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.
Dubber on Thu, August 28, 2008 at 10:10 said:
There’s one more layer to this - and that’s the fact that when you focus on creating quantity and passion rather than scale and spectacle, you are less desperately attached to the idea that something is either a commercial success or an outright failure.
When you’re making new things every day - or many times a day - the cultural and societal value of those individual works outweigh the investment and need for financial return.
So a low-investment passionate work may not reap significant financial rewards, but if you’re going to make another couple of those before breakfast, then it’s not that big a deal - and you’re having a far more significant impact at the same time.
That’s not to say you can’t or shouldn’t labour over works for the public good - but that culture is something that happens in real time and has a much faster pulse than commerce.
But conversely, your odds of hitting the jackpot (both culturally and economically) escalate through the roof the more seeds you plant - and the more stuff you just put out there.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about the ‘Black Swan’ event - that one in a million improbable event that more often than not turns up - as long as you keep at it.
So - yeah, I’m in complete agreement. You only really do this right when you’re prepared to do it wrong quite a lot. And when you’re not too precious to put something out there that isn’t really ‘finished’ in any real sense. That’s when you get the real successes.
Create, release and then polish. Or - to put it another way: Ready… Fire… Aim.
Antony Mayfield on Sun, August 31, 2008 at 1:34 said:
Thanks for the summary, Matt - it’s a shame that the Guardian is keeping the video behind a firewall as I’d love to watch it.
Content and the connections that come from creating a network around it, or creating value within existing networks, may just turn out to be the permission to have a shot at creating some revenue generating business models at all.
I think it comes down to understanding the value in understanding networks. If you know where people are and what they want from you above and beyond the content, what some of them may be prepared to give you money for, then you
There were a couple of dominant business models in the Gutenberg age: advertising alongside the content, or sponsorship (be it semi-benevolent state funding, or the oevrt branded content that brought you say, soap operas or the super rich-man’s version of football that is the modern Premiership).
I think the way that it may turn out is that these will be one of a “spectrum” of business models which will be tried in various combinations and iterations around a franchise or content brand to what works.
And the smarter we get about understanding our networks, the faster and more efficient that revenue portfolio management will become…
Mark Rock on Mon, September 01, 2008 at 1:08 said:
The problem with traditional tv producers is that they nearly all operate on a cost plus basis - ie they make a guaranteed mark up on the price of a commission. So it’s really not in their interests to find more economic ways to market.
Also, if you like Clay Shirky, then a man closer to tv producers home (or not!) should be Michael Rosenblum. He’s been banging on about truly economic production of news for years. There are a few of his very readable musing here - http://www.dna2008.com/en/external-blogs/michael-rosenblum/
Stuart Cosgrove on Wed, September 03, 2008 at 1:53 said:
Mark said “The problem with traditional tv producers is that they nearly all operate on a cost plus basis - ie they make a guaranteed mark up on the price of a commission. So it’s really not in their interests to find more economic ways to market.”
Too true and can be the base of a whole range of mis-presumptions which will undoubteldy silt up on 4iP’s beach in the weeks and months to come.
Shirkey has also touched on the some of the other key issues that has historicaly troubled TV culture - obsession with IPR, revenue increments,control over content, hierarchies of authorship etc etc.
Only thing I’m not so sure about Clay is he is still using his slave name - shouldn’t he be Mohammed Ali Shirkey.
Ian McClelland on Wed, September 03, 2008 at 4:23 said:
‘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.’
I’m not sure if TV Producers ‘seek to maintain cost structures’; aren’t they rather beholden to them as the majority of revenues still come from TV advertising, subscription and license fees (passed onto producers in the form of commissions). In order to explore new digital outlets; and until those outlets are profitable, then existing cost structures and the revenues they support will be maintained.
Having said that there’s always marketing departments that could be downsized ;0)
Matt Locke on Wed, September 03, 2008 at 10:40 said:
Mark - thanks for the link to Michael Rosenblum. He was working with the BBC when I was there around 2001/2. His low-cost news production model is interesting, but not quite as radical as later blogging and citizen journalism models.
But news is perhaps one of the areas where low-cost production is easiest. I’m interested in how you do other genres like drama, factual or features in low-cost models. Or are new genres appearing that don’t conform to these existing broadcast categories? Clay cited Ze Frank’s (http://www.zefrank.com) work as an example, in particular ‘The Show’, where he made content every day for a year, just to see what happened. I’m not sure this would fit into any existing TV genres…
Mark Rock on Fri, September 05, 2008 at 12:22 said:
Matt - I did respond to your post but there’s an overzealous spam catcher in the wings!
The Pied Pipes on Thu, September 25, 2008 at 4:09 said:
Funny, I wrote a post back in July that addressed some of these issues and mentioned Shirky’s reasoning:
http://www.mypipeline.co.uk/blog/2008/07/20/new-public-service-media-with-old-business-rules/
I think Matt’s comment “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” is spot on, but there is also the issue of old-school commissioning itself being hugely expensive and not particularly open to the ‘wisdom of the crowds’.
Maybe we should be looking for ways to establish ‘public commissioners’ as part of the 4IP process…I find that most often the missing element of ‘Public Service Telly’ is the public.
To be honest, isn’t YouTube the new public service media outlet? I can go on there and start a campaign just like on Battlefront, find out how to play the guitar (from people who do not expect anything in return other than eyeballs and the odd comment) like on schoolofeverything, and watch the best political speeches of all time. That all serves me quite well as a member of the public. YouTube is already, for want of a better term, an ideal platform for public action and service…
I think too that the 4IP project should look to establish more of a physical neural network of local public service content…I’ve blogged about that here:
http://www.mypipeline.co.uk/blog/2008/09/22/heres-an-idea-for-4ip-outdoor-interactive-public-new-media/
Mark Rock on Thu, September 25, 2008 at 4:39 said:
Interesting
We too are interested in physical spaces like libraries, shop facades etc. Unlike the web, they are very underdeveloped places.
I think this is a realistic (and a great) area of focus and would actually be relatively easy. Interestingly, we working with these guys at the moment -http://citywall.org/pages/about - on integrating their multitouch libraries into our broadcast technology (which essentially takes all that stuff happening on the web and turns it back into TV - bit strange I know). So think huge video walls broadcasting local content when passive but springing into lovely iPhone-esqe life when interacted with.
We’re actually just about to build a prototype 1m wall at our offices if anyone is interested in having a look.
Mark
Jon loves Electric Guitar on Wed, February 11, 2009 at 4:48 said:
I completely agree with you. Even if a few people look at your content surely that IS validation enough? the internet is an open resource for people to freely express and enjoy themselves!
« Previous entry: Head of 4iP Appointed
Next entry: Mobile usage in US v EU »