The Great Google Tube Content Debate
Posted on October 13, 2006
Filed Under What's New, For Argument's Sake, Advertising/Marketing |
The Google You Tube take over has got people talking about what media 2.0 will look like. One part of the debate is: does it mean a radically lower overall cost of advertising? Here’s my answer.
In the past media organisations have had some form of control (being able to meet distribution costs, owning broadcast networks, cable pipes), a point made by numerous writers over the past 48 hours. Go here for a great summary.
Control is gone which is why papers like the Guardian are spending millions taking out their digital territory, in the hope of replicating control. I think Murdoch has done a better job by buying platforms.
Ultimately though Web 2.0 is really about corner shop publishing and the ability to monetise small e-publishing operations.
YouTube, for example, is used extensively by people who have set up video publishing businesses and want to avoid all the server cost associated with storage and delivery - and so give it to YouTube. Just as I might not want to host pictures in an epublishing enterprise - I give that to flickr.
(If I was YouTube I’d be seeking ways to monetise my presence as video host to small publishers and if I was google I’d be looking closely at what I can do to support small publishers rather than rake them with ad sense).
Web 2.0 is the corner shop medium. It gives me plenty of ways to develop a website and to draw in content at next to no cost. Larger media players are challenged by the amount an individual or small team can achieve.
The sheer volume of content in a newspaper website is no longer a challenge for me to match or at least appear to match. I can use thegoodblogs to display other blogger posts, I can draw in a YouTube video (or have my own videos hosted by YouTube), upload a few podcasts, take in a few feeds, have a grazr window, lay down a few sidebar widgets. It takes a day.
Look at blog aggregators as an example. Blogbridge is slowly developing into a content rich destination with wider coverage than many newspapers. Podcast agggregators are doing much the same, and becoming almost overwhelming in their content depth.
Advertisers will certainly benefit from this - if I want to launch a classified and ad sale business for a dozen websites I can aggregate them and undercut most established media businesses because it can all happen at very low cost.
For example what’s to stop me doing a $5 house sale classifieds profitably? Craig Newmark does house ad sales for free.
What it means is anybody can create content-rich, multimedia products and go in search of an audience
We’ve yet to explore the implications of a million publishers who used to be called journalists unleashing that economic power.
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