Conflating "media" and "content" is the issue here.
Facebook is successful because of content. Google+ failed because there wasn't any content.
Heading tech up against content in some way is also a silly argument. Good tech supports the transmission of content. Bad tech gets in the way. Good content is enabled by good tech.
Ultimately, a web page with some stirring, moving or life changing words on it is going to have more potential impact than all the NerdMagic in the world. But: they're heavily codependent.
Most content on Facebook is garbage. So more accurately it's addictive content that fits the algorithm which is important. For that to happen, you need users. Typical chicken and egg problem.
Garbage content is part of the plan. That is literally what makes it addictive. See ‘The Hook Model’. Basically people ‘gamble’ for good content like they do on a slot machine.
Facebook is successful because of its ease of use comparative to Google+. Facebook's genius was that it was designed to be easy enough for the masses to use. Google+ was clearly designed by engineers, for engineers.
There's your problem right there, but you got it right in the second part of your post.
> Good tech supports the transmission of content. Bad tech gets in the way. Good content is enabled by good tech.
That was the crux of the issue. Steve Jobs understood this. Its why my Mom was able to grasp an iPhone interface far easier and sooner than the Android phone she had had for years before. It still blows my fucking mind how anyone can find the iPhone more intuitive, but I guess that's because I grew up in the 80s and 90s, with 80s and 90s computers as a kid, so you had to learn the technical underpinnings somewhat in order to even operate those machines.
They don't support that content is king, they support that ease of use is king.
Imagine if, to upload a TikTok video, you had to bring it into an editing suite as complex as DaVinci Resolve and tweak all kind of things... add and refine audio tracks... color grade it, etc. It wouldn't have taken off at all.
What all these platforms have in common is that even idiots can use them to make "content"... if you can even call it that.
I really enjoyed reading this article. One key takeaway for me was how its in the interest of companies like Substack to initially have a lot of high profile creators defect from their motherships (like a lot of journalists have recently done) and then eventually decrease reliance on the superstars so that Substack's value doesnt immediately decrease once these superstars leave.
At the time he wrote it, the whole of Hollywood yearly revenue made less than 2 weeks of telcos’, and SMS by itself was worth more (SMS has been commoditized since, to the benefit of Apple and Facebook).
Wow, thank you very much for the link. Now I see what's gone wrong with all the ISPs in America.
> “I don’t want to be anyone’s dumb pipes,” says Hindery. “If all you do is racks and servers, that’s dumb. What we’re doing is melding the network and the content.
This is a fancy way of saying, "I'm not content to just create a huge, high-speed network that services as many customers as possible, I want to extract yet more revenue out of a business I probably don't understand and can't be expected to competently manage."
Trying to explain to these idiots that the only thing an ISP - be it Comcast, AT&T, Charter, Spectrum, Frontier, whoever, can offer me, is a great big fat dumb fucking pipe, is like trying to explain the finer points of Shakespeare to a mollusk.
Content sells the tech. The tech makes the most money though.
Microsoft is 1 tril bigger in market cap than Disney. Strange to use a Bill gates quote and then discuss Disney films.
Nintendo as a company makes more money on selling consoles, than on Zelda.
The article touches on this and could expand on it. No new tech launch is going to work without content, so in that sense it is king, but the money is in the tech.
> Nintendo as a company makes more money on selling consoles, than on Zelda.
In revenue or profit? It’s kind of definitional that there’s more revenue from the console than the game given that for any console you need to purchase on average ~1 game at most and a game is worth far less than a console. However, it’s my understanding consoles are generally loss leaders, priced at or below cost in anticipation of profit driven by sales of content.
In 2017 Nintendo sold roughly $257 of Switch hardware for $300. 40 dollar profit. They might have increased the margin since then.
A $60 game is sold to a retailer for $38-45. The publisher takes 20 of that (nintendo in this case) and the advertising & developer take the remaining 20. So nintendo probably takes 40 dollars profit from first party games like Zelda.
Margins on consoles used to be lower, $10-20 and they'd make $40 on the controller sales. The joycons on the switch cost 45 to make and sold for 50. The margin is back into the console as a whole again.
Digital sales on ingame items are likely close to pure profit.
It can't though. Books, printing presses, etc. are all forms of technology. Good content can't as easily propagate and proliferate without the infrastructure created by the tooling that supports the activity. You might be inclined to state that this belabors the point of being specific about modern Web technologies, but still - the medium is the message. They are still linked even if the underlying technologies change.
