We believe 2027 is going to be a great year for the development of branded media within the tech industry. This strategy isn’t new – but it’s new for us. Today, we’re relaunching our digital presence as publication-first, as a bilingual editorial platform built to produce quality analysis for decision-makers in both the English- and Spanish-speaking tech ecosystems.
What’s the thinking behind this decision? Aaron (Director) and Circe (Sr. SEO Consultant) discuss it:
Distribution as a moat
Aaron: When the tools to produce anything become accessible, the level of conversation drops to zero and the differentiator moves somewhere else. What starts getting fenced off, with high barriers to entry, are distribution channels. There used to be an enormous sunk cost in production: a knowledge barrier and a money barrier. Today someone can put together an open-source Adobe suite spending a moderate budget on tokens, something that would have required an extremely expensive team of developers before. So what does Adobe have that those people don’t? I’d keep paying for Adobe even if the open-source clone existed, because with Adobe Fonts I get access to, say, Linotype’s typefaces without paying an extra cent. What Adobe has is an ecosystem of elite partnerships, and that doesn’t get replicated with code.
Circe: It’s like chapter 24 of Capital, the enclosure of the commons. We had this whole open expanse of possibility available to us, and one day the owners showed up and said: the line is here, pay to cross. Steam, Spotify, all those licenses.
Aaron: And it’s the same thing with AI: it’s an original appropriation of data. If everyone’s gateway to the internet becomes OpenAI, the whole landscape shifts. Before, in search results, you at least had a shot at competing. Sure, Bloomberg or The New York Times would beat you, or whoever had the budget to bid on any keyword. But if you don’t even show up as a citation because ChatGPT has a deal with Bloomberg, you’re simply not in the game. One possible way out is to negotiate: if they use us to train, they should pay us. Pixar, for instance, could have played that card before its aesthetic got co-opted and degraded into AI slop.
Circe: That’s one way out, but I see it as the extreme option. I think there’s something in the middle ground: ChatGPT is going to have to earn legitimacy as the LLM of the people. On the other hand, Google was born in an era when it could say “our algorithm is based on fair competition, the best content wins.” That’s not a given anymore.
Recently, OpenAI signed deals with more than twenty publishing companies covering more than 160 outlets in more than twenty languages, including Brazil’s Folha and UOL, in May 2026. The deal between OpenAI and News Corp is one of the more generous ones in this roster, reportedly worth around $250 million over five years; though according to other reports, that figure includes OpenAI credits and isn’t all cash. Reddit reportedly collects some $60 million a year from Google, to whom it provides preferential API access, to train Gemini on Reddit posts and feed AI Overviews with user-generated content.
Apple, for its part, is discussing a nine-figure budget to pay publishers based on actual usage of their content in Siri. Meanwhile, the New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over unauthorized use of its content library. And visibility in AI can’t simply be bought: according to Muck Rack, around 84% of citations from ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini come from organic content, while paid content or sponsored placements account for just 0.3%. The door isn’t sealed shut for smaller players: the same analysis found that Claude tends to surface small, niche outlets more often than the big ones.
Welcome to the zero-click internet
Aaron: The internet gave us two things: a distribution layer and a measurement layer. I’m almost glad that generative AI, the pressure to spend less and zero-click have thrown all of it into crisis, because it’s about time we dropped the pretense. We’d been assuming people behaved in ways they never did and never will, especially in tech and startups. If nobody read the company blog before, who’s going to read it now?
Circe: Plus, user behavior is already changing. I use Google’s AI Overview a lot to find memes. Before, you had to try a thousand word combinations; the other day I described the meme of the girl spitting out knives and it found it instantly. There’s going to be a total shift in behavior, and I think that’s a good thing.
In the United States, 68% of Google searches ended without a click between January and April 2026, according to Similarweb data, and the share of searches with at least one click dropped 9.5 points compared to 2024. AI Overviews appear in more than 20% of searches and, when they do, CTR drops by almost 60%; on mobile, zero-click approaches 77%.
Ahrefs, analyzing 300,000 keywords, measured a 58% drop in CTR for the first position when an AI Overview appears above it. The most telling finding is that referrals from AI platforms to external sites stayed essentially flat between January 2025 and January 2026, even as usage of those platforms grew nearly 30%: the answers absorb attention and don’t give it back. One nuance in favor of building brand: branded searches are among the least affected by zero-click. If someone’s searching for you by name, they still click through.
