What Happens To Media When The Web Goes Away, with Tony Haile

Channels with Peter Kafka

Vox Media Podcast Network

Business News, News, Tv & Film, Technology

4.4 • 585 Ratings

🗓️ 26 November 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We built the modern media business for the web — for people who visited websites, read articles, and saw ads. What happens when no one does that anymore? That’s been one of the big themes of conversations we’ve been having on Channels with this year — with people who run big and small media properties, and with people who are trying to build media businesses. And that’s why I wanted to talk to Tony Haile. Tony got into digital media years ago, when he was the CEO of Chartbeat - the analytics site that trained every web publisher to watch what was happening to their properties in real time. Then he went on to build Scroll, a sort of ad-blocking subscription service that was meant to work with lots of news publishers. Twitter bought that one, then killed it. The point is that Tony has spent a lot of time talking and working with media companies of all sorts, and now… it looks like he’s getting out. So I wanted to talk him about why his new company — Filament — is not a media startup, and what he thinks is going to happen to the rest of the media business as AI washes over the landscape. This is going to sound like a bummer of a conversation — and in some parts it is! But he’s a good guide, and there are some glimmers of hope here and there. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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1:33.1	tis and see supply from the box media podcast network this is channels with peter kofka that is me
1:43.7	i'm also chief correspondent at
1:45.9	Business Insider. Happy Thanksgiving. Today we are talking to a channel's favorite, Tony Hale,
1:52.8	not the great comedic actor, but an entrepreneur who has been in and around digital media
1:57.3	basically forever. And he's someone I like reading and talking to when I want to try to sort through some
2:03.9	thoughts about the future of everything.
2:07.3	And I also wanted to talk to Tony because he's working on a new thing.
2:10.7	And from what I can tell, it doesn't have much to do with media.
2:14.6	And my worry was that he's doing that because he doesn't see a lot of future
	...

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