Damaged Goods

Although this article is now two weeks old, I still think you should throw a glance at it if you haven’t already. The Wall Street Journal explores web stardom (bloggers, YouTube comedians, Flickr photographers, podcasters) and comes up with a list of “cewebrities” who earn their living by producing content. If you scan the list, one of the most consistent (and, in my opinion, unsurprising) characteristics of these individuals is that they profit from producing content, but they do not sell content. This is a bitter pill to swallow for a large part of the traditional media industry. They have tried in vain to somehow condition internet users to pay for professionally produced content for about a decade now - as far as I can see there are still no major success stories. And now they are being outflanked by non-professionals (and by that I mean non-incorporates) who aren’t even making an effort to sell the content they produce, but prefer to market themselves (and their connectedness) instead, mostly through advertising. Though “friends” on MySpace are hardly the equavalent of real-world friends, having direct communicative access to roughly a million people should still translate into some very real marketing potential. I believe what further accellerates this development is that it is so much easier for individuals to build an image-based business than it is for corporations to sell content. Consumers see through the information-as-a-packaged-product analogy and are literally not buying it. And while the lack of a secure and ubiquitous micropayment system and the fact that many pay-for-content schemes are still too focused on facilitating lock-in are both part of the problem, the problem itself is far greater. The cost of media-transmitted entertainment and information for the consumer has always been closely tied to the cost of its distribution. Those costs have been reduced almost to zero (at least while everyone pays for their own internet access) and the consumer knows it. The only way to persuade him that your content is still worth paying for is to convince that it is better than what he can get elsewhere. And because better increasingly means 1) less conventional, 2) less streamlined and 3) more personal and immediate, mass-produced content is losing out. Scarceity - your content being available only to a select few - is no longer a selling point. Proliferation drives relevance: if what you produce is not being read, watched or heard by enough people it will not be relevant, nevermind selling anything. Imagine a hypothetical scenario in which people actually stopped to pirate music and movies. Would they simply start to buy all that content or would they turn to other content producers? My money is on the latter, not because blogs are “better” than the New York Times, or YouTube “better” than Hollywood movies (in fact, the comparison seems surreal, at least at this point), but because you simply don’t buy what you don’t know. The strong belief of traditional media companies that their product is simply “better” reveals a) that they lack in-depth knowledge of the options available and b) they erroneously assume that consumers know this, believe it, or care.