Developing branded media as an investment in brand marketing
Aaron: If there’s a possible differentiator, it’s tone of voice. The problem is that tone comes with brand risk: once you adopt a distinctive tone, you stop pretending you can please everyone.
Circe: Plus you have to invest in real copywriting, which has historically been hard to pull off.
Aaron: Even more so now because “AI can generate it.” Well, if you’re paying someone $15 a piece, of course AI is going to give you something better. When I generate drafts with AI, I rewrite 85% of it, and I let the other 15% slide because by then I’m too tired to rewrite it.
Circe: And people don’t buy out of reasoning, they buy out of the phantasm, to put it in Lacanian terms. Nobody is rational. The only rational purchase is going out to buy milk and rice.
Aaron: When someone chooses a publication, they’re choosing a perspective, a tone of voice, a belief they identify with. Not just because it covers topics they’re interested in – that’s where you get commoditized. If you want to cover tech, Wired and Bloomberg are already there, with access to primary sources a startup’s content marketer could never reach. That’s not the game to play.
The risk, the failure mode of branded media, is that everyone wants their own little patch of turf without really believing in the strategy and without being willing to commit the resources. It would end up like what happened with blogs: instead of “10 mistakes when hiring an agency,” they’d do newsjacking but under the same paradigm of cheap volume and generic messaging, instead of building a distinctive voice and betting on quality.
Circe: In the end, we’re selling creativity to find room to maneuver. Finding a creative way out is the only way to survive in this context. And I think that, since AI is going to generate increasingly bland output, because it’s a mathematical calculation, audiences are going to seek out more human creativity. The other day I saw a comment about the new Pixar trailer: “I can’t watch this, it feels like I’m watching AI.” And it’s true. I think in the future hand-drawn animation is going to be valued a lot more.
To me the biggest danger is cowardice when it comes to taking a risk with a message. Almost every example of successful branded media or advertising in recent years worked because they dared to say something. Look at Tulipán: it talks about sex, which even today (despite everything) remains a controversial and delicate topic. And you also have to know where to draw the line so you don’t cheapen yourself. If you’re not selling distinction, what are you selling? Low-cost airlines strike me as a tragedy: what used to sell you on flying was the luxury of flying. If advertising doesn’t sell an illusion, it’s dead. And the other risk is fatigue. There’s that meme with the little figures wearing hats, where one of them says “Brand” and everyone throws their hat down, because brands ruin the trend.
Data on B2B decision-makers points in that direction. In a 2024 Edelman and LinkedIn report, 73% of decision-makers said they trust thought leadership more than traditional marketing materials, and 53% said brand recognition matters less when that content is strong. But the blade cuts both ways: in the 2020 edition, only 17% rated as very good or excellent the quality of most of the thought leadership they read, and 25% said a poor-quality piece directly led them to not do business with whoever produced it. Voice also matters when it comes to trust: the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer finds that customers trust their peers and specific influencers more than corporate spokespeople. Having resources and a strong brand isn’t enough either: a16z ended up shutting down Future, the publication it had launched to compete with the tech press.
Category narratives are competitive infrastructure
Aaron: There are marketing fundamentals that predate the internet and have to do with how people make decisions, not just as consumers but in terms of self-identification. Niche, community, ICP, personal brand. The internet gave us the channels and mechanisms for certain people to discover certain things, but the fundamentals were already there.
Circe: I think of Pergolini’s Rock & Pop radio station. He always presented himself as the rebel, he built a community of listeners who followed him wherever he went and who saw themselves reflected in him. He realized he could sell the counterculture. That’s when marketing understood it was more profitable to sell to niches than to the mass market, and with the internet the whole model clicks into place. Before, you targeted the nuclear family; today you target tribes. What we did with The Infinite Machine back in 2021 was exactly that: building community at the crest of the wave, learning its language and gradually working our way into its networks.
Aaron: There’s a book, Conversational Capital, that explains how to design a product or an experience so people want to tell their circle about it – it uses Cirque du Soleil as one of its main examples. It’s an analog, pre-internet form of going viral.
Today, whoever narrates the category is the one who shows up in the answer. According to Muck Rack, when an AI is asked what’s happening in an industry, it turns to journalism: for trend-related queries, nearly half of the responses (46%) cited news coverage, while for “how to” queries it leans more on reference content and brand material. For companies entering a new category, 60% of decision-makers say thought leadership helps build credibility when a category is being defined or opened up. And the terrain favors tribes over the mass audience: the 2026 Trust Barometer, with nearly 34,000 responses across 28 countries, found that 70% of people have an “insular” trust mindset, reluctant to trust those who are different from them.
