RSS
Twitter
Can Silicon Valley Repeal The Laws Of Economics?
from the not-paying-attention dept
The changes we've been seeing in the content industries is driven by some very basic economic forces: competition pushes the price of goods and services toward their marginal cost. There's now lots of competition in markets for information goods, and the marginal cost of producing those items (i.e. distributing a copy of an already-produced song or article) is very close to zero. Therefore, we should expect that over time, the prices of those products would also fall, to the point where the price becomes zero and producers use those information goods as a way to sell other goods. And that's exactly what we've been seeing over the last few years. Newspapers are dropping their paywalls and selling ads. Bloggers are giving away news and commentary as a way of building up their reputations. And we're starting to see musicians give away more of their music as a way to build up a fan base for their concerts. These trends are driven by some pretty fundamental economic forces, and there's not much any one person or industry can do to change them.
But some people are very confused about this. For example, writing in the New York Times, Jaron Lanier tries to blame Silicon Valley for setting the Internet up wrong. He claims that "we" could "design information systems so that people can pay for content." Apparently, Lanier hasn't been paying attention over the last decade. What Lanier is alluding to is micropayments, and micropayments have been tried over and over again. Silicon Valley was only too happy to offer consumers opportunities to pay small amounts of money for content. But it turns out that customers hate micropayments. They're a headache to deal with and they produce very little revenue for content creators. After years of trying to get customers to sign up for micropayments, websites finally discovered that it just works a lot better to give the content away and sell ads.
The other thing Lanier apparently hasn't noticed is that there's already a massive industry devoted to producing content and giving it away in order to sell ads. Last time I checked, a ton of people make a living in the television industry, despite the fact that virtually all the content they produce is given away free of charge. Yet inexplicably, Lanier seems to believe that giving away content and selling ads won't be a viable business model in the Internet age. The problem isn't that ad-supported content isn't viable. The problem is that a lot of incumbent media companies have executed their Internet strategies so ineptly that hardly anyone is visiting their sites. You can't sell very many ads if you've got a tiny audience. The solution is for them to come up with more appealing products (hint: dropping DRM is a good first step), not to once again bang their heads against the brick wall of micropayments.
Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.
