Thursday, September 11. 2008Will the future of Online Media mainly be a market of Ad funded cr*pComments
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What you say is only true for content producers that rely in internet-related income (ads or subscription). There are many content providers that use the internet in order to get their income "offline":
- A band putting free audio so that you get to know them, and come to a gig (or book them one) - A shrink/furniture designer/karate master/etc. with interesting and profound insights, who wouldn't mind might getting a few more customers due to internet exposure, but never at the expense of not looking professional. - A political group (or an individual who lives in a war zone and just had enough) - there's no income, but the reward is much greater (life, death and such). In short - the content will always be there. The tricky part might be to find it, but hey - what are friends for ![]()
The Dod, you are right of course, but it is a fairly small segment and not persistent - you can't easily build a major media industry out of it.
True, but "industry" is a term as archaic as "industrial revolution". If you have reason for people to produce content and a reason for others to "consume" it, what do you need an industry for?
@Dod - The big question though is this - who will fund the hard, independent reporting?
@ Glenn - There are indeed hybrids, this blog is one of them - but they are by and large offset funded, and sadly a lot of that funding is not dissimilar to non-independent Ad funding.
> who will fund the hard, independent reporting?
There are 2 diffenet issues here: - creation of content ("reporting") - selection of worthy items ("editing") What I believe is that there will always be hard reporting, and - to some extent - independent ("truely independent reporting" is a myth that never existed. Everyone has an agenda). There will always be "reporters" with an incentive to write (trying to promote a political approach, a tech standard, a rock band, etc.), and the reader community should not disqualify a source just because there is such an incentive. As long as it is clear what that incentive is - the information is valuable (e.g. it's not a "sin" for a pacifist to read "Mein Kampf"). What an "editor" used to do way back when information was an "industry" can now be achieved by various friend-based processes. One example where this is already the standard is open source code repositories (whether centralized like gforge/sourceforge/launchpad or a project's own darcs/svn/etc.): - "Reporters": Everyone can suggest code or documentation to the project, they always have an incentive (they wrote this patch because they needed it for a job they're getting paid for - now they hope it becomes "official" and they don't have to worry about it each time there's an upgrade). - "Editors": The community can decide whether this contrib sould become official [or - if they disagree - fork]. Can news-editing work this way too? This was always the case inside a news-room (where editors judge incoming contributions), and a community can do such a job just as well (as the existence of large open source projects proves ![]() Maybe we don't see good enough community-based news-editing platforms [yet], but that's simply a matter of code (as in http://code-is-law.org ![]()
@alan p == True. True. Funding is the constraint, isn't it? I wonder if there is a way to attract cash across the independent media scene while keeping that medium honest..?
It happens all the time, only offline. For example, we used to be part of a [now inactive] wiki that did Karaoke in English for non-English speaking students ( http://dtriamsoidao.pbwiki.com/folder.php?folder=English+songs ). The "funding" was in hours teachers could spend doing this instead of teaching. The "profit" for the "investor" was "look, we have a nice site, we're modern, send your kids here".
There were other benefits for the school - e.g. the ability of a teacher to print a translation from the net, or even use karaoke software (e.g. pykaraoke) with the midi+karaoke files via an overhead projector instead of writing the lyrics on the white-board for the children to copy. Everybody wins, and no money changes hands over the net. Even better: the content (mp3, midi+karaoke, pdf, etc.) can be used by anyone under a creative-commons license. One day I (or somebody else) might make a VCD out of this (DVDs are still rare in Thailand). What's the incentive? Maybe a friend will want to learn English (maybe his/her kids will). The VCD will (as CC license dictates) mention the school's name. Maybe somebody will upload it via a torrent and it becomes a hit, and maybe several parents will eventually get exposed to the school's name and check it out. Bottom line remaines the same: The market is there even if it's not on the net. |
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Tracked: Apr 09, 23:48