🐭 We focused on Disney Streaming — for good reason. Disney’s D2C Streaming profits more than doubled: up 116% to $712B in 2Q.

🐭 I also unpack and explain the deal Disney announced yesterday with TikTok:

TikTok is integrating into Disney+ with a curated feed of Creators and much of the content focused on Disney IP. Importantly, Disney will package and sell this ad inventory across BOTH Disney Streaming and TikTok - something that will be popular with Creators and Advertisers.

🐭 This move allows Disney to begin to compete with social platforms, on mobile, outside the living room. It is also another shoe dropping in the verticalization of Premium Television. As I told Romaine, this is more than Brands Cosplaying Creator, it's a careful and 1000% necessary move into mobile.

🐭 I mention the success of Toy Story in the interview. Here are the receipts:

Toy Story 5: $1B+ at the global BO; Toy Story catalog: 2B hours streamed this summer; Toy Story Merch: $1.1B in sales this year; Toy Story drove a +20% jump in OpInc at Disney Parks & Experiences. Walt’s Flywheel in action.

🐭 I also dug into Disney’s Sports game. OpInc at ESPN and Sports fell -17% in 2Q. That’s because their NBA fees skyrocketed 86%. Disney’s sports fees (alone) are $12B in 2026 - that’s 60% of Netflix’s entire 2026 programming spend. That said: the NBA Finals rose 100% this year, with viewing among P12-24 up 140%. The NHL Finals also grew 100% this year. So the Sports bet is starting to pay off.

🐭 The question is, can Josh D’Amaro and Disney transform ESPN into a streaming service faster than Trad TV dies? Otherwise, even the Knicks may not be able to make the sports math work.

Some Disney things we didn’t cover on Bloomberg:

🐭 Overall Net Income at Disney fell -52% in 2Q: This stems from their sale of their half of A+E Global Media to Hearst - taking a $900 million write down on value in the process.

🐭 Disney has finally started to improve their position in the FOX acquisition seven years ago: Because of the full integration of Hulu and FOX content (The Simpsons, X Men) into the Disney Universe, they’ve moved from -$67 BILLION negative asset value to approximately -$40 BILLION.

🐭 Still, at this rate, Disney won’t break even on the FOX acquisition until 2034.

🐭 Disney shares are up 5% this week.

Let me know your thoughts on all that.

Cheers.

ESHAP

Adam Smith’s original theory of Capitalism was deeply moral, violently anti-monopoly, and structurally designed to protect the working class. Smith’s belief was that healthy competition in a free market would incentivize individual people and businesses to provide the best services at an optimal price, to be the most competitive, and attract the most customers. A shoemaker can’t charge exorbitant prices or make shitty shoes, because their competitor will undercut them or make better footwear. To succeed, a cobbler must make great kicks at a fair price and pay workers a competitive wage, so they don’t quit and design sneakers next door.

Crucially, Smith’s work warned harshly against companies that became so large they would be monopolies and about collections of magnates colluding to corner markets.

For real Capitalism to work, Smith explicitly dictated that the wealthiest members of society should pay a higher, disproportionate share of taxes, as a core, foundational component of a healthy capitalist economy.

Capitalism, in its truest form, as conceived by its architect, is a free market based on fair competition, where those who are most successful pay a “disproportionate” amount of their income back into the system, offering new competitors necessary resources to foster the rise of new competitors, and to prevent one company (a monopoly) or small group of colluding companies (an oligarchy) from squelching competition and taking advantage of consumers aka the public.

Smith’s original concept bears zero resemblance to the version of “Capitalism” practiced in America in 2026.

In 1976, fifty years ago, the top tax rate in the US was 70%. Over a certain amount of income, the biggest “winners” of American Capitalism had to put 7 out of every 10 dollars they earned, back into the system, enabling Americans who made less to be educated, eat well, stay healthy, and build new competition for “the winners.” This ensured that competition itself continued and the best products and services, at the best prices, were available to everyone.

This is precisely how the American Middle Class was created. Just as Smith envisioned. It wasn’t perfect, but it was far fairer than feudalism. It was also much more of a free market than we have today.

