Peak content: The collapse of the attention economy
themediabriefing.com
themediabriefing.com
Zynga pioneered this approach to such a degree that they were essentially the BuzzFeed of interactive entertainment. Later, many AAA games would follow suit embracing the Free-to-Play model. Higher production values with the same sleazy monetization strategies. The end result was games of all types selling their soul in the name of making a quick buck.
Web content has the same problem. In the face of content becoming a commodity, the reaction thus far has been to produce more content. More content means lower quality content. Lower quality content results in monetization becoming more difficult, and thus prevalent. More prevalent monetization leads to ads. Ads kill page performance, thus driving anyone away who doesn't have an ad blocker. That in turn leads to idiotic things such as paywalls and traditional media being turned into a glorified blogging platform (cough Forbes). It's a race to the bottom.
The solution to this of course, is to simply make a high quality product. Ensure the content is top-notch, kill anything that isn't. Make sure page performance is excellent. Hand-curate ads such that they're non-invasive, fast, and not killed by ad-blockers. Admittedly the last point is difficult, but it can be done. If the publication is sufficiently niche, a subscription model could actually be appropriate in lieu of ads; nautil.us is a fantastic example of this.
In the end, it boils down to the classic error of the suits screaming "monetize!", ruining their product and shooting themselves in the foot in the process. This same dynamic applies to games, print media, and even startups alike. There's a reason YC constantly reiterates that monetization efforts are foolish in the face of a product that isn't great.
I agree with this strategic sentiment, but I'm not sure the solution is as simple as you think it is. Higher quality content generally requires much more expensive production costs, and it's far from clear that the revenue side of the equation will support these costs at anything more than hobby-level scale.
"Admittedly the last point is difficult, but it can be done. If the publication is sufficiently niche, a subscription model could actually be appropriate in lieu of ads; nautil.us is a fantastic example of this."
I love Nautilus, as I imagine a lot of HN readers do. But how is it doing as a business? Is it thriving? Is it crushing it? Is it barely scraping by? I'm not posing these questions Socratically; I'm genuinely curious to know the answer. Extremely curious, in fact, as someone who's spent a lifetime in the content business and desperate for any glimmer of hope along these lines.
My instincts lead me to a similar hypothesis as yours: find a niche, overservice it, and invest in quality as a differentiating factor. But historically, these sorts of publications have rarely been goldmines. Many of them, especially in the old days of print, were borderline nonprofits -- heavily subsidized by charitable publishers or donors.
I suspect there is a niche out there for the specialty publications of the world: your web equivalents of Road & Track, Field & Stream, Wine Spectator, Robb Report, Foreign Affairs, and so forth. I am not as sure there is a lucrative niche in general-interest categories, such as news. Even still, I'd love if any of the niche publications in today's brave new world -- Nautilus, for example -- would let us in on their business data. Even just a slice of it.
True, but high-quality content also serves to build reputation. Positive reputation can still drive revenue, even in this day and age. If major publications haven't failed on that front, then they've failed on others, such as presentation. Excellent products have to achieve and maintain excellence in all areas, and any chink in the armor is reason for people not to regularly use a product. I don't know of a single major publication that's checked all the boxes.
>I love Nautilus, as I imagine a lot of HN readers do. But how is it doing as a business?
That's a good question. I don't know, but I really hope it's doing well.
Can it drive a business model, though? Again, let's turn to the case of Nautilus. We can probably assume it has a great reputation amongst an admittedly small group of readers. But is that reputation driving subscription revenue sufficient to keep the publication in the black? To keep it growing? To keep it securely in business?
Once again, I'm 100% aligned with you in my hopes and desires for the industry. But hope isn't a business model. I'd like to hope that Nautilus is a great example of how to run a content business; unfortunately, at the moment I have insufficient economic evidence to back up that claim.
I agree with you that excellent products can outcompete commodified trash under certain circumstances. I'm less sure that enough people want to pay for the product at all in this case, however, be it excellent or otherwise.
Whatever the case, thank you for a compelling take on this subject. I quite sincerely hope you're right.
