AI, Tailwind, and The Future of Media

Recently there was an announcement that Tailwind was laying off 75% (3 of 4) of its engineering team because of revenue collapse. The initial hint came from a comment on a PR and was followed up with a podcast on X. This has caused a lot of discussion in the IT world. But I want to take a different approach. What does this mean for the media industry and the future of how we find out news?

The Tailwind announcement comes from the rise of a number of factors. I'm not an expert, so this is gathered from other sources. One cause seems to be that licenses for monetised content was provided as a one-off payment, which requires either a constant stream of new users to pay for ongoing development or additional revenue streams. The second is that coding agents are able to create components for developers, which reduces the need to pay for pre-built components. The third is lack of traffic, that users get answers to Tailwind questions in their IDE or AI client rather than going to the Tailwind documentation website.

It is this third reason that I want to pick up on, and which could have a significant impact on the future of traditional journalism and media empires. But there are also relevant differences that make me think the impact will be less.

Understanding Traffic and Revenue

First, we need to consider why loss of traffic is impacting Tailwind's revenue stream. With Tailwind, as with other traditional websites, revenue comes from advertising. And advertising comes from the benefit of targeting a captive audience.

This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. It's why we have adverts in social media platforms like Facebook, it's why Twitter increased its focus on adverts when Elon Musk overpaid for the platform, and its why there are sponsored links on search engines.

And AI platforms are also starting to talk about adding adverts. OpenAI's ChatGPT have started talking about adding adverts to the platform as of January 2026. And again, this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. The platform is not free. Either people have to pay for it, or they get adverts.

There will inevitably be pushback, but this has been the case for generations.

And this brings us to mainstream media. Most TV news outlets have advertising. It's common in news websites. And that's just a follow-on from printed media - newspapers - which have had adverts since before anyone alive was born. Online media have a bad reputation for including adverts. But unlike TV or printed media, you can pay to remove ads.

And advertising or paying to remove adverts is a key revenue stream for mainstream media.

The dependency on direct traffic for advertising revenue is very reminiscent of Tailwind's situation.

AI and Media

So let me give a couple of real-world examples in the context of media.

Circumventing Paywalls

Just this evening, I found an interesting hook to an article on Facebook. As has become commonplace on Facebook, the post was from the mainstream media outlet, provided some information but not all. To find more, I had to click a link in the first comment - again, a standard approach. At this point some websites would bombard me with adverts, lazy-loaded to make it painful for me to read the article, because the page regularly jerked about on my device. This particular mainstream media outlet hid the article behind a paywall, although I could sign up for a free trial.

But the AI-savvy person knows there's an alternate route. I closed the website and went to my favourite AI interface. I took the basics of the Facebook post, and asked AI what the news was. I not only got lots of details, I could add follow-up questions to drill down further.

Furthermore, I could tell from the logos displayed that AI had searched the mainstream media outlet that had paywalled the article.

Cutting Through Bias

The other example was from the middle of last year. There was a spate of toxic patriotism in UK. Consumers of mainstream media were fed specific versions of the story, depending on the approach of the outlet. Opinions and "facts" were spouted. Ask yourself, how often does mainstream media link to sources outside their own website to allow you to fact-check what they say. Some sites provide fact-checking, but not most.

For this particular story, I turned to AI to ask specific questions and drill-down to the antecedents of the trend. Unlike mainstream media, this gathered a wide variety of sources, allowed me to ask follow-up questions, and view first-hand the specific content with evidence of the dating. This demonstrated far-right involvement at the start of the trend, as evidenced by the individuals' own social media accounts.

Mainstream media often offers a specific political viewpoint. Human being are naturally lazy, and have often relied on a single media outlet. And whereas social media political attitudes are often based on the people you follow and the algorithm derived from them, mainstream media often have political attitudes that are proudly overt.

This is nothing new. Newspapers have had specific political attitudes for longer than anyone has been alive, they rarely change, and never for long. And the "trusted" media outlet often transcends generational boundaries - there are individuals who take their news from a specific newspaper or newspaper's website because their parents did. Moreover, as I found out from newspaper rounds when I was a child (who remembers fondly the videogame Paperboy?), most households got their news from a single outlet.

Impact of AI and Media

So here are two factors:

1. Using AI offers unique advantages over relying on mainstream media.
2. Mainstream media requires advertising to be sustainable.

If enough people start gathering their news from AI instead, what will the impact be in mainstream media's revenue streams?

Will advertisers transfer their advertising to AI platforms instead?

But if the impact of AI on mainstream media's revenue stream is similar to the impact of AI on Tailwind's revenue stream, how will this impact journalism?

AI Won't Kill The Media Star

The Buggles confidently claimed "Video Killed The Radio Star". They were wrong. So wrong in fact that MTV (which showed the video as their first song) died before radio.

Similarly, I don't expect AI to completely kill mainstream media, for multiple reasons.

Firstly, as already mentioned, human being like confirmation bias, and like to be told what to think by news-streams with a similarly political bias. So many, not just older people, will continue to use a particular mainstream media outlet to give them their news. So even those that are news only will continue to get revenue.

Some others diversify by doing more than just news, and this brings revenue from advertising via media that cannot be replaced by AI.

Advertising will probably reduce, and we've already seen that with the rise of online media. Local newspapers and news outlets have been aggregated under national groups. And many often curate news from social media platforms or use photos from non-journalists. But there is certainly scope for media outlets to use AI to increase their productivity, not least for same reason laymen will, to aggregate and curate other media reporting.

It will also be interesting to see how the balance between AI platforms and mainstream media outlets changes. Will they try to block AI platforms? Will media conglomerates create their own AI "news expert" clients? Will AI platforms pass on some advertising costs to mainstream media for access to content? AI platforms will certainly advertise their own platforms on those media outlets, in order to persuade individuals to use their AI platforms for a variety of tasks.

Summary

AI has surpassed the point of critical mass already. I no longer rely on Google-fu, identifying keywords to search for. I now typically ask AI clients a full question and follow-up questions. And AI is my main approach for research, drilling down into blog posts for confirmation or further details. It's not going away, whether you adopt it heavily or try to avoid it.

And its impact will be varied and widespread, some of which we cannot even perceive at this time. The impact on advertising and revenue streams is clear. It's already having an effect, and companies should already be anticipating it. Revenue streams may change, some companies will adapt and some will not survive. And we're really only at the start of it.