For most of the internet’s history, media has been built around destinations. You visited a website, opened a newspaper app, checked YouTube, read a newsletter or listened to a podcast. The assumption was simple: if something was interesting enough, people would go looking for it.
Social media changed that relationship. Instead of deciding exactly what you wanted to see, you opened a feed and allowed an algorithm to decide for you. Media no longer had to wait for you to find it. It could find you.
Now that model is changing again.
People are not consuming less media. If anything, we are surrounded by more of it than ever. Every platform wants us to open its app, every creator wants another subscription and every company wants another follow. AI is adding even more supply by making content faster and cheaper to produce. Ofcom found that UK adults now spend around four and a half hours online each day and use an average of 41 different apps each month. Ofcom, Online Nation 2025
We have created an almost unlimited supply of things to look at, but our capacity to pay attention to them has remained largely the same. And as the public internet becomes more crowded, some of the most important parts of our digital lives are happening somewhere else.
WhatsApp groups, Instagram DMs, Discord servers, Telegram channels, Close Friends lists and private communities have become places where we do much more than talk to friends. They are where we recommend things, discuss things, make decisions and decide what deserves someone else's attention.
The scale of these spaces is easy to underestimate precisely because much of their activity is private. In the UK, WhatsApp reached 90% of online adults in May 2025. Around 36 million adults used it on an average day, up from 30 million the year before. Discord reached 7.5 million UK adults, up from 6.2 million. Ofcom, Online Nation 2025 report
This might look like a change in where people spend their time. But it points towards something bigger. The internet is slowly moving from an economy built around attention to one increasingly shaped by permission.
From Destinations to Discovery
The early internet depended on people deliberately going somewhere. You typed in a web address, visited a blog or checked a forum because you wanted to see what was there. Media companies competed to become places worth visiting.
The feed changed this by making discovery almost effortless. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and eventually TikTok removed the need to know what you were looking for. You opened an app and an algorithm assembled an endless stream of things it thought you might like. It became one of the most powerful discovery systems ever created, but its success also produced an enormous increase in the amount of content competing for attention.
Every creator became a publisher. Every company became a media company. Billions of people became potential broadcasters. Generative AI is now accelerating this again by making images, articles, music and video dramatically easier to produce. The problem is not that the feed has stopped working. The problem is that anything inside the feed has become easier to replace.
A TikTok is surrounded by thousands of other TikToks. A newsletter sits beside hundreds of emails. A podcast competes with millions of episodes. Great content can still win, but the environment around it makes any individual piece increasingly disposable.
There are signs that our behaviour is changing too. Ofcom's 2026 research found that social media remains almost universal among UK internet users, with 89% of adults using at least one social platform and 97% of 16 to 34 year olds doing so. At the same time, its research describes social media use as becoming more passive and cautious. Ofcom, Adults' Media Lives 2026
We may not be leaving social media. We may simply be changing what we use it for. Public platforms remain incredibly good places to watch, browse and discover. The more interesting question is what happens after discovery.
From Attention to Permission
A feed and a notification have a fundamentally different relationship with us. A feed asks us to enter an environment and see what is there. A notification comes directly to us, and we usually have some control over who is allowed to send us one.
That makes notification access surprisingly valuable. Almost anyone can appear on your TikTok For You page. Far fewer people can repeatedly appear in your WhatsApp notifications without being muted, ignored or removed. Someone might first see your post, then follow you, subscribe to something you make, join a private community and eventually talk to you or other members directly. At each stage, the potential audience becomes smaller, but the relationship can become stronger.
This becomes particularly interesting when media begins appearing in spaces originally designed for personal communication. An update from a creator can sit beside a message from your brother. A community notification can appear beside your work group. A recommendation can arrive directly from a friend rather than an algorithm.
Media is moving closer to the places where relationships already exist. That gives these spaces something much harder to manufacture than reach: digital intimacy.
Permission matters because it is difficult to fake. An impression can be bought. A view can be generated by an algorithm. A follower can be acquired through a moment of attention. But remaining inside someone's private digital world requires something more persistent. You have to continue being useful, interesting or important enough not to be removed from it.