In that case publications like Nautilus would probably have to be ad-supported. Hand-curated ads would go a long way towards preserving design, performance and even revenue since most ad blockers wouldn't block them.
However, there's still massive benefits to outsourcing ads—namely advanced analytics, targeting, and click fraud detection right out of the box. Implementing any of those in-house is certainly non-trivial.
That said, most publications—especially niche ones—are selling direct to their audience right now. There's nothing wrong with that, unless consumers prove adverse to paying for content in a subscription manner. I tend to strongly agree with you on that point.
While perceived value is one issue on that front, I think a lot of it has to do with the inconvenience of signing up, paying, and logging in. App stores don't have this issue, and they offer a lot of print media content these days, though I don't think they've really solved anything yet.
Film has Netflix. Music has Spotify. Print media doesn't really have an equivalent. So, it's possible that may be one angle. I know there's startups that have tried this, but none have approached the scale or success that Netflix or Spotify has.
And isn't the fact that most publications doing "general-interest" news can't survive actually great - if there isn't enough demand on the market, then the market agrees with my (and most of HN's?) subjective assessment: most news is worthless.
> a subscription model could actually be appropriate in lieu of ads
Doesn't a subscription model imply a paywall?
Paywalls vary in terms of aggression and the nature of the content they're protecting.
For example, WSJ's paywall is extremely aggressive and the content it protects can be found from other sources for free. Most of the time you can go over to the New York Times or some other publication and get the same story for free, because NYT's paywall is a lot less aggressive. Even so, if you subscribe to either, you're still going to get a bloated page filled with stories that can probably be found elsewhere.
Something like Natilus on the other hand, has a very non-aggressive paywall, it's devoid of ads and bloat, has a clean design, and the content is sufficiently niche that you'd feel like you're getting a real value for your money while supporting a unique publication to boot.
So, a paywall may be idiotic depending on why and how it's deployed I suppose.
Economics is way to provide compensation. But it also often doubles as an effective form of filtering.
In "Meditations on Moloch"[0], Scott Alexander did a pretty good work describing this mechanism, as well as various consequences it has. The general pattern is:
"In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse."
[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
The only way you can make a valid "everything will be shit, markets are bad" argument is if there is a mechanism through which you believe regression to the mean of [cultural values, intellectual endeavors] is "BAD", and PERMANENT for some reason (culture, psychology, neurobiology) leading us as a society to some kind of mental poverty. But then you're saying someone should somehow regulate this? Decide? Maybe even you?
"I am most certainly not fooled by the antirigorous arguments of the way above their pay grade academics who truly believe they could run the world the way Plato intended them to. Get thee behind me, Satan."
That's from http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/. If you like SSC, you might enjoy it.
I disagree with you here. It won't kill lowest quality content producers. On the contrary, it will kill the higher-quality content producers (as it in fact does), because quality content is more expensive to make than crap one. The optimized variable is profitability, which right now is strongly tied to view count - therefore you get more and more viral, easy to make content, made of every cheap mind hack we can think of.
I'm not sure about your second paragraph - you say "regression to the mean" and "permanent", as if regression to the mean wasn't by definition the default state of the system, and hence permanent (absent default-changing influences). My belief is though that the degeneration of mass media is a continuous process driven by the market, so as long as the market incentives are in place, no regression is going to happen. You'd have to destroy the current mass media industry for news to regress to the (arguably much better) mean.
> But then you're saying someone should somehow regulate this? Decide? Maybe even you?
Well, yeah. Not me, or not one person in general, but we'd better regulate it somehow, because right now it mostly runs without any kind of explicit control - i.e. it does whatever it wants, which is not what humans generally want it to.
Clickbait will appeal to population, spring up new clickbait ventures, and descend down a spiral you describe. Best clickbaiters will emerge victorious, worse clickbaiters will crawl back with their tails between their legs. The first will be profitable, but not excessively so. The latter will have been hopefully funded by rational venture capitalists, not taken on any unreasonable personal risk and carry on with their careers. Nobody will have lost anything, except all the people reading their content.
