More on the End of Content Businesses
by Joey Manley
A friend of mine, a cartoonist who sometimes makes her living with her comics, and sometimes does not, told me that the Publishing 2.0 post that I linked to the other day depressed her. “I’m a content creator. If content creation isn’t a business anymore, what am I supposed to do? Open up a web hosting shop?”
It hadn’t occurred to me that the thesis would be read that way.
I’m not sure if I’ve understood Publishing 2.0 blogger Scott Karp’s point — since I went to creative writing school, rather than business school, you always have to remember that my credentials are suspect, especially when we get to the higher reaches of business logic — but my interpretation of “content businesses are dying” means good things for cartoonists, and other creative types, not bad.
When business journalists/analysts/whatever talk about “business,” they don’t mean the kind of thing that you and I do, where we eke out (or try to eke out) a middle-class self-employed income using our own creations (comics in your cases, code and services in mine). At least, I don’t think they mean that. They mean, specifically, big business. The kinds of businesses that show up on the stock market. The kinds that have to make enough money to support lots of employees, lots of vendors, lots of stockholders, the kinds of businesses that have to pay rent on large buildings and electric bills and phone bills and corporate taxes and R&D and still have some left over at the end of the day. It may be hubristic, but for many, these are the only kinds of businesses that deserve the name “businesses.”
Just insert an imaginary “big” in front, wherever Karp uses the word.
The reason big content businesses (e.g. “publishers,”) are in trouble is specifically because individual content creators can now reach audiences, and sometimes even monetize their relationships with those audiences, without giving up the ownership of their creations.
Scott Kurtz has said, and I agree, that webcomics is a cottage industry, an aggregate of thousands of individuals trying to make a living doing what they love (and tens of thousands more doing it for a hobby). In Publishing 2.0, Karp is saying that the entertainment industry itself is becoming a cottage industry, which is squeezing out the big players at the top, and putting power in the hands of the hundreds of thousands of small players at the bottom. Or, at least, that’s my interpretation of his essay.
Some, like, say, Platinum Studios, are trying to move webcomics closer to the old-school entertainment industry model, centralizing everything, investing money up front in the development of original content, which they will own lock, stock, and barrel — not by right of having created it, but by right of having paid money for it (well, really, in corporate terms, those are the same things; Ford “makes” cars by paying people to make them; Platinum is a “content creation” business in exactly the same way) — and then monetizing their ownership later, in large, spectacular ways (like a movie deal). That’s an understandable strategy, for a company whose expertise and experience lies in that kind of activity, but I suspect it will fail, because the entertainment industry itself, generally, is moving in exactly the opposite direction. Webcomics are already perched exactly where everyone else will end up.
In a cottage industry version of the entertainment industry, the only big businesses that will succeed are the ones who empower the individual creators to reach their own goals, on their own terms, and make their own money: the technology vendors, the service providers, and the attention aggregators. The Ebays of content, in other words. And that’s where I’m hoping WCN will be at the end of the day, for the webcomics niche of the entertainment industry.
Hope that helps.
April 6th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Yeah, your last post was a bit fatalistic, but this does clear it up nicely. In a lot of ways I agree with you, and while these cottage industries will take a bite, perhaps a large one from content driven business, I don’t think they’ll ever kill it off off completely.
The best analogy I can draw is that I would much rather pay 8.50 to see a Batman movie done by Chris Nolan, even though I could hop on YouTube and see someone in a Batman costume acting out a fan fiction for free, even if it’s VERY well done, which some are. The good news though is no one is forcing me to chose, nor will anyone ever likely do so. I can view them both if I like, or chose what I like and ignore the other.
Media is evolving, and in evolutionary steps, some species go extinct, but many just adapt to the new landscape, and ultimately, are better off for it.