The Iliad and Ramayana were using the most cutting-edge information technology of their time, and spreading with the backing of the extant political regimes.
They were not competing with TikTok, CATV, and Disney.
Well, good tech can propagate even further and wider.
Nobody cared/cares (where nobody=very few) for the Iliad or Ramayama on the other sides of the world that created them.
But technologies created on each side quickly reached the other side or spread all over the globe. This includes primitive technologies which we tend to forget they are technologies like agriculture, the wheel, iron forging, etc.
"Content" has a pretty broad definition. In a social network, "content" is people (and what they post). In a search engine, it's documents (and what's in them). In an app store, it's apps.
If there was nothing worth reading online, no one would use Google. If no one was posting anything interesting on Facebook, it would have no users. If there were no apps worth using on the iOS store, iPhone wouldn't have nearly as big a market share.
You're looking at content in a very narrow definition. A database is content, as is a casual conversation with your friends.
>"Content" has a pretty broad definition. In a social network, "content" is people (and what they post). In a search engine, it's documents (and what's in them). In an app store, it's apps.
If we stretch the definition beyond any meaning, or to mean "input" or "data" in general, then sure.
Usually by content we mean news, music, videos, movies, writing, comedy, commentary, etc. though.
Not apps, office documents, or people's social messages...
>You're looking at content in a very narrow definition.
Me and most people using the term. Perhaps you're looking at it in an extremely wide definition?
As many have pointed out, this is an obviously oversimplified maxim. But I’d like to add two reasons why I think it is a useful heuristic despite that.
1. Great content can’t be commodified, despite the industry’s best efforts.
2. Content lives in extremistan. [1]. Though the average piece of content has little upside, the upside of a great piece of content is nearly limitless.
At the very least, content is a “prince” alongside distribution (network effects).
[1] “Taleb provides another example of Extremistan: book publishing. Suppose one randomly chooses a thousand authors, and adds up the total number of books they have sold. Now, add the bestselling author in the world, J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books. Her book sales with vastly exceed the total of the other thousand authors.”
That’s because distribution is currently “open” for some definition of “open”, due to the advent of internet protocols and risk of legislation.
If the US cable TV companies wanted to shut down access from Apple/Netflix/Disney and force them to go via the cable TV company like they used to, they technically could (cable TV internet is the only high download bandwidth option for most Americans). They wouldn’t brazenly do this by shutting down access completely, but they are doing this via throttling and I could see rate limiting certain services in the future unless you pay more, etc. Or Comcast can exempt itself from data caps.
At the end of the day, the owner of the pipe that comes into your house or the wireless signals has the technical power to control what comes in and out and at what cost. Which is why it should be a publicly owned utility.
First, the phrase "content is king" doesn't originate with Bill Gates, or Sumner Redstone, who popularised it. It appears in a 1974 book, and pre-dates even that. See: https://lgkmarketingcc.com/content-king-said-better/
A discussion based on this premise should at least get the provenance straight.
Aguments over provenance notwithstanding, my view is that the aphorism is a convenient bit of stage distraction attractive to media monopolists themselves aware of the real truth: network control is emperor. Andrew Odlyzko argues this; https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=235282 (as @fmajid notes elsewhere in this thread)
And this goes beyond just getting the proprietor's cut, the vigorish, skimming your 5, or 10, or 30%.
Central control of a network means deciding what that network is. Where it begins, where it ends, what goes in, what comes out, who can receive, who can send, what interactions are possible, speeds and latencies, what messages are heard, what are not, who pays, who gets paid, who plays for free.
These factors are wholly ignored by contemporary US (Borkian) antitrust doctrine.
Even Redstone appropriated the phrase from elsewhere.
Though it’s often misattributed to Bill Gates, Sumner Redstone popularised the phrase “content is king” which was used in a 1974 book, and pre-dates even that. See: https://lgkmarketingcc.com/content-king-said-better/
A good start would be to stop using this stupid terminology. Quoting RMS [0]:
I think it is ok for authors (please let's not call them creators, they are not gods) to ask for money for copies of their works (please let's not devalue these works by calling them content) in order to gain income (the term compensation falsely implies it is a matter of making up for some kind of damages).
Generally consuming something means that it no longer exists after it has been consumed. A fire consumes a home and it can no longer be lived in. I consume a hamburger and therefore you cannot eat it. Content on the internet isn't consumed in this sense. If anything it's your own time and attention that is consumed when watching videos.
