What Do Media Businesses Look Like In 2026 And Beyond

Nostalgia Is Not A Strategy

Thurston spent about a decade at Reuters, building out a mutual fund classification tool, Lipper, given his finance background, and then pivoted to Silicon Valley, running a consumer genetics company. He acquired Outside Magazine in 2021, during the pandemic. He’d seen how Big Tech was shifting the media landscape.

“The largest media players in the world, YouTube, Google and Facebook, have essentially been sucking the vacuum out of the industry for years, making it easier and easier for advertisers to spend larger dollars and target people with a first-party data advantage we don’t have,” he says.

Outside Inc. owns six media brands older than 50 years, including Ski, Backpacker, Yoga Journal, Velo and Pinkbike. Most of them were acquired out of financial distress, he says, and were not in good shape when he took on the challenge to try to turn things around.

“One of my favorite things is that nostalgia is not a strategy,” he argues. “If I just relied on the nostalgia of the brands, they would all be out of business now.”

Why Immersive Media

Giller, similarly, has spent almost 30 years watching media reinvent itself.

He founded Grist, one of the first digital-only newsrooms, in the late 1990s. He has since watched journalism move through social media, podcasting, and to video streaming. His read on why immersive media is the next shift is rooted in something he noticed watching people react to it firsthand.

“When I first started spending time with immersive media and gauging how people responded to stories told with these tools, what struck me was how differently people talked about what they’d encountered,” Giller says. “They described experiencing something they had lived through, not just something they had watched or read.”

Immersive media is not meant to take the place of reporting. Giller is clear about that.

“I don’t see immersive media as a replacement for journalism. We will always need great reporting and strong local news organizations,” he iterates. “Immersive media is a new tool, a new form of communication used to help people engage more deeply on issues that might otherwise feel distant or abstract.”

Rebuilding The Revenue Mix

When Thurston’s company made most of its brand acquisitions in 2021, advertising accounted for 75% of revenue, and 70% of that was concentrated in a single category: outdoor gear.

“Today, 60% of my revenue is recurring, extremely stable revenue that is either SaaS or consumer subscription. 40% is advertising tied to the media business, and even that advertising revenue is now diversified more broadly to non-endemic advertisers than to our own category,” he notes.

That shift came from building businesses outside the media brands themselves: a mapping and trail-data division, a travel booking business and an event registration platform, all sold as software rather than content. Thurston pointed to a mapping tool, Gaia GPS as an example of a business AI cannot easily replicate.

“If you need to go outside and find a hiking trail and then record that hiking trail, AI isn’t going to do that for you,” he says.

Agog is running a parallel experiment on the funding side rather than the revenue side. The organization has committed $6.5 million in grants so far and just had another call for climate-focused projects. The response to its first open call surprised even Giller: more than 700 applications, and over 40% from teams with no prior XR experience.

Three Agog-supported projects are breaking through the noise: “Solwata,” “Out of the Ashes” and “Empire at Sea” were selected for this year’s Venice International Film Festival immersive competition. “Solwata,” produced with Human Rights Watch and narrated by Mark Ruffalo, follows communities in the Solomon Islands losing their homes to rising seas.

The Money Problem

Ask Giller whether anyone has actually figured out how to make journalism pay for itself again, and he doesn’t pretend otherwise.

“I can’t say that anyone has fully solved that puzzle yet, and the truth is that media is constantly evolving. Advertising alone isn’t enough for most organizations. Attention is fragmented, and trust is harder to earn.”

What he does see working: newsrooms coupled with membership models, and organizations that pair reporting with events, education and community engagement, the same instinct behind Semafor’s events revenue and 404 Media’s membership base.

Thurston’s version of the same lesson came from watching the outdoor retail industry’s collapse play out in real time. Demand for gear spiked during the pandemic, retailers oversupplied inventory expecting the boom to continue, and then interest rates, inflation, and tariffs hit at once. Bike manufacturers, he explains, got hit with tariffs twice, once on raw materials like steel and aluminum, and again on the finished product.

“When the consumer wallet gets tight, it’s not the same as groceries. You can wait an extra year for a new tent, a new bike, a new pair of running shoes,” he says.

That squeeze has been showing up beyond retail. Advertising budgets across the outdoor category have shrunk with them. Thurston said the diversification away from endemic advertising is the only reason his company wasn’t more exposed.

“If we had the same reliance on those dollars as we did six years ago, we would be in real trouble. The benefit is that we have diversified away from that, even though they’re very important partners to us.”

What Success Actually Looks Like

Giller is careful not to oversell what immersive media can do. When asked about skepticism that the format actually changes minds, he made a distinction: “It’s important to separate skepticism from cynicism. Skepticism can be healthy,” he says. “For me, the most promising outcome isn’t that immersive media magically changes people’s minds. It’s that it creates opportunities for curiosity, conversation and action that can become the starting points for something larger.”

For Thurston, the metric that matters most isn’t necessarily circulation or page views. It’s whether people actually go outside.

“The most important metric at Outside is not page impressions, not membership. It’s daily active users who are doing something outdoors,” he says, pointing to a recent product push toward audio content, built specifically so people can listen to long-form stories while running or hiking rather than staring at a screen. “I’m consuming more of our content now than I ever have, since we went to audio.”

That thinking is also what built Outside Days, the company’s four-day outdoor festival in Colorado, sponsored by REI, Brooks, Jeep and The North Face. Thurston said he modeled it after the consumer-facing energy of South by Southwest, something he noticed the outdoor industry never quite had.

“There’s a lot of B2B events, a bunch of outdoor vendors talking to each other, but there’s no consumers there, literally zero,” he said of the industry’s existing event circuit. Programming includes climbing walls, fly-fishing clinics, and panels on public land access. The latter is just as relevant because Thurston says, “It’s mind-blowing that there are roughly 2 million acres of undeveloped land on U.S. playgrounds that groups like the Trust for Public Land are working to convert into usable green space.”

Both bets are, in their own way, a wager that the future of media has to be built somewhere outside the traditional feed, whether that’s an immersive headset or a hiking trail.

James Crane, Director of Business Development at Sugar23, says he sees a world in which the analog of the 90s is making a comeback from physical media to more and more in-person entertainment. “I don’t think we’re moving away from technology. Technology will continue to advance faster than ever. I just think we’re moving towards balance.”

For the media business, the last 25 years have seen a massive shift from all analog (print, magazines, newspapers, and books) to then primarily digital. Those were two extremes. Consumers now seem to be looking for that balance, as Crane suggests: how to tell stories in online and offline formats that don’t feel overwhelming and encourage readers to truly connect with the subject matter. The revenue models to back them will also need to be diversified, consisting of all of the above: events, SaaS, advertising, and physical sales.