What's a Superformat?

After dozens of expert calls about Internet 2025, our team is starting to identify a few threads that need pulling.

Today’s thread is a provocative take about the future of digital media. In many ways, this argument is a build on last week’s question about the durability of websites. If yesterday’s web was built out of pages, is tomorrow’s going to be built out of superformats? What is a superformat anyway?

Last week we published a post that is generating a little bit of buzz. The title is juicy: “Superformats will save media in the new internet.” This post comes from a former digital media executive who was present for the rise and fall of one of the biggest media brands online. It is an incomplete and developing point of view that is simultaneously ambiguous and ambitious. In other words, it’s perfect for discourse.

What is the problem?

The underlying business model for digital media was always wrong and the failures of well-known brands are a predictable consequence of this fact. Conventional digital media has always overvalued attention while arbitrarily designing itself too far away from the bottom of the funnel.

Chasing audience attention was always as empty as the packaging of the content. The chief byproduct of this business model is the search-optimized article page, loaded with blinking ad pop-ups and content that is, by definition, always a half-step behind the curve.

So what was the problem? In a nutshell it was the format of how content was designed, distributed, and monetized; it was the foundation of this whole system: article pages. The article page was always too big, too dumb, and too rigid for a fluid, real-time internet.

The new internet is going to put this model out of its misery.

Introducing Superformats

This is where the argument gets admittedly murky. We dutifully transcribed the vision; scrutinized it as we adapted it; and, to be honest, we are still trying to figure it out.

We’ll summarize it this way: a good story is the nucleus of the superformat concept. It is the inverse to the underlying article page problem; unlike the rigid container, the superformat is the story itself, and that can contain any form. If the article page is a glass, the story is the water in it. Or the whiskey. The next internet is going to break the glass forever.

A superformat is the un-article. It has no defined shape, size, or delivery mechanism. It revolves around three core units: the story itself, the user’s context, and the underlying brand. Its location in the conversion funnel is as variable as its form. Some instances of this experience can live at the point of purchase while others hover around awareness. Conventional media is not designed for this.

The superformat is what happens when context is productized into a business model.

What is the solution?

The solution is still a theory but the essence of it is a new business model for storytelling and audience engagement. If yesterday’s media businesses were built around popular voices, topic verticals, or geographic locations, the superformat media will be a federation of popular voices (with their own loyal audiences) that assemble around psychographics and values/like-mindedness.

The technical mechanism for superformat media is generative AI.

Let’s test this theory

This is a provocative vision that has already inspired strong opinions. We’ve heard people “violently agree” with this thinking on LinkedIn and others who have texted us saying “I’ve read this two times and I have no idea what it means.” We will dig into this further with some follow up conversations about formats. Let us know if you have a reaction to this concept. Maybe we can draw out the original thinker from behind the Overheard veil.

When you think about Internet 2025, what do you see as the greatest opportunity that you or your business is directly invested in? Tell us what you think.