April 6th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
It’s true that the big budget, flashy action picture won’t be easily produced by any cottage industry. Quieter, more character-driven types of full-length features, too, will always be difficult to produce, just because the supply of actors who can make memorable characters come alive on screen will always be limited. So, yeah, movies will be able to avoid the coming cottag-ification, probably — unless the audiences dry up (too busy watching YouTube and reading webcomics to go to the theater! ha!)
April 6th, 2007 at 2:19 pm
I think there are two problems with this and that, for all of its shortcomings, big business has always taken care of. These are quality control and barriers of entry. I am a creator myself and very sympathetic to the content and spirit of what you say. However, my frustration with webcomics has been in the two areas I mentioned above.
First, Barriers of Entry. Though unpopular, in an untterly pragmatic sense, BOEs are almost always good things. Imagine if, in an exaggerated sense, any idiot with a handheld camera could release a movie on 3,000 screens nationwide. The internet is lousy with terrible, terrible webcomics. Look at the self-publishing sites, too, and all the horrible novels and self-help books, etc. I am not picking on webcomics. If anybody with some free time, a scanner, a computer and photoshop can make a webcomic, then anyone possessing all those things will make a webcomic. Unfortunately, it seems that this is what is happening.
My second point of quality control is very similar so I won’t go too far into it. But, those big publishing houses also have, in my estimation, experienced editors who act as filters keeping out the bad stuff and encouraging the polishing f the rougher stuff until it resembles a quality product.
I love comics. I read them all the time. I love prose fiction and read it as well. I gave up on webcomics and don’t bother with self-published prose. Why? I grew weary of wading hip-deep through schlock in hopes of something worthwhile.
I don’t want to sound overly pessimistic, but if you are truly hoping for a decentralized system I hope someone, somehow, is being that filter. There are no barriers.
Cheers.
April 6th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
Good questions/concerns — good enough to address them in a new blog post, rather than having them be buried down here in the comments. I’ll make such a post soon. Am on my way to dinner right now, and probably closing shop for the day, so it won’t be before tomorrow. Thanks for stopping by, though.
April 6th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
I think that webcomics… and heck, most things on the web now that I think of it… have proven anything, it’s that “free” will trump “quality” every time.
Tim, the problem I have with your Batman example is that it’s a TV nation, not a movie nation. You pay for your cable service, you get thousands of entertainment choices. While the majority of TV smells of ass, most people accept it because they’re not paying on a per-show basis. And if they don’t like it, they go look at something else. Your cable company is a service provider, not a content provider. This is how the web is.
But with movies and paper comics, you’re paying for that single piece of content. If you don’t like Batman, you can’t just leave and go watch 300 in the theater next to you.
So I think fan fiction is just the dark, painful price you pay for being able to look at something else besides the Batman movie you may or may not enjoy.
Anyway, off on a tangent now…
April 7th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
Yeah, maybe I should have stayed away from movies by example. Regardless, my point was that quality will always carry a premium, medium be damned, (even in TV I picked HBO this week because I love Entourage) because the very best will always have the option of saying “pay me or I won’t do this anymore” and people will.
April 7th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
But Tim, what you’ve just said doesn’t contradict what I meant. I guess I still haven’t explained it well enough.
If the thesis holds true, small, one-person (or tiny team) businesses will do just fine — will thrive, and create lots of middle-class self-employment livelihoods for lots of creators — the ones, that is, who create the quality (or, at least, the popular) material. These livelihoods will be no worse than the salaried livelihoods currently enjoyed by, say, employees of DC/Time/Warner. In many cases, they will be better. And there will be more of them.
Big, multiple-investor content businesses, the kinds of businesses that journalists and analysts are paid to obsess over because there’s Huge Amounts of Money being stockpiled All In One Place and That’s What Business Journalism Readers and Analyst’s Clients Want to Hear About? Those are less likely to succeed in the long term. If the thesis holds.
April 8th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
Naw, I get ya man, and I’m with ya, we’re both just dancing around the same point, I think. It’s what happens when you have a writer and an artist trying to talk business!