Rediscovering Audiences: The Transformation of Media Distribution in a Platform-Dominated and AI-Mediated Environment

The rise of global digital platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Google Search, Apple News, and other aggregators, has fundamentally altered the ecology of media creation, circulation, and consumption. Over the past decade, tensions between media organizations and global platforms have been extensively examined across political economy, media studies, journalism, and communication research. Foundational work on platformization, network effects, multi-sided markets, algorithmic power, and datafication has shown that platforms do not merely connect users, media producers, and advertisers. Rather, they organize markets, structure visibility, standardize metrics, govern access to audiences, and reshape cultural production.Media organizations have consequently become more dependent on platform infrastructures, ranking systems, recommendation algorithms, advertising technologies, audience analytics, and data flows. However, revisiting the familiar narrative of media organizations struggling with platform algorithms is no longer sufficient. The rapid development of generative AI, AI-driven search engines, chatbot interfaces, automated summarization tools, synthetic media, and personalized recommendation systems is introducing a new layer of intermediation between media organizations and audiences. These systems are beginning to reshape how audiences encounter, evaluate, trust, and consume media content. Rather than directing users to publishers’ own websites, apps, or subscription channels, AI systems may extract, summarize, repackage, translate, recommend, or answer queries directly from media content. Such practices may weaken referral traffic, reduce brand recognition, complicate attribution, and challenge the economic value of original publication.This Research Topic seeks to move beyond established debates on platform dependency and algorithmic visibility by foregrounding newer and more disruptive shifts in media distribution. It uses the idea of ‘audience rediscovery’ to capture the need for media organizations, scholars, and policymakers to rethink how audiences are reached, measured, retained, monetized, and understood when discovery is increasingly shaped by platforms, algorithms, creators, and AI systems. These shifts include platform dependency, decoupling, and strategic adaptation; algorithmic visibility, resistance, and platform fatigue; the growing power of creator-led media; the platformization of podcasts, newsletters, and streaming video; the impact of generative AI on search, recommendation, summarization, and content discovery; and the emergence of chatbot interfaces that may bypass publishers’ own channels altogether.The scope of this Research Topic covers the changing conditions through which media content is discovered, ranked, recommended, summarized, monetized, measured, governed, and trusted. It is particularly interested in how relationships among media organizations, audiences, platforms, creators, advertisers, technology companies, and AI firms are being transformed by AI-driven search, chatbot interfaces, automated content generation, algorithmic personalization, synthetic media, and new forms of audience behavior.Suggested subtopics include, but are not limited to: • platform dependency, decoupling, and strategic adaptation• algorithmic visibility, resistance, and platform fatigue • AI-mediated discovery and content visibility • short-form video and platform-native storytelling• decentralisation, private audiences, and community-based distribution • creator-led media and personality-based engagement.Information and Instructions for AuthorsManuscript summaries (Frontiers' name for abstracts) of up to 500 words will be considered until 12 November, 2026. Authors are encouraged to submit a manuscript summary before submitting a full manuscript. Topic editors: Miao Guo, Todd Holmes Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82532/rediscovering-audiences-the-transformation-of-media-distribution-in-a-platform-dominated-and-ai-mediated-environment