Stop Crying Over Your Worthless Content

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately regarding content development, content aggregation, and what content is worth.  I’ve got a million ideas washing around in my head, so I’ll try and make sense of a few here, try and stick with me.

When I talk about content, I’m not only referring to news or written text.  Content includes music, television, film, and even video games as well.  The amount of content that is being produced today as compared to only 15 years ago is tremendous.

A monumental shift started when the general public was given tools through technological development to become their own publishing source.  The internet itself is obviously the backbone on which all other tools were built, such as blogging platforms, content aggregators, and messaging services like Twitter.   It seems today that at least 1/10 of humanity has access to tools which allow them to become their own content generators and publish to the whole world.  Just think about that, 600,000,000 people having access to disseminate their ideas to the whole world.  I think that number is also very conservative.   Only a hand full of publishers had global reach before this shift, even national reach was fairly limited.

Point number one tonight is pretty elementary, but is the building block for the rest of my argument.  The amount of content being produced today which is easily consumed by a global audience is massive compared to what was available 15 years ago.  The point here is that the supply of excellent content has massively increased.  Niche content has exploded, publishers no longer have to play to a wide audience, they can target specific groups who are willing to pay for in depth knowledge of a certain field.

And because of the ability for everyone to be a content publisher, ordinary content has gone from being worth something, to worth NOTHING!  If you are a news source that is regurgitating the AP news wires in the morning, you are dead, because no one is willing to pay for that information.  In the past, they had no other choice but to pay for it due to the fact that local or regional newspapers or media outlets had a monopoly on the means of information transmission.  Now, an information consumer can get that info from anywhere across the web, for free.  So casualty number one of the information age has been ordinary content, it’s worth zero now.

And here’s the difference, when the Wall Street Journal puts up a pay wall on their site, they can do it because their content is worth something.  You can’t get the kind of investigative journalism they provide on financial markets in many other places.  They still posses a scarce information asset.  Does the New York Times still posses the same asset, not really.  They have done a better job at transforming their news source into an information medium that focuses on more niche stuff, but as we’ve seen with their bottom line, their means of transmission still doesn’t fit the bill for what they are getting paid for the content.  The numbers for them just don’t add up.

How about music, well we saw what happened when the means of transmission shifted from the record store to iTunes, prices plummeted.  At the record store you pay $30, in the iTunes store you pay $10, and 1 per song.  Video games?  Same thing.  TV and film are walking down the same road right now.

Right now we are at the stage where every large content producer is screaming about the fact that his business model doesn’t work given how little his content is worth now.  You want to know what I have to say, suck it up and innovate.  If you want to know whether your content is worth anything, put it out there for sale, you’ll get a pretty good idea by seeing how many people are willing to pay.  Any local news paper is largely worthless given that they don’t provide information that people can’t get elsewhere for free.  The winners are niche content providers, people who provide specific expertise.  In a world where the individual can cobble together different sources of information through RSS readers and aggregators, there is no need for a newspaper or magazine to put together the various writers for them.  So the newspaper model only serves one purpose, to pay journalists to do investigative journalism.

Let’s just take for example Tom Friedman, editorial writer for the New York Times.  I’ve felt for a long time that he is the perfect example of why a newspaper no longer has to exist.  Tom could easily go out on his own, start his own blog, and monetize it by selling a subscription.  He has the readership and people would follow him.  In fact, he would probably make more money on his own than with the New York Times.  Tom provides an in depth source of information and view point that people are willing to pay for, unlike much of the other content the paper puts out.

So here is what I propose.  The news business especially must move to a system where individuals are directly responsible for producing great journalism, and publishing it one their own platform, call it a blog if you must.  The newspaper, if we are still calling it that, would fund the journalism, and own a portion of the revenues generated by the blog, each situation would be different in terms of the financial arrangement.  But in essence, what we need is venture capital for bloggers, where the blogger gives up some equity in his publishing product for the means to do go journalism.

This brings us to the idea of the content aggregator, today’s version of the newspaper.  Businesses that pay to produce content but don’t charge for it hate content aggregators because they do none of the work to produce the content but reap the benefit of advertising through page views.  Why does the content aggregation model work so well, because you are getting the best of the best from every source of info, instead of getting one or two good things from the New York Times.  Let’s even take another step forward to smart aggregators which also curate, like Abnormal Returns in the finance space.  Not only are you getting the best content out there, but instead of having to cull through a massive amount of it, the best of the best is put in front of your face for your easy consumption.

So what does this all mean.  Well first it means that if your content isn’t specific, insightful, awesome, original, a scarce, it’s worth nothing.  In this case, either do it for fun or pack up your bags and go home.  If your content does posses these traits, you should love the intelligent aggregators, they drive traffic to you, where you can charge for it with advertising or a pay wall.

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