Time to revisit an old question: Is content king in the new media world?
In a series of articles last week, The Wall Street Journal highlighted a phenomenon they called Do-it Yourself Media. (sub needed—and well worth the fee for anyone who is reading this blog).
After a decade of the Internet revolutionizing the way people communicate and spend their leisure time, a growing number of consumers are going further -- creating entertainment and other media "content" on their own. Cable networks, radio stations -- even advertisers -- are embracing such "user-generated content" and serving it up, hoping to appeal to new and younger audiences that are impatient with standard media fare.
Cable network Current TV is using viewer-supplied videos to fill large slots of its 24/7 hour schedule. All one needs to make a video Web log, or vlog, is a digital camera (many capture moving images) and a broadband connection. Videos produced by individuals as well as mom and pop production operations also are finding their way to on-demand services offered by cable companies. Mefeedia.com, lists 2,580 vloggers who have created a total of over 100,000 videos.In the heady days of Web 1.0, the debate over “is content king” raged in many venues. None other than The Bill addressed the very question in a column 10 years ago. He said right up front: “Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet.” In typical Gates fashion, he put his—Microsoft’s—money to support this strategy, losing a bundle (at least by normal media business standards) in content-rich Slate.com among other investments.
Was Gates wrong? Is format king? Are transactions king? Is process king? All the above? None of the above?
As much as most journalists and producers would like to believe that it is all about content, they would be right only some of the time—and maybe not even the majority of instances.
For example, that Web site that gets so many pixels of copy here and elsewhere, Google, is primarily about process: it’s real value added is the algorithm that helps users find the content of others. Yes, it’s the content we are seeking and get, but Google has not created any of it other than a display page.
Yahoo rose to prominence as an indexer of the content of others. Today it is among other services, a portal, pulling bits and pieces of the content provided by third parties. With its "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone” site it is dipping its pinky in the real content waters, but the experiment is still young and the results unknown (at least to us).
One of the most successful Web ventures has been eBay, which is all about transactions. The only content eBay owns is the code to its application system and the copy it writes for its front page.
Many of the most successful online ventures have been those where the users are also the content creators. The biggest media acquisition of the year I believe was News Corporation's purchase of MySpace.com. This is a site where the content is created by users, who then look for other users by the content they created. Consider the likes of Friendster, Facebook.com and Flickr. Think of the biggest information services and you will find that the content was user created: like the telephone, now cell phones, SMS: we create our own content.
Of course there are many venues where content is both critical and potentially profitable. Can you say HBO? And certainly the television networks in their heyday. Even today, the difference in a rating point – that is, more popular content than a competitor – is worth hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue in a year. King Kong pulled in a “disappointing” $50 million its opening weekend of Dec 16-18, but the second place movie that opened that weekend sold only $13 million in tickets.
Yes, content does matter. Sometimes critically. But so can process. So can format. For the big, traditional media companies having content is not sufficient nor is it even necessary to be successful in the digital environment.
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