Today, the top tax rate in the US is 37% – nearly half of what it was fifty years ago. By comparison, Finland, ranked the happiest country in the world for nine straight years, has a top tax rate of 58%. That is how they provide universal healthcare and universal childcare to every single Finn – enabling people to invest into their families, their careers, and into new businesses. Additionally, in Finland, all corporations pay a flat tax rate of 20% – no loopholes, no exceptions. While America has a stated top corporate tax rate of 21%, a humongous share of US companies pays $0 in taxes. 88 of the most valuable companies in America, including Tesla, Disney, Liberty Media, Yum Brands, Roku, Live Nation, and Wynn Resorts, pay zero taxes. In its entire 24-year history, SpaceX, run by the world’s richest man, has never paid taxes.

Consequently, over the last fifty years, America’s income and wealth have been consolidated among very few people, at the expense of most Americans. The top 10% of Americans (34 million people) now control more than two thirds of America’s total wealth. Today, the 308 million Americans in the bottom 90% hold just 32.8% of wealth of in the United States.

Since 1976, the incomes of the top 1% of Americans have grown 322%, while the wages of 90% of Americans have grown just 27%. Fifty years ago, the average US minimum wage worker earned 1.2% of the average income of the top 1%. Today, the average minimum wage employee earns 0.86% of an average one-percenter.

The last increase to the federal minimum wage was in 2009. Why? Because in 2010, immediately after the last minimum wage increase, regulators in the US uncapped the limit that corporations can spend on elections, and the CEOs of those companies have lobbied stridently against raising the minimum wage. As the population has grown (+57% since 1976) American regulators have allowed our wealthiest people and companies to pay far less (or absolutely nothing) in taxes, so less cash gets funneled back into society, stifling the ability for those in the 90% to compete fairly, thus winnowing America’s Middle Class.

As a direct result of the collaboration of a small cohort of “capitalist winners,” in the last half century, American Capitalism has transformed (read as metastasized) into “American Casteism.”

You may ask yourself, “so, what does this have to do with Hollywood?” The answer: Literally Everything.

Hollywood’s Entertainment Industrial Complex personifies the American ”Capitalist” Caste System more than any other industry.

33% OFF FOR NEW PREMIUM SUBS!

Read more

Right now, we are witnessing a pincer movement against the First Amendment by the most powerful people in America.

On one side, the current administration is systematically weaponizing federal power to intimidate, penalize, and silence independent reporting. On the other, the wealthiest tech titans and media moguls are eagerly engaging in preemptive surrender — sacrificing their own journalists and cutting massive checks to buy regulatory favor and protect their balance sheets.

We — in the media and in the public — have a choice. We can follow the corporate elite into a crouch of compliance, or we can look to The New York Times’ recent courtroom victory as a definitive profile in courage. This is a call to arms for the media to remember its core mission: to defend the First Amendment and hold the most powerful accountable — including the federal government, the tech oligarchy, and even the media elite itself.

THE DEAT…

Read more

Read more

• Misalignment burnout

• What to do, first, when you get shitcanned

• What to do NOW BEFORE you need a new gig

• How to start shipping value in order to get value back

• Creating a routine that maintains your sanity and holds yourself accountable

• How to get over your fears and start building your own brand

• How to start by... STARTING

• A WHOLE LOT MORE!

If you're uncomfortable right now, you are not alone.

If you want to do something about it, check out my complete guide for taking control of your career trajectory and get some great advice in the webinar above.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in live!

Don’t miss out on any of my Substack content. Become a Premium Peacenik with this special summer offer!

Cheers!

ESHAP

Over the last fifty-four months, globally, the media, entertainment, and technology sectors have shed more than one million jobs.

In January, I predicted that the shitcanning would get worse this year. Boy, was I right. In fact, the 2026 1H actuals — a devastating 76% surge in pink slips — prove that I underestimated the disaster.

Read more

Read more

Of all the gravitational forces in the Media Universe, by far the most powerful is the dramatic tilt of the planet’s generational axis from Baby Boomers and Gen X to Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen A.

Among Media’s power elite, there is a massive misunderstanding of who actually populates the planet and how that one factor has upended Media consumption in every region on the planet.

