Reblog: The Future Of Media

I wrote this post almost nine years ago, before our investments in Twitter, Tumblr, Wattpad, SoundCloud, Kickstarter, and a host of other bottoms up media businesses.

I can remember the moment. I was in my home office in our old home at 11 West 10th Street. That was a sweet office, top floor, with windows facing front and back. I wrote it on my laptop on the conference room table that I took from Flatiron’s offices when we shut that firm down. I have no idea what happened to that table. I’m going to find out what happened to it.

I recall the feeling of writing this post. I was filled with inspiration. It was as if I was Moses and God had just handed me the ten commandments, but there were (and are) only four.

I still think it’s one of my best posts. I hope you agree.
————————-
I have seen the future of media and it looks like this:

Mashed Up Blog Posts at tech.memeorandum

Mashed Up Funny Videos at delicious

Mashed Up Playlists at webjay

Here is the future of media:

1 – Microchunk it – Reduce the content to its simplest form. Thanks Umair.
2 – Free it – Put it out there without walls around it or strings on it. Thanks Stewart.
3 – Syndicate it – Let anyone take it and run with it.  Thanks Dave.
4 – Monetize it – Put the monetization and tracking systems into the microchunk.Thanks Feedburner.

Leaving aside the rights issues, which I know are large, if I were a television executive right now, I’d take my content, microchunk it, put a couple calls to a video ad server in the middle of it, and let it go whereever it wants to go, safe in the knowledge that whenever the show is viewed, I’ll get to run a couple 15 second spots in the middle of it (which I could change whenever I wanted to and which I could measure).

This is where media is going and its not going to be stopped.

I know that Jason Calacanis hates the really simple stealing that goes on with Engadget or Autoblog posts.  But you know what?  He’s not going to stop it.  What he should do is monetize each and every post with an ad of some sort and a tracking mechanism of some sort and let the content flow.

RSS is a new medium.  It’s not like the web any more than the web was like print.  Remember back in the late 90s when the media execs tried to use the web to sell more papers?  It doesn’t work.  Content wants to be consumed in the media its delivered in. 

So RSS content is not going to be used to send people to the web.  It’s going to be consumed in the RSS medium, whatever that turns out to be.

The data is pretty clear about this. The publishers that put only an excerpt of their posts/stories in their feeds get pretty low click thru on those excerpts. Those that put the full post in get a lot more readership.

So the trick is to figure out how to monetize RSS right in the medium, not as a way to send traffic back to the web where it can be monetized with the traditional web techniques.

Why did I decide to write this post today?  Because in the last week I have gotten between five and ten requests to use my RSS feed in some sort of syndicated and mashed up RSS or web service.  I’ve told all of them to go for it.

Here is the deal with my RSS feed. Anyone is free to use my RSS feed to produce whatever content they want to produce with the following exceptions.  I do not want and will not allow my content to be used in pornographic or hate related properties.  And the posts must be shown in their entirety with any advertising and tracking tools that I decide to use in them.  And I must be given attribution for my work.

Other than that, go for it.  Take it.  And build something great with it.

#Web/Tech

Comments (Archived):

  1. JimHirshfield

    …and when you descended from the mount, the mass media was worshipping the golden calf, erecting walls and soliciting subscriptions as in days of old. Fire and brimstone ensued…(likely how the old conference table went up in flames).In time, the path to the promised land was seen by a righteous few. And USV was pleased and shined its graciousness upon them.

    1. pointsnfigures

      And they are still trying to build walled gardens today. Music publishers can’t understand why whole albums aren’t reversing their downward trend. This morning, I was watching ESPN and turned it off because it was boring. Much easier to access the sports news I wanted to access on the internet.The trend isn’t just in media. It’s hitting fin tech, ag tech, med tech and other business silos. But executives there just don’t know it yet.

      1. diymanik

        The education system could also face the same problem. The courses haven’t been able to hold the interest of students as expected. They don’t seem to have the impetus to go to e-university when the sword of student loans isn’t hanging over their head.

        1. pointsnfigures

          Education will be disrupted. I have sketched it out. It won’t be from the inside of the asylum.

