Grading 2025: what we got right and wrong
We held ourselves accountable this week. The grades matter less than the patterns they expose across YouTube, Netflix, creators, CTV and AI.
Marion: “Time to grade our own homework. I’ll be ethical and honest. What about you?”
Evan: “I’ll be neither of these things.”
This week on The Media Odyssey Podcast,
and I revisit our 2025 predictions and hold ourselves accountable. 4 predictions on my side (for the rest of my predictions, head over here), 5 on Evan’s, all put under the microscope. Some are slam dunks, some are wildly wrong. Some say more about where the industry is heading than anything we published this year.This episode is less about looking back and more about pattern recognition: what actually shifted in 2025, what didn’t and where the cracks in the system are widening.
A few teasers without giving the game away:
📺 One of us claims an A+ and calls it “the year YouTube finally got recognised as proper TV.”
🎛 One prediction about Netflix turned into a very real product conversation that no one saw coming.
🎥 Another prediction lands in the creator economy and sparks a debate about who is about to industrialise whom.
🖥 A prediction about CTV fragmentation receives the lowest grade of the day.
🤖 And the AI discussion? Let’s just say the words “boring success” and “crazy bubble” appear in the same sentence.
We also end on something more personal. This was a brutal year for jobs in media. We talk honestly about what helps, what doesn’t and how we each deal with the emotional free fall when the market contracts.
If you want to know who graded what, and why, you’ll have to listen. Full episode is live now: APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE.
If you have time for one podcast only, let’s make it The Media Odyssey Podcast, produced with love from Amsterdam & NY.
That’s it for today but before you go, share your own predictions (right or wrong) in the comment below or with a quick reply to this email.
