The year 2026 has arrived. Is this a fresh start? Unlikely. Yesterday still matters and tomorrow is all about the story we believe. What comes next is narrative.
One year ago today, January 1st 2025, we declared Media & Entertainment to be the most influential industry on Earth. Over the course of the last 365 days, that claim has been tested in public and proven correct.
Not only has M&E directly influenced elections, global trade deals and social movements, we’ve broken yet another record for annual global revenues with an estimated US$3.065 trillion being spent on a combination of consumer access to content and advertiser access to consumer audiences.
Over the last year, development of cutting-edge technology has coalesced around the production and distribution of content and its effect on what we all think we know. That influence over the minds of nearly every human on Earth was at the heart of our reference, a year ago today, to Sir Francis Bacon’s four-hundred-year-old motto: scientia potentia est; “knowledge is power”.
Yet the power of knowledge is no longer concentrated in its possession. It is concentrated in the medium of its transmission.
In other words, control over how knowledge spreads, how it’s framed and how it becomes shared belief now binds our intimately connected planet together. That control is exercised by the Media & Entertainment industry. Every other industry depends on M&E for messaging, marketing, persuasion and legitimacy. So do governments. The events of the past twelve months have made that dependence impossible to ignore.
That is why Media & Entertainment is no longer simply one industry among others. It’s the system through which belief is transmitted, legitimacy is bestowed (and withdrawn) and collective action is instigated.
The power to fill peoples’ minds, combined with the application of industrial process, now firmly positions Media & Entertainment as the world’s Apex Industry.
A New Era
The momentum behind our industry’s ascendancy shows no signs of slowing.
As we mark the beginning of this century’s second quarter, momentum over the past twenty-five years continues to carry us all along with it. But from this momentum, something new does seem to be emerging.
The nature of control is changing.
The democratization of content distribution, made possible by the internet and technologies ancillary to it, is now firmly embedded within the unstoppable momentum we all feel. This shift to consumption of content over the internet has catalysed corporate consolidation of legacy media conglomerates that once exercised hegemony over content distribution.
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Narrative: Why Media & Entertainment is the World’s Apex Industry
If money is the metric, M&E is near the top of the league tables. But add inherent control over all narrative, and we see all other industries bow before it.
This shift from a form of centralised control over distribution by the Media Majors and toward decentralised, direct to consumer business models is demonstrated in our 2025 Media Investor Survey. In our analysis of data from nearly 100 professional investors into M&E managing over US$111 billion, a clear deal flow direction toward D2C opportunities has become clear.
This may seem contradictory when viewed in the context of the mega-deals targeting a shrinking number of large, publicly-listed media conglomerates. The acquisition of Paramount by SkyDance has certainly consumed a lot of attention. This, followed almost immediately by the competitive pursuit of Warner Bros. Discover by Netflix and the newly merged Paramount-SkyDance, reinforces the observation that a contest for control over access to audiences is heating up.
When viewed through the lense of Narrative Economics, there’s little doubt as to why.
It’s been audiences that have driven growth in value by committing attention and money to the consumption of content. Particularly digital content distributed over the internet, with a notable shift in attention from content under the control of the Media Majors and toward content generated from within the Creator Economy via social media platforms.
Audiences have determined which creators have risen, which platforms have prospered and which legacy players have lost relevance. The cumulative effect is a visible change in how real-world events are now perceived and processed.
Decision-making has begun to shift away from slow, institutional fact-filtering and towards faster, socially mediated processes shaped by opinion, persuasion and emotional coherence.
Human cognition is designed for narrative. We make sense of complexity through stories, not datasets. When distribution is frictionless and feedback is immediate, narratives move faster than verification. Influence compounds more quickly than certainty.
This does not mean truth disappears. It means truth competes.
That may become the defining feature of this new era. The contest is no longer over who delivers the information, but over who controls the narrative.
Who Leads Whom
Any shift in control begs the question of who’s in charge.
Those at the top of organisations tend to think of themselves as leaders. They are, after all, making decisions that directly affect anyone dependent upon them.
But leadership is a tricky concept. Being in a position of authority or privilege doesn’t necessarily make one a leader in the true sense of the word.