The Public Internet Discovers. The Private Internet Discusses
Private networks also change the way information travels. On TikTok, a video might reach you because an algorithm believes you will find it interesting. In a group chat, the same video might reach you because your friend thought you should see it. Both are recommendations, but they do not carry the same meaning.
Private messaging is already an important part of how information moves. The Reuters Institute's 2025 Digital News Report, based on almost 100,000 respondents across 48 markets, found that 19% used WhatsApp for news each week, the same proportion as Instagram. The report also found that news consumption is becoming increasingly fragmented across a wider range of online networks. Reuters Institute, Digital News Report 2025
Earlier Reuters Institute research gives us another clue about what happens once information moves into these spaces. Its comparison of Facebook and WhatsApp found that Facebook was more commonly used to discover and consume news, while WhatsApp users were more likely to discuss news privately or participate in groups built around particular topics. Reuters Institute, The Rise of Messaging Apps for News
The research predates TikTok's current dominance and the recent explosion of AI content, but the distinction it identified has become even more interesting. The public internet is exceptionally good at helping information travel. The private internet is where people begin to discuss it, interpret it and do something with it.
That should change how we think about influence. A group of 100 people who know one another, talk regularly, exchange ideas and make recommendations can sometimes be more valuable than an audience of 100,000 passive followers. The important question is not only how many people a network contains, but how many meaningful relationships exist between them.
For years, we have measured digital power by asking how many people someone can reach. Increasingly, we may also need to understand how strongly those people are connected.
From Audiences to Networks
Most digital marketing has been built around accumulating audiences. Gain followers, turn some into subscribers, sell products, advertising or memberships to a small percentage of them, then continue growing the audience.
But an audience is not necessarily a network. Most of your Instagram followers do not know one another. Most podcast listeners never speak to another listener. Most newsletter subscribers have no relationship with anyone else reading the newsletter.
A network is different because its members can create value for one another. They exchange information, make introductions, develop shared references, recommend things and sometimes build relationships that no longer require the person or company that originally brought them together. The company stops being the only source of value because some of the value begins to exist between its users.
This creates an interesting possibility for the future of media and marketing. The strongest media products may begin to look less like publications and more like networks. A newsletter can become the entry point into a community. A podcast can become the reason a group of people meet. A brand's content can attract an audience, while the relationships between customers become part of the reason they stay.
Content might get people through the door. The network can give them reasons to remain there.
The Second Life of Content
This shift also changes how we should think about the value of content itself. Most marketing measures content at the point of consumption. Someone sees a post, watches a video, likes it, comments or clicks. These are useful signals, but they mostly measure what happens during the content's first life.
The more interesting question is what happens next.
Someone sees a LinkedIn post and sends it to a colleague. A TikTok gets dropped into a group chat. A screenshot from an article appears in a WhatsApp conversation. Someone sends a product to their partner with the message, “This is what I was talking about.” The content has now left the environment it was designed for and entered a different one, and its role changes when it does. In the feed, the content was competing for attention. In the group chat, it becomes part of a conversation.
We can think about this in orders. The first-order effect of a piece of content is its immediate consumption: somebody watches it, reads it or likes it. The second-order effect happens when that person decides somebody else should see it. The third-order effect is what those people then do with it together. They might discuss it, disagree with it, buy something because of it, use it to make a decision, turn it into an inside joke or send it into another network entirely.
This creates a problem for the way we measure content because some of its most valuable effects can happen after the point where our analytics stop watching. Imagine one post receives 500,000 views and thousands of likes before disappearing. Another receives 20,000 views but repeatedly finds its way into the right group chats, appears in conversations between colleagues, gets screenshotted into presentations and eventually influences what people think or buy. Our dashboards would probably tell us the first piece performed better. The business might eventually discover that it was the second.
This suggests that marketers need to think beyond making content shareable. We should think about designing content for its second life. For years, one of the central questions in social content has been how to make someone stop scrolling. That still matters, but it should be followed by two more questions: what would make someone take this out of the feed, and what will happen when it gets there?
Content designed only for a feed assumes an individual consuming it. Content designed for its second life gives people something to talk about. It might contain a surprising statistic, a useful framework, a provocative but defensible opinion, a question people want someone else's answer to, or a visual that explains something better than they could explain it themselves.
The content becomes more than something to consume. It becomes something people can do something with. That may be the difference between content that is merely shareable and content that creates interaction after it has been shared. The strongest content does not simply make somebody think that something is interesting. It makes them immediately think of the person they need to send it to.
The Journey Between Users
The same principle applies to product design. We spend enormous amounts of time designing the user journey, but relatively little time designing the journey between users.
Products already have second lives. A restaurant booking gets sent to a partner. A Spotify track enters a group chat. A Strava run prompts a conversation between friends. A Figma file becomes a place where a team works through an idea. In each case, the original interaction creates another interaction involving someone else.
The question for product teams is whether these behaviours happen accidentally or whether the product has been designed to encourage them. A share button does not necessarily make a product social. The larger opportunity is everything that happens after someone presses it.
If somebody discovers a product they love and sends it to a friend, what does the recipient experience? Do they arrive at a dead-end product page, or does the product recognise that a social interaction is taking place? Can they react, compare, add something, vote, reply, join or send something back? Can that interaction create enough value to bring another person into the product?
This asks us to think beyond the individual user journey. Some of the most interesting product opportunities may exist in the space between one person's action and another person's response.
The New Scarcity
Technology rarely removes scarcity completely. It usually moves it somewhere else. The internet made distribution incredibly cheap, so access to information stopped being scarce. Social media created enormous amounts of content, so attention became scarce. AI is now making content itself cheaper to produce, which will increase that pressure even further.
As content becomes more abundant, permission becomes more valuable because permission is built on trust. When there is more information than anyone can possibly consume, knowing who to listen to becomes more important. When anyone can generate convincing text, images or video, knowing where something came from becomes more important. And when algorithms can place almost anything in front of us, choosing who is actually allowed to reach us becomes more meaningful.
Smaller networks provide some of that missing context. You know who shared something. You understand why they sent it. You often have some idea of how much you trust their judgement. The value is no longer simply in the information itself; it is in the relationship surrounding it.
This is why the move towards private spaces should not be understood simply as another platform shift. The important change is not whether people spend more time on WhatsApp than Instagram, or whether Discord grows faster than another social network. Platforms will continue to rise and fall. The deeper change is in the nature of the relationship people are willing to have with the things competing for their attention.
A New Model for Growth
None of this means TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, podcasts, newsletters or websites are disappearing. They may simply start doing different jobs.
Public platforms are exceptionally good at discovery. Algorithms can introduce a creator, company or idea to millions of people who have never encountered it before. But discovery is different from relationship. The public feed can find the audience; smaller networks can deepen the relationship with it.
That suggests a different way of thinking about the customer journey. A stranger discovers something through a feed, follows the person or brand behind it, subscribes, perhaps joins a group or community, begins participating and eventually builds relationships with other people there. What began as an impression gradually becomes a relationship.
For companies, the objective is therefore not simply to gather the largest possible audience. It is to understand how some of that audience can become people who actively choose to remain connected, and how those people can begin creating value for one another.
There is a strange contradiction at the heart of the modern internet. We have never had a greater ability to speak to everyone, yet some of the most valuable conversations are happening between fewer people. We have never produced more content, yet recommendations from people we trust feel increasingly important. And we have never had more ways to attract attention, yet the ability to reach someone directly feels increasingly valuable.
The public internet is not disappearing. It remains one of the greatest discovery systems ever created. But another internet is growing underneath it, inside group chats, DMs, private communities and networks built around shared interests and relationships. It is harder to see and harder to measure, but that may be precisely why businesses have underestimated its importance.
For the last decade, the internet rewarded whoever could capture the most attention. The next may increasingly reward something harder to earn: permission to keep it.