          1. Wade

            When I was applying to college back in ’08, I hadn’t taken stats yet. So I went on iTunes and downloaded a stats course from Harvard. I was new to the space back then and didn’t look for certificates of completion, but today students can get certificates from accredited online institutions.When I was a senior interviewer in the Admissions Office at Claremont McKenna College, I took note of the few students who listed their “extracurricular education.” These kids are autodidactic, a trait that we try to cultivate in college but often fail to do so.

          2. diymanik

            I’d love to hear your thoughts on what form that may take.

      2. Elia Freedman

        I read about a play in a football game last night and wanted to see it. The highlight was no where I looked except behind a paywall. Oh well. Everyone lost my “business.”

  2. Dave Hendricks

    Many of the most successful publishers now have paywalls of one sort or another. You might not see it as a paywall, but your personal data like an email address is a form of currency. Giving away content is not a business where you make it up in concert ticket sales later on, like musicians’ strategies have become.Freemium is good to a point but at some point, unless you aggregate 100% – which makes you a technology company prolly – you need to monetize your content. How many pure play publishers are getting venture $ to reach scale on a free model?

    1. LE

      but your personal data like an email address is a form of currency.Nobody has to give their “real” email address though. They can use another free email address for all the ephemeral requests for an email address. Then, like when you use a slight variation of your name [1] that ends up on a postal mailing list you can easily filter any annoying uses of that email.[1] For example if someone wants your name you simply use “Dav Hendricks” or “Dave Hendriiicks” etc. I know someone who makes two restaurant reservations at different times doing this. They use “erman” and they use “herman” in order to book two different times.

    2. Russell

      Subscription business models are a good thing. I think people have become fascinated with the free part of freemium… and haven’t worked out how to get people paying for the premium paying stuff! I would strongly caution any media company going to a pure ad-driven, or even an ad + events model unless you’ve been in the game pre-2008 and see how that cookie can crumble.

  3. William Mougayar

    From your list, I would say that Monetization hasn’t happened as such. Content itself has been difficult to monetize. But our Attention to content can be monetized. So the monetization is peripheral to the content itself.2005 was when we were enamoured with RSS feeds, and it started to get unmanageable from a Reading point of view. I recall there were dozens of RSS readers, and I kept trying several of them. That was pre-Google Reader days. Now content is totally unbundled and everyone of us is a publisher.That has created a challenge in re-assembling that content from a user point of view. We need to go hunting for it, following links, Twitter feeds, aggregated sites, Nuzzel, Feedly, Zite, etc…That challenge is getting harder, not simpler. I was about to write a post emphasizing the fact that now we need to PULL content on our own. It will not come to us assembled or aggregated like it used to. We are left to our own devices somewhat, and some of us are getting good at it, others less, but it’s a competency we have developed. And it is time consuming.The present of media? If you think content, content wants to be:Discovered Filtered CuratedPersonalizedAggregatedRe-published Liked Shared Discussed AnnotatedEtc.

    1. Elia Freedman

      So what is working and for whom regarding Monetization?

      1. William Mougayar

        If you take Facebook or Twitter as examples, the content is free, but they are monetization the attention spaces around that content. Even the new media pubs, their content is free but they monetize by ads, events, transactions, etc.. A blog community owner (like Fred) monetizes indirectly by making connections, meeting people, learning stuff, promoting their own agenda sometimes, getting us to support what they believe in, etc… Maybe monetization doesn’t have to be monetary. Monetizing = extracting value.

        1. ShanaC

          the content on twitter and facebook though is the self. The content on the nytimes is the world. Very different models

          1. William Mougayar

            They are inter-twined too, no?

          2. ShanaC

            not completely. ebola isn’t the self.

    2. Charles Kenny

      Your description of content seems to describe Reddit pretty well. ;)Pulling our own content is one area where there is a real opportunity. Time savers have always been a great way to make money, and since the supply of content is now so great, it is no different from shopping. Curation is, to a certain extent, one answer, but what I would really pay for is a service that organises my Netflix queue into a list that ranks it on a ‘must-watch’ basis.

      1. William Mougayar

        Reddit is good. yeah, Netflix’s recommendations are a joke.

    3. awaldstein

      Is there really a difference between content and our attention to it?Content without attention doesn’t exist. Content with attention is media.

