Well, it started as a gradual slide toward centralization of platforms, then everyone fell off a cliff without realising what happened at all. The content crunch happened around a perfect trifecta of technology: mobile’s explosive growth, RSS’ death and the centralisation of everything.

Metaphors aside, what really happened is quite simple: social media appeared — and our collective attention turned from news sites and search engines to centralized platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Over time instead of consuming news by going somewhere to read it, it just came to you, in a single feed.

It was around this time that RSS began its slide into irrelevance and sealing the fate of RSS forever, Google Reader was quietly put to sleep by the search giant in early 2013. It’s hard to understate how important RSS was to early blogs — it was the only way to “subscribe” to get the latest posts without needing to give someone your email address.

As social sharing of articles became the discovery mechanism of choice it ultimately changed how people wrote: many people began engineering your title, picture and other elements for likes and shares. Facebook’s algorithm quickly became the maker and breaker of content — if you found yourself in its favor you might see millions of views in a day, but other times you’d get nothing.

That shift, to a world where we can measure everything people are doing, had a positive side effect. Publishers like BuzzFeed, Upworthy and others were born, all of whom ultimately disrupted the entire industry — because they were so widely shared, consistently.

Facebook referrals surpassed those from Google properties for the first time in 2015. Twitter, Pinterest and many others continue to drive traffic, but Facebook is the juggernaut of content and everyone from bloggers to the largest media companies know it.

That’s in part because our collective consumption habits have changed dramatically. In 2014 a study found that content consumption inside mobile apps had already overtaken the desktop and you’ll never guess who was on top of the pile — Facebook.

Because of its dominance, Facebook has made many moves to control — or at least influence — content since 2014. In 2015 it launched an ‘Instant Articles’ format which is special HTML markup exclusive to the social network that lets content load quickly inside its mobile apps, in response to how slow many platforms had become.

Facebook says that it’s as a result of research that found most users wouldn’t wait around for a site to load for more than few seconds before giving up — but it also shows just how much influence the network has and the power it has to force a change like this.

The problem with that influence is the company also has enough control to exert its power over the media and creators in general.

From July 2016, Facebook announced that you’d see fewer posts from publishers or brands, and more from friends or family. In one move, the social network decimated publishers’ reach… unless you’re willing to cough up money for a sponsored post.

Native advertising

Ten years ago if you’d said “companies are going to pay to posts blogs in disguise on journalistic platforms” almost everyone would have looked at you like you were a little crazy — that never happened.

Native advertising, which emerged out of a desire of the media to increase their waning revenues, became popular online around 2014 when companies like The New York Times and BuzzFeed realised there was a way to get cash for letting companies post veiled content to their own audiences.

It’s important to remember that native advertising isn’t really a new phenomenon, although it is online. Branded TV shows existed for decades, as well as editorial advertisements in newspapers and sponsored radio programs.

There are hundreds of examples of both good and bad native advertising, but one that was particularly great is this post on The New York Times about Women Inmates — which is real journalism — but happens to be sponsored by Netflix’s Orange Is The New Black.

Native advertising is a topic that anyone in the industry will hand-wring over simply because it’s kinda gross to trick your visitors into reading something that’s basically an infomercial, produced in-house by people sitting scarily close to their editorial teams. But… they make a lot of money.

When native advertising arrived online it didn’t just happen slowly — it came with a bang, and before anyone knew it, was everywhere.

It’s important to understand why native advertising happened, however, in the way it did, which leads us into the next key development.

Adblocking

Native advertising was a reaction to a disease that publishers considered to be out of control. Adblocking, which is rapidly growing in popularity, has nearly doubled in usage every year since the mid-2000s.