An Ode to Content
It seems every day I hear or read at least one thing about the death of the content business.
Now to be clear — there’s very good reason for this. Traditional publishing models are broken as the web continues to democratize the creation and distribution of content. Print businesses are burdened by excess cost. Expensive marketing channels give way to buzz building through influencers and the social web. Historical gatekeepers are increasingly rendered irrelevant as distribution moves towards on-demand electronic delivery.
And don’t get me wrong, these are all great things for the consumer. The web has given us infinite frictionless ways to satisfy our content needs, from aggregators to blogs to status updates to tweets.
But could you imagine a world without the WSJ or NYTimes? Philip Roth or Junot Diaz? Radiohead or Jay-Z?
The best stuff will always be the best stuff, and we consumers will always want it…no matter how it gets delivered to us. A recent study by The National Endowment for the Arts shows fiction reading for adults actually increasing 3.5% from 2002 to 2008, reminding us of just that.
But that means we have to pay for it. Creators should get paid for their hard work, like everyone else does. And they will. Just many fewer of them, through new distribution channels and with different economics.
The democratization of publishing and distribution is the equivalent of deleveraging in the financial system. The garbage previously pimped by the industry is being flushed out. But in the end, the new and improved system gets back to what it does. And the best stuff in the world gets even better — better curated, better distributed and more easily consumed. And I for one am happy to pay for it.
