Welcome back to the friday quick format “3 business news, 1 implication” where I pick up 3 relevant business stories on proprietary audience and attention and I try to take out a relevant implication.
First: Instagram is testing Features — horizontal videos up to 90 minutes — and pushing further onto connected TV.
But connected TV is no longer one big, complementary bucket. It’s becoming crowded.
So why should a brand choose Instagram instead of YouTube — or add it to YouTube?
YouTube already has search, discovery, subscriptions, revenue sharing and a mature TV ecosystem. Instagram has cultural relevance and creator relationships, but not yet a proven long-form business model.
When the CTV gold rush settles, distribution alone won’t be a differentiator. The question will be: what relationship do you own that another platform cannot reproduce?
Second: Amazon says Prime Video is now profitable, with a revenue run rate in the tens of billions.
Amazon Ads generated 19.6 billion dollars last quarter — just under 10% of Amazon’s total revenue. But video helps build and retain an audience Amazon can monetise through advertising, subscriptions, shopping, devices and data.
Prime Video is not just a media business. It is part of a closed commercial system.
Third: DoorDash is buying Instacart for 17 billion dollars.
For a non-American audience: DoorDash delivers restaurant meals; Instacart powers grocery shopping, delivery and retail media for almost 100,000 stores.
Put them together and you connect advertising, purchase, fulfilment, delivery and customer data.
So here’s the implication.
As technology lowers costs, retail and media will increasingly converge into proprietary audience systems.
Is traditional media finished? No.
But media companies cannot survive by selling inventory alone. They need to own distinctive IP, build direct relationships around it and connect those relationships to revenue — without outsourcing the entire strategic layer.
That is where the next media model will be built.
