As now happens frequently, mainstream media has taken a blog discussion, written it up, and sparked off more interesting debate. Media symbiosis continues to develop. A blog post by Jeremy Liew of the VC firm Lightspeed Venture Partners on how to build online media businesses with at least $50 million in revenue triggered an article in the New York Times titled Popularity May Not be Enough. In essence, he says that there isn’t enough money in advertising for more than a handful of content businesses to make good money. Mainstream media can still price their advertising at a reasonable price, but not the emerging players. The piece explores some of the key issues, including other possible business models, with some interesting comments from Tim O’Reilly.

I think part of the point is being missed here. A VC may only be interested in businesses that earn $50 million annually, but other people will be very happy with a healthy personal income to effort ratio. The entire economy is being modularized, and we mustn’t forget that part of the fundamental dynamic at play here is the growth of many smaller businesses to complement the media monoliths. Allen Stern makes essentially the same point.

As such we are beginning to see how the head, the long tail, and what is in between becomes populated by media and content. A couple of years ago I used the following diagram in a keynote I did at a public relations conference. I’d probably create it differently now, but the point remains that there are different segments along the power law curve along which all media and content creators are distributed. Different business models will apply at different points on the curve.

Kyle Reddinger suggests creating “niche monopolies” is the go, which aligns with the “topic specialists” I proposed. Matt Terenzio says that we will move towards “true value” in how advertising dollars are allocated. It’s very hard to think why this won’t be the case in the long term. However Scott Karp seems to believe that value has got misaligned, with Google a possible culprit in driving down advertising revenue. Mathew Ingram thinks a “measure of engagement” will help identify the value of pricing. There is indeed great value in developing the mechanisms that allow us to understand how value is created in online advertising. But in the meantime there will be vagaries in advertising pricing. All the while new business models will emerge along the curve. VCs love “scalable” business models. However there’s no reason why all business models should scale.

I often write on this blog about the fabulous things I come across in the wonderful living networks in which we exist. In this case, I have to write about something that sucks real bad.

From back in the mid-1990s I have thought that one of the most awesome applications of the Internet is for everyone to be able to listen to any radio station on the planet. Back in the bad old days of crude electronic distibution technologies (AM and FM radio), we could only listen to high-quality radio from stations in our immediate locality. As soon as the first internet streams were made I started listening to radio stations in the Netherlands, LA, Nigeria, New Zealand, anywhere where there was an early desire to gain listeners farther afield. How fantastic to be able to listen to them all, finding unique DJs and hearing local news from across the globe! I envisaged that soon anyone would be able to find and listen to their very favorite radio stations from the tens of thousands across the planet.

Since then a whole new space has arisen, with not just existing radio stations streaming their sounds onto the net, but a whole new cadre of internet-only radio stations. Soma.FM, out of San Francisco, is my very favorite DJ-selected station I’ve found. Listen to their Groove Salad station – I love it. In addition, an entirely new offering has arisen, in which technology enables us to listen to personalized music. I have written many times before about collaborative filtering music stations like Last.FM and Pandora. Other interesting ones I’ve discovered lately include Finetune and Musicovery.

Now all of this may disappear. In a shocking decision last Friday, the Copyright Royalty Board announced new Internet radio royalty rates, doing exactly what was suggested by the RIAA’s lobby body, effectively tripling the cost of streaming music, effective retroactively from the beginning of 2006, and increasing every year until 2010. Bill Goldsmith of Radio Paradise, a leading Internet radio station, does the math, working out that he will now have to pay out around 125% of his revenue, meaning he immediately has to consider closing down. Mark Cuban says “goodbye to webcasting.” Om Malik asks “Last.FM, Pandora KO’ed by new royalties?” Mike Masnick talks about “internet radio royalty rates designed to kill webcasts.” Indeed, there some bad craziness in the business logic here. In the first instance, putting music webcasting stations out of business isn’t going to increase revenue. Secondly, recording companies make the majority of their money from hits, and hits happen because people hear them. There is massive investment in promoting music to traditional radio and music TV stations, yet for no good reason the opposite attitude to online music streaming.

Now this isn’t to say that Internet radio will die completely. Those with big pockets or associated business models may still do OK. Indeed, new business models will be found. But it is an extraordinary pity that innovation in how all of us discover and listen to music is being stymied. It would be criminal if Last.FM and its peers were forced to close down, leaving us all impoverished. I hope that sense will prevail and this decision will before too long be changed.

[UPDATE] A few resources: Save Our Internet Radio, Save Internet Radio, Online petition to US Congress, email your Congressman about this, and Bill Goldsmith’s blog post about it.