Medium-to-highbrow journalism is struggling to get by - but that is mostly because it's readership doesn't care enough - or enough of it's readership doesn't care - which is to say their quality wasn't great. It may have cared before, but now there are better options. Some of them are better in the sense that people are lazy and passive entertainment has gained their favour. Others are better options, because they are of even better quality. It's unfortunate, but the thriving high-brow media sector shows that there is a market for quality publications.
Maybe I'm in a delusional bubble, since I live in a country where the average person gets 3-4 long form periodical publications (weeklies/ monthlies) and 20-30% of the population gets their daily newspaper delivered every morning before sunrise.
> which is not what humans generally want it to.
"Which is not what you think humans generally want it to." is softer form of the same statement :)
Without aspirational media & news (by which I mean media that is intellectually targeted above the optimal profit point), intellectual discourse lessens in greater society. This lessening of discourse leads to lessening of intellect in greater society. Repeat ad nauseum until we've optimized our culture's stupidity.
In reality, there are obviously multitudinous different streams of media one can partake in. But I would say that the existence of any mass/popular/mainstream vein still makes the above a concern.
I worry that quality may not be the route back. After all, how exactly do we define quality?
What is more vexing in my opinion is when an organization creates works that are widely agreed upon as high quality, whilst still abusing monetization efforts to various degrees.
In the games industry, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Dota 2 would be interesting case studies, since, in order of wildly unrelated user generated content from greatest to least, these are probably Valve Corporation's highest revenue churning titles at the moment. Though, this is still an example of quality not eliminating the issue at hand.
Obviously that experiment has been very successful, but we also don't know how it would have fared had Valve stayed the course and stuck to a more traditional strategy, continually updating the game while selling it for a reasonable price.
>What is more vexing in my opinion is when an organization creates works that are widely agreed upon as high quality, whilst still abusing monetization efforts to various degrees.
The production values might be high quality, but the product as a whole isn't, because monetization efforts detract from the overall quality of the product.
Just wanted to point out one thing -- the pioneers of the F2P model was not Zynga. It was South Korean gaming companies. (didn't know about this myself until I heard about it from Jon Van Caneghem)
Don't you mean scarce not prevalent here?
In other words, when you have solid content you don't have to constantly churn out garbage and then blanket said garbage in ads.
In the book Money Ball (yet to see the movie), the Oakland A's realized - despite the hype - the big names aren't cost effective. That instead by going for people who would consistently get on base and score runs, they could build a roster that would win regularly without spending stupid amounts of money. You don't finish 1st but 2nd or 3rd might work.
In terms of content, it may be too expensive to for that 1M views post but if you can get 10 that get 100k views each, the advertising numbers work out the same and probably for a fraction of the cost. And betting everything on that single post is risky anyway because what if it doesn't catch?
There's also a marketing aspect as that BIG post has to have broader appeal. The smaller posts can hit individual niches.
[0]http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/the-econ...
Ahh, there you see the problem! you can also output all harry potter novels from digits of pi, but that doesn't get anyone anywhere. : ) The entire point of a good content producer is to understand what the customer needs, and put it out, NOW. So I'd imagine 538 will be automated about when computers start writing Harry Potter equivalents.
Beyond my recreated blacklists, so much garbage has narrowed my focus and sources. NYTimes, a few RSS feeds, HN for tech. Hopefully, as with books, the culture will begin to correct course.
(Gonna break out my cane and start waving at some kids any moment now)
Best thing is it was able to import all my old Google Reader subscriptions. Although by now, I think that ship has sailed for other people...
The search engine could then discard most derivative articles, even if they'd been reworded. It's a form of automated curation, based on content, not attention.
That said, I think the drive to fact-check every statement in an article is a red herring. Other sites have tried this (Infobitt, Grasswire) and it doesn't work well for general reader.
I know this is specifically about the economics of content creation and media consumption, but talking about the rise of the Internet and the plurality of voices that previously couldn't be heard from the point of view of the owners who can't profit just seems incorrect. It's this kind of thinking that leads to stronger and stronger intellectual property rights, which is a euphemism for more and more restrictive information control.
Materially speaking the Internet has ushered in a golden age of media, but its revolution is being held back by outmoded economic relationships. This article is wondering how to reassert those relationships over the Internet instead of wondering what new relationships are possible.
You can probably get all of those you need from the layoffs at Yahoo and Aol. We've probably passed "peak people generating and selling crap content."
Have we hit "peak advertising" yet?
IMHO, there are real obstacles to these types of experiments taking place. For one, many media organizations still have a top-down, "me too" attitude when it comes to innovation. The boss sees something he or she likes ("Buzzfeed is hot!"), convenes a committee to discuss how to do something similar ("Let's do Buzzfeed for our niche!") and then the team (or consultants) build it out ... sometimes over a period of a year or more to "get it right." In my experience, there is little attempt to gauge (during the planning stage or when it's being prototyped) if the "Buzzfeed for XYZ" is something their audiences want.
In addition, in media organizations that sell advertising, resources are more likely to be put assigned to projects that the sales team thinks are important, even if audiences aren't really interested. An example that springs to mind is the brand new feature on a local news website that supports auto dealerships even though most car buyers are not going to the news site to buy cars.
Incidentally, I have been working on a framework for the creation of media content (including news, film, websites, music, etc.) called lean media. It draws heavily from the lean startup movement, while attempting to reconcile the emphasis on constant and careful measurement (A/B tests, etc.) with the intangibles that are an integral part of the creative process. If anyone is interested, I have a long writeup on Mediashift (1) as well as a blog (2) and I would be interested in getting feedback.
1. http://mediashift.org/2016/01/lean-media-a-new-framework-for...
(Or is the number of people who value their time so they pay for quality just too low?)
I wonder what this 40% consisted of.
Never forget social signalling, "this is what everyone expects we do". They don't actually read it or want it, but they expect to see it there, like a glass of water at a restaurant table.
Consider how some products exist mostly to funnel purchasers up to the next highest product tier. Likewise I suspect some stories exist mostly to funnel readers to stories they want read, not to be read by themselves.
With no actual data, its merely theoretical, but there are at least some theoretical models that could excuse the creation of unread content. Not that I would waste much time or money on the unread-by-design content, although literal lorem ipsum as content might be going a bit far.
Tangentially, this must have always been the case, perhaps it was even worse when measurements were hard to come by. During pure print media days, lots of what they thought people read was through wholly inaccurate methods. So that forty per hundred is probably much improved over how it used to be.
Network TV advertising woes: I have mostly stopped watching TV except for Hulu Premium. I pay $12/month and watch about 5 hours/month Hulu content. Since Hulu is owned by the 3 bug TV networks, aren't they doing fine with me as a consumer? I also sometimes watch TV reruns on Netflix and I have no idea how much content creators get paid for this older material?
Passion writing vs. commercial: I find amazing content on the web that represent huge efforts by authors. But, I still buy a lot of eBooks because the quality is a bit better on average.
I spend a ton of time watching conference talks on YouTube. This seems like a win-win-win situation. I save travel and conference costs, and don't miss much (except not getting to personally network), Google gets my YouTube Red monthly subscription fee, and conference speakers extend their reach of who they can affect with their ideas.
Really, it's the sugar to shit ratio of the content, as well as the overall quality and compelling nature of the content at issue.
Traditional media is producing a lot. Both content and ads, and often it's mixed. "News" has become increasingly unclear, making it difficult to discern fact from opinion. Entertainment programming is often 50/50 AD to entertainment ratio, and the quality doesn't often justify that kind of time investment.
People are paying as much attention as they ever did. Traditional media is simply getting it's ass kicked.
There is a bargain you make between the reader and your advertisers, you protect your reader from aggressive overt advertisements, you provide your readers with something worth reading. It is hard to make a retelling of a story that everyone has reported on, worth reading.
It is also impossible (at present) to lower the friction of reading and subscribing to a point where it gets sufficient market penetration to make it scalable. I imagine that something halfway between flattr and the NY times subscription is going to be an answer.