The Architecture of a New Media Business and How INFIA Corp Build It: We Treat It as a Consumer Product Business

A short history of how media got here.

Every twenty years or so, the media industry redefines itself around whatever surface is winning audience attention. Print sat at the centre of the conversation for most of the twentieth century, then radio, then broadcast television, then cable. The internet rearranged the question entirely in the late 1990s. Social platforms rearranged it again in the 2010s. And now, well into the second half of the 2020s, the conversation is being rearranged a third time by two forces moving in opposite directions.

On one side, the way audiences discover media is changing. Reuters Institute's 2026 Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions report, drawing on a survey of 280 senior media leaders across 51 countries, found that publishers globally now expect a 43% decline in search referral traffic over the next three years. Chartbeat data on 2,500 news sites already shows organic Google search traffic down 33% year-on-year. The traditional pipeline that fed audiences to media properties is closing.

On the other side, the rise of personality-led, IP-led, community-led content. The Interactive Advertising Bureau's 2025 Creator Economy report places US creator advertising at USD 37 billion in 2025, projected to reach USD 44 billion in 2026, growing roughly four times faster than the broader media industry. Nearly half of brand buyers now describe creator content as a 'must-buy' channel. Reuters Institute reports that 76% of publishers are actively encouraging their staff to behave more like creators, and 50% are partnering with creators directly to distribute content.

Read together, these two data points describe the same underlying shift. Audiences have stopped going to media. Media now goes to audiences. And the unit of value has stopped being the publication and started being the relationship.

There is a version of this article that opens with definitions. The dictionary one. The academic one. The regulatory one. We have read all of them, and none of them describe what we actually do for a living.

At INFIA, we build, manage, invest in, and revive intellectual property. Some of that IP lives inside what most people would call media: Dagelan, Infipop, Volix, JSD, VBIZ, IP Club, Melodi Alam, Nolzza, Crush, lesnois. Some of it lives as character IP. Some of it lives as placemaking. The categories matter less than the underlying truth: every one of these is a relationship with an audience, expressed across whatever surface that audience happens to be on this year.

So when someone asks us what new media is, our honest answer is that the question itself is from the wrong decade. The more useful question is: what kind of business is media in 2026, and how do you run it well? This article is our answer.

So what does "new media" actually mean?

Academic definitions tend to describe new media as content that is digital, interactive, networked, and on-demand, in contrast to the linear and one-way broadcast model of traditional media. A 2025 review of new media literature in the journal Preprints makes the point that traditional frameworks built for broadcast and print are no longer adequate to describe a media environment that now includes user-generated content, algorithmic distribution, and creator-led publishing.

There is also a useful counter-narrative worth surfacing here. A 2025 study published in Journalism (Sage Journals) by Vojtěch Dvořák, based on three years of participatory ethnographic research, examines the practice of what he calls homeless journalism: digital-native, platform-based publishing that operates outside institutional gatekeeping. Dvořák's finding is that this kind of work is not a deficit version of journalism. It is a different methodology, one defined by community participation, format fluidity, and proximity to audiences that traditional institutions struggle to reach. The absence of a fixed institutional 'home' is, in his framing, a feature of the practice rather than a flaw.

At INFIA, our working definition borrows from all of this but lands somewhere more concrete:

New media is any creative practice that earns the right to live inside an audience's daily life, across whichever surface they happen to be on, and translates that earned attention into a durable brand they choose to keep around.

Two phrases in that definition do most of the work. Earns the right describes the input: trust, taste, consistency, cultural fluency. Durable brand describes the output: something the audience would notice if it disappeared, and something that can travel beyond any single platform. Everything between those two ends is the gameplay, and the gameplay is what this article is really about.

Media is a consumer product business. It always was.

For most of the twentieth century, media companies could afford to behave like public utilities. Distribution was scarce. Whoever owned the printing press, the broadcast license, or the cable infrastructure captured the audience by default, and whoever captured the audience captured the advertisers. The product was attention, the moat was infrastructure, and the business was margin on inventory.

That model worked when audiences had nowhere else to go. They have everywhere else to go now. Platforms collapsed the distribution moat. Cheap tools collapsed the production moat. What is left, when distribution is free and production is cheap, is the only thing that was ever durable in the first place: a recognisable creative identity that an audience chose to care about.

This is not a new observation outside Indonesia. At a Morgan Stanley media conference last year, Disney CEO Bob Iger reportedly used the word brand more than 25 times in a single appearance. Bryan Goldberg, CEO of Bustle Digital Group, has argued publicly that "the digital media rollup has proven successful only when assets are thoughtfully combined with an eye toward consumers." A 2024 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that IP-led marketing carries structural advantages of sustainability, extensibility, and cross-platform persistence that brand-independent media marketing cannot replicate.

The point all of this converges on is simple. The most successful media businesses of the next decade will not behave like publishers. They will behave like consumer brand companies whose front door happens to be a feed. The question is what comes after the feed.

