The term “enshittification” has been used to describe the devolution of the broader digital landscape into a toxic sludge of affiliate marketing, unregulated influencer advertising, and AI-generated content. And much of the blame for this shift lays — correctly — at the feet of platform providers like Google, Meta, and X. But for all the economic clout these digital authoritarians wield over our collective information space, there has been comparatively little examination of the nature of media’s role in enshittification. As someone who spent the vast majority of my career in media, I feel there’s a lot to say about our industry as part of this process. At best, I’ve heard peers paint this enshittification as inevitable — and our role as one of an unwilling party, subject to unavoidable coercion. At worst, I’ve seen this cataclysm painted as a necessary evolution of an industry, with the unstated subtext that it has always been exploitative of its customer (the reader).

I am no pure soul. During my time as editor-in-chief at an independent digital publication, I saw far behind the curtain — how media advertising, influencer marketing, affiliate sales, and the nature of corporate access all work together to make independent publishing viable in the consumer product coverage niche. Seeing how the sausage was made, contrary to the statement’s historical intention, did not turn my stomach. Rather, I was fascinated by the possibilities such a system afforded. I never felt I was unduly influenced by the prospect of making a sale to an advertiser or by a potential loss of access to a major corporation. Still, it was obvious how easily these lines could blur — and how, as an individual motivated to see your publication succeed, there’d be no reason to feel “bad” about it. What sticks with me, and what does feel shitty in that spirit of enshittification, is that I rarely found myself going to bat for the reader when making these considerations. The game had three players: My publication, my staff, and our corporate partners-slash-adversaries-slash-benefactors. Knowing which hat to wear at any given moment required a high degree of self-awareness and discipline, one that I developed a keen sense of throughout my career.

But what does any of that mean? Statements presented in a vacuum tend to absolve us quite quickly compared to the ethically challenging situations that erupt on the ground. While I can’t name names (I’m not interested in being sued by the owner of my former employer), I can give you a very real example regarding a major corporation I regularly dealt with at my publication. And I was overwhelmingly the editorial point of contact for that corporation at my publication.

• At one point, early in my career, this corporation threatened to sue us (and possibly me) for publishing trade secrets in a news story. A lawyer called me. They were Very Serious.
• Later, that relationship developed into accepting various embargoes and, eventually, a long-standing series of junkets (travel and accommodations paid) to that company’s events.
• Later yet, I helped to initiate discussions of multiple advertising deals with this company as the only person in my organization with the necessary contacts, context, and motive to do so. (These deals funded organic coverage of our stories at trade shows, the vast majority of which were unrelated to this company. No promises about what was covered, if anything, or how it was covered, were made, or even insinuated.)
• Over the years, I published many, many articles about this company in an editorial capacity. All of which I stand by! I never felt “unduly influenced,” and we never did any “advertorial” for this brand. But they paid us substantial money to advertise.

Did this highly developed relationship engender greater care and consideration in my handling of a negative story about this company? Yes. Did it ever stop us from publishing a negative story, or color our coverage thereof? No. And I know from discussions with many peers over the years that I am far from alone in this experience.

This is the very, very messy nature of being an independent publisher. Many people operate under the assumption that media companies have strictly firewalled sales organizations that shield journalists from any kind of business influence or non-editorial relationship with the brands they cover. This is the case at some large publishers, and I applaud them for the resourcing and organization they commit to this “firewalling.” But the reality for smaller publishers (and some very big ones…) is that no such firewall meaningfully exists. We are left to navigate the ethical minefield of corporate influence and duty to readership, often with zero oversight. 

But the real danger of these relationships, in my view, tends not to be at the kind of independent publisher I led (and I have the self-awareness to know that it sounds like I am being very self-serving in this judgment, but give me a minute). With a masthead and a staff, you at least have a nominal duty to uphold the standards, ethics, and quality of the publication you work for and the people who rely on you every day. I took this duty seriously. You want to do well by the people who work with you, and you want them to feel empowered to publish the kind of stories and views that put those values on the page and reinforce them. I had many, many agitated — sometimes, openly argumentative — phone calls and email conversations over the years based on our reporting “upsetting” or “damaging” a relationship with this brand or that. And I always considered it my first duty to defend our coverage and my staff in the face of criticism. Full stop.

Even when, in hindsight, we’d perhaps been less than perfect in our approach to a given story or our level of outreach prior to its publication, corrections of factual errors were always made, and statements by companies we covered in response to our coverage were always published (provided those statements were made in good faith). Organizationally, my staff could always fall back on me to defend their reporting, and I could always fall back, at last resort, on the owner of the publication — he stood by my calls and believed steadfastly in the ethics of our reporting. He also served as my redirect if an inappropriate conflation of editorial and economic relationships emerged. That is to say, if a company ever felt like they’d “paid enough” to change coverage or push on our people, he was always there to step in and tell them to rightly go fuck off. I was immensely grateful to him for providing this cover, but I can’t recall a specific instance where I had to use it. It was so, so unusual — almost all companies understand how deeply inappropriate this is, and the ones who don’t are not the big ones with lots of leverage. This dynamic is well established and, in my experience, well respected.