81% of the world’s population — 70% in the US, 67% in Europe, and 81% of Latin America — are now under 55.

I chose the 54/55 axis point as a focus of this study for a very specific reason. The generation gap for Media consumption between those over and under 55, in these eight major regions, is massive — and widening.

The data I’ve posted below comes from the ESHAP Cross-Screen Attention Index: The first zero-sum, wholly-deduplicated map of human attention in history. The index is a free, interactive app that allows you to see the total attention, by generation for eight major markets around the world.

In the last week, The Index has gotten a lot of attention from Media pros in these markets.

It’s also managed to upset a number of executives in the Measurement Industrial Complex, because I’ve used their publicly available data, cross-collateralized with handset data and consumer panels from those regions, to show that our collective TV measurement is a mirage.

Why? For two reasons.

1. Traditional measurement companies in these regions all assume that if a TV is turned on, that it’s actually being watched. Think about your own media habits to understand the fatal flaw in this assumption. Three quarters of all consumers watch TV with a phone in their hand. Most audiences, often or always, are using those phones to look at something else rather than the television screen. Contrary to conventional Media wisdom, it is not possible to pay attention to two screens at once — attention, in fact, cannot be divided.

2. These organizations are either Joint Industry Committees (JICs) controlled by the companies whose very survival relies on inflating TV tonnage over mobile realities, or for-profit corporations whose massive fees are disproportionately paid by those same companies. As a result, their math skews towards over-indexed TV consumption by the eldest people in those countries, who watch-max for television usage over social video consumption. This is exactly how the world’s major television platforms have found themselves locked inside a geriatric trap of their own making.

Naysayers — all of whom work for or with traditional measurement organizations, by the way — have taken some exception to our methodology. You can see their vague critiques in my comments section (here). Yet none of them, when asked, could point to specific data from their own platforms to contradict our findings. They simply do not like that I have used their very own data to show the innate flaws in their own data, and want me to stop.

If you know me at all, you’ll know I can’t stop and won’t stop. I encourage you to click through to the Cross-Screen Attention Index and look at all the data — and methodology — yourself.

However, for the visual learners out there, below I’ve posted a set of infographics, comparing the time and attention spent on the major platforms between the cohorts over and under 55 in the US, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, and Mexico, from December of 2025 through May of 2026.

In these charts, you’ll see two things: the huge gap between generations of audiences around the world; and the urgent need to accurately measure attention across all our screens.

The 55+ audience spends a disproportionate amount of time and attention on Trad Media. They consume more television than all the other generations.

However, when you zoom in on audiences under 55, you will note that the top-four most-used platforms are YouTube, TikTok, Netflix, and Instagram — with the exceptions of Brazil and Mexico, where national broadcasters replace Netflix in the top four.

In fact, in all eight regions, TikTok beats Netflix for total attention among all consumers under 55, and surpasses the rest of traditional media in every region except Brazil and Mexico.

US

The rest of this post is only available to Premium Peaceniks. To unlock the full, volume-weighted telemetry for all these regions, you’ll need to upgrade.

Read more

Yesterday, I sent you what we believe is the most comprehensive measurement index for total global attention, ever.

There are myriad takeaways from that first ever Cross-Screen Attention Index. But one of the most important was that consumers watch 2-3 times more video on mobile than they do on TV. In other words, the center of global video gravity has officially shifted from the television to the phone.

Today, I’m going to show you what to do about it.

MEET ROSEBERRY: VERTICALLY INTEGRATED PREMIUM VERTICAL TV STUDIO

Read more

Below, please find my official autopsy of Traditional Media as we know it.

These 👆 are the results of a massive, Media measurement mission: Create a global cross-screen index to track the total attention of today’s consumers, regardless of which screen they use, across all the generations of the planet.

THE ESHAP CROSS-SCREEN ATTENTION INDEX — a FREE, interactive dashboard for global attention, across eight countries (US, UK, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy) — is NOW LIVE AND ONLINE.

(To play along, take a sec and open another window and pull up The Index now.)

Look at this chart again.

