When I first studied Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma in business school, one part never sat right with me: disruptive innovation means the new thing actually underperforms compared to the status quo. For years I couldn’t wrap my head around it: why would anyone switch to something worse?
It took watching entire innovation cycles play out between 2012-2025, seeing the digital video landscape evolve and mature first hand to see how powerful this really is. I saw it up close while working with talent and sports organisations making their first serious moves into YouTube, or when I was part of teams building owned and operated channels to global audiences serving hundreds of millions of viewers a month. What looked small and underpowered at the start often turned into the growth engine a few years later.
Each wave of disruption enters the market looking “worse” by old rules, but better on new dimensions audiences come to value. What looks good on TikTok, raw, fast, personal, would never pass editorial at the BBC. But despite this fact, TikTok built up global scale, cultural influence, and deeper reach with younger audiences than most broadcasters have found hard to match.
I’ve seen this dynamic while working with platforms directly as they rolled out new monetisation services, often in stealth before public launch. Videos dismissed by creatives were later embraced by audiences, unlocking millions in ad revenue through new distribution.
AI video today feels generic compared to creator content. Less emotional depth, nuance, but allows for infinite, automated output at near-zero cost. And at the high end startups like Promise in Hollywood are proving it can already match cinematic quality.
This raises another question: who decides what counts as quality? I’ve recently become a bit obsessed with an academic paper on the meaning of quality by Martin, Elg and Gremyr (2020). The central idea: quality is not universal. It changes depending on the context, who’s judging it, and what criteria are being used. Quality isn’t a fixed trait, it’s a negotiation between values, stakeholders, and expectations. And that negotiation looks different in every setting.
The most interesting paradox in 2025 is YouTube celebrating 200 billion Shorts daily views on one day, while pushes for content integrity the next. The influx of AI generated content is forcing platforms to face this contradiction.
The money shows the same pattern. TV broadcasting remains enormous, ~$335B ad revenue globally in 2024, but essentially flat. Social platforms are smaller in absolute terms but growing at ~13% CAGR. Meta 160 billion dollars in ad revenues in 2024, YouTube over 30 billion, and TikTok close to 20 billion. Compared to them AI content tools (generative AI in media/creation) are still tiny in 2024, but scaling at 30%+ CAGR. TV is still the giant, but the growth, and the future value is in social and AI.
We are living through one of the most dramatic shifts media has ever seen. If quality is no longer a fixed standard but a shifting, context-driven negotiation then global platforms are the ones shaping that context at scale. This is why underperformance becomes the entry point for new players and the place where future demand starts to concentrate.
What once looked like weakness is actually the foundation of the next wave of strength.
Tamas Csak is founder of Founder of Thunder consultancy.
REFERENCES:
Christensen, C. M. (1997) The innovator’s dilemma: when new technologies cause great firms to fail. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Martin, J., Elg, M. & Gremyr, I. (2020) The Many Meanings of Quality: Towards a Definition in Support of Sustainable Operations, Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, 36(3–4), pp. 185–198.
Business of Apps. (2025). Meta accounted for 60 percent of social app revenues in 2024. (Accessed: 8 September 2025).
DemandSage. (2025). TikTok Ad Revenue: How Much Does TikTok Make From Ads? (Accessed: 8 September 2025).
Grand View Research. (2024). Broadcasting & Cable TV Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report (Accessed: 8 September 2025).
Statista. (2024). TikTok’s global advertising revenue 2020–2026. Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1199981/tiktok-global-advertising-revenue/ (Accessed: 8 September 2025).
WARC. (2024). TikTok global ad revenue to reach $34.8bn in 2026. (Accessed: 8 September 2025).
Wikipedia. (2024). YouTube (Accessed: 8 September 2025).
