Social Media Aggregator
Despite extraordinary advances in APIs, automation, and distributed systems, individuals are still forced to manage their social media presence through fragmented, closed platforms, logging into multiple accounts to publish identical content while relinquishing control over their own data.
Working with APIs daily highlights just how unnecessary this fragmentation is. Publishing content across multiple social media platforms simultaneously would be significantly more efficient than logging into each platform individually. While API-based integration is readily available for business and institutional accounts, personal profiles remain heavily restricted.
A more powerful and structurally transformative solution would be the creation of social media aggregator platforms. However, restrictive API policies imposed by major social media companies have historically made this model infeasible. These constraints create artificial barriers that suppress competition, entrench vendor lock-in, and limit user control.
Channels-AI (or equivalent)
A social media aggregator platform that enables individuals to publish content to a central wall and synchronise that content across multiple social media platforms—without requiring repeated logins or platform-specific workflows.
The platform would resemble a conventional social network, but with a critical distinction: each post would display aggregated engagement data across all connected social channels. Metrics such as impressions, likes, shares, and comments would be consolidated into a single, unified view.
Content published on any connected platform could automatically synchronise back to the Channels-AI wall and propagate across other linked networks, subject to explicit user permissions. Users would retain full control over which platforms are connected, which engagement metrics are visible, and whether cross-platform interactions are displayed.
This approach allows users to log in once and manage content distribution across all connected accounts, significantly simplifying multi-platform publishing. At the same time, it increases visibility and content flow for smaller social networks, promoting competition and reducing reliance on a small number of dominant platforms. It would help accelerate the growth of other social media platforms by increasing both their user base and the volume of content published on them.
Current Market Status Quo
Social media platforms derive approximately 95% of their revenue from advertising. The commercial incentive is therefore clear: maximise user attention, engagement time, and behavioural data to increase advertising yield.
Despite the existence of thousands of social media platforms globally, market power is highly concentrated. A small number of incumbents capture over 80% of users, traffic, and engagement time, creating significant structural barriers to entry.
New platforms face a multi-stage challenge:
User acquisition at scale: Platforms must attract a critical mass of users while operating at a loss, often for many years.
Early-stage monetisation: Initial revenue is limited to brand awareness and top-of-funnel advertising, which delivers relatively low margins.
Advanced advertising infrastructure: Long-term profitability depends on sophisticated advertising systems capable of optimising for bottom-of-funnel conversions. These systems typically rely on proprietary tracking scripts deployed across large portions of the web to monitor behaviour, infer interests, and attribute conversions.
A more competitive and privacy-preserving alternative would be a single, industry-standard tracking framework built around anonymised, aggregated data and governed by unified privacy controls. Such a model would reduce invasive surveillance, lower barriers to entry, and prevent dominant platforms from using proprietary tracking infrastructure as a competitive moat.
A New Social Media Law.
If governments were to introduce compliance legislation requiring social media platforms to provide open, standardised, and interoperable APIs, granting users full control over how their content and personal data are shared, it would represent a fundamental shift in the balance of power across the digital ecosystem.
At present, this level of functionality is largely reserved for company and institutional accounts. Businesses already benefit from a mature ecosystem of tools capable of publishing content across multiple platforms via APIs, adapting posts to character limits, formatting rules, and platform constraints.
Individual users, however, are largely excluded. This disparity reinforces closed ecosystems, entrenches incumbent dominance, and limits interoperability and user choice.
Extending API access to personal accounts would dismantle these artificial barriers. It would unlock new platform models, stimulate innovation, reduce vendor lock-in, and enable individuals to exercise meaningful control over their digital presence.
User Adoption
Building a social media platform is technically straightforward; achieving user adoption is not.
Users are unlikely to join a new social network if their friends, public figures, or organisations are not already present. Network effects strongly favour incumbent platforms where audiences, conversations, and social graphs are already established.
