16z raised $15 billion; what exactly is it betting on in the new media landscape? On X, everyone is a KOL, with millions of views every month. Traffic itself is no longer valuable. What's valuable is attention, the power of "belief," and the scarce right to be trusted.
This article explains a16z New Media, agency, how to make traffic meaningful on Twitter, and ICM.
a16z raised $15 billion in funding in the new year, which went viral across various platforms. They raised so much money to tell a story of "All in America, believing in AI + Crypto and technology".
Two months ago, they also established a New Media team to help a16z itself and its portfolio companies with "new media".
AI/Web3 companies in Silicon Valley are currently hiring, offering substantial rewards for finding a "Storyteller"—someone who can write threads, postposts, and tell stories.
A partner at a16z new media company bluntly stated: "Marketing expertise has replaced computers as the most sought-after skill."
What a16z has truly valued in recent years is not the content itself, but the way power is restructured.
New media is just a facade.
What has really changed is: who has the authority to give orders (agency)?
Why has "new media" been elevated to such a high level in the past two years?
Because the attention economy has basically run out of new tricks.
• Excessive amount of content
• Distribution costs are close to zero
Being seen no longer constitutes an advantage.
What's truly scarce now isn't exposure.
Instead, there are two things:
Is your judgment trustworthy?
Can you turn "belief" into "action"?
This is why you will clearly feel a change:
Previously, the media focused more on storytelling and setting narratives; now, the media is beginning to directly influence decision-making and trigger actions.
When content is no longer scarce, what truly matters is no longer "what you said".
Rather, it's about what will happen next .
This is the core meaning behind a16z's repeated emphasis on New Media.
It's not a matter of format like Thread, podcast, or short video.
Rather, the distribution structure has changed, and the power structure has changed accordingly.
A very simple comparison:
Old media
• Distribution is scarce (TV, newspapers, platforms)
Value is concentrated in institutions
Creators are essentially employees.
New Media
• Decentralized distribution (X / YouTube / Substack / podcasts)
• The individual itself becomes a node
Creators directly accumulate influence and bargaining power.
The real change can be summed up in one sentence: the media has transformed from institutional assets into personal capital.
Once the media becomes personal capital, it ceases to be merely an "exposure tool" and begins to become a tool of power.
When the media belongs to an institution, it is your exposure tool; when the media belongs to an individual, it becomes your ability to influence the decisions of others.
Influence on decisions is power.
Agency
The ultimate goal of new media is not page views.
Rather, it is the right to act (agency).
The right to act means that others are willing to act with you, trust your judgment, and pay for your ideas.
Packy mentioned in "The Power Brokers":
"The goal of the Fund is to earn carry points with as few people as possible in the shortest amount of time."
Firm's goal is to leverage scale to continuously build long-term advantages.
This distinction explains why media capabilities have always been considered "icing on the cake" in traditional VCs, while at a16z, they have been made into essential infrastructure.
For a long time, our pre-set order was:
Money → Company → Market
Money comes first; it decides everything.
But in a world of extreme media saturation, this order has been reversed:
Right to act → Community → Market → Capital
Why is it that nowadays "there is a lot of money, but things are difficult to do"?
Because funds no longer automatically translate into action.
Distribution is not scarce
• Extremely noisy attention
Trust cannot be bought with a budget.
We've seen this many times in the crypto(I won't give examples to avoid offending anyone):
The project had plenty of money, but it still failed to launch successfully. The valuation was high, but nobody was really willing to participate. The narrative was complete, but nobody followed up with execution.
It's not because there's not enough money. It's because there's no right to act.
The truly scarce resource now is not capital.
Instead:
Is it possible to get a group of people to believe the same thing at the same time?
• Is it possible to get them to act at the same time?
Whoever can do this has mastered the real leverage.
So I'm not praising it, but using a16z to explain an ongoing structural change.
What has new media solved? What is still missing?
If the media can form a consensus, and that consensus can drive action, then the market is the settlement layer for that consensus.
Why ICM (Internet Capital Markets) inevitably emerged after New Media:
Because new media has an inherent structural flaw :
Influence ≠ Ownership
Traffic can be monetized, but it cannot be combined or held long-term.
Creators still rely on platform revenue sharing, brand collaborations, and advertising cycles.
The concept of ICM was first proposed by Solana, and it fills this gap: transforming narratives/consensus/culture into tradable, holdable, and collaborative capital structures.
ICM addresses the next step in New Media:
How is influence priced, traded, and sustained?
If we were to categorize it in one sentence:
New Media: → Who gets the attention?
ICM: → How Attention Becomes Capital Structure
in conclusion:
New Media addresses the "right of dissemination," while ICM addresses the "right of pricing."
The essence of ICM:
· Change attention → agency → pricing → capital formation
It's not a speculative tool, but rather a coordination infrastructure.
Finally, I'd like to quote a famous saying by Navarre, which I admire, to echo this point and conclude the article.
Naval said: "Code and media are the levers behind the new rich."
Indeed, over the past 10 years, Silicon Valley's upstarts and big companies (Internet/Software/AI) have essentially relied on "code leverage" to create wealth.
With the popularization of Cursor and Claude, everyone can Vibe Coding, and the ability to write programs is gradually becoming less scarce; some even predict that within the next 10 years, all junior programmers' jobs will be replaced by AI.
The truly scarce leverage in the next cycle is new media :
This refers to the scalable dissemination of narrative, judgment, and taste. Good leverage can generate compound interest while you sleep, and continue to influence others when you are not present, helping you build "trust + reputation + opportunity entry points".
Code is law.
New media is the law.
