The Fourth Estate (Moved): Remaking Media

If its not Blogs, its Bittorrent. Media’s death has been proclaimed so many times, it might be time to question the diagnosis. Without doubt the game is changing. Audiences, content creators and advertisers are being thrown into bed together. A situation – which as you might expect – is not to everyone’s comfort. And that really is the point. Mediums don’t die. The economics just change.

Making money from media boils down to two big ideas. Selling access to content or selling access to audiences. If you were lucky, like those in the US subscription television game or AOL in the mid nineties - you got to do both. On the other hand if you were like the early internet radio pioneers or AOL in recent years and you had trouble doing either very well – you generally didn’t do it for much longer.

Now, of course, there is a bigger problem. Media is being unmade. Content that was once fixed on distinct platforms – TV, radio, print, cinemas – is becoming unbundled and accessible across the web. Some of this is due to the usual suspects – pirates and teenagers ripping copyright material and, like misdirected Animal Liberationists - ‘setting it free’. Increasingly, however, consumers are also accessing legal music, movie and TV show programming made available by the original content owners through Apple iTunes or their own websites.

More money for content creators, you say. But before you get too excited and multiply two million downloads by $1.99 – consider this. For the longest time, blockbuster entertainment has been funded by aggregators who have used exclusive content as a lure to attract mass audiences. And not just in one market. The old way that territory licensing and syndication agreements worked, it didn’t make much difference if you were the company creating the content or just aggregating it. You could bite the cherry more than once. In other words – Australian TV audiences would watch a hit US TV series sold to their local network during primetime, buy a copy of Madonna’s new CD that had been printed and distributed by a local publisher, and read a column syndicated from the New York Times reproduced in their domestic newspaper. No longer.

Once content is liberated from its host medium, and you can get a copy of the latest and greatest piece of entertainment on any device at any time – it follows that the media aggregation and financing model must also change. Sure – its cool for Disney to pump out their material onto iPods and Warner to sell movies via Bittorrent - but longer term big media is going to need to figure out how create new platforms to aggregate audiences. Once exclusive content goes out the window as a strategy – you need to a new card trick to keep advertiser dollars rolling in.

The BBC has been embroiled in controversy lately about their announced plans for creating a Web2.0 style network of community and content. In truth – they were right on the money. The secret sauce is not in hosting content, but hosting audiences. Its easy to forget that consuming media can be highly social – sitting on a couch with friends watching a trashy Aaron Spelling soap or teenagers messaging each other during American Idol – is part of the shared experience of entertainment. Social networks, tags, and comments are not only consumer created content, they are also a form of collective consumption. Part of building the next generation media platform is providing somewhere for audiences to connect and participate.

The other important feature of the media platforms of the future is being a filter against information overload. In other words – collating and organising material irrespective if was created by your own people, your audience or even your competitors. The idea of editorial selection is a familiar concept to big media. Editorialising other people’s material is not. But particularly in the area of news reporting – the most vital and relevant information will increasingly not even be written by journalists. When war breaks out, chances are that it will be a local eyewitness with a video phone and not a CNN camera crew that has the scoop. But it may be a CNN that aggregates, filters, edits and presents all the diverse footage as it comes in – so that users can experience more signal less noise.

Actually – the non competitive content aggregation model has been around for a while. Adult operators have understood this logic since the beginning. Ultimately, it is more economical to send a visitor who doesn’t want to sign up for your paid content service to a competitor site, and take a percentage of the revenue than lose the sale at all. With more sophisticated visitor tracking software - you can also see how eventually a pool of advertising dollars might be spread between a network of professional and consumer generated content providers.

The rise of consumer generated content is not bad news for existing creative producers. High budget material will continue to exist, even if the financing models change. Further - the web makes for a much more cost effective and fluid distribution system, that lessens the influence of traditional gatekeepers who used decide on behalf of audiences what they like to watch. But of course, the consequence of a more level playing field – is that the quality of content will become the final arbiter of popularity. Umair Haque says it nicely. Forget blockbusters, you need the snowball effect.

After all - the most valuable networks are neither broadcast towers nor fibre optic pipes – but viewers themselves. Whilst commercialising the new audience requires thinking more about platforms than products, we are also entering a much more uncertain world where viewer loyalty is hard to sustain. Today’s MySpace, might be tomorrow’s Friendster. And that really is the bottom line.

If media is to be remade, it will be by the masses and not the moguls.

Comments

Media is becoming more unique, more personalised and more relevant. The rebirth of the community portal and its rise to prominence in the eyes of more traditional media companies support this.

However, the focus has changed. Gone is remediation and simple content ‘repurposing’ - we are now looking at the birth of a new phase in the evolution of media…me-media. This consumer driven, highly focused form of media consumption – where the media ecology (time, place, channel, etc.) is entirely at the user’s discretion – is going to cause something of a headache for traditional media companies as they struggle to understand the variable and turn a buck from them. They can’t go running to traditional ad agencies either as they are struggling to come to terms with interactivity – let alone media ecology variations.

Now is the time for the digital agencies to come to the fore. Their experience in handling the shifting ecologies of the online space (PC, PDA, Mobile, Interactive TV, etc.) and their inherent understanding of how to get people to ‘lean forward’ into modern media give them the edge.

Long live the digital agency.

Posted by: Brad Argent | May 29, 2006 at 04:04 PM