For influencers — the lone operators who dominate new media consumption — there is far less “buffer” between content and the blowback it causes. In fact, there is often none at all (and far less precedent in terms of ethical boundaries to begin with). You are the person who negotiates a deal with the advertiser, produces the advertising content, publishes that advertising, and provides the necessary disclosure. This advertising directly supports your livelihood. You are also the person who must “report” on this company. If your reporting makes this company unhappy, you will have to personally manage that fallout, which could easily lead to the termination of a significant source of your income. I’m not here to name names, but over the course of my career, it became very obvious who made content for the love of subject matter — quite a few people do! — and who made content because they understood this provided a platform the brands they covered would then monetize. I’m not saying that the latter are “bad people,” or that they necessarily have some delusion about the ethics of what they’re doing. I’m just saying they don’t care. They’re in it to win it, and “winning” in their world comes in the form of a bank transfer. Some of these people very openly disclose these relationships (which is legally required in both the US and EU!), but many don’t (because enforcement is incredibly difficult to police).

Now, imagine yourself in the position of a brand. Who would you rather deal with: The hand-biting independent publisher, or the predictable and highly personally-motivated influencer? I don’t think this requires serious answering; the question is strictly rhetorical. Another rhetorical question: Do you think people in media haven’t noticed this?

It was clear from the outset that influencers would always have an advantage in direct brand advertising relationships. Their platforms are highly targeted, they are generally much friendlier to brands, and they are highly incentivized to give advertisers their desired deliverable (read: to get paid). None of this is meant as revelatory or shocking information; this is very obvious stuff. Less obvious is how this affects legacy online media: The shift toward influencer marketing has all but drained the direct ad revenue lake for independent publishers. They’re slower, less targeted, and much more fickle about where and how a brand’s story appears (because of all this business about “ethics in journalism”). Why bother? I’m not under any illusion that corporations owe some nebulous social debt to financing the cause of independent journalism (an unproductive and naive fantasy that, frankly, I wish some of my peers would give up). But this has left independent journalism in a very, very bad spot. And that spot is rapidly driving the enshittification of media.

To replace direct advertising, publishers have pulled on three very big, very shitty levers:

1. SEO. Drive more audience by creating content that serves only to show up on page one of a Google search result.
2. Affiliate marketing. Get people to click on monetized hyperlinks that pay a commission if a product is then purchased. (It doesn’t even have to be the product you initially click on, by the way. Amazon will pay out when you buy dog food after you clicked in from a link to a wireless mouse on the same tab.)
3. Operational efficiency: Pay people less (or make them freelancers) and tie their jobs to direct or indirect revenue metrics. Lay them off or fire them when they don’t meet quotas and replace them with someone (much) cheaper.

The first problem is that these are the only readily available levers for media to pull on. And I know it: I tried to pull on the first two as EIC of my publication. I never considered lever three (it also wasn’t my lever to pull, and it’s one that, self-evidently, would make any decent human being feel bad). At the time, the first two levers represented novel intellectual challenges that could improve the financial viability of our publication — they were really quite interesting to me. They were something new. But I was also woefully underequipped to exploit them on a strategic level. These are functions that have dedicated personnel and tooling at larger publishers, and at our scale (around 10-15 full-timers on staff), we were both too small to pursue them with dedicated hiring and too big to meaningfully drive an impact on the bottom line through on-and-off again efforts. We either had to commit fully to these as core operational directives, or to accept that we were one small vessel at the mercy of oceanic content currents and publish the stories and themes we felt were worth reporting on. By the time I was leaving the media world, this wasn’t even really a “choice” any longer — only insofar as choosing the former meant you might have to cut staff, while choosing the latter guaranteed it.

The problem is that pulling these levers just makes for bad shit on the internet. This amazing article on HouseFresh does a far better job explaining why than I ever could here, and you should read it. (I should also note that I had to find the link to this article on a Threads post where I initially found it, because Googling “air purifier SEO reviews exposed” or “why air purifier reviews on Google suck now” or any other term not including this site’s domain name was, unsurprisingly, very ineffective at surfacing this objectively outstanding piece of reporting.)

In the five or so years since this process began, the independent media world has basically collapsed. Large publishing aggregators like Future, Valnet, Red Ventures, GMG, and others have pulled all three levers mercilessly, destroying jobs, journalistic credibility, and the general vibe of the written internet. Even influencers are feeling the pain as the platforms they rely on increasingly become gamified and subject to the ever-changing whims of their algorithmic overlords, constantly seeking to extract the most engagement time from their audiences. Enshittification is, in short, taking over every part of the media.

I don’t know how we fix this. I don’t know if we can. There’s no silver lining. There’s no “lifecycle” playing out. Media is getting smaller and worse, and it seems destined to stay smaller and worse for the foreseeable future. I hope I’m wrong.

Author’s note: This piece has not been keyword optimized for Google and I took the hero shot at the top of the article with my iPhone for an unrelated purpose (read: likes on Instagram).