      1. William Mougayar

        exactly…what i was saying is that you monetize the attention around content, not content itself. and that’s something the old media hasn’t been able to understand if they keep putting paywalls around their content.

        1. awaldstein

          Ahh..understand.The argument of course is that then the only models that make sense are media which by definition are only useful at scale.Not a big fan of pay walls but I am one for subscription models as not all content is valued strictly by the numbers.

        2. Salt Shaker

          Many content driven media companies need a dual rev stream (sub and ad rev) to make their biz models work–particularly legacy brands w/ print and digital assets. Although ad rev continues to migrate to digital, the strongest beneficiaries are still primarily a select group. There are far more digital brands chasing ad dollars then there are ad dollars to satiate the need. Many media companies have yet to strike a good balance in offering free vs. paid content. The NYT is a prime example (e.g., free digital access limited via an archaic monthly counter and excessively expensive sub rates).

          1. ShanaC

            Even all digital could use subscription. CPM dollars continue to go down because of the way audeince development actually works in practice.Unless you have a huge source of free media (that creates quality/ethics issues), you have to question what we’re going to do about how to explain people about ebola. or their controversial school district election, or something

          2. Salt Shaker

            Many pure play digital media companies have the reach and scale to be successful w/out a sub model, but they’re more the exception than the rule. Also, a growing reliance on programmatic trading has lead to the commodization of media.

          3. ShanaC

            Buzzfeed is the only one I can think of, and they are arbitraging traffic, and have a model that is fundamentally ad tech. many others can’t, and are not fundamentally built out in a way they actually optimizes the value of their own traffic.So….they lose tons of money, and effectively the creation of traffic is a money pit sink….

          4. William Mougayar

            That’s the dilemma they face, but they also still have a large overhead/cost structure that keeps pulling them, and that forces them to justify charging for content- but for the wrong reasons. Pay-walled content isn’t necessarily “better” content than free content.

          5. Salt Shaker

            An all access digital subscription to the NYT, including an intro promo rate, costs annually $341. That’s insane, particularly as you note “pay-walled content isn’t necessarily better than free content.” I’m sure the NYT has done testing on price elasticity and various promo offers, but that kind of pricing certainly limits the paper’s appeal.Interestingly, I wrote to the NYT a while back suggesting they test giving away a FREE iPad (or other tablet) w/ a 2-yr paid subscription for say $500. The iPad would be preset to default to the NYT’s app or home page. Given the potential quantities involved, the NYT presumably could secure very fav rates from tablet manufacturers. I actually got a very complimentary response from one of their mktg geeks, but I’m not sure if they ever explored further.

          6. William Mougayar

            yup. they still haven’t figured out the right model.

    4. Alexey Semeney

      But if distribution would go event better, then you would be able to read aggregated content from different, but relevant authors on one blog.

      1. William Mougayar

        content aggregation is a tough beast. i was in that business for 4 years and milked the variations on it. it helps, but you’re always going to be missing something. you need a multiple approach that includes both serendipitous and targeted filtering + aggregators.

        1. Alexey Semeney

          Sounds interesting. However, content aggregation and content distribution are very different things.”serendipitous and targeted filtering + aggregators” – we just moved from this problem and left it for the blogging community based on following. And it works just great.I would be interested about your feedback on AtContent. What would be the best way to contact you?

          1. William Mougayar

            Sure. so, are you like Tabula/Conduit or Atomic Reach perhaps. I’m at wmougayar AT gmail.

          2. William Mougayar

            Got it. Forgive the analogies, so it’s a bit like what Zemanta is trying to do as well, right?

          3. Alexey Semeney

            Nope, Zemanta and other similar companies are doing it on an enterprise level. AtContent is a platform for bloggers, the basic usage is free. Btw, I sent you email.

  4. Martin De Saulles

    Sadly, RSS did not enter the mainstream in the way many of us thought it would. Interesting that email still remains a popular distribution method for Web content. That’s how I saw this post.

  5. Alan Warms

    I remember reading that post vividly. It was the playbook I used as Publisher of RealClearPolitics. Awesome!

    1. leigh

      crap i don’t remember anything from yesterday vividly!

    2. Wade

      HUGE fan. I remember pitching RCP to everyone in my family one Thanksgiving. Thanks for all you’ve done.

