries editorial weight or cultural resonance. Broadcasters who silo content from the community leave margin on the table. If your podcast has fans but no membership, no events, no companion product, you’re not in the business, you’re in the hobby.

The lesson is simple: content must be great, but it must also be catalytic. It must spark something beyond itself. Publishers who understand this will build ecosystems, not just outputs. They will treat every story as a gateway, every subscriber as a participant, and every product as a proof of value.

This is the new margin. And it’s not hiding. It’s waiting to be claimed.