Follow me on a naive exercise here:
Zoom out from books only let's look at some media that are competing for people's attention in 2021.
(not exhaustive:)
- Video-games (including mobile)
- Social Media (fb, tiktok instagram etc)
- Video streaming services (youtube, netflix, etc)
- Music (single purchase and streaming)
- TV (yup still going)
- News (TV, and online mostly)
- books (print and ebooks)
Let's state that most of these industries have seen the amount of content published increase exponentially in the last 15 years.
Assuming that premise to be true is it really that much of a surprise that the average income of each content author is decreasing?
The only way that would be surprising is if the number of available attention hours was increasing at an even faster rate (which i guess would not be impossible if you could measure the masses of digital consumers who entered the "attention market" in that same time period).
My guess is that the scales tip a lot to the supply side though.
We simply have too much stuff being produced now and not enough people to consume it.
Then there is the fact that in the open publishing models we have now the market does get flooded with a lot of below par quality stuff.
The way we deal with it now is typically by some sort of popularity based algorithm that aggregates attention on a few winners and produce a huge long tail of "looser" content.
I don't know if i have the right "picture" here but it is certainly my gut feeling that there is too much stuff out there for it to retain the same value.
(not exhaustive:)
- Video-games (including mobile)
- Social Media (fb, tiktok instagram etc)
- Video streaming services (youtube, netflix, etc)
- Music (single purchase and streaming)
- TV (yup still going)
- News (TV, and online mostly)
- books (print and ebooks)
Let's state that most of these industries have seen the amount of content published increase exponentially in the last 15 years.
Assuming that premise to be true is it really that much of a surprise that the average income of each content author is decreasing?
The only way that would be surprising is if the number of available attention hours was increasing at an even faster rate (which i guess would not be impossible if you could measure the masses of digital consumers who entered the "attention market" in that same time period).
My guess is that the scales tip a lot to the supply side though. We simply have too much stuff being produced now and not enough people to consume it.
Then there is the fact that in the open publishing models we have now the market does get flooded with a lot of below par quality stuff.
The way we deal with it now is typically by some sort of popularity based algorithm that aggregates attention on a few winners and produce a huge long tail of "looser" content.
I don't know if i have the right "picture" here but it is certainly my gut feeling that there is too much stuff out there for it to retain the same value.