You know, for those who want to stick with the old media, the old top-down content distribution models, and cultural gatekeeping duties, the scary thing is: that’s not your decision to make.
Publisher, web producer and friend of the show, Rich Holman, has written a very interesting post about the implications of digital media for the business models of content industries. He reminds us that it’s not a straight fight between new media and old media. Because new media doesn’t care. It will just continue doing what it does well:
- Disaggregation – content reduced to the micro-format, individual components – photo, song, article, chapter, web link, tv clips.
- Aggregation – platform(s) to view micro-formats, these are the winners – google, yahoo, facebook, flickr all using human/computer filtering to serve relevant content back to user
- Content creation – new tools enable anyone to create content at ‘professional’ levels, Adobe, Apple, Internet applications, MS Word.
- Content distribution – the internet, social-networking, algorithms, RELEVANT advertising
- Business structures – new technologies and applications enable relatively small groups of people to run large operations (Craigslist?). Income doesn’t need to be that big to support such groups (even reenumerate them handsomely)
So to sum up, less people, money and effort is required to sustain a content business that is several (hundred) times the size and breadth of anything seen in human history. All this spells out a massive change in the way companies have operated for over 200 years, top down, pre-packaged, advertised, distributed, and sold to the consumer.
As he says – 2008 is going to be a big year…
