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Welcome back to the HYPEWORKS Newsletter.
Legacy media is dead. Long live new media.
This week we look at Cluely founder Roy Lee’s TechCrunch appearance, lack of virality (ironically) and subsequent knifing (below) that’s created a lot of debate about the state of media.
Lee himself tweeted:
The interview with Lee, at barely 13,000 views. is somehow the second most-watched TechCrunch video on YouTube in the past year!
If one random interview I did can outperform almost everything a billion-dollar media brand posted all year, it tells you everything you need to know. The audience isn’t there anymore. The attention left the building.
All the views are on social. Every breakout clip, every quote that travels, every founder people actually care about, it all happens on feeds now.
Nobody wants to watch corpo slop. The days of five-person panels, fake laughs, and “let’s unpack that” interviews are over. People want tension. They want honesty. They want to feel like they’re in the room when something real happens.
Social media has already eaten everything. It’s bigger than AI, bigger than the internet, bigger than media itself. It’s where culture actually lives.
TechCrunch can’t compete with a guy holding an iPhone and a take. Because the game isn’t about production anymore, it’s about connection.
If the internet built infrastructure and AI built automation, social built identity. It’s where everyone goes to see what’s real.
So yeah. Legacy media is dead. The feeds won.
Thirteen thousand views on TechCrunch means nothing. But that same clip, reposted raw on social? That’s where it lives forever.
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— Alex/Jake, team HYPEWORKS
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