Read Write Web has a post up that says “content is a commodity”. As an admittedly biased content producer, in the past I’ve written many posts on the scalability of content and the commoditization of distribution.
I think that the entire content vs. distribution debate it moot: in a vaccuum, either argument is provocative and attention-grabbing but incomplete and inaccurate.
Everything we know about history of media suggest that the key variables are quality and scarcity.
Indeed, if I lived 24/7 in the world of blogs, then yes, we’re in a downward spiral where text-content is a commodity and generally speaking the quality is not going up, but going down.
Every day someone new signs up to a blog account, enters the conversation which really means they quickly publish a quick post with little additional or original content. At the other end of the spectrum, you have splogs popping up day in, day out.
Video content is not immune, either. Most user-generated video content sites boast plenty of people with opinions, standing on a soapbox, having little to add.
Be it on the blogosphere or most video UGC sites, indeed there’s an insane amount of supply… and in economics, when there is a ton of supply, usually this cuts into the value of a good or service.
When Sumner Redstone said “content is king” it was in the context of relative to distribution mechanisms: There would always exist channels of distribution (albeit in varied forms), but content was always going to be necessary.
Some examples:
When cable (MTV, ESPN, etc.) popped up and increased distribution outlets on television, it cut into the power and value of the networks (ABC, NBC, CBS). This new distribution also created demand for new content. This is why ESPN and MTV are such strong brands. In fact, I’d argue that globally, ESPN and MTV are stronger than NBC, ABC and CBS.
In fact, I’d argue that distribution is even more commoditized, especially if you consider recent web history:
Consider the following development of distribution channels online:
> FIRST LAYER: LAUNCH OF PORTALS
> SECOND LAYERS: BIRTH OF SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES
> THIRD LAYER: RISE OF VERTICAL SITES
You can now tap into millions and millions of people online thanks to the fragmentation of audiences and the commodization of distribution. What’s more, tools like RSS and XML have considerably reduced friction and increased mechanism distribution.
We produce high quality, professional videos (already there, there is a barrier to entry) and then have a Push and Pull distribution mechanism at play. The fact that we’re signing distribution deals at such a torrid pace is proof that the demand vs. supply dynamics of content are far better than those of distribution.
In that context, ask yourself, is the following video on Paris Hilton’s new shoe line - which initially sat on this URL - worth less or more?
- Day 1: Someone (a blogger) grabs the clip and posts it on their blog.
- Day 2: The next day a major media company (in this case, our new distribution partner Glam Media) syndicates it and distributes to their audience of 20M users…
- Day 3: Tomorrow someone grabs it and add is to their social networking site…
- Day 4: Before long, larger portals like AOL or Yahoo! who are always looking for programming opportunities come across it in more and more places and add it to their deck.
Unlike a text-based blog where any author can publish a quick post, in our Paris Hilton Shoe Launch video example, the main variable is neither content nor distribution but quality and scarcity.
- Quality content is hard to come by. That is why that blogger and that media company feature our content and do not recreate it: they can’t! There is some barrier to duplicate the content.
Bloggers these days (especially tech oriented bloggers) can simply recreate the same blog entry. That lack of barrier to entry might partially explain why that kind of content has become commoditized. Read Write Web, Tech Crunch, Mashable etc. are all readable sites, but remove the image, branding and logos and tell me can you really tell one apart from another? I am not so sure you can. That’s not a knock, at all, because they have distribution (they would fall under Layer 3, above).
- In a similar vein, quality traffic is worth so much more than low-quality / fraudulent clicks. If you have a solid audience then your audience is not a commodity.
Putting everything together, I’d say Mr. Redstone is right, and Ms. Perez is wrong: with more distribution mechanisms, the value of content soars exponentially.
But indeed, if we’re talking about a medium like blogs where there are no content creation barriers to entry other than a blogger account and access to press releases, then yeah, sure, content is pretty worthless.
In the meantime, here’s Paris:
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