Last Saturday, Clay Shirky gave the FutureView keynote at the Edinburgh TV Festival. Clay is a fantastic public speaker, and has been one of the most insightful analysts of emerging social media trends over the last 10 years or so. This year, he published “Here Comes Everybody”, a brilliant overview of how social media technologies are giving people the power to ‘organise without organisations’.
The message of Clay’s talk was simple - we are now living in the first post-Gutenberg economy. Although Gutenberg radically democratised the production and dissemination of information with his printing press, the expertise and costs involved were still significant enough to warrant filtering what gets published. The economic risk involved in printing 100s or 1000s of copies of a book, not yet knowing the demand from the public, meant that the role of flitering content fell to those who owned the means of production - the Publishers. This Gutenberg economic model - Filter, then Publish - has held steady for every mass media technology since, including cinema, radio and obviously TV.
With the advent of the Internet, the tools for production and distribution have been further democratised, so that the economic risk involved in distributing content can be virtually zero. In this Post-Gutenberg economy, the best strategy is to Publish, then Filter, as the economic cost of making decisions about what might or might not succeed can be more expensive than actually making the content.
Notice the phrase ‘can be’ appears twice in that last paragraph? This is critical, and points to the way in which Post-Gutenberg economics are most often misunderstood. Clay addressed two concerns that most established TV producers have with the way content is being made on the internet - “Isn’t most of it just crap?” and “How can we make enough money to make anything that’s *good*?”
Clay pointed out that content production now exists not in a binary opposition, with professional on one side and amateur on the other, but on a spectrum, from individuals making comments or uploading pictures to friends all the way to Lost and Heroes. Much of the content on, for example, Youtube, is crap, at least to the mass tastes that traditional TV has tried to target. But if the cost of putting up this content is virtually nil, then why not? Even if only a few friends look at your video, for most people, that’s validation enough.
As for the money question, Clay pointed out that we need to explore different business models - its not a case of just moving your whole business from Plan A to Plan B, but in trying to find ways of innovating and experimenting, and using the feedback you get to inform better and better strategies. In one of the most pithy comments in his talk, Clay explained that the way content is filtered on the internet is not through expensive meetings with channel controllers and marketing experts, but through ignorance - it just doesn’t get watched.
In Q&As, the TV producers in the audience came back time and time again to this money question, all of them wanting a simple panacea for how they can turn attention on the internet into cash. But in a comment on Twitter afterwards, he said these missed the point:
Just gave a talk @ a TV conf. Talked about new economics of production. Not *one* question was “How can we lower our costs?” The econ questions were versions of “How can we raise enough revenue on the web to pay for our pre-web cost structures?”
This is the single biggest risk facing existing content producers shifting from a Gutenberg model to a Post-Gutenberg model. In seeking to maintain their existing cost structures and ways of working, they miss the real opportunity, which is to find ways of making content that is faster, more flexible, and crucially - cheaper. This doesn’t mean that it can’t have impact or quality for its audience - Clay said that content producers need to focus on making content that creates passion amongst its audience, rather than focusing on scale.
Publish, then filter; Passion, not scale - these should be stapled onto the walls of anyone interested in creating value - public or commercial - on the internet. And they should be in the DNA of anyone commissioning for 4iP.