> If anything it's your own time and attention that is consumed when watching videos.
Yes. 'Content' certainly isn't consumed from the perspective of the content providers, who can keep streaming the same data until they choose not to.
[Edit] Hmmm. Consumption, in the sense of irreversibly using a one-time resource, is sort of relevant. Once I have consumed food, I cannot re-consume it (in it's original form). Using this meaning, however, I 'use' rather than 'consume' a physical book or other format where I have a physical copy of the data (e.g. in the form of a non-rented DVD or similar).
The novelty of such works, however, is consumed when seen for the first time. You can never see a work of art for the first time a second time. And that's important.
A big difference is that others can consume the same thing, a million content creators is more than enough to supply content to the entire world. There is no reason why consuming digital content should cost a significant part of your income when it is so cheap to produce at global scale.
The etymology of the words “consummate” and “consume” are completely different. The former is from con (altogether) and summa (sum total; taken from summa (highest supreme)): my interpretation is “union with god”. Which fits with its adjective definition: high degree of skill; complete or perfect. The later, to consume, is from con (altogether) but added to sumere (take up). And if someone were to altogether-take-up I would assume that there would be nothing left.
The new way of interacting with videos and other media online does warrant a different term. Many people really don't watch videos, they consume content, ie. scroll or swipe through an endless stream of tweets/videos/reddit posts stopping and then moving on.
It's just like watching a movie vs watching TV, reading versus paging through the newspaper, etc.
> Many people really don't watch videos, they consume content, ie. scroll or swipe through an endless stream of tweets/videos/reddit posts stopping and then moving on.
How is that different from plopping down the sofa, turn on the TV and watch the endless stream of content being broadcast to you? This isn't really a new thing, most people consumed TV that way before digital consumption became a thing.
I'm really ambivalent about Stallman's language crusades. Similarly to how I dislike the focus on the newest politically correct terminology.
Why is "creative" OK, when "creator" isn't?
I think it's more about the fact that adopting the enemy's language is seen as a kind of submission, a recognition and acceptance of their power over you, even if their words themselves aren't "bad" intrinsically.
Not sure if it's the right hill to die on. Eventually words and meanings readjust to describe reality. Map and territory, you know.
Well, there's also the theory - articulated best in Orwell's 1984 of the places I've seen it argued for - that language also shapes what thoughts can be held or shared. Given how much impact choosing the programming language has on a technical project I'm inclined to think there's something to that idea, and Stallman may be more sensitive to that than the average bear.
In this case the language crusade prompts us to think about our assumptions more deeply. The comment did bring my attention to concepts I had not noticed before.
There is an adversarial aspect to it, but it's no different from debating ideas. You're just questioning certain premises, it doesn't mean you have to discard them afterwards.
My pet peeve is User Generated Content. Generate is often used when an inanimate object gives rise to something, so UGC is dehumanizing in addition to being devaluing.
I don't love the terminology either, but it's like a lot of evolving linguistic culture: it tends to stick in the craw of those of use who grew up using different words, not because it is "wrong" per se but because it is different. I think the linguistic shift actually does map on to a notably different attitude toward the way cultural products are produced and consumed, as other commenters have noted, as well as the democratization of the resources for creating things like video due to the ubiquity of smartphones.
Stallman expanded on this somewhere else. The argument was that it uniformizes, degrades the work and focuses on just the mere aspect that it can fill up some container. Like the contents of standard cargo ship containers. Video, podcast, article, whatever it is, the important part is that we can serve ads alongside it and we can market it and we have all these "interfaces" that have nothing to do with the ideas conveyed or the artistic effects or intents etc.
Your example is very good for proving my point; the expression "without content" talks about what? about the content? So you would say "content without content" to speak about a text that does not have substantial content?
Exactly. See the comment elsewhere about Orwell's 1984. In which Newspeak [0] is "a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary designed to limit the individual's ability to think and articulate "subversive" concepts such as personal identity, self-expression and free will"
Facebook is successful because of content. Google+ failed because there wasn't any content.
Heading tech up against content in some way is also a silly argument. Good tech supports the transmission of content. Bad tech gets in the way. Good content is enabled by good tech.
Ultimately, a web page with some stirring, moving or life changing words on it is going to have more potential impact than all the NerdMagic in the world. But: they're heavily codependent.