Karl Stefanovic and Nine parted ways last week, immediately, rather than at the end of the year as originally agreed. The trigger was a podcast interview with Tommy Robinson, the British agitator and English Defence League founder whose legal name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.

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Stefanovic declared himself "free" and "truly independent", thanked his existing sponsors and openly called for new ones. Read one way, that is a man who has looked at the American media landscape and concluded there is a fortune to be made going it alone. On part of the diagnosis, he is right. On the part that matters, the numbers are brutal.

There is a persistent belief in this country that you can import the American grievance-media business model, the outrage economy, the audience-of-the-aggrieved, the monetised culture war and make it pay here the way it pays there. It is worth walking through why that belief is mostly wrong because it comes down to one thing: scale.

Start with the part, if Stefanovic has these plans, he gets right. Podcasting and alternate media are a genuine growth market, and not a marginal one. Roughly 9.6 million Australians now listen to a podcast every month, about 47 per cent of the population, up sharply in just a few years. Some of the fastest growth is among blue-collar workers and young men. If you were betting on where audiences are heading, you would bet here. That instinct is sound and should also act as ominous warning to legacy media platforms and any industry that relies on it for future revenue.

The problem is not the medium. It is who the audience is, and how many of them there actually are.

Take the figure or personality everyone reaches for: Joe Rogan. Yes, Rogan has built something enormously lucrative, more than 14 million followers on Spotify alone, a licensing deal reported to be in the hundreds of millions, top episodes that have drawn tens of millions of views apiece. But Rogan is a bad template for the aspiring merchants aiming to tap into grievance politics, because Rogan's product is not grievance politics.

His platform is pitched at several audiences at once. Yes, the........

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