      1. Alan Warms

        I was just the Publisher – the founders John McIntyre and Tom Bevan ran and run the show and deserve all the credit

        1. Wade

          Yes I read your intro article… Still great work! You had a hand in some of my favorite features.

  6. kenberger

    you are banning your stuff from being considered #VCPorn ! I love it !

  7. jason wright

    BMT

  8. matthughes

    Prescient.

  9. sigmaalgebra

    I believe that there is some valuable insight in these thoughts, but it seems to me that more is needed.We can see that in the idea of content being sent around, mashed up, and used to “build something great”, the goal of the creator of the content is to get it, and its ads, in front of a wide audience. And the intention is for the audience to use the mashups, etc., as a way to find content that they like.E.g., inNo Pain No Gainhttp://avc.com/2014/07/no-p…July 16th, 2014,there was from a Twitter tweet i’ve grown tired of spotify and pandora — listening to the same stuff.so i’m going to try soundcloud for a while — any hints? with answer follow me (and others) on soundcloud. here’s mehttps://soundcloud.com/fred…and here’s my liked trackshttps://soundcloud.com/fred… For a second example, inTech Circlehttp://avc.com/2013/08/tech…August 20, 2013there was I have found it increasingly difficult to find blogs and blog posts by regular bloggers who are talking about things that are interesting to me.The big aggregators (Hacker News, Reddit, Techmeme) sometimes surface interesting posts, but where do you find about the every day blogger who is writing about tech stuff?The idea of a blog roll seems to have come and gone. I stopped running a blog roll here at AVC at least six or seven years ago. So, for each user of the Internet and for each of their interests, say, regarded as unique in all the world, long term or just of the moment, there’s a problem finding content that user will like for that interest.Yes, one approach to a solution is to put content into “microchunks”, embed some links to ads, and make the result generally available for mashups and something great.Another solution is to use “big aggregators (Hacker News, Reddit, Techmeme)”.Of course, these aggregators tend to be focused narrowly on certain subjects, especially information technology startups.Yes, still, the problem is not solved, for either the creator or the consumer of the content.So, we need a better solution.Okay, how to do that?Maybe say that the problem is search, discovery, recommendation, curation, notification, and subscription of all the content of new media.We have to suspect that a lot of people have seen this problem and thought of how to get a better solution. Approaches include the social graph, manual curation, intuitive heuristics, matching keywords/phrases and sorting results by some measure of gross popularity, artificial intelligence, big data, machine learning, cluster analysis, support vector machines, singular value decomposition, speech recognition, natural language processing, etc.Maybe there is a better way? Hmm ….I have to doubt that very many people will be able to figure out a good or even significantly better way.

    1. William Mougayar

      good comments, close to what I was saying. i don’t think there is a technological solution. the solution is you and I spending time to gather/pull all this content on our own.

      1. sigmaalgebra

        Thanks. i don’t think there is a technological solution. It’s easy enough to believe that, but my view is that we can have a Web site that is an effective “technological solution”.Of course the history of technology is awash in examples of solutions that are rock solid but which in advance would broadly have been seen as just impossible. So, to know whether or not something in a STEM field is true, have to evaluate it. The NSF, NIH, DARPA, ONR, and much of the rest of the US DoD, the editorial staffs of good, appropriate journals, and Ph.D. committees at good research universities are good at such evaluations.Of course, another approach to evaluation is to build a Web site to deliver such results and let people be convinced by the site.For the Web site, I have the software is written and running. I need to do some polishing of the UI/UX, give a critical review, and maybe make some revisions. Then I’ll load some initial data and go live.Last night I went shopping for a first server — processor with 4.0 GHz clock and 8 cores, 32 GB of 1600 MHz ECC main memory, 4 hard disks, 1 TB each, …, less than $1500. Amazing.So, get some publicity and use Grimlock’sGuest Post: HOW TO SOCIALhttp://www.avc.com/a_vc/201…Feb 26, 2013andMinimum Viable Personalityhttp://avc.com/2011/09/mini…Sep 29, 2011try to get some users.

  10. leigh

    Ha, you totally got ‘they won’t be able to stop online stealing’ thing wrong. #embarrassing!

