
Peak content: The collapse of the attention economy - joeyespo
http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/peak-content-the-collapse-of-the-attention-economy
======
rl3
This trend has parallels with the games industry. Many publishers and
developers decided long ago that monetization above all else was the goal, and
it didn't matter if that meant pumping out title after title with terrible
production values and sleazy monetization strategies.

Zynga pioneered this approach to such a degree that they were essentially the
BuzzFeed of interactive entertainment. Later, many AAA games would follow suit
embracing the Free-to-Play model. Higher production values with the same
sleazy monetization strategies. The end result was games of all types selling
their soul in the name of making a quick buck.

Web content has the same problem. In the face of content becoming a commodity,
the reaction thus far has been to produce more content. More content means
lower quality content. Lower quality content results in monetization becoming
more difficult, and thus prevalent. More prevalent monetization leads to ads.
Ads kill page performance, thus driving anyone away who doesn't have an ad
blocker. That in turn leads to idiotic things such as paywalls and traditional
media being turned into a glorified blogging platform ( _cough_ Forbes). It's
a race to the bottom.

The solution to this of course, is to simply make a high quality product.
Ensure the content is top-notch, kill anything that isn't. Make sure page
performance is excellent. Hand-curate ads such that they're non-invasive,
fast, and not killed by ad-blockers. Admittedly the last point is difficult,
but it can be done. If the publication is sufficiently niche, a subscription
model could actually be appropriate in lieu of ads; nautil.us is a fantastic
example of this.

In the end, it boils down to the classic error of the suits screaming
"monetize!", ruining their product and shooting themselves in the foot in the
process. This same dynamic applies to games, print media, and even startups
alike. There's a reason YC constantly reiterates that monetization efforts are
foolish in the face of a product that isn't great.

~~~
jonnathanson
_" The solution to this of course, is to simply make a high quality product.
Ensure the content is top-notch, kill anything that isn't. Make sure page
performance is excellent. Hand-curate ads such that they're non-invasive,
fast, and not killed by ad-blockers."_

I agree with this strategic sentiment, but I'm not sure the solution is as
simple as you think it is. Higher quality content generally requires much more
expensive production costs, and it's far from clear that the revenue side of
the equation will support these costs at anything more than hobby-level scale.

 _" Admittedly the last point is difficult, but it can be done. If the
publication is sufficiently niche, a subscription model could actually be
appropriate in lieu of ads; nautil.us is a fantastic example of this."_

I love Nautilus, as I imagine a lot of HN readers do. But how is it doing as a
business? Is it thriving? Is it crushing it? Is it barely scraping by? I'm not
posing these questions Socratically; I'm genuinely curious to know the answer.
Extremely curious, in fact, as someone who's spent a lifetime in the content
business and desperate for any glimmer of hope along these lines.

My instincts lead me to a similar hypothesis as yours: find a niche,
overservice it, and invest in quality as a differentiating factor. But
historically, these sorts of publications have rarely been goldmines. Many of
them, especially in the old days of print, were borderline nonprofits --
heavily subsidized