The First Draft of the Future
Navigating the Liquid Content Era
By Philip Allin, Overtone CEO
At the intersection of online content creation and advertising, there is often a fizz of energy. It’s the noise from a trillion-dollar machine that is relentlessly trying to find better ways to produce work, or profit from it.
Right now, the buzz is around liquid content. This is the idea of having little bits of information (“It’s raining in Tokyo”, “Acme Corp is up 4%”) and allowing them to flow across different mediums and in different shapes and sizes, without losing their context or their value. It’s useful to dig in here for two reasons. First, it helps us understand how AI creates content, so it gives us a look to the immediate future of the content industry. Second, I believe it will have a radical impact on content businesses (publishers, platforms, individuals, brands and so on). Handled well, it can benefit everyone.
Liquid content is a direction, not a trend
The modern publisher is fighting a losing battle on three fronts: platforms (who determine the access), advertisers (who own the spend), and what we might loosely call AI (which increasingly manages the interaction).
Underlying all this is a more exhausting battle against human complacency. Faced with a choice between apparently good enough content –for free, just accept some cookies or a privacy violation and go– and clearly well crafted content, most users, most of the time, will take the path of least intellectual resistance. The Fourth Estate is fighting the ‘effort paywall’.
Take this recent Rebooting piece, which makes the case for moving from output-based to usefulness-based journalism. This principle helped Dmitry Shishkin triple audience growth at the BBC. A key point in the article is the suggestion that newsrooms can easily get distracted by ‘shiny object’ formats (VR, or specific app features) without actually supporting the core mission.
In the piece, Shishkin asks for examples of publishers pushing out liquid content. This question sidesteps an important point. Publishers are late to the liquid game. AI, mostly in the form of LLM-powered chatbots, are designed to work in liquid form. This is because of the nearly direct interaction between the consumer and the content itself. Information is thrown into a vast tank, and as far as AI is concerned, is no longer tied to a fixed format. Instead, it exists as a fluid asset that can be shaped to an individual’s consumption patterns in real-time. You want the weather report as a video? Here it is. Your friend wants it as a table and some bullet points? Voila. The same basic information, very different formats.
Turning the page
So how do creators and owners, analysts and advertisers (and let’s not forget the actual readers!) deal with a paradigm shift of such unheard proportions, which will likely mean leaving ideas and the economics of things like “the page” behind? Before taking a step forward, it can be helpful to take a few back. Here’s a rough timeline of how we got here. Ping me in a few years if the prediction didn’t work out.
2000: Mass Adoption – Internet growth and digital choice allow people to navigate the web.
The internet is a mall.
2005: Social Media – Information flows through personal and professional networks built on human trust.
The internet is a business hub.
2010: Pervasive Feeds – Passive consumption eases to the fore, as people rely on networks built on implicit trust.
The internet is a party.
2015: Personalized Realities – Echo chambers become public, as highly personalized world-views shape real-world events.
The internet is a filter.
2020: Machine Learning – Transformer-based architectures quietly reshape how we experience our understanding of global events.
The internet is a mirror.
2025: Customization Rules – Chatbots and vibe coding allow us to create strongly personalized experiences around information.
The internet is a feeling.
2030: Hyper-Embedded Customization – Your online (and most likely offline too) life may be entirely different from anyone else’s, fully realized through the flow of a liquid internet.
The internet is a first-person game show.
Financing the future
So how do professional writers, those who really care about their audience, fit in? They become minters of value. For better or worse, online content is now a marketplace. Consider the finance industry, which is a roughly 30x larger market than the content world. Part of its enduring success is its willingness to treat value as fluid and transactional. It is, in a word, liquid. What if we force ourselves to think no longer of strict pages or articles, but in useful elements, such as the data behind a weather report, or a public figure’s recent quote, or today’s Acme Corp stock price compared with last week? When content is dissolved into verifiable and modular elements, it creates information flows that can be shared, streamed and measured around the world at near-zero marginal cost.
Then the role of the creator –the human, don’t forget– transforms into a reviewer of what’s going on. This arbiter of relevance can then be paid, according to market demand. This is unlikely to be an immediately popular idea, certainly not with professional writers and creators. But it is the most logical way for them to be valued for their talents. Similar to media outlets, these people exist as a medium between a reader and the world, acting as an authority on recognizing relevance.
So this is a solution to the content polycrisis. In a world of endless AI synthesis, real value resides in whatever is new (and true). It should make sense: AI, for all its charms, cannot know what is going on at any given moment. We, people, are the source of the raw and verified account of what is actually happening. The moments that matter.
Pipes and pages
The current content industry processes a trillion dollars through a system built around the idea of pages, posts, and platforms. I think this is why there is a kind of industry stasis. The systems we have aren’t designed for the content experience we demand, but no one has yet cracked the puzzle of re-engineering the massive machine to ensure liquid content powers business liquidity.
In this agentic future, the ‘page’ evaporates. Journalists and publishers must shapeshift into the marshalls of a liquid world, providing the information flow with legitimacy. Assuming we create infrastructure and an eco-system to match, humans will not only have a key part in the future, we will be rewarded for it.
From the First Draft of History to the First Draft of the Future
Journalism was traditionally the ‘first draft of history’. Properly understood, integrated and managed, liquid content provides the opportunity to flip this around. Content is no longer just a record of the past. It can serve as a record of what is happening now, and feed into what is next.
In this world, people craft raw material upon which all subsequent versions of history are built. We can then return a significant percentage of revenue to the person or people who invested the time to record something of value. That something starts with a fact and adds perspective, experience, humour, or comparison: something personable, something that explains why this story or picture matters. In a world of fluid information, you either provide the source or you become the sediment. It is time to go with the flow.