Asking users to abandon existing platforms and rebuild their audience from scratch is therefore unrealistic and explains why most new social networks fail.
A social media aggregator platform directly solves this problem. It allows users to participate across all platforms simultaneously, gaining immediate utility without leaving existing networks. Adoption becomes complementary rather than competitive, enabling meaningful uptake from day one.
Social Media Aggregation:
Modern social platforms tightly couple content creation, distribution, identity, and monetisation into proprietary stacks. Aggregation separates these concerns.
The aggregator would function like a traditional social network, with walls, feeds, and profiles, while integrating with multiple external platforms via APIs. A single post could be synchronised across dozens or even hundreds of connected accounts.
Engagement data from each platform—likes, shares, comments—would be consolidated beneath the original post, with interactions clearly labelled by their source platform.
Users would remain in full control of platform connections, visibility settings, and synchronisation rules. Individuals seeking maximum reach could opt into full aggregation, while others could apply selective controls.
For example, a government representative could publish a single post that is instantly distributed across multiple official channels, while public feedback from all platforms is consolidated into a single, transparent interface.
This model simplifies publishing, amplifies reach, reduces fragmentation, and breaks down closed ecosystems—fostering healthier competition across the social media landscape.
Generating Ad Revenue
By removing the need to log into multiple platforms to publish identical content, a social media aggregator would reduce user dwell time on incumbent platforms, directly impacting their advertising exposure.
User attention would instead concentrate on the aggregator, allowing it to capture advertising value currently monopolised by dominant players. As engagement time increases on aggregator platforms, it would decrease proportionally elsewhere through fair competition.
The aggregator could operate a privacy-first advertising model built around a government-approved tracking framework. Targeting would rely on anonymised, randomly assigned identifiers that are periodically rotated and expire over short timeframes. These identifiers would be invisible to third parties, including the platform itself, preventing long-term profiling or user-level tracking.
Standardising this approach would make advertising markets more accessible to new entrants while preserving effective targeting without invasive surveillance.
First Mover Advantage
No platform of this nature currently exists because dominant social media companies have deliberately restricted API access to enforce vendor lock-in and preserve control over data and distribution.
Compliance legislation mandating open APIs and user-controlled data access would remove the primary structural barrier preventing aggregation. This would enable the emergence of new platform models and restore openness to the web.
While incumbents may view aggregators as parasitic, they do not own user data, nor should they control how users distribute their content. Reassigning control to individuals shifts power away from monopolistic platforms toward user-centric innovation.
Government Ownership or Investment
A social media aggregator would pose a material threat to entrenched industry players, who are likely to resist its emergence through legal, regulatory, and political pressure. As the model proves viable, additional aggregators would inevitably follow.
To ensure long-term viability, government ownership or strategic public investment may be required. Public backing would provide financial stability, institutional legitimacy, and resilience during early, non-profitable stages.
Early involvement would also secure a first-mover advantage, positioning the platform as a flagship European digital infrastructure project—strengthening digital sovereignty, reducing dependence on non-European platforms, and fostering a more competitive and resilient global social media ecosystem.
Summary:
The current social media landscape is not the result of technical necessity, but rather the product of deliberate architectural and regulatory choices that concentrate power, restrict interoperability, and limit user control.
A social media aggregator platform such as Channels-AI demonstrates that an alternative model is both technically feasible and economically credible. By enabling users to publish once, distribute everywhere, and view unified engagement data, aggregation removes the core barriers to adoption without requiring users to abandon existing networks.
When combined with open APIs and privacy-first advertising standards, this model offers a path toward a more competitive, transparent, and user-centric digital ecosystem.
Meaningful change, however, requires regulatory intervention. Mandating interoperable APIs and user-controlled data sharing is the critical enabler. With appropriate public support, social media aggregation can rebalance the ecosystem, restore user autonomy, strengthen European digital sovereignty, and lay the foundation for a more open and resilient web.