  11. Anjuan Simmons

    I have long respected the power of RSS. After all, why should I go to each individual site when my RSS reader (currently, Feedly) packages all of them into a nice interface for me? However, I think that RSS will always be a background method for getting content that the average user is unable to comprehend. This if fine because the same is true of Java, HTML, CSS, etc. I also think that, while longer form content may drive more readers, services that summarize content will create a nice niche for themselves. A example of this can be found in the popularity of the @savedyouaclick Twitter account.

  12. jason wright

    if Fred’s still in the air i might be able to get away with this one.does anyone have the OnePlus smartphone, and perhaps an “invite” going spare to buy one? crazy marketing strategy imho.

  13. iggyfanlo

    You and your team at AVC have made some truly impressive calls in the past 10 years

  14. William Mougayar

    Well, this post inspired me to write another one- The Future of Pulling Content is Youhttp://startupmanagement.or…

  15. ShanaC

    One problem with this – No one is creating a unique voice, and the ad prices keep dropping. So content becomes sadder 🙁

    1. William Mougayar

      what do you mean by “unique voice”

      1. ShanaC

        This is a long conversation about audience development online.Basically, IAB standardized ad types (and they are working to standardize native ads in some way shape or form now)The smart thing then was to load up of IAB standard types. This drove inventory to be effectively infinite, which made it smart to try to do the following1)JUice pageviews/uniques in artificial ways, including bot traffic2) Load up on as many banners as possible to earn as much on ads as possibleGoogle then made it worse by algorithmically defining “good content” so that when people searched, some people got seen and others didn’t.This basically taught consumers of media that all media is fungible and similar. Content in place a should be the same as content in place b. Then twitter and facebook came along, and amplified these same tendencies among consumers. Furthemre, they also amplified that media should appeal to the base parts ourselves as reflections of ourselves because of small character limits. Media companies courted this tendency because minimal changes in presentation drove tons of one off traffic to specific articles, (but not overall brand traffic on a constant basis) This is again due to the algorithms involved in facebook and twitter.Ironically, the one thing media companies haven’t built – algorithms that reflect the people they want to have in order to court them and keep them around permanently on their site. They also don’t court and grow writers with said same similar voices. They lack a voice and a vision. And they lack a way of incorporating their users voice as well into this vision. (Though vox might be a rare exception to this rule…I’m debating this in my head)partially this is due to the chinese wall. partially this is due to questions involved in journalism ethics (how to override algorithms for basic knowledge purposes) But other than that, its mostly fear of what they think they are selling versus actually selling.As a result, content is very generic sounding. I keep thinking many sites are just segments of clickiness for types of people. And there are strong overlaps between these types. Which means w’ere all boring, and learning and thinking less.</rant>

        1. ShanaC

          wow, that was a rant

        2. Matt Zagaja

          LukeW posted an interesting page of notes on advertising and UX that included this fact:Out of 1,707 ads you may click on 17 (or less than .1%). 31% of ads are never seen by users (off screen, etc.). 50% of mobile ads are clicked on accident. You are 478x more likely to survive a plane crash than to click on a banner ad.http://www.lukew.com/ff/ent…The sense I get is that the Googles and Facebook of the world want to find good content for their users so they build out these algorithms, then many companies deconstruct them because they realize if they can push their content through to these platforms they get page views which equal ads which equals real money. Then Facebook or Google get disappointed with the declining quality because the noise starts to drown out the signal from their proxy indicators and they change things which then impacts real people with real jobs. It’s a difficult tension. I think it also leads to a lot of short-term thinking.There have been plenty of content generators that have cut through the cruft, however. I especially would single out podcasts like Freakonomics and websites like Vox, The Verge, FiveThirtyEight that have found a workable model for quality content.

