January 11, 2004
the future of big media v4056.02
A lovely little post by Jason Kottke about a guy who predicted blogging (or “metajournailsm”, as he called it) over six years ago.
This is what caught my eye: “The beautiful thing about this new meta-journalism is that it doesn’t require a massive distribution channel or extravagant licensing fees. A single user with a Web connection and only the most rudimentary HTML skills can upload his or her overview of the day’s news. If the editorial sensibility is sharp enough, this kind of metajournalism could easily find enough of an audience to be commercially sustainable, given the limited overhead required to run such a service.”
Exactly. With the software basically free and the internet already in existance, why do we need Big Media’s sorry ass in the equation?
Purists will say “we don’t”. I disagree. There’s too much money to be made.
Whether it’s old media (TV, newspaper) or new media (internet) Big Media’s main source of revenue will continue to be the same one it’s always been– advertising. The New York Times earns its daily crust by supplying audiences to advertisers. The audience shows up every morning in exchange for being given “all the news that’s fit to print” plus some thoughtful commentary. Other media organs do something similar, offering their audiences pictures of naked girls with nice breasts, or the latest info on haute couture or the latest music coming out of the record companies.
Supplying audience in return for cash, using whatever means necessary. News, tits, fashion, music… whatever works.
A media company of the future might be quite different– instead of a huge editorial titan providing its own content with salaried content creators (a biz model that’s already seeming pretty tired), I can see something more like a brokerage house which arbitrates relationships between hundreds of big money advertisers and millions of small free content websites. Yes, Google Adsense has something like that already, although presently it’s neither pretty, fun or interesting. I’m seeing something more akin to Blogads , only far bigger and far more sophisticated.
If, as Clay Shirky has said before, the quality of free content will continue to rise, then the media company will have no need to hire content providers, because with few exceptions the free stuff will be as good as any paid stuff.
In Big Media, the relationship between advertisers and audience is the constant. The fulchrum in the middle– the content– nobody cares if it’s paid for or free. They just care if it works for them. The only people who disagree are the paid content providers and well, yeah, they would, wouldn’t they?