Media is becoming a measurable growth channel
Aaron: We’ve shifted toward working more on building content operations, sites, audits and consulting, a kind of support for managers. But before, when we were producing content, content functioned as a mediator between audience and product, and that role is in crisis. Today we have to operate more like a company that makes content worth consuming on its own terms, which then connects to the product.
A media ecosystem is emerging within tech because the old model no longer works. Of course, buying into this strategy requires patience. If you treat it as just another item on the marketing checklist and after two months say “the pilot didn’t work, we’re killing it,” the whole game stops making sense.
Circe: It happens with everything. I know of a case where someone rebuilt all the pages on their site using Claude artifacts, and right now they’re doing well on Ahrefs. I want to see how it looks in three months.
Big software companies already treat owned media as a serious channel. HubSpot bought The Hustle in 2021 for a reported $27 million, with close to 1.5 million subscribers, in a bet aimed at lowering customer acquisition costs. After acquiring Starter Story, its YouTube network reaches, by the company’s own account, 2.9 million subscribers, surpassing established players in the category like Morning Brew.
Semrush added Third Door Media (Search Engine Land, MarTech and SMX) in 2024, and Stripe bought Indie Hackers in 2017, two cases following the same logic. Post-AI, new metrics are emerging too, like presence in AI answers – and that presence, however elusive or novel to measure today, can affect other conventional metrics. Seer Interactive measured that brands cited in AI Overviews had a paid-ad CTR of 15.74% on the same searches, compared to 11.19% when they weren’t cited.
But let’s not obsess over measuring growth
Aaron: Marketing is going through a crisis of measurable results. Fewer and fewer things are measurable, and the numbers we do see are a joke. When you get into growth hacking or performance marketing, you stop thinking about awareness, about brand, about how people perceive you. You think about the number, and everything becomes about keeping that number looking good this week and the next. You lose sight of the medium term, the idea of a shared project with your audience. You lose the idea that this brand exists in the world and can play a meaningful role, even if it’s just in someone’s working life. You fall into a short-term cycle, always watching for how the algorithm is going to screw you, when the meta is going to shift. It turns marketing into gambling.
Circe: I’m rewatching Mad Men and something strikes me: our profession has always had to prove things that are hard to prove. In the first episode there’s a psychoanalyst who says she studied with Jung and does market research. That character never appears again, but I love that connection between 1960s psychoanalysis and marketing. We’re always fighting to demonstrate what we do and what return it generates. In digital marketing we gave that a name: ROI, KPI, CTR. Acronyms that give the shape of data, and legitimacy, to a discourse that deep down just says “it went well, it went badly, or it went so-so.” And in the end, if you have a brand, everything else is just trinkets.
The horizon is a long one. According to John Dawes’s 95:5 model (Ehrenberg-Bass), popularized by LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, only 5% of B2B buyers are in-market at any given moment, while the remaining 95% won’t buy for months or years. Binet and Field arrived at a 60% brand / 40% activation split based on 996 IPA case studies, and for B2B the B2B Institute’s adjustment puts it closer to 46% brand and 54% activation, though there’s no consensus on the exact ratio. And measuring well is hard: in 2020, 74% of B2B marketers had no way to attribute their thought leadership efforts to sales. Measuring is useful, but not to the point where the number gets to decide what kind of brand we want to be.
Is now the time to invest in branded media?
None of this is new on its own. Concentrated distribution, zero-click, trust as a scarce asset, the value of narrating a category, and the pressure to measure everything are diagnoses that have been circulating for a while. What’s changed is that they’re now converging. Producing content costs less and less, reaching an audience costs more and more, and AI answers absorb attention, flattening the ROI of our content. In that context, the corporate blog conceived as a product showcase stops making sense, and what’s left is what no tool can solve for us: perspective, tone and judgment.
That’s why we’re relaunching Postdigitalist as a publication. We’re not doing it because the model is foolproof, but because our craft has always been writing well, researching and thinking clearly – differentiators that have never been more valuable. We’re going to publish in Spanish and in English, for decision-makers who read in both ecosystems, with our own voice and at a pace that doesn’t depend on whether next quarter confirms a thesis.
We know this isn’t something you measure in two months. If performance marketing is like going to a casino, this is the opposite bet: slow, cumulative, and built around brand as an asset. We’re going to measure what can be measured, but we’re not going to let the number decide what kind of publication we want to be.