          1. ShanaC

            CTR is a bad way to measure IAB ads in the first place. The reason CTR was adopted was that first in buyers were all direct response types.And content generators is exactly what the problem is . Its not a cutting through a cruft. Its an ownership of the problem.Vox, the Verge, and 538 are wait and see problems. We don’t know how long they will live. Other, similar choices have morphed away from pure news to more opinions (salon, slate)

    2. sigmaalgebra

      The world is just awash in, there’s no shortage of, good content. But mostly the content doesn’t get out there.Why?The media industry is still solidly stuck with the results of McLuhan’s “the medium is the message”, and the industry wants to stay with the old message that worked best for the old medium.The old medium is well on the way to a small fraction of its old self or dead.The “old medium” was essentially the limited bandwidth of a morning newspaper, an evening newspaper, a few radio stations, Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report, and a few TV channels dominated by, right, ABC, CBS, NBC, and a few more, and we can throw in publishers such as Random House. That was it.So, limited bandwidth.Then the message was to reach as wide an audience as possible, and, thus, the content was mostly pitched at some average common man in the street, say, 2.1 children, which mostly didn’t exist.Now apparently the main cable TV channels, maybe NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, Fox, and a few others have their battles of the titans for audience share, struggling, struggling, struggling, with each nuance of Katie Couric or whomever, trying and trying and trying to get another 0.5% of audience share. It’s play musical deck chairs on the Titanic.In simplest terms, the audience is growing old and dying off, and young people are just ignoring Ms. Couric and all the rest of the media royalty.I have three quite good TV sets and a connected set top box but have watched TV, at least not at home, for a total of less than 60 second for years. Newspaper, magazine? I won’t have one in the house. Radio? Similarly.For me, old media is gone with the wind and nonsense. I always did scream at how brain-dead it was, and now I go to the Internet.But, even on the Internet, the major efforts still totally fail to get it: The efforts are still trying to use brain-dead content to grab eyeballs from their imaginary common man in the street. They want to be the one media outlet with the greatest number of eyeballs just like did make sense in the old days of limited bandwidth.Instead, the new direction is focused media, focused on small and specialized parts of the whole audience.So, in the future a media outlet will have a specialized audience and provide content good for that audience. Or, the action will be in the long tail.The old industry will hate any such thing and fight it to their last drop of blood because in the past any such content was a career killer.So, as the old industry remains with feet stuck in the concrete of old low bandwidth, focused new media will provide the good, specialized content, of which there is no shortage.There are some focused efforts, but each one strains to be more brain-dead than even the old industry, e.g., goes for wacko content, say, space aliens, multiple universes, the hideous, absurd, vulgar, degenerate ridiculous, etc., all no doubt partly in an effort to have contempt for the audience and exploit it.The audiences and content are readily available. A key is to take a few thousand board-feet of 2 x 8s and break them over the heads of the executives of old media to see if they are just asleep or really dead and, if just asleep, wake them up and begin to pound out the old narrow bandwidth nonsense and pound in some decent common sense about content.E.g., one of my old pet peeves is cooking shows that are determined, with determination stronger than granite, always to pass out fantasy and never but never be usefully instructional. So, they keep passing out their fantasy, and I keep ignoring it.More generally, the old nonsense is solidly baked into the industry, e.g., so that anything that passed through a video camera has to be under the control of old media values and, thus, brain-dead, with much more emphasis on entertainment value than content or usefulness; can see this situation if watch video produced for K-12 classrooms. We’re talking total trash.There was one exception: Late one night, broadcast as a means of K-12 teachers recording the content, I happened to see a program on plane geometry. Right away I sat up, thought, “good stuff, wow, who’s doing this?”, “recognized a lion by his paw”, and watched to the end to see the credits. Right: The lecture was by A. Gleason, long at Harvard with help of T. Apostol. Gleason? At Harvard he was made a Harvard Fellow and just skipped his Ph.D. and never got one. Early on he knocked off one of Hilbert’s problems. Good plane geometry lecture! No doubt the usual producers had to be bound and gagged to permit Gleason actually to provide good content!Why total trash? In the old industry of low bandwidth, anything actually instructional was instant career death. So, the industry is populated by people who hate anything instructional, or even informative for that matter. This brain-dead stuff is on the way to changing. And that’s necessarily much of the future of media.

      1. ShanaC

        that’s not necessarily true either. I think the bundling problem in media is being reshaped, not dying away.