A true leader is made so by those who choose to follow. That makes followers the true power behind the economic and political systems we’ve built over the past several centuries. Influence over followers who choose to support one leader over another, or one brand over another, is the single most important factor in the forces now being brought to bear on, and by, our industry.
Followers in the modern sense of the word, or perhaps more accurately, in the colloquial, invariably equate to an audience. For anyone to be followed, in this sense, there must be content for consumption by an audience it resonates with.
The story-teller that masters audience resonance becomes, by definition, a leader. That story-teller may be a film-maker. A writer. Or a politician.
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The Now Literal Reality of a Virtual Age
The US election starkly demonstrates the internet’s power to shape our lives, our world and our future.
This creates a paradox for those who are, or want to be, in charge. Leaders who lose resonance with the audience lose relevance as well, and the only means of accessing any audience is through the Media & Entertainment industry.
The operating policy within most of our contemporary institutions, regardless of one’s nation, is that followers are dependent on leaders. What the Media & Entertainment industry has managed to do is flip that truth on its head. In an environment where influence can be built, or lost, at the speed of light, leadership becomes dependent on the audience.
That isn’t to say that Media & Entertainment industry is in charge. Far from it.
At least, not yet.
The Year of the Crowd
In our 2025 New Year article, we declared 2025 to be the Year of the Audience. We think we were right at the time.
Over the past 12 months, audiences have gained recognition as the basis for revenue streams to companies within M&E. This recognition has shifted focus from Intellectual Property as the singular foundation for value in our industry and toward a more bi-polar view.
The management of audience acquisition, retention and monetisation is as fundamental to the media business today as creative license and content production processes ever were.
Put simply, content without audience is worthless.
To a growing degree, audiences themselves are becoming aware of this. As they do, the path they take in asserting themselves will have a lot to do with how respected they feel as fans. Their central position in professional sport, for example, has for years provided some sports-fan organisations with a say in what their local sports clubs can, and cannot do.
The fans know that they can make, or break, a club.
Sports may be indicative of things to come.
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The Burgeoning Bubble of Big Brand Sport
Major league clubs reach record high valuations just as media rights revenues in the world’s most lucrative market face the challenge of legacy media aging out.
The fan-bases that coalesce around sports clubs offer examples to the large numbers of fans focused on video games, musicians, movie franchises and television series. The influence such fans have over decisions made by those who believe themselves in charge are illustrative of how inverted the hierarchy of control really is.
At some point, the audience ceases to be a fan collective and starts to become a crowd.
An audience can be thought of as a crowd by many who rely on them. But the two words don’t mean quite the same thing. An audience is attentive. A crowd is not necessarily so. A crowd is messy. A crowd is in the process of figuring itself out.
A crowd also asserts itself. While an audience may be thought of as merely consuming content, a crowd today will generate it. And the content they generation has effect. With social media. In the markets. On the streets.
A crowd is an audience that reacts.
The art of story-telling will continue to give audiences something to pay attention (and money) to. In the year to come, some of those story-tellers will see their audience transform into something else.
When the audience begins to assert authority and influence over the industry it learns from, things can change, for better or worse, quickly. This is when terms such as crowd-sourcing and the expression, wisdom of the crowd, begin to take on new meanings beyond finance and prediction markets.
That is when things get interesting.
What the Media & Entertainment industry will unveil in the coming year is which leaders are guided by their followers and which are not. Those that are have likely figured out the economics of narrative and the management of audience resonance. They will face their fans.
Those who haven’t will face the crowd.
That, of course, will be a story in and of itself.
Explore Media & Entertainment further:
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Thomas is our founder, acting Publisher and contributes an outsized proportion of our articles and editorial pieces.
He is an American lawyer & private equity specialist with 30+ years of international experience in investment strategy. He has lived and worked in London, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Nicosia as both adviser and executive to several of the world’s largest family offices, institutional investors and State-investment companies. He is also founder of Coherent Media Group, a corporate holding company dedicated to media & entertainment businesses globally.
In his spare time, Thomas is a corporate and political speech-writer and has ghost-written numerous Op-Eds, political/espionage thrillers and science fiction novels.
