The future of media reporting:
Until about five years ago, there well established three-step approach
to any media business. First, an editorial team developed content and
establishes a brand to attract an audience. Second, that audience was
built through promotion and distribution. And finally the audience was
monetized with a combination of advertisements, subscriptions, and/or
direct sales.
This approach - to have editors assemble and
create content to attract an audience to a destination, could be called
editorially driven content. Media companies built brands, and editors
were the stewards of the audience.
Around the millennium,
Google's algorithmic approach not only destroyed the ability to control
margins through distribution, it also led to a second kind of content:
Intention driven content . Pioneered by About.com around 2002 and
expanded by sites like Associated Content and Demand Media, this content
was based on the stated intent of searchers, rather than editors. This
content monetized relatively well, and helped drive a content explosion
that further impacted the economic viability of advertising driven
businesses.
But neither of these types of content models will
be viable much longer. Increasingly, we neither trust editors to tell
us what we should read, nor are we trusting Google to give us the best
results. Instead we are trusting our friends, and we are trusting
specific individuals: authors.
We are beginning to see the
emergence of a third kind of content: author driven content. Author
driven content had its roots in blogging, where creators began to
connect directly with their audience without an editor as an
intermediary. Aggregators like Matt Drudge began to highlight specific
writers, rather than their publishing parents. And Twitter and Facebook
Subscriptions have accelerated the trend -- we are quickly moving to a
world driven by individual authors controlling their own audiences...and
those audience are movable. Consider this "blog", the Future of Media.
No one writing here is a "Future of Media writer." And furthermore, we
are all bringing our own audiences to this site.
As platforms
and sites have proliferated, readers are becoming accustomed to
following talented creators regardless of location, domain, or platform.
While some "Publishers" may survive as aggregators and curators of
content -- authors and creators will ultimately begin to control their
audiences -- and they will develop new ways to capture that value.
Consider Google's recent decision and statement around its
"rel=author" tag: "We know that great content comes from great authors,
and we're looking closely at ways this markup could help us highlight
authors and rank search results." We know social media is a natural fit
for author driven content -- but even Google is saying that search
results will soon be author driven.
http://www.mediapost.com/events/?/showID/FutureofMedia.11.NYC/type/Content/itemID/2246/art_aid/159718/TheFutureOfMedia-THE%20BLOG.html
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