Data Diary

The empire strikes back – media mogul versus the internet

Posted on 23 November 2009

The bourgeoisie are marching to liberty.  The third estate has evicted the fourth from its perch in the pews.  Everyman can now be a creator, a reporter, a publisher.  The proliferation of content is threatening the very fabric of our media moguls’ existence.

And yet there is hope. As Andrew Keen put it (in the ‘The Cult of the Amateur’):

“The one resource that is challenged all the more by this long tail of amateur content is our time – the most limited and precious resource of all”

Our old world media moguls may have lost control of the content creation process, but perhaps here is the breach that they have been searching for. People need editors and filters to help them sort the dross from the slop.  Just maybe our media moguls can evolve into ‘content curators’ and take back the initiative in the information revolution.

Navigating the content explosion

In an earlier article we defined the media as ‘the medium through which we communicate’.  When newspapers and television networks ruled the roost, media moguls were able to extract their pound of flesh because they controlled the medium – we had to go to them to get our content.  The flipside was that we had little choice about what we listened to or read – think of the dread in the pit of your stomach when “Little House on the Prairie” invaded your lounge room.

But in the new world order, with the distribution of content being virtually frictionless, media moguls no longer control the medium.  Content created by their machines must compete with the wall of noise emanating from the internet.

Herein lies the dilemma.  There are too many dishes on the menu.  How is the audience to choose where to spend their time?

Outside the traditional media formats, there are essentially three (sometimes overlapping) ways that the audience can get help 1) via content aggregators, 2) via search engines and, increasingly, 3) through social media channels.

Content aggregators

The content aggregator is perhaps the most despised foe of the media mogul.

Content aggregators are generally publishers of others (on-line) material.  They generally get their content for free.  Likewise their content is typically free for users, although they often have advertising on their sites and may charge subscriptions for premium services.

It is also useful to distinguish between those sites that aggregate content from non-traditional sources and those that aggregate ‘news’.

So in the red corner, you have aggregators such as The Huffington Post, Seeking Alpha and The Business Insider that aggregate content from blogs and other sources outside the mainstream media.  Standing next to them are the aggregators that are taking former advertisers direct to their target markets.  In the local arena, a site like Boardroom Radio publishes podcasts from listed companies and financial institutions.  In this case, the aggregator is providing the medium for contributors to talk directly to users of the site, presumably investors, thereby avoiding the need for a middle man media to paraphrase the ‘press release’.  Similarly, Morningstar are taking their first tentative steps in a similar direction.

Contrast this with the ‘news’ aggregator in the blue.  Examples in the Australian context are news aggregation sites like the Business Spectator, ABIX, NewsBites.    They summarise news from traditional sources and link to it.  These are aggregation sites that have a human editorial touch.  By contrast sites like GoogleNews and Wotnews collect newsfeeds automatically (Google using its seven secret herbs and spices – Wotnews with a semantic search engine and sonic screwdriver).  A site like Silobreaker uses a blend of both.

So where does the media mogul fit in all this?  Uncomfortably.  The ‘independent’ aggregators are beyond their reach.  The ‘news’ aggregators are feeding off their blood.  The audience just doesn’t have to come to the media mogul’s site anymore, and even if they do, the content is often free.

As Sally Jackson writing for the Australian records:

“Online operators with minimal overheads are really beginning to hurt established media organisations, not by generating their own content, but simply by linking to and abstracting third party news content for their own benefit…”

We have crossed the border into Tlön where “The concept of plagiarism doesn’t exist: it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous”.

On the face of it, things look pretty grim for the media mogul.

The search engines

“The ultimate search engine would understand everything in the world.  It would understand everything you asked it and give you back the exact right thing instantly.”

Not sure Larry Page’s burning bush (from an article by Richard Wray in the Guardian) is going to make our media mogul feel any better.  They’d only be happy for us to get ‘the exact right thing instantly’ if we’ve paid them for it.  It’s exactly with this objective in mind that Murdoch has said that NewsCorp will be taking the WSJ ‘pay for access’ model global.  Even more to the point was his proclamation on SkyNews (of course) that News was going to block Google’s access to their sites.

There has been a good deal of to’ing and fro’ing as whether News stance is sensible or, ultimately, even enforceable.  For example, Bill Tancer from Hitwise published the following charts which show that Google delivers in excess of 20% of the WSJ traffic while making the point that “blocking Google could isolate the Journal from potential new online subscribers”:

But in the context of what we have just discussed, it doesn’t seem like Rupert has much choice.  It is not as if he is getting any actual money from these readers anyway (unless the value of his online advertising declines as a result of a reduction in traffic).

And even more interesting is the thought that perhaps Rupert is right.  That search engines are less relevant than the data seems to suggest.  A search engine may be useful for finding the answer to a specific question but in a world where information is abundant, maybe we just don’t need search engines to deliver us our daily content.  And this is where social media steps in.

And social media

One more quote just because it has all the bland arrogance one might expect from a new media mogul.  From Mark Cuban’s weblog:

Having to search for and find news in search engines is so 2008.

The point he goes on to make is that Twitter and FaceBook are where people are gravitating to find content – or more correctly how content will find them.  In the context of our information rich world this makes sense.

This is where the power of the local or the community wins out over the global brand.  With content, particularly if its of the ‘news’ variety, being so damn portable, its distribution will move to where the community is online.  The best a media mogul can hope for is that the relevant content will be linked back to in a way that readers must view the original content in the manner in which god intended.

Note too that the social media sites do not have to be of the name brand variety.  As we noted in an earlier article, sites like The Slope of Hope and Zero Hedge have dynamic communities that define them as social media just as much as Facebook or Twitter.  The point is that these communities of like minded individual’s effectively act as the content filter.

Finally, there is the role of the realtime search engines that are being developed to search our social media.  There is a motley collection of developers putting together the next generation of search and aggregation platforms – Topsy, Collecta, One Riot, Lazy Feed, InfoNgen and the self styled ‘stealth startup’ Wowd (If you are interested in comparing their functionality – try searching for “Murdoch” on each – given today’s announcement about the discussions between Microsoft and News – you will get all the real time search results you will ever need.)  Not sure I really understand.

Conclusion

So is there hope for our media moguls in these trends?  Certainly they make Murdoch’s recent action’s intelligible – he doesn’t have much of a choice.  At the risk of over-simplfying, the challenge for the media mogul is then:

1) to create desirable content – so as to compete with the non-traditional media aggregators

2) then restrict its portability – to cut-off the bloodflow to the ‘news’ aggregators (access granted if they are prepared to share their revenue)

3) and make it relevant to communities – enabling social media to index and link to original content

Does this make them ‘content curators’?  Not really, but I’m happy to pretend if they bury the Little House under the Prairie for all eternity.

Next article we will look at the financial sector specifically – where news and analysis is valued for its utility not necessarily for its ability to entertain – to see how these trends are playing out.