Future of Media Summit 2007 is on the way! Echoing what we did in a world-first at the Future of Media Summit 2006, the conference will be held simultaneously in Sydney on the morning of 18 July and San Francisco on the evening of 17 July, linking cross-continental panels and discussion by videoconference.

The partnership document which describes the event is available below. As last time, we’re looking for partners and sponsors to help bring this fun event to the world. Let us know if you want to chat about this.

Click here to see the Future of Media Summit 2007 Partnership document

More details will be available shortly – keep posted! In particular, we will soon start to release some of the content which will be at the heart of the event – and we’re always seeking partners for creating extraordinary content about the future of media. For now, here are some excerpts from the document (excuse the corporate-speak…):

Read more →

This issue has been discussed before and I’ve written about it several times, though it doesn’t seem to go away. Robert Niles, editor of Online Journalism Review, has written a very interesting post titled Are blogs a ‘parasitic’ medium? He notes :

Over the past months, I’ve heard several journalists make the same comment at various industry forums: That blogs are a “parasitic” medium that wouldn’t be able to exist without the reporting done at newspapers.

Back in April 2006 I wrote a blog post on The symbiosis of mainstream media and blogs, in which I quoted from the Financial Times and commented on this idea of parasitism:

“The present round of chiselling may feel exciting and radically new – but blogging in the US is not reflective of the kind of deep social and political change that lay behind the alternative press in the 1960s. Instead, its dependency on old media for its material brings to mind Swift’s fleas sucking upon other fleas “ad infinitum”: somewhere there has to be a host for feeding to begin. That blogs will one day rule the media world is a triumph of optimism over parasitism.”

Cute metaphor. Yet symbiosis is far more apt than parasitism. Mainstream media in its online form largely gets attention through blogs. Blogs add immense value to the original articles, by identiyfing what’s important, pointing out flaws, adding other perspectives, making visible to all the conversations that stem from media pieces. Blogs depend on mainstream media, with its resources and editorial capabilities, for sure. Yet media is increasingly dependent on blogging for the direction of attention and layer of value-add created.

I later wrote about the collaborative space of blogs and newspapers, discussing how Technorati enables blog commentary on newspaper articles to be visible when you read the original article:

Newspapers and other mainstream media are still the primary reference points for what’s happening in the world, and the first pass of editorial commentary on that. Yet mainstream media increasingly feeds off the dialogue and news that surfaces in the blogosphere. News sites are also vastly enhanced by having the conversations that stem from their articles being visible to all. Anyone who wants to comment on a media story can have their thoughts available to readers globally, not just on a single site, but through an entire world of syndicated media.

In the Future of Media Strategic Framework, the central feature is the Symbiosis of Mainstream and Social Media, as illustrated by the circular flow of the cycle of media (click through for anthe downloadable diagram and explanation of symbiosis):

Robert uses a diverse range of interesting quotes to unpack the idea that blogs are parasitic. Ultimately, the most important reason that this is nonsense is that blogs are collectively a mechanism for us to discover what we as a society (or subset of it) find interesting and useful. Even if there were no useful content in blogs (which of course is also nonsense), their collective function of collaborative filtering is an extraordinary bound forward for the world of media.

Dan Gillmor also notes:

For the record, there are at least a dozen bloggers whose coverage of topics I care about do a considerably better job than any journalist working for a traditional media company.

while Howard Owen comments:

The best way to understand blogging is to blog. That’s why I say: All journalists should blog. You can’t get modern media without understanding blogs, and you can’t understand blogs unless you do it.

Americans are unhappy with quality of journalism. That will be the key driver of the citizen journalism, or more broadly, new forms of media content creation and distribution. A survey performed in conjunction with the recently held We Media conference in Miami by John Zogby interviewed 5,384 adults nationwide, giving some pretty solid results. The figures below show that, not surprisingly, professionals (in this case the conference goers) are not quite as cynical as the population at large. However conservatives and older people are particularly contemptuous of the standards of journalism. As a result, a significant majority of Americans believe that blogging and citizen journalism will play a vital role in the future of journalism.

Source: WE MEDIA-ZOGBY poll

While I’m a true believer in the power of media creation outside the establishment, I’m still a little surprised by the broad enthusiasm of the respondents for blogging and citizen journalism. What it comes down to is dissatisfaction with the status quo, and having seen the potential for something better. This is certainly not to say that blogging in its current form is a viable alternative to mainstream news media. New models that combine professional expertise with amateur participation will absolutely become alternatives, or at least strongly complementary to existing media. My favorite example is NewAssignment.Net. David Cohn from NewAssignment.Net reviews the idea of “crowdsourcing” in journalism, and points to techPresident, which will include input from contributors across the nation.