This is the share of consumer attention, across these eight major regions, for all people 13+.

Note that the Local Legacy Media index is a combo of ALL local traditional Media from these eight nations, compared to the rest of the global players on the chart. Note also that for total attention, all fourteen of the Legacy Media platforms, combined across all eight regions, lose the battle for cross-screen attention to the global attention champ, YouTube.

If you decouple all the trad media, the top four platforms for total cross-screen consumer attention, for all people Bar Mitzvah or older, are: 1. YouTube, 2. Netflix, 3. TikTok, and 4. Instagram.

More importantly, this is total attention paid, from all people 13+ in these regions. When we ZOOM IN and look at how the majority of humans on earth consume media… it looks like this 👇.

Of all the data in this report, perhaps the most pivotal is this: 81% of the world population — 65% of the people in these eight regions — are now 54 or younger.

This new index reveals that, across the planet, Legacy TV relies, almost entirely, on a shrinking minority of our most senior citizens, watching the same stuff, over and over and over, throwing off the balance of our measured video consumption.

When you remove that dying demographic (of which I am, myself, solidly a member), the combined fourteen Legacy outlets in this index are surpassed — handily — by YouTube, Netflix, and TikTok.

Even more eye-opening: Across these countries, YouTube garners more attention among people 13-54 than Disney, Disco Bros, Paramount, NBCU, and FOX — combined. And TikTok beats all other platforms except YouTube for attention paid, including Netflix, and Local Legacy Media.

But a zoomed-out, global view is not truly actionable, nor the point of this new index.

Rather, our intent with this new, free, interactive, user-driven platform, is to provide a strategic fiscal and investment planning compass for each of these regions.

The ESHAP CROSS-SCREEN ATTENTION INDEX (ECSAI) is now live — with data for total cross-device attention, for France, Brazil, Mexico, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the US, from December 2025 through May 2026.

It is the first zero-sum, wholly-deduplicated map of human attention in history.

It shows the total hours of attention paid to each platform, side-by-side, accounting for daily human attention as a finite resource, which cannot be divided between screens. In this index, if someone is looking at a TV, even if they have a phone in their hand, the time is allocated to the television. But, if someone is scrolling TikTok, even if the TV is on in the room, we apportion that attention exclusively to the phone, while discounting the TV that’s not being watched.

The data in The Index tells a remarkable story — a crime thriller, really — about the current state of global Media. See the chalk outline for yourself!

While Trad Media continues to cling to an aging audience, in ALL EIGHT MAJOR REGIONS — even where Legacy Media is deeply entrenched in the free Media culture and protected by local regulations — among the 13-54 majority, YouTube is the most used platform, by a sizable margin. Netflix plays bigly across all eight regions, but among 13-54 and all the younger demos, especially with Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen A, in most of these areas, TikTok outpaces Netflix, and all other comers.

In fact, as this new data shows for the first time, in many regions — particularly in the US — while YouTube is tops for total attention, TikTok actually beats YouTube among Gen Z and Gen A (consumers 13-34).

And this, ☝️ right here, is precisely why we need a Cross-Screen Index.

No one else is measuring all these platforms, side by side, across all devices. As a result, the industry gets easily distracted by feckless signposts that tells us “YouTube is #1* on TV!” (*with P2+ and without counting phones, laptops, or tablets).

Traditional Media currencies only track specific, individual devices, but not the humans who use them. They count a television playing to a room (whether full or empty) as an absolute premium, while viewing high-intensity, mobile consumption, with active thumb-and-eye engagement, as "digital background."

This collective industry blindspot is precisely why Trad Media drove into a brick wall. Legacy tracking systems want you to look at Media through isolated silos — weighting a television playing to no one as more equal than rabid attention paid to a phone.

A hyper-disproportionate amount of our Media measurement investment is spent measuring television viewing — even when that TV is not being watched. Thus, Media execs spend an equally disproportionate amount of time, energy, and resources fighting for control of a screen that only captures 40% of video consumption. That’s not just bad business; it’s a suicide mission.

The Index is designed to prevent that — it is designed to show, specifically, where the entirety of consumer attention is actually being paid, so that Media professionals can invest in content, advertising, overhead, and infrastructure, accordingly.

