
Content Is King (1996) - AdamFernandez
http://web.archive.org/web/20010126005200/http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/columns/1996essay/essay960103.asp
======
Bartweiss
It's fascinating to me that Gates correctly described the content we would see
and the problems in monetizing it, but was totally off base in predicting we
would have any of it fixed by now.

Content is king, and sites with content richer than plaintext have done
substantially better. Advertising has done well, and long-term subscription
models continue to drive down user counts. The line about "attract attention,
not convey information" was a prescient look at a world of shitty, flashing
banner ads. He missed subscriptions for premium features, but it's a subtle
difference.

On the other hand, ads still cripple the speed of page loads - smart
advertising has added weight as fast as internet speeds have improved. Per-use
transaction fees still haven't caught on (except in freemium games) because
they encourage users to not consume content, and because no one trusts a
central authority to set them up. Ultimately, ads are the only effective
small-charge technique anyone has found.

He was spot-on with the problems the web faces, but wrong in thinking they'd
be solved by now.

~~~
davemel37
This is how most predictions play out. It's not so hard to see where things
are going, but near impossible to predict how they will manifest themselves.

------
smacktoward
Anyone who finds this interesting should track down a copy of _The Road Ahead_
([http://www.amazon.com/Road-Ahead-Bill-
Gates/dp/9573231670/](http://www.amazon.com/Road-Ahead-Bill-
Gates/dp/9573231670/)), the book Gates published at around the same time as
this appeared. It's an interesting look at his thinking just when he was
beginning to realize (very nearly too late!) that the Internet was going to be
a Very Big Deal.

~~~
colinbartlett
I soaked that book up as a 15 year old when it was released. I remember
proudly writing a report on it.

In retrospect, The Road Ahead probably had a more profound effect on me than I
realized at the time. There's a great quote from the book which sums up why I
took hold to computers and software more than many of the other creative and
engineering related endeavors I had at the time:

"Computers are great because when you're working with them you get immediate
results that let you know if your program works. It's feedback you don't get
from many other things."

~~~
wslh
> "Computers are great because when you're working with them you get immediate
> results that let you know if your program works. It's feedback you don't get
> from many other things."

No, you get that feedback from playing music and singing.

~~~
forgetsusername
No what? He says "many" other things, not "any other things".

~~~
wslh
Cooking, dancing, playing with Legos, etc.

------
oautholaf
Which was more prescient, this or "Content is Not King"?
[http://firstmonday.org/article/view/833/742](http://firstmonday.org/article/view/833/742)

In many ways, it seems like Microsoft's late-90's obsession with content
didn't really pan out. Sure, MSNBC is still around but sidewalk.com long since
evaporated. It doesn't seem like MSFT really became a profitable media
company.

But look at how many multi-billion dollar "unicorns" are messaging companies.

~~~
Guvante
> But look at how many multi-billion dollar "unicorns" are messaging
> companies.

Talking about current valuations of relatively young companies is odd when
comparing to Microsoft's history. The scale of things means that what works
for one doesn't necessarily work for the other.

------
edw519
_As connections to the Internet get faster, the annoyance of waiting for an
advertisement to load will diminish and then disappear. But that 's a few
years off._

Still is. And will always be.

The annoyance of ads will always expand to fill any improvements in throughput
achieved by technology.

~~~
davemel37
If only someone invented a way to block ads from loading :)

Seriously though, why did it take so long for adblocker to be invented?

~~~
e12e
Long? There's been ad-blocking proxies available for a long time. Eg:
[http://www.squidguard.org/history.html](http://www.squidguard.org/history.html)

I remember setting up some kind of http-proxy with local cache an ad filters
in the late 90s, early 00s -- possibly squid with a plugin -- probably on
Slackware. Persistent local cache of static resources helped a lot with
loading sites (which doesn't really make any sense, considering browsers
already had a local cache). Ad-blocking was simple -- just replacing
banner.gif-s with a blank gif image or something along those lines. But it
worked, and preserved the layout of the page.

------
scottfits
This is incredibly clairvoyant. Gates accurately predicted the success that
content megaliths would see (I was thinking about Netflix, online news,
personal blogs), but he didn't exactly predict the huge content landslide we
face today and what it has created. For example, he basically urged
corporations to create a bunch of content, while some of the most successful
sites on the internet today simply exist to filter and aggregate content and
to separate the signal from the noise (like Google).

Overall he's still right--content is king. But I predict that in the future
the internet is going to be dominated by user generated content and websites
that can effectively show us what we want to see--websites that can refine the
ever-growing amounts of information we have at our fingertips.

------
theseatoms
"If people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a
screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information
that they can explore at will."

Incredible how far we've come from "put up with turning on a computer."

"But within a year the mechanisms will be in place that allow content
providers to charge just a cent or a few cents for information. If you decide
to visit a page that costs a nickel, you won't be writing a check or getting a
bill in the mail for a nickel. You'll just click on what you want, knowing
you'll be charged a nickel on an aggregated basis."

I can't decide if this sort of micropayment-driven internet would be heaven or
hell.

~~~
sogen
Facebook, Gmail, Google, etc., already do this, charging advertisers nickels
to blast people using those platforms.

~~~
theseatoms
I would classify Facebook and Google as advertisers themselves, but that's
semantics, I guess. Point taken.

There are effectively two classes of internet citizens: those who block ads,
and those who do not. Users like myself free ride off the eyeballs of this
second class.

Imagine if ad-blockers were included in internet browsers by default. It would
cripple the economics of the internet. (Is this the explicit reason for
Chrome? Because it look like a great defensive maneuver.)

------
voidfiles
We spend far more time consuming content generated by our friends and family
then we do consuming content created by media companies. I don't think he
could conceive that a company like Facebook could control the means of
distribution by providing something that people want more the professional
media.

~~~
jonnathanson
_" We spend far more time consuming content generated by our friends and
family then we do consuming content created by media companies."_

I think this is generally true, but less true today than it may have been a
few years ago.

What percentage of interactions on social networks involve sharing or
referencing preexisting content of some sort? Movie trailers, articles, songs,
Buzzfeed lists, surveys, memes, and so forth? Many of these forms of content
have been created by one type of media company or another.

------
SandersAK
This was written in a time before things like the Ice Bucket Challenge. It was
inconceivable to think of that as powerful content that would generate
millions of unique views.

Content is king, but what Gates could have never guessed was what type of
content.

------
applecore
_> In the long run, advertising is promising... But today the amount of
subscription revenue or advertising revenue realized on the Internet is near
zero-maybe $20 million or $30 million in total._

Look how far we've come.

------
serve_yay
For video, meaning shows and movies, content is king.

For music and writing, distribution is king.

~~~
Spivak
Why is distribution king? What is special about music and writing that makes
it so that people wont seek out quality content?

~~~
jpadkins
lower barrier to entry. easier to get to acceptable quality.