        1. sigmaalgebra

          If I understand what you are saying, then, yes, but: While there may still be some outlets for the common man in the street, for 99 44/100% of the outlets and maybe 80+% of the audience, page views, etc., one outlet, with bundling or not, still will have to focus on a narrow audience.Why? Else someone else will come along with content better for part of the audience and split it off.More generally, it’s simple: One size fits all doesn’t fit very well. So, in everything from shoes to raincoats and much more, need a wide range of sizes, and styles, prices, etc. Same for content.Due to the low bandwidth, old media needed essentially one size fits all — that was their “message” from the old “medium” of low bandwidth, e.g., just three TV networks for the whole country.Now with high bandwidth, media will have to have more variety than, say, the rag trade, autos, furniture, courses in a college catalog, etc. Then there will also be some cases of media content analogous to one-off, bespoke, or custom. The “message” will be focused outlets of, in total across all the outlets, enormous variety due to the “medium” of the Internet. It’s as inevitable as water runs downhill and as solid Darwin wants millions of species, one for each niche.I can believe that an empty niche will get snapped up as a juicy business opportunity like a slow duck by a fast, hungry croc.I can’t believe that the ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, Fox school of media will react.Then there will be enhanced need for the ability of each person to find, for each of their interests, long term or just of the moment, content they will like for that interest, the interest treated as unique in all the world.Enhanced? There have long been 100+ million blogs tracked by Technorati, and as inhttp://avc.com/2014/08/rebl…sometimes Fred has wanted better means to find content he will like for some of his interests.How to do that? Yup, I’ve worked it out; yup, there’s some math involved; and I have the corresponding crucial core software and front end Web site software running. Yup.

  16. Alexey Semeney

    Hi Fred, awesome decision. Then you would be interested to connect your blog to AtContent.com for sure. We have a plugin for WordPress, so you can easily use it.Once you connected, all your articles become available for reposting via JavaScript and signed with your name. You’d be able to see who repost you and how many times, as well as how many readers you gain across all other blogs.We avoid content duplication, we use no-follow and canonical tags for all the links in reposts. If you update your post, it’ll be updated across all blogs with your reposts.Who would repost you? For example, Technorati and other tech blogs. I think you’ll like it.

    1. luca unti

      i’ll test it

      1. Alexey Semeney

        Tested?

  17. Kasi Viswanathan Agilandam

    What I infer from the post is …so over the last decade the readers have also changed fromJust reading the content (0-comments on your original post).Reading and Analyzing the content and then arguing about it….P.S. today’s comment is limited to 50 only because it is old-content … if it were new aboutwhat would micro-biology look like in 10-years from now … “The future of BIOLOGY” then I do hope it would have attracted about 100’s.

  18. Joscelyn

    Talking of taking content and building something great with it, didn’t this blog used to be licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution licence? it would be interesting to know why it isn’t any longer.

  19. paramendra

    Obviously, I had not read the original. This post is as intriguing as its introduction.

  20. Eduardo Teixeira

    Really, really nice!Monetizing this way is still not that easy but Medium might be the way to go very soon

  21. Mariah Lichtenstern

    Good one. As for TV Execs…Hollywood is slow to adapt, aren’t they? #PopcornTime

  22. kskobac

    I love this post and it’s vision, but in the last year Techcrunch, Mashable, and even GigaOm have changed over to partial RSS feeds. It feels like RSS is under attack again. Reading cached feeds on the subway is getting harder and harder.

  23. Marcin Szelag

    Hi Fred. Thank you for reblogging as I haven’t read this post earlier. Recently I wrote my own post on RSS to a similar tune. If someone is interested in my POV here is the link to my post: http://ms.innovationnest.co….My argument is that many people are missing the point. I agree that content has been largely fragmented over the years and it is harder to find great/unique content on the web these days. Everyone is in fact a publisher and that is a good thing. What hasn’t been really figured out is the distribution part. Authors on one side – readers on the other side. How do we connect these two parts together. My idea for a solution is simple: a) there needs to be a simple protocol – RSS b) we need to be able to categorize content – hashtags c) consumption of content needs to happen in a unified enviroment – reader app.When it comes to monetization it is also simple. The web made content free and available. In my POV it should stay that way. What we should figure out is how to cash in on content with ads. It is the oldest model in the media business and it works. The model needs to be adapted to the nature of the web.The other thing that is still new is mobile and how we consume content on our phones and tablets. Mobile web will be much bigger than its stationary version. This is the opportunity.I’m really interested in your opinion.