This post was inspired by some of my prior musings, and a recent NY Times Op-Ed piece, Bits, Bands
and Books, by Paul Krugman.
I am also reacting to some false platitudes in blog posts that I referenced yesterday – such as "new media is pretty much the same as old media, just a different form factor"… and "content is king."
In the Times piece, Krugman evoked Esther Dyson’s eerily prescient prediction about the devaluation of content:
In 1994…. Esther Dyson…made a striking prediction: that the ease with which digital content can be copied and disseminated would eventually force businesses to sell the results of creative activity cheaply, or even give it away. Whatever the product — software, books, music, movies — the cost of creation would have to be recouped indirectly: businesses would have to “distribute intellectual property free in order to sell services and relationships.”
For example, she described how some software companies gave their product away but earned fees for installation and servicing. But her most compelling illustration of how you can make money by giving stuff away was that of the Grateful Dead, who encouraged people to tape live performances because “enough of the people who copy and listen to Grateful Dead tapes end up paying for hats, T-shirts and performance tickets. In the new era, the ancillary market is the market.”
and concluded:
…Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we’ll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.
It won’t all happen immediately. But in the long run, we are all the Grateful Dead.
As I said yesterday, Content is no longer King, it is a commodity. Not that it is unimportant, but its value is diminishing and it is quickly becoming a loss leader.
The proliferation of blogs is making it harder for new bloggers to break through. The burgeoning growth of media choices of all kinds is dividing our attention, challenging content creators (and advertisers and PR people) who want to reach large audiences. For all the Long Tail theories, the current system rewards (read: pays) mad traffic.
So, content is no longer king
Connections (as in social networking) and filters (as in search engines and social news sites) are kings. So are hard to reproduce things – high touch skills, expertise, comportment and business processes. Recall my post Business Process Innovation and PR.
Said another way, Meta is the new media. (see my post Heavy Meta).
Meta is information about information. It is content about content, comments, news about news, social news, search engine results.
Media is increasingly social, expurgated, and user generated. We are the media (of course, I am not the first to say this, see the Dan Gillmor link and book of the same name).
We are the Kings.
