Analog
(old) media is all about managing scarcity by controlling distribution, the net
effect of which is to enable publishers to price access to their “toll roads”
as they see fit.
Digital media, by contrast, is premised on the assumption that the tools for content creation, selling, distributing and marketing said media content enable meta-professionals and prosumers to create a surplus of “good enough” content.
This content, in tandem with un-tethered distribution and pretty good information search/retrieval functions, operates in complete disregard for the old media-based pricing models that preceded it.
As such, when the forces of analog media collide with digital media, as they have in music, newspapers, yellow pages, books and magazines (and are beginning to collide in television and movies), a brutally efficient “creative destruction” process occurs.
Simply put, when the digital forces can assemble a “good enough” version of the un-tethered content, then in most cases, the analog media provider is in deep trouble (read: devastating business model disruption).
In this guest post for O'Reilly Radar, I take a look at Media Disruption in the real world; examine Differentiated v. Undifferentiated Media strategies; and analyze the implications for Re-thinking Your Product and Your Audience.
You can read the full post HERE.
UPDATE 1: Great article by Dan Lyons, writing under 'The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs' about "Why Mainstream Media is Dying." Excerpt: Every once in a while you get to see a mainstream outlet cover a story right alongside a blog, so you can put them up against each other and see why one was so much better than the other. This week TechCrunch and the New York Times (photo) provided just such a lesson. The issue was a company called Zynga, which makes online games, like FarmVille, that have become incredibly popular on Facebook among people who are missing parts of their brains. On Oct. 31 TechCrunch broke a big story called “Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem of Hell” about how Zynga was making money by selling scam ads — the kind that trick kids and other frigtards into signing up for useless subscriptions to stuff they don’t want. After all this, we woke up Saturday to find a story in the New York Times, also about Zynga (and other Facebook game companies) with the headline, “Virtual Goods Start Bringing Real Paydays.” The Times put two reporters on the knob-polisher, and somehow they managed to interview Pincus, and to quote him — and yet they included not a single word about the scammy ads. Not. A. Fucking. Word.
Related Posts:
- Digital Media Rules: The Open Sourcing of Information
- Apple, the ‘Boomer’ Tablet and the Matrix
- How Social Media Works: It's About Breadcrumbs and Conversations
- The Programmable Fan Site: A New Media/Ad Unit Model
- Flip Video News Network: Crowd-Sourcing meets CNN
