New business models gain traction. The last generation of companies relied on advertising above all else. Startups increasingly ignore that money spigot in favor of subscriptions, in-app payments, or e-commerce. On a small scale, several of these experiments look promising.

In ten years, speaking to AI friends at least as often as to human ones may be normal. That could reduce our desire to use social networks to find online kinship.

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it,” philosopher Henry David Thoreau said.

A new wave is emerging to meet this opportunity. Upstarts like BeReal, Poparazzi, Mastodon, Post News, and others seek to win by promising a better use of our most valuable resource: time.

If you think of social media as a spectrum – from social to media – all of these companies are shifting toward the latter end.

In the U.S., traditional media has increasingly pushed toward the poles. A Pew Research study from 2019 illustrates how partisan American news consumption is. Ninety-three percent of those who selected Fox as their main source of news identified as Republican, while 95% of those that chose MSNBC considered themselves Democrats. The information we consume reflects our political affiliations to an extreme extent.

Subscriptions and in-app payments may better suit the hit-driven nature of social media companies.

Traditionally, social media companies have forgone early monetization so as not to inhibit growth, but it may be worth adding some degree of downside protection. Offering a paid product means that even if your app is little more than a summer fad, the exercise has not been fruitless, potentially producing millions in revenue.

As TikTok has already shown, there’s an opportunity for social networks to act as the gateway to e-commerce.

A relentless march towards richness. 
Economies replacing advertising.  
The rise of synthetic kinship.

Social media may also take inspiration from immersive games on the business model side. Platforms like Roblox have demonstrated the power of running in-world economies. Rather than leveraging ads, Roblox monetizes via avatar accessories, game upgrades, or other special experiences.

The next generation of social media giants may not obsess over capturing attention. Instead, they’ll focus on creating functional, multifaceted economies.

Fundamentally, we seek out those platforms to connect. Humans crave kinship, a sense of belonging with a larger group. Right now, that can only be sated by interacting with other humans. Very soon, though, that may no longer be true.

Though dystopian, it seems eminently plausible that humans may have dozens of synthetic friends and loved ones in future decades. We will talk and play and share with these creations as we do today.

Instead of connecting with one another (or pretending to), we might live in private versions of The Truman Show, with AI playing the other characters.

AI could be used to bootstrap new social experiences. The founders of future platforms may solve the cold start problem by generating billions of synthetic personalities to interact with human participants. Even a network with a few hundred “real” users could be made to feel active in this way; the lines between human and artificial people will become increasingly blurry.