To achieve this, the ESCAI incorporates a Sovereign Boundary Model: with hard, quantitative ceilings locked down entirely by local, currency-grade telemetry logs (Nielsen, BARB, Médiamétrie, Comscore, Sensor Tower, etc.). Rather than asking consumers to estimate their viewing hours, the index uses this codified telemetry to establish absolute macro volumes.

Behavioral data from GWI Consumer Diaries is introduced strictly as a coefficient matrix to map friction points and calculate the mathematical overlap when two devices are running in the same room.

Three quarters of consumers actively use smartphones while the TV is on in front of them. Yet legacy currencies rely on passive boxes in empty rooms — counting televisions playing to heads buried in phones as “active viewers.” Instead, we use behavioral data to verify actual human presence and device co-activity. By injecting human reality back into blind hardware metrics, The ESCAI enforces the absolute laws of human physics and accounts for time as a non-elastic, zero-sum commodity — a closed market sponge.

SEE: ESHAP CROSS-SCREEN ATTENTION INDEX METHODOLOGY & SOURCING.

Each quarter, we will update the ECSAI (pronounced EE-say) with new data, on a rolling six months basis. Simultaneously, we will drop an Index Report, with deep analysis of the data and the trends, right here on Substack.

This is different from other measurement offerings, which provide small, irrelevant glimpses of data for free, then charge clients millions of dollars per year to fund it — while keeping the vast majority of us who work in Media in the dark. This incentivizes the measurement industrial complex to lock our data in silos, dividing and double-counting consumer attention.

Below you’ll find my first-ever ESHAP Cross-Screen Attention Index Report, with a deep dive into all the data from all eight regions.

HERE ARE THE RED HOT TAKES FROM THE FIRST ESCAI REPORT:

• While Local & Global Traditional Media in all eight countries continue to draw attention from local consumers, their businesses have become senior living societies — disproportionately dependent on the shrinking minority of their populations over the age of 55.

• For the supermajority of audiences in all eight regions (people 54 and younger), YouTube now dominates our collective attention.

• However, TikTok is coming on, fast. In the US and many other regions, TikTok is now #2 with consumers under 55 for total attention paid each month, #1 with consumers under 35, and actively threatening YouTube’s attention title with all consumers under 45.

• Netflix is strong in many of these regions. Yet, they appear vulnerable to phone consumption around the world.

• Netflix loses to YouTube in every region. More urgently, they are now behind TikTok for total cross-screen attention with consumers 13-54 in the US, the UK, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain.

• For audiences 13-44 Netflix loses the battle for attention to Instagram in five of the eight regions: Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Italy, and the United States.

• When we collapse Facebook and Instagram into a de-duplicated Meta metric, Meta sweeps Netflix in all eight regions for users 54 and younger.

• On the interactive Cross-Screen Index, we allow you to toggle the data to combine or separate IG and FB into one metric for Meta. However, we measure Instagram and Facebook separately in this report, as they have dramatically different user-bases.

• 53% of Facebook’s user-base in these eight countries is over 55, whereas 90% of Instagram’s audience is 54 or younger.

• YouTube still beats Meta in all these regions among consumers 13-54, but not by much.

• Global Trad Media in The Index — Disney, Fox, Disco Bros, Paramount, NBCU — play differently in various regions, but their total lack of cross-screen strategy has them losing badly to Global Big Tech platforms in all eight territories.

• All of the Trad US Media giants fail to secure even one #1 or #2 spot among people 13-54 in any of the eight regions that we cover — including their home territory.

When we embark on projects like this, we start fresh. No preconceptions. No confirmation bias. We let the data give us the plot, then we tell the story. This is, by far, our most ambitious data endeavor yet. It’s a Mt. Everest of data, and it tells a remarkable story about the future of Media, based only on the actual needs of real consumers.

We will keep following the data where it leads us. And The Index will always be totally free. For my Index Report, you will need to upgrade to Premium Peacenik (aka paying subscriber). This helps us fund the work behind The Index, while keeping it free for everyone.

