A market in knowledge – just another challenge for traditional media
Posted on 25 November 2010
This week another episode in our very sparodic reflections on the evolution of media – with the focus today on the commoditisation of ‘expertise’.
Way back in the primordial mists of 2009, I got a logo designed by a student in my home town, Melbourne.
Nothing extraordinary in that, but the process by which we came to work together was revolutionary – at least to me.
I ‘met’ (in a virtual sense) the designer by running a design contest with a winner-takes-all prize pool of US$500.00. I used LogoTournament for this purpose. Over a week long period, I received some 400+ entries from designers from every conceivable part of the globe. The contest was iterative, I provided feedback on which designs I liked and why. It was difficult to choose a finalist. The end result was impressive – at least it’s the closest I’ll ever come to logo nirvana – given its use of both the positive and negative spaces.
Now quite apart from the outstanding value for money and time that this process involved, the point is that this easy access to a global pool of expertise is another step-jump in the evolution of man’s ability to communicate. A diagram might help here:
The broadcast model stood unchallenged pretty much since Moses was a boy. It enabled ‘an expert’ to communicate with a wide audience – particularly after the printing press got going, and even more so when radio and television entered our huts. The audience was limited to heckling the author face-to-face or writing a letter if they knew how.
The internet fundamentally changed this relationship. With it’s arrival, the audience acquired a voice. It’s taken time, but the growth of social media and the blogosphere now means that not only can any audience member contact an ‘authority’ directly, they can now publish their own views in a myriad of ways.
We’ve covered this all before (various articles here), so what’s new? It’s that the audience can now talk to many ‘authorities’ at the same time. Knowledge is no longer the preserve of tonsured monks. Nor is it only preached from the pulpit. It is being commoditised – thereby reducing the price of acquiring it.
To be clear, what we are talking about here is knowledge as distinct from raw data or ‘information’. The common analogy is that information is like a red light, while knowledge is knowing to jam your foot on the brake. Information in the internet age is ubiquitous and has an ever shortening shelf life. Principally for these reasons it has become (virtually) free. Knowledge on the other hand is valuable, it’s based on expertise that resides within individuals.
So when we see sites like Logo Tournament and elance.com opening up competitive market places for knowledge it really means something. And don’t think it can only happen to graphic designers, computer programmers and copywriters. Consider the service that the GLG Group offers – a ‘global marketplace for expertise’. Its ’Q&A platform’ promises the ability ‘to aggregate Council Member opinions on a given topic, often in fewer than 48 hours from start to finish’. It has more than 250,000 ‘subject matter experts worldwide’.
To some this is a fearful development as it threatens to undermine the financial basis of existing business structures. A single individual can compete with institutionalised expertise on a virtually level playing field. Couple that with the fact that the market is global – and that a single US$ is valued very differently in Vilnius, Jakarta and Melbourne – and we can understand the concern.
Perhaps even more fundamental than this are questions about how the efficiency gains are to be distributed between stakeholders. Tom Glocer (Reuters CEO) alluded to this in a recent lecture at MIT (here) when he argued that we get the media that we ‘deserve’ but that he expects alternate structures to emerge to deliver the media we ‘need’. Notably the fairy godmother of ‘knowledge markets’, Wikipedia, is a non-profit organisation. The question is simply whether the shareholder driven profit motive is compatible with a model where the audience becomes the principal stakeholder.
Conclusion
The emergence of markets in expertise is perhaps then just another reason why Newscorp is shifting to the paywall model. As Clay Shirkey (here) suggested – the Newscorp strategy is about targetting small(er) groups who are prepared to pay to read views that agree with their own. Given that ‘news’ is fast becoming free and that access to ‘expert analysis’ is also being taken away from a closed shop media distribution system, newsletters may be the only sensible alternative for these ‘traditional’ newspapers.
In any event, notch this latest development up as just another mind twisting challenge for the big media companies that are in the business of extracting value from the ‘transmission of ideas”.
2 responses to A market in knowledge – just another challenge for traditional media
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I like your analogy about information being the red light and knowing what to do with it is the knowledge to apply the brake. It surprises me that the information is becoming freely available. i would have thought that the gatekeepers of the raw data would make it more expensive. Maybe what we are going through is a period of ‘gluttony’ and as we all become used to being informed and updated, the gatekeepers will stop the flow, leaving whole populations dependent on the data, high and dry, and their readers and sub-communities in the dark. The backwash from down the chain will be “here take our money, just give us our data fix”
Agree that is the risk. Balanced against this is the idea that the ‘audience is the stakeholder’ – that the shareholder driven profit motive may not compatible with the key driver of value, the scale delivered by an aggregated audience. Sure there are plenty of businesses seeking to leverage data for profits – targetted advertising etc. But there is also a ‘social good’ aspect to much data collection that suggests public or non-profit structures are superior for delivering the objectives.