Online Content Is Not Worth Very Much

"The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell," Wired magazine's recent profile of online content machine Demand Media, dovetails nicely with my last post.

Bob Garfield analyzes online ad valuation from an inventory supply-side economics perspective. Demand pursues their business model from a content supply-side perspective. Both arrive at the same inevitable conclusion: cheap, fast, good enough, and at volume is the only way to earn money from the Internet—and perhaps all digital communication networks.

Demand Media crunches multiple streams of search data through several algorithms that eventually churn out search engine optimized titles that they predict will attract hits—a combination of high traffic but little competition. The result is thousands of mostly how-to articles, listed content, and informational videos that aren't high on style or even valuable content, but fill a voids that their data says the public is increasingly searching for.

Their process is getting so refined that they are ramping up to produce 1 million pieces of content per month, which the article's author Daniel Roth notes is "the equivalent of four English-language Wikipedias a year." Roth later writes:

To appreciate the impact Demand is poised to have on the Web, imagine a classroom where one kid raises his hand after every question and screams out the answer. He may not be smart or even right, but he makes it difficult to hear anybody else.

The result is a factory stamping out moneymaking content.

For the privilege of stamping out the actual content, writers, editors, videographers, and other creatives are paid on a scale to rival minimum wage. The videographer Roth features to begin his article, for example, gets paid $200 total for 10 videos he shoots in one day.

The moral here is that content is, once again, not king. It's barely even a serf. And we see this medium and all it transmits for what it is: cheap and fast. But is it really good enough?

The Advertising Glut

Last Thursday, I listened to a fascinating episode of the NPR program On Point with Tom Ashbrook titled "What's Next for Advertising?" You can listen to it yourself here.

During the program, Bob Garfield made a truly insightful point that I've yet to hear anywhere else. He thinks that online advertising is unsustainable. The Web is a limitless platform, offering limitless advertising space. However, There is not limitless advertising demand or inventory. There will always be a glut of advertising space or supply, which according to simple economics means prices will always be driven downward.

Therefore, the advertising business model as it currently exists cannot support the cost of creation of even small amounts of premium content, because the Web's open content creation and distribution ecology is also a leveler of content quality—the cream will always rise to the top, but it is all still there to see and fulfill niche tastes and tendencies.

This is bad news for Internet advertisers of all stripes—both the content creators and those who'd try to sell ads against their content. The only way, in this scenario, to make money is through monopoly. Which would explain Google's profits and push to grow their market share.

Please Justify Your Existence, Hollywood

Why do we need cameras and producers and CGI, when one person can set a story to music and make people cry using nothing but sand?



Addendum: To preempt the inevitable comment: yes, I do recognize the irony in using a performance for a highly produced television franchise that I found on the Web's largest video repository as evidence that we don't need technology to be entertained.

World Enough and Time

My friend Albert's recent blog post about Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" has me ruminating on that poem a lot lately. Albert focuses his explication on the enigmatically beautiful phrase "vegetable love." Yet it's that poem's first line, "Had we but world enough, and time," that still gets me.

Has there ever been a more concise, universal statement of longing?

Marvell specifically addresses a longing erotic in nature, but his hypothetical construction could be a prelude to any human passion. It is why we chase youth and money, technology and entertainment, fame and status—all things that represent control over some inexorable force.

Youth stalls time's yardstick, age. Fame enables our names to live, thus cheating time's ultimate arbiter, death. Money, status, and entertainment offer us "world enough," whether that means consumption or leisure. And, of course, technology buys us the illusion of both time and world. After all, technology saves us time and allows us to be virtually in multiple places at once.

Of course, such pursuits ultimately prove fruitless. We know this objectively, yet we pursue anyway. But we can't be blamed for this drive. It's something we struggle with today. It's something Marvell recognized 400 years ago.

However, I can't help think that the world would be somehow better if we could just recognize that world enough might be the ground we can cover with our own legs. And time enough might be living each moment in a manner meaningful to us yet mindful of others. And both could be achieved in those instants when we give over some gift of ourselves, to either a lover or a stranger, in whatever capacity we have to give, with no expectation of reciprocation yet complete surprise and delight when that gift is returned.

The World Actually IS Flat

The Internet has an end point. Who knew?

TV Fills the Void

I've always wondered why the television show Friends was so popular. It had an improbable concept (young people with no visible means of support living in gorgeous New York City apartments), formulaic sitcom banter, and some consistently annoying characters and story lines. Yet people, myself included, watched it with a devoutness that would be the envy of any church. The show was, in fact, an anchor for years of Must See TV.

Could Friends' popularity be due simply to its title? Perhaps, if one stretches the argument Jonah Lehrer reports about in his latest post on The Frontal Cortex: "the benefits of watching television when lonely . . . provide the same sort of emotional relief as spending time with real people."

Media ecologists have been observing these effects of television for decades. Marshall McLuhan identified television as the most significant electric media of his day, because it enabled the viewer to transport beyond time and space and engaged multiple senses, thus stimulating our evolutionary proclivities toward a fragmented, tribal society. Neil Postman then took up the yolk, exploring the darker implications of this feature of electric media.

But even television itself is limited, primarily by schedule, distribution, and level of interactivity. We still must watch our shows either according to a network's schedule or must wait for the DVD release, and we can't enter the narrative played out before us.

Which leads me to wonder where the Internet, which breaks through those barriers by being always already available and completely interactive, will take us. Lonelygirl15 aside, how much less lonely will we be online, even if it forces our attention away from our physical environment and into our own isolated head-space focused on a device?

Sex or Conan O'Brien?

India's Health and Family Welfare Minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad, has a solution for exploding birth rates: give poor villagers electricity so they can watch late-night TV and stop fucking.

According to Rhys Blakely of the London Times, the minister said,

Don’t think that I am saying this in a lighter vein. I am serious. TV will have a great impact. It’s a great medium to tackle the problem... 80 per cent of population growth can be reduced through TV.

Why stop at TVs? Give them laptops and smartphones, and they'll never even want to touch another human.