CROSS-SCREEN ATTENTION INDEX REPORT: JULY 2026

Read more

Today, as a special summer treat to beat the heat, I’ve got two summery treats to keep us cool. First, fresh off the press, here’s the JULY MEDIA UNIVERSE MAP.

The July map shows massive movement in the Media Universe.

🪐 Trad Media stagnates as AI capitalizations defy financial logic. Anthropic is now valued more than Netflix, Comcast, The Walt Disney Company, Paramount, Fox Corporation, Roku, Spotify, Nintendo, Roblox, and Disco Bros... COMBINED.

🪐 FOX & Roku are now tethered - but will the combined value be the combined value? More? Less?

🪐 Newly public Bending Spoons has been added to the map, at an eye-popping market cap of $23 billion.

🪐 There are 176 companies on the map with a total valuation of $32.1 Trillion. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, Meta, Ope…

Read more

THIS IS THE JULY 2026 MAP:

My name is Evan Shapiro. People refer to me as a Media Cartographer. This map is why. Since 2020, using only publicly available data and powerpoint, I have been mapping the Media ecosystem, redrawing it each month and posting it here.

The ratios on the map are not subjective opinion... they’re maths. Each entity is represented to scale by their current valuation - the fairest way I could find to portray the gravitational pull of power in the info-entertainment-tech industrial complex and track the trajectories of all its major players over time.

As a point of comparison, here👇 is my first Media Map, circa 2020.

Drafting these maps, by hand, in PowerPoint; digging into the earning reports of every company on the map quarter after quarter; tracking the trajectories of all the planets, month after month, year after year, offers useful and unique perspective.

That process fuels this newsletter: where I publish more visualizations and infographical landscapes (such as the UK TV Universe, the Addressable Table of Elements, and the Creator Ecosphere) as part of weekly analytical essays covering the Media Industrial Complex and its ongoing mishegas.

The July map shows massive movement in the Media Universe.

🪐 Trad Media stagnates as AI capitalizations defy financial logic.

🪐 Anthropic is now valued more than Netflix, Comcast, The Walt Disney Company, Paramount, Fox Corporation, Roku, Spotify, Nintendo, Roblox, and Disco Bros... COMBINED.

🪐 FOX & Roku are now tethered - but will the combined value be the combined value? More? Less?

🪐 AND YET... Larry Ellison has lost $100 Billion in the last 30 days as Oracle plummets 35% to 404 billion - most apt number ever.

🪐 The race to be the world's most valuable company is really heating up, with Alphabet Inc., Apple, and NVIDIA jockeying for pole position.

🪐 Newly public Bending Spoons has been added to the map, at an eye-popping market cap of $23 billion.

🪐 There are 176 companies on the map with a total valuation of $32.1 Trillion.

🪐 Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX - just 9 companies - represent 76% of that value: $24.5T.

What does all this motion mean for the future of Media? That’s precisely what we cover here each week. So, stay tuned in to find out!

Below, you’ll find Media Maps from each year since 2020, in high resolution, for you to download and use however you like.

Much of this newsletter is free for everyone. But to help us fund all this cartography, we do periodically ask you to upgrade to Premium Peacenik — aka paid sub. If you want to join us in that effort, there’s a special offer below, just for you! If not, no worries — please keep reading for free.

Enjoy the Universe!

ESHAP

MEDIA UNIVERSE MAPS 2020-2026: IN HIGH RES

Read more

Read more

FULL DISCLOSURE: I go to Cannes Lions every year because, in short, it’s my job. I make money at Lions for appearing, moderating, predicting, and pontificating — to bring data and deliver inconvenient truth. My expenses are covered. It would not otherwise, for me, in any way, be worth the enormous time and expense it requires to attend the epic boondoggle we call “the International Festival of Creativity.”

EVEN MORE FULL DISCLOSURE: I enjoy Cannes Lions. I stick to the places where I’m invited, and avoid big, crowded parties. There are few events with the varied and interesting cross-section of thinkers and doers who attend Lions. This year was no exception. There is significant value exchanged at Lions — but, as I demonstrate below, it is just not tied in any way to the silly way all the money gets spent.

