After generations of vertical integration followed by an era of disintermediation, news and affinity brands are learning to get comfortable with ambient discoverability—or presence built through podcasts, video, and newsletters that live entirely off their platforms and aren’t designed to convert audiences back to the homepage. That may sound like giving Neal Mohan more business at a time when YouTube is already a dominant monopoly. But it’s a short-term play for a long-term audience—one that the Times is already making through many of its next-gen products, all aimed at younger users who have never scrolled a news site 10 times a day or, obviously, held a physical paper in their hands. Popcast, Interesting Times, The Interview, and the like all do the trick. It’s a bet that repeated, familiar exposure pays off once a young adult begins their news-brand journey in earnest.

On a superficial level, it appears that most young people don’t care about news at all. (Yes, you were weird in high school and stood out, but you knew that already.) According to a recent Pew report, only about a quarter of people under 30 say they ever go looking for news, a habit that becomes far more common as people age. (The good news is that foreign-policy interest is climbing among younger generations—ask Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris about the questions they field from Gen Zers on the Israel-Palestine conflict.) Meanwhile, fully 81 percent of teens report getting their news from influencers, according to a recent study from the American Press Institute. Kahn and his video team know this and are hoping to capitalize.

Of course, ambient discoverability means surrendering control to somebody else’s product roadmap. Adam Mosseri is giving Instagram’s 3 billion monthly users more say over what they see, and Threads, under Connor Hayes—who just took the platform past 500 million monthly users, roughly on par with X—has deliberately deprioritized news and politics. But Matt Brittin, who ran Google’s EMEA business for a decade before taking over as director general of the BBC, has made meeting younger audiences on their own turf the organization’s central bet. As a result, the BBC has become YouTube’s most-watched media company over the past year, per analyst Evan Shapiro: BBC Studios is up 60 percent in watch time since 2025, with an average of 13.3 minutes per video—longer than any other media company. What if the issue isn’t actually that younger people don’t care about the news, so much as they don’t like receiving it in its current format?

None of this really amounts to a new “pivot to video.” That earlier industry-wide delusion assumed that video was supplementary—a side bet funded by platform partnerships, staffed with expensive teams, and never prioritized as a serious business. BuzzFeed exploded a watermelon with rubber bands on Facebook Live (the platform’s biggest viral hit on Live at the time, with more than 800,000 concurrent viewers); The Dodo tossed curated cute-animal content into the never-ending sea of cute-animal content and hoped it would float; etcetera. Most of it was garbage, and all of it was susceptible to an algo tweak. This time, the bet isn’t that video content is supplementary, but rather inevitable.

If played correctly, there’s a world of opportunity for publishers and creators in areas they didn’t consider before. For instance, as attention migrates from the smartphone back to the television set, platforms that once buttered their bread with low-quality, user-generated video—TikTok, Facebook, YouTube—are trying to capture more attention and viewing time, while also leaning on premium brands to sell CTV ad dollars against. The publishers that succeed in this new era will have algorithm authority—or a preferred standing inside A.I. chatbots’ and social platforms’ recommendation systems. This can come in the form of a licensing deal or an innovative partnership, like Cloudflare’s Monetization Gateway program that lets publishers charge A.I. crawlers per request in real time rather than negotiate a one-off contract.

Then there’s the third, almost galaxy-brainish method: building trust with the machines via topical depth and clean, structured content—the kind of authority a chatbot’s answer implicitly leans on. This isn’t exactly monetizable at present, but it’s going to be the baseline for any publisher who survives the current age. Less than 30 percent of people who use A.I. for news trust its accuracy, which presents a long-term problem for the frontier labs. Future’s chief revenue officer, Mike Peralta, put it best when asked at Cannes what his company has learned about showing up in answer engines: “Authority and trust” are what actually earn a citation now.

The lesson is, of course, deceptively simple: start building a brand that people recognize regardless of where they encounter it. But it’s also a frightening proposition for many brands that lost their identity during the swirl of the platform era, when they tried to be everything to everyone in the name of homepage traffic. But there’s never been a better moment for publishers to experiment with their own long-arc work, as Kahn would say. What’s the worst that can happen when there’s nothing left to lose? We all know the Times is going to make it, but it can’t be the only one.