Everybody Is A Star
(Media • Internet)
Here’s another indicator big American newspaper publishers can ignore as they plunge headlong toward fiscal folly by trying to force their web visitors to pay for online news content:
Fewer than 5% of Europeans paid for any online content in the past three months, according to the European Information Society’s 2009 annual report. More to the point, among the other 95% who didn’t pay for any content in the past three months, “half of them state that nothing would make them change their minds” and pay for content.
I’m afraid Rupert Murdoch, Dean Singleton, Hearst and the rest have convinced themselves that their news content is just so gosh-darned compelling that, given the right software, they can exchange it for cash even if it means reversing gravity or turning human nature on its head. Of course, as you can see right here, they can’t. But it’s become apparent Rupert at least is going to have to burn his fingers himself in order to become convinced the stove is hot.
What I found most interesting about the European Union commission’s report was its confirmation of a couple of online facts: Most people aren’t interested in paying money to obtain online access to “professionally produced” content – whether written, photographed, sung, spoken or videoed. But people are falling all over themselves to produce and distribute their own writings, photos, songs, podcasts and videos online. Witness the rise of web publishing and the popularity of tools provided to the non-technical: blogging software, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr.
Maybe this is the logical extension of where things are heading: The only reason people have been willing to pay so much to see a Hollywood movie or hear a heavily promoted rock band’s album, or watch a hit HBO TV series, is because they didn’t know that just about one out of 10 people have the artistic talent to make an entertaining movie or sing beautifully or report with clarity to their fellows what events are transpiring in front of their eyes. Maybe all this latent human creativity has simply been repressed and lying fallow because the proper tools for production and distribution were far beyond the means of any but the fabulously wealthy.
But now that professional or near-professional-quality music, photos, news reports or videos can be so cheaply and easily created, and distributed nearly for free, maybe it will turn out that the average person would rather be entertained or informed or amazed by talented people they know and have learned to trust. As opposed to people with a history of trying to figuratively twist their arms to extract a pay wall or a licensing fee or a ticket surcharge or a monthly invoice or a commercial interruption.
Maybe no matter what the newspaper monopolists do (or the cable and broadcast TV monopolists or what’s left of radio, for that matter), most of their business value will continue to turn to dust right before their eyes.
Not just because most of them haven’t figured out how to work within the framework of digital media and are instead trying to remake it into their own analog image of what they wish it could again be. But, more probably because, as the giant public wakes up to the new publishing power it holds in its own collective hands, it becomes apparent that the Many are far more creative, innovative, fun and interesting than the Hollywood-Disney-Sony-Rupert corporate-created cardboard Few.
→ B.Dunn, Aug 21, 2009, 07 41 am
Hear, hear. Your post on this subject is far more interesting (and closer to reality) than anything in this vein put out by the self-serving minions of the Murdoch-Hearst ilk, the ‘cardboard few.’ Thanks. Keep on toppin ‘em.
— R. Brady Aug 22, 02:38 am #
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