COLD …

Read more

Today: A Blueprint For The Future

Those who follow this newsletter, know our Map of The Media Universe (this one just updated to reflect Fox’s brilliant acquisition of Roku — middle left, between Disney and Netflix).

You may have also seen the recent launch of our exclusive Cross-Screen Attention Index — the first metric to track total consumer attention, across all screens, on all platforms.

We use this newsletter to publish infographics based on shit-tons of data, landscape reports generated from mountains of research, and forecasts for the future, mapped against the voice of the audience.

We work year-round, with data partners such as Ampere Analysis, GWI, Antenna, Tubefilter, MX8 Labs, Digital i, Precisify, Common Sense Media, Influencer Marketing ai, and more; continuously updating our datasets. Each quarter, we pore through the earnings reports of all the Media players represented on the Map. We continuously scour the connected universe, hunting for fresh insight and scouting gaps in Media’s user-awareness. Our quantitative construct is sound.

But the framework of our work is not built solely on quantitative analysis. Each year, we interview hundreds of citizens from the Media Universe — experts, execs, vendors, advertisers, agencies, engineers, information officers, strategists, consultants, managers, interns, academics, data scientists, platforms, publishers, producers, and individual members of our community. We talk to a diverse array of global Media thought leaders, nearly every working day.

These two data engines — one dashboard of user behavior and industry trends; the other based on the current, actual reality of the people and institutions who make up the Media Universe — form our framework.

This is the Cartographer’s Blueprint: A strong cocktail of hard math, human input, and inconvenient truth.

Last week, we curated a live program at StreamTV based on this Blueprint. The Media Universe Summit was a full day of brand new findings from the real world of real consumer behavior, blended with best practices from Media’s best practitioners, containing THIRTY CASE STUDIES from the front lines of what’s actually working right now.

In the flow below, you’ll find videos of the whole morning program of the Summit:

• My opening keynote where I unpack our recent Attention Index and show how to see The Whole Consumer (25 mins)

• The New Media Model: case studies from Larry Flynt Productions, Stapleview, Uscreen, and Pressman Film (30 mins)

• The Future of Animation: Moderated by YouTube; feat. case studies from Animation+, Toonstar, and Explosm (27 mins)

• Building A Modern Media Empire with Dhar Mann Studios: feat. DMS CEO Sean Atkins, Tamara Rothenberg from Samsung, and Kim Larson of YouTube (25 mins)

• Scoring Franchises: A fascinating keynote from IP valuation guru Lauren Zeinfeld, who grades my ESHAP brand, live on stage, to demonstrate how to value YOUR IP and measure the upside you’ve yet to realize (20 mins)

Videos of these full sessions are all below. You’ll see these are not run-of-the-mill panels driven by PR flacks and talking points. There’s no pablum, no bullshit. Just real talk from smart people.

We promised people Punk Rock Presenting: three chords and the truth. I think we delivered.

Together, they are a live Blueprint for what is next and now — actual actionable insights from the real world of what’s working, built on a foundation of data from the behavior of our audiences.

In this newsletter, we strive to offer digestible analysis to help you navigate the chaos. The sessions below are a live-action adaptation of that. Additionally, at the very bottom of this post, following all the video, you’ll find a downloadable PDF of my entire presentation on The Whole Consumer.

This is the culmination of a year’s work. I hope you enjoy!

CARTOGRAPHER KEYNOTE: THE WHOLE CONSUMER

Read more

Attention: Share of 55+

Attention Share: Bar Mitzvah thru 54

Thanks for watching.

Let me know what you think!!

ESHAP

Read more

Introducing the ESHAP Cross-Screen Attention Index.

In the commercial Media industry, measurement has always been divided by screens. No major auditing bureau or currency panel has ever forced television meters, handset timestamps, and browser logs into a singular, logic-enforced, zero-sum attention budget. This is collective malpractice. If you still treat social video and television as separate silos, to twist the age-old Wanamaker adage: You are wasting half your fucking money.

Here’s why…

In the next three years, one trillion dollars will be spent on advertising in the US. More than three quarters of that will be spent on digital platforms. Another $180 billion will be spent on television advertising. No one is measuring the reach, frequency, or effectiveness of this massive cashflow across these platforms.

Publishers and advertisers look at their TV ratings, digital buyers and social media experts look at mobile handset logs, and everybody claims they are winning the war for reach. Meanwhile the measurement industry locks agencies into long-term contracts, then charges sellers through the nose to use their “currency.” Or, they will track attention across all the platforms, but only by campaign - not as a map nor trajectory of total cross-screen attention. This leaves our collective data on real attention siloed to the point of pointlessness.

The industry is totally blind to how real people actually behave. Today’s consumer is a singular, fluid entity moving seamlessly across a multi-screen day, allocating a single, finite commodity: attention.

The Media industry is lost specifically because they are charting their course based on the failed logic of vanity metrics, rather than following the actual data; the voice of the audience.

In a recent survey by ESHAP and MX8 of 3,000 US consumers, 59% of people say they use their phone to watch video more than any other device. Just 28% named TV as their most-used source for video. When you look only at people under 55, however, this ratio gets more dramatic.

Only Baby Boomers watch more video on televisions than on phones. Every other generation of Americans watches video on their phones two to three times more than their TVs.

This is the Media Generation Gap.

I have been studying this trend all year. I have become obsessed with the idea of measuring total attention among competing platforms across all screens.

As far as I can tell, the ESHAP Cross-Screen Attention Index represents something never achieved in media analytics: a singular, logic-enforced, zero-sum attention budget that tracks the whole consumer across all attention endpoints simultaneously.

By treating human focus as a tangible physical property constrained by a fixed 24-hour clock, we built a model that removes corporate bias, complacency, and corruption from measurement.

This model produces a singular, unduplicated map of total human attention by harmonizing Nielsen’s TV currency with Comscore’s handset panels and GWI daily consumer diaries. We collapsed every delivery mechanism — linear, on demand, broadcast, cable, subscription streaming, free ad-supported streaming, and mobile social feeds — into their corporate parents. To do this, we built a deterministic Python accounting engine that operates under the laws of data science and geometry. This logic engine treats attention as a closed, zero-sum matrix.

This data is from December 2025 through May 2026, and tracks all attention, including time spent watching video and consuming other social media.

The results show, for the first time, a more accurate media hierarchy across every format and screen — from vertical social feeds and letterboxed streaming to smartphones, laptops, and Connected TVs. Is this Index a 110% perfect read of all Media usage? No. Does it provide a clearer, more accurate account of actual, total Media attention in the US than the industry has ever had? Hells to the yeah.

Our data construct is sound. But the framework for this index is not built solely on quantitative analysis. Over the last year, we have interviewed hundreds of experts, practitioners, vendors, buyers, managers, executives, interns, academics, data scientists, platforms, publishers, producers, and members of our community. On nearly every one of our working days.

The numbers in this index are from companies we all know. So is its point of view. We knew to ask the right questions, because everyone asked us. We use words in this report that come straight from the mouths of the people, at all levels, who run all the companies in the Media Universe.

These results are not mine. They are ours. These opinions aren’t mine. They are ours.

The underlying raw inputs we used to construct this index — Nielsen’s Media Distributor Gauge, U.S. Census population stats, Comscore’s digital market updates, and GWI’s consumer diaries — are all 100% publicly available, out in the open for anyone to read. Yet, no one in the multi-billion-dollar Media Industrial Complex has ever combined and shared them. Because our industry is kept in eat-what-you-kill silos. So we don’t ask.

That fear of finding out is the systemic blindness now pushing our industry off a cliff. Thus, the Cross-Screen Attention Index. It’s our new compass, away from the cliff and on the path toward today’s audience: The Whole Consumer.

Like many metrics used in the Media Universe, this index’s framework — our Cartographer’s Blueprint — is a mix of hard math and human behavior. We have a pretty strict methodology for both. The quantitative methodology is at the bottom of this report. The qualitative framework is our secret sauce, so, then, it’s secret.

The result, is that the ESHAP Cross-Screen Attention Index shows a picture of the Media landscape, and The Whole Consumer we have literally never seen:

Read more