The connection economy is a barbell, and Muse is the hinge

Brian Morrissey argues that what follows the attention economy is what former Industry Dive CEO Sean Griffey called the connection economy, and it is shaped like a barbell. On the human end sits the craft business of connecting people through communities and events; on the other sits an API-driven, AI-mediated economy where a new set of aggregators act as "agentic concierges" to their humans. The trigger is Meta's Muse, which Morrissey says is growing faster than ChatGPT and is "destined to be the first consumer AI product with 1 billion users." He has been running it for days, feeding it his newsletters and links, and concludes publishers cannot follow Amazon's lead and block it. "It's a pipe dream for publishers to follow the lead of Amazon and block Muse," he writes, because consumer expectations will shift like Amazon made next-day delivery a default. The Guardian CEO Anna Bateson put it bluntly on stage at TRB's Audience Summit: "Our website may become something that is more of a service to agentic audiences rather than where you have the majority of human traffic." Skift CEO Rafat Ali says his company will reposition as a "decision intelligence company for the travel industry," moving from "I read Skift to I use Skift."

The crux

Publishers cannot wall off AI agents the way Amazon is walling off its store, so the strategic choice is whether to become a trusted source an agent draws on for briefings and decisions, or a disposable pageview supplier it skims past.

Sell-side read

The near-term risk is not traffic loss but subscription churn: one of Muse's early use cases is cancelling subscriptions people do not use, which punishes publishers reliant on "sleepers" who quietly pay without engaging. You need to be earning a renewal every month, not sitting on a stored card.

Watch

Whether publishers start shipping "entitlements" for their content inside other products, as Bateson described, and whether any major publisher publicly negotiates agent access terms before year end.