Why Content Is King
divinations.substack.com
divinations.substack.com
Facebook is successful because of content. Google+ failed because there wasn't any content.
Heading tech up against content in some way is also a silly argument. Good tech supports the transmission of content. Bad tech gets in the way. Good content is enabled by good tech.
Ultimately, a web page with some stirring, moving or life changing words on it is going to have more potential impact than all the NerdMagic in the world. But: they're heavily codependent.
Google itself has lots of (free) content. Search is a medium
While stirring content may exist (where is it?) , it rarely meets big tech (so it can be win-win for both)
Either you're very good at discovery or you have to be great at curation/creation
Imagine if, to upload a TikTok video, you had to bring it into an editing suite as complex as DaVinci Resolve and tweak all kind of things... add and refine audio tracks... color grade it, etc. It wouldn't have taken off at all.
What all these platforms have in common is that even idiots can use them to make "content"... if you can even call it that.
Facebook is successful because of its ease of use comparative to Google+. Facebook's genius was that it was designed to be easy enough for the masses to use. Google+ was clearly designed by engineers, for engineers.
There's your problem right there, but you got it right in the second part of your post.
> Good tech supports the transmission of content. Bad tech gets in the way. Good content is enabled by good tech.
That was the crux of the issue. Steve Jobs understood this. Its why my Mom was able to grasp an iPhone interface far easier and sooner than the Android phone she had had for years before. It still blows my fucking mind how anyone can find the iPhone more intuitive, but I guess that's because I grew up in the 80s and 90s, with 80s and 90s computers as a kid, so you had to learn the technical underpinnings somewhat in order to even operate those machines.
Ease of use = more content.
Of course Facebook is successful because of content. Do you think people keep going back not to view photos or posts of others?
You could share photos on Friendster.
You could share photos on <insert a dozen dead platforms here>.
Its ease of use. It always has been.
Very related to this article is this article about the need for a creator middle class. https://li.substack.com/p/building-the-middle-class-of-the
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=235282
At the time he wrote it, the whole of Hollywood yearly revenue made less than 2 weeks of telcos’, and SMS by itself was worth more (SMS has been commoditized since, to the benefit of Apple and Facebook).
> “I don’t want to be anyone’s dumb pipes,” says Hindery. “If all you do is racks and servers, that’s dumb. What we’re doing is melding the network and the content.
This is a fancy way of saying, "I'm not content to just create a huge, high-speed network that services as many customers as possible, I want to extract yet more revenue out of a business I probably don't understand and can't be expected to competently manage."
Trying to explain to these idiots that the only thing an ISP - be it Comcast, AT&T, Charter, Spectrum, Frontier, whoever, can offer me, is a great big fat dumb fucking pipe, is like trying to explain the finer points of Shakespeare to a mollusk.
https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=0051060861021170...
Microsoft is 1 tril bigger in market cap than Disney. Strange to use a Bill gates quote and then discuss Disney films.
Nintendo as a company makes more money on selling consoles, than on Zelda.
The article touches on this and could expand on it. No new tech launch is going to work without content, so in that sense it is king, but the money is in the tech.
The "tech" used in spreading the Iliad and the Ramayana was the spoken word. And yet they spread across countries and cultures.
Nobody cared/cares (where nobody=very few) for the Iliad or Ramayama on the other sides of the world that created them.
But technologies created on each side quickly reached the other side or spread all over the globe. This includes primitive technologies which we tend to forget they are technologies like agriculture, the wheel, iron forging, etc.
They were not competing with TikTok, CATV, and Disney.
I'm pretty sure it can. Just not entertainment tech (game consoles, etc).
If there was nothing worth reading online, no one would use Google. If no one was posting anything interesting on Facebook, it would have no users. If there were no apps worth using on the iOS store, iPhone wouldn't have nearly as big a market share.
You're looking at content in a very narrow definition. A database is content, as is a casual conversation with your friends.
If we stretch the definition beyond any meaning, or to mean "input" or "data" in general, then sure.
Usually by content we mean news, music, videos, movies, writing, comedy, commentary, etc. though.
Not apps, office documents, or people's social messages...
>You're looking at content in a very narrow definition.
Me and most people using the term. Perhaps you're looking at it in an extremely wide definition?
In revenue or profit? It’s kind of definitional that there’s more revenue from the console than the game given that for any console you need to purchase on average ~1 game at most and a game is worth far less than a console. However, it’s my understanding consoles are generally loss leaders, priced at or below cost in anticipation of profit driven by sales of content.
19mil Breath of the Wild (Zelda)
21mil Smash bros
28mil Animal Crossing
The gamecube and the wii were reasonably cheap hardware with a markup. I haven't researched the switch, it looks no different to me.
*updated to sep2020 figs
A $60 game is sold to a retailer for $38-45. The publisher takes 20 of that (nintendo in this case) and the advertising & developer take the remaining 20. So nintendo probably takes 40 dollars profit from first party games like Zelda.
Margins on consoles used to be lower, $10-20 and they'd make $40 on the controller sales. The joycons on the switch cost 45 to make and sold for 50. The margin is back into the console as a whole again.
Digital sales on ingame items are likely close to pure profit.
1. Great content can’t be commodified, despite the industry’s best efforts.
2. Content lives in extremistan. [1]. Though the average piece of content has little upside, the upside of a great piece of content is nearly limitless.
At the very least, content is a “prince” alongside distribution (network effects).
[1] “Taleb provides another example of Extremistan: book publishing. Suppose one randomly chooses a thousand authors, and adds up the total number of books they have sold. Now, add the bestselling author in the world, J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books. Her book sales with vastly exceed the total of the other thousand authors.”
https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html
- Scale Economies - the more you invest the more profit you get
- Network Economies - platform business models like Amazon
- Counter Positioning - Vanguard and ETFs
- Switching Costs - this is why Facebook still exists
- Branding -
- Cornered Resource - patents etc.
- Process Power - this is why governments still exist :)
Those who control distribution set the price.
If the US cable TV companies wanted to shut down access from Apple/Netflix/Disney and force them to go via the cable TV company like they used to, they technically could (cable TV internet is the only high download bandwidth option for most Americans). They wouldn’t brazenly do this by shutting down access completely, but they are doing this via throttling and I could see rate limiting certain services in the future unless you pay more, etc. Or Comcast can exempt itself from data caps.
At the end of the day, the owner of the pipe that comes into your house or the wireless signals has the technical power to control what comes in and out and at what cost. Which is why it should be a publicly owned utility.
The book seems to be J. W. Click, Russell N. Baird, Magazine Editing and Production (https://www.worldcat.org/title/magazine-editing-and-producti...). W. C. Brown Company, 1974, 274 pages. (Google Books preview: https://books.google.com/books?id=lMpHwLnvsvAC&q=%22content+...)
Earlier appearances in the 1960s refer to educational films (https://www.worldcat.org/title/toward-improved-learning-a-co...). (Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=LiQgAQAAMAAJ&q=%22content+...)
A discussion based on this premise should at least get the provenance straight.
Aguments over provenance notwithstanding, my view is that the aphorism is a convenient bit of stage distraction attractive to media monopolists themselves aware of the real truth: network control is emperor. Andrew Odlyzko argues this; https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=235282 (as @fmajid notes elsewhere in this thread)
And this goes beyond just getting the proprietor's cut, the vigorish, skimming your 5, or 10, or 30%.
Central control of a network means deciding what that network is. Where it begins, where it ends, what goes in, what comes out, who can receive, who can send, what interactions are possible, speeds and latencies, what messages are heard, what are not, who pays, who gets paid, who plays for free.
These factors are wholly ignored by contemporary US (Borkian) antitrust doctrine.
It's not just the vig.
Sumner Redstone died this past August at 97; (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/12/obituaries/sumner-redston...) (NYTimes).
Though it’s often misattributed to Bill Gates, Sumner Redstone popularised the phrase “content is king” which was used in a 1974 book, and pre-dates even that. See: https://lgkmarketingcc.com/content-king-said-better/
The book seems to be J. W. Click, Russell N. Baird, Magazine Editing and Production. W. C. Brown Company, 1974, 274 pages. (https://www.worldcat.org/title/magazine-editing-and-producti... (Google Books preview: https://books.google.com/books?id=lMpHwLnvsvAC&q=%22content+...)
Earlier appearances in the 1960s refer to educational films (https://www.worldcat.org/title/toward-improved-learning-a-co...). (Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=LiQgAQAAMAAJ&q=%22content+...)
Monopolies can subvert natural human behavior for some time, but if Google won't make its AI content aware, it will eventually stop to matter.
I think it is ok for authors (please let's not call them creators, they are not gods) to ask for money for copies of their works (please let's not devalue these works by calling them content) in order to gain income (the term compensation falsely implies it is a matter of making up for some kind of damages).
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20171108235001/http://mail.fsfeu...
It's just like watching a movie vs watching TV, reading versus paging through the newspaper, etc.
yet here you use the same word without problem, don't you?
I guess an appropriate word for "casually reading" would be "browsing" ?
How is that different from plopping down the sofa, turn on the TV and watch the endless stream of content being broadcast to you? This isn't really a new thing, most people consumed TV that way before digital consumption became a thing.
Yes. 'Content' certainly isn't consumed from the perspective of the content providers, who can keep streaming the same data until they choose not to.
[Edit] Hmmm. Consumption, in the sense of irreversibly using a one-time resource, is sort of relevant. Once I have consumed food, I cannot re-consume it (in it's original form). Using this meaning, however, I 'use' rather than 'consume' a physical book or other format where I have a physical copy of the data (e.g. in the form of a non-rented DVD or similar).
GRRM is de facto a creator god of Westeros, and Tolkien of Middle-earth.
Your example is very good for proving my point; the expression "without content" talks about what? about the content? So you would say "content without content" to speak about a text that does not have substantial content?
Exactly. See the comment elsewhere about Orwell's 1984. In which Newspeak [0] is "a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary designed to limit the individual's ability to think and articulate "subversive" concepts such as personal identity, self-expression and free will"
Why is "creative" OK, when "creator" isn't?
I think it's more about the fact that adopting the enemy's language is seen as a kind of submission, a recognition and acceptance of their power over you, even if their words themselves aren't "bad" intrinsically.
Not sure if it's the right hill to die on. Eventually words and meanings readjust to describe reality. Map and territory, you know.
There is an adversarial aspect to it, but it's no different from debating ideas. You're just questioning certain premises, it doesn't mean you have to discard them afterwards.