Why parasitic platforms keep feeding on media (and what’s next)
Opinion
Social platforms promised reach. What they delivered was dependence, collapse and lost audiences. Media owners, advertisers and agencies now face the same trap with AI.
If you’ve never heard of cymothoa exigua, you really should.
It’s also known as the tongue-eating louse. This tiny creature swims into a fish through its gills, latches on to its tongue, drains the blood until the organ withers away and then — in the most grotesque twist — replaces it.
From then on, the fish uses the parasite as its tongue. Not only is the fish none the wiser as the louse taxes its food, the poor thing becomes dependent on it to keep eating.
Does this remind you of any companies in the advertising and media world?
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Additive vs extractive media
I’m guessing you didn’t decide on a career in advertising or media because you wanted to data-mine the world for commercial gain.
I’m also guessing, at some point in your formative years, you were enthralled by storytelling, special effects or the pursuit of truth. These were brought to you by additive media.
Additive media makes life better by extending or simplifying activities that already hold value. TV, cinema, radio, podcasts, books, posters or (printed) newspapers and magazines. Whether you pay full whack or get the ad-funded version, there’s a clear value exchange. You get culture, storytelling and entertainment; the media owner gets revenue.
Nothing is “free” and that’s the point: you’re the customer, not the product.
Parasitic media is different. It tends to be additive at first, then turns the tables.
Instead of enhancing your life, it extracts value from you: your time, your attention, your data. It serves the platform and its shareholders, not you. It hooks you in with something that feels delightful, but the real game is monetisation and manipulation.
The fact that it’s “free” is the giveaway.
How do platforms get away with this? Two main strategies: slowness and monopoly.
Slowness: The frog in the pot
Parasitic platforms don’t flip a switch from “good” to “bad”. They shift gradually — slow enough that you don’t notice until it’s too late.
Think back to Facebook. It didn’t go from wedding photos and relationship statuses to algorithmic rage bait overnight.
Or its younger (adopted) brother Instagram. At first glance, it’s just a fun, free tool for sharing photos. But, over time, its value proposition is muddled: the same feed that brings fleeting joy also produces endless anxiety and numb scrolling.
First came harmless tweaks: social indicators such as “likes” and “shares”, designed to create little loops of reinforcement. Then the feed itself became algorithmic, carefully tuned to keep you scrolling.
By the time the consequences were obvious — polarisation, misinformation, addiction — these platforms had already become cultural background noise.
Stopping wasn’t an option. They had your tongue.
The Zuck stops nowhere: Why Meta will never be held accountable
Monopoly: Kill the rivals, own the market
The second strategy is to remove any escape routes. As Cory Doctorow, coiner of the (now clichéd) term “enshittification”, puts it: tech companies don’t compete with their rivals; they buy their rivals.
Mark Zuckerberg admitted it outright: “It is better to buy than to compete.”
How many hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent by these companies to ensure US lawmakers remain asleep at the wheel when it comes to antitrust? Competition disappears, leaving users with the illusion that the current digital media landscape is inevitable.
Or look at Google search. Results have been overrun by SEO spam and ads for years. Google could fix it. It doesn’t. Why? Because it doesn’t have to. When you’re the only game in town, you can enshittify the product and still watch the money roll in.
Responding to the competition posed by ChatGPT, which many find to be a better version of search, Google has launched an AI Mode that spits out an article about your query instead of ranked links.
Leaving aside whether AI Mode is any good, consider what it now takes for Google to change anything. And then imagine what could have been over the last 20 years if, say, Google was forced to break up its ad business or sell YouTube.
This is not just history. It’s happening again, right now.
Google expands ads on AI Overviews as it begins tests on AI Mode
The AI frontier
AI tools are in their “additive” honeymoon phase.
ChatGPT, Midjourney, Claude — these tools feel magical, useful, almost benevolent. But it’s the same playbook. Loss leaders today, extraction tomorrow. Bank on dopey US senators to do nothing.
As for the enshittification playbook — just look at who’s being hired.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has hired Kate Rouch, formerly Meta’s global head of brand marketing.
Microsoft has recently poached Mark D’Arcy, a marketing veteran from Meta and Time Warner, to drive brand strategy for Copilot. He’s tasked with reshaping Copilot into a product that feels human‑centric.
Translation: advertising is coming. You don’t raise $64bn in investment without, at some point, needing to generate a huge avalanche of cash.
Lessons we refuse to learn
Our industry has been here before.
Publishers, petrified by the digital tsunami looming nearer, gave away their content to platforms on the assumption that Facebook and Twitter were unavoidable.
Dependence is a huge source of power. Each time Facebook tweaked its algorithm, traffic cratered. Entire business models were crippled and even wiped out, no matter whether they are larger (Reach, BuzzFeed) or smaller (LittleThings, Upworthy, Mic).
We can’t pretend we weren’t warned. But hindsight is worthless if we don’t change.
Be very careful building your future on the back of US tech companies that offer free services and make bold claims about how its tech will “change the world”.
The same businesses that enshittified social media are already working out how to do it again with AI. Agencies and advertisers will be tempted by the shiny new inventory, the exciting branding plays, the reach.
But for media owners, the risk is existential.
Publishers say Google’s AI Overviews have reduced traffic potential
Don’t lose your tongue
This business only works if competition exists on both the buy side and sell side. We’ve seen what happens when platforms grow fat while the rest of us are patronised as partners when, in fact, we became the product.
But you wouldn’t know that from the way most people in the industry talk about platforms today.
It’s almost as if their tongue has been replaced by an alien life form.
Omar Oakes was founding editor of The Media Leader and continues to write a column as a freelance journalist and communications consultant for advertising and media companies. He has reported on advertising and media for 10 years and was previously media and tech editor of Campaign. His column on The Media Leader was nominated for the BSME’s B2B Column of the Year in 2024.