Events Will Undergo Same Barbell Evolution as Media

If we look back on the past century of media, we have seen a dramatic evolution of what has worked. And with the arrival of the internet, what was working suddenly stopped. The pandemic is going to force the same thing to happen to events over the next few years.

Think back to newspapers in the 1980s and 90s. In the United States alone, newspapers were generating close to $70 billion in ad revenue in the late 80s. Benedict Evans has a great chart showing this. Then the internet came along and things started to change. But it was slow change. It was only after the arrival of massively successful search engines and social media platforms that advertising revenue truly cratered.