The Great Fragmentation: Navigating the Splintered Web
The social web has grown up, and blown apart.
Audiences are tired of the same old feeds and are drifting into games, group chats, forums and AI chats, each with its own vibe, rules and in-jokes. For brand and social strategists, one message across many channels is now a fast way to be ignored.
We’re living through the Great Fragmentation.
This new Pulsar study shows how audiences, platforms and behaviors are pulling in new directions, so you can stop shouting into the void and start building momentum around the stories that matter (enlarge to read fullscreen).
What you’ll learn:
- How the social universe is really shifting: where time and attention are moving across social and social “adjacent” spaces
- The media-fication of social: why TikTok, Instagram and YouTube now behave more like TV.
- Why audiences are moving to identity and community-based socials: how the migration to niche, trust-rich spaces – particularly amongst Gen-Z audiences – is impacting everything media reach to moments of inspiration.
- What the Great Fragmentation means for marketers: why cultural targeting beats demographics, why narratives (not channels) should be your unit of strategy, and how to build multi-format creative that can actually travel across a splintered web.
If you’re planning your 2026 social & channel strategy, this one is for you.
This article was created using data from TRAC
