TJ Walker discusses why traditional media is failing, pointing to Gigaom's closure as a symptom. Content is cheap to make, there's too much of it, and ad revenue has dried up. He sees YouTube creators and corporate marketing content filling the gap, but worries local government reporting will disappear unless audiences find a way to fund it.
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Gigaom is going out of business. What does that say about the future of the media business? So folks, if you're not familiar with gigaom, it is a wildly successful, at least I thought it was a wildly successful high tech website that covers all the latest in tech news. They have fancy conferences, big names, celebrity venture capitalists involved with it, and they have 6.4 million readers every month. It's huge. It's astronomical. Now we've all become inured to the news that a daily newspaper has gone out of business. That happens all the time. A Barnes and Noble store going out of business. It frankly seems odd to have a week go by without seeing one of those two things happen. But a fancy new high tech website, media business that has millions of views, that's not supposed to happen because after all, a site like this doesn't have legacy costs. They're not paying for the pensions of the truck drivers to deliver the print version. They didn't have a print version. They didn't have truck drivers, they didn't have pensions, presumably, and, and yet they still didn't make it. What does that really mean for the media business? Well, what I think it means is that there isn't going to be a media business for most people in the media. And that is because content is virtually free to create. There are more content creators, including yours truly, than ever before. So there's an explosion of content. Blog posts, articles everywhere, video everywhere. There is frankly much more supply of content in the world than there is demand. Basic economics, takeover advertising rates are plummeting. It's simply not adding up. That's why we see so many newspapers going out of business. They're no longer selling the 5 and 10 and $50,000 full page ads. They're substituting that for $50 banner ads on a webpage. And that is simply not sustainable. Now here's the thing nobody likes to talk about. Media professionals like to say, well, all the other stuff is junk and if people want quality, they're going to have to pay for it. Here's the thing, there are a lot of so called amateurs who are creating great quality. WikiLeaks supposedly has fewer errors than the Encyclopedia Britannica. And there is a tremendous amount of high quality Entertainment content. On YouTube, for example, young people in their dorms are creating funny entertainment. Now the real challenge is of course what's going to happen when we need people to explain to us serious legislative issues facing Congress. You're not going to get college kids in a dorm room in Berkeley to have the resources to do that. Now, I'm not predicting that the New York Times will go out of business, but it's probably going to have some eccentric billionaire buy it, turn it into a non profit so it can continue. But what about the rest of the media? What I think is going to happen is continuation of what we're already seeing to some degree. And that is more and more businesses are creating content that is of use, is of value to people, myself included. I do on average 7, 8 blog posts a week, typically a couple a day. At least seven videos on YouTube that I like to think are somewhat professionally produced. And yet I'm not in the media business. I'm in the media training, public speaking training business. The content I create is just as a promotion for another separate core business. Now there's good and bad to that. Anytime someone is creating content and not getting paid for it directly, somehow they're getting paid by your eyeballs to promote something else. Now in my case, I try to be honest and fair and accurate, but if you look at all my videos and all my content over the course of a year, you'll certainly detect a bias. A bias in favor of encouraging people to get media training and presentation training. At least I'm up front about it. I'm worried though, when we get to the point where your average city council, your average school board, your average state legislature has no serious media coverage and the only people writing about these serious governmental matters are the lobbyists who are paid for by the largest interest groups. That's where the real trouble is. There's not a lot of glamour, there's not a lot of click bait in covering a city council meeting. But decisions are made there that will affect our lives. I'm TJ Walker. If you have some solution to the media business, post it here.