The funnel: from media to IP to real-world product.

This is the part of the conversation that gets skipped most often. Most analysis of new media stops at the feed. Audience grew, engagement rose, ad revenue followed. That is the front of the funnel. The back of the funnel is where the actual business gets built.

At INFIA, every brand in the media portfolio is operated as the opening stage of a longer journey. The audience meets a creative identity on a digital surface. If the creative identity is strong and the relationship is real, the brand earns the right to extend. First into experiences the audience would show up for in person. Then into physical spaces and consumer products the audience would buy, return to, and bring their friends to. The media is the front door. The IP is the architecture. The product is the destination.

The media is the front door. The IP is the architecture. The product is the destination.

Stage 1. Media base: where the relationship begins.

This is the surface most people associate with the brand name. Dagelan lives here as a comedy and pop-culture media brand with one of the most recognisable creative voices in Indonesian internet culture. So does Infipop as a cultural lens on Indonesian Gen Z. So does Volix as a sports culture brand, JSD as a lifestyle voice, and the rest of the INFIA media portfolio. The work at this stage is craft, voice, consistency, and audience trust. The output is recognition. When an audience member sees a Dagelan post in a chaotic feed and recognises it as Dagelan within two seconds, the asset has been built.

Stage 2. IP extension: where the relationship becomes a property.

Once a media brand has earned recognition, the creative identity becomes IP. Not in the legal sense alone, but in the practical sense: a recognisable format, voice, or universe that audiences will follow into new contexts. This is where the brand stops being content and starts becoming property.

For Dagelan, this is the stage where the comedy brand extended into live experiences. Dagelan Bertawasya is the live-event expression of the same humour audiences had been watching in their feed, performed in front of the community that built the brand in the first place. The audience that recognised Dagelan on a screen now recognised it in a room, and the relationship moved up a level. The IP was no longer a posting cadence. It was a live cultural moment people travelled to be part of.

Stage 3. Placemaking and product: where the relationship has a physical address.

The last stage is where the IP earns a permanent place in the audience's life. A physical space. A consumer product. Something the audience can return to, gather around, and make part of their own routine.

For Dagelan, this stage shows up as Tikum Dagelan and Warkop Junto Dagelan. Both are real-world placemaking expressions of the same brand audiences first met online. A place to meet, eat, hang out, and continue the relationship offline. The audience that watched Dagelan in their feed, then attended Dagelan Bertawasya, can now bring their friends to a physical Dagelan space and let the brand live somewhere beyond the scroll.

Stated this way, the funnel looks linear, but in practice each stage strengthens the others. The placemaking gives the media surface fresh stories to tell. The IP earns trust that lowers the cost of every future extension. The media brings new audiences into the top of the funnel who eventually discover the physical destinations below it. The whole thing compounds, which is why we treat the model itself as the asset, not any individual layer of it.

The four principles that hold the funnel together.

If the funnel is the architecture, these are the operating rules we use to keep it standing.

• Build for 360-degree brand recognition, not single-channel performance. Every brand in our portfolio is designed from day one to live in more than one place. A feed brand that cannot transfer into a venue, a product, or a community is a feed. A brand that can transfer is a brand.
• Run on IP economics, not page-view economics. Page views depreciate the moment a post is published. IP appreciates the moment an audience recognises it. The financial engine of the business is the recognition that compounds across formats and years, not the impression that resets to zero tomorrow.
• Stay platform-agnostic by design. A brand that depends on a single platform is one algorithm update away from extinction. The brand lives in the audience's memory, not in any platform's recommendation engine.
• Treat creative practice as the moat. When anyone can produce and publish content at almost no cost, generic content stops being worth anything. What remains valuable is distinctive creative identity. We invest in the people who carry it and the editorial discipline that protects it across every format the brand appears in.

So what is new media, in the end?

New media is not the end of media. It is media finding its real shape. For most of the last century, the industry mistook distribution scarcity for business strength, and confused captive audiences for loyal ones. AI answer engines and the creator economy have together stripped that illusion away. What is being lost is the part of the business that was never really about creativity in the first place: the chokehold on attention, the rent on infrastructure, the assumption that audiences would show up because they had nowhere else to go. What is being clarified is the part that always mattered. A media brand earns its place by being recognisable enough, useful enough, and human enough that an audience would follow it across formats, across platforms, into live rooms, and into physical places. That is the only sustainable business there ever was. The next decade will reward the operators who treat it that way and quietly retire the ones who do not.

The conversation about what new media is, what to call it, and how to define its boundaries will continue for a long time, and that is healthy. The terminology will move. The platforms will move. The rules will move. What we offer is a working model and a portfolio that has been built using it. Media in 2026 is a consumer product business. The asset is the audience relationship earned through recognisable IP. The destination is real, physical, and ownable. The funnel from a feed to a face-to-face moment to a place worth returning to is the entire point.

This is how INFIA plays new media. We are happy to keep showing the work.