Platforms need the news, but they're killing it

Support for the show comes from Engine. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard, but if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Engine is the fastest-growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes, earn up to 10% back on hotels, and in 2025, Engine customers save more than $300 million on travel, with zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS.

More than 1,000 businesses join Engine every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com slash decoder. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neilan Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. We've been talking a lot this year about the changing internet and what it's doing to the media ecosystem, particularly journalism, which has taken a back seat to creator and influencer media across virtually every platform.

But the platforms themselves have a lot of influence over what those creators and influencers make. If you're a decoder listener, you'll recognize this as a theme that we come back to a lot. The idea that the way we distribute media directly influences the media we make. The influential media scholar Marshall McLuhan famously summed this up as the medium is the message. It's a big idea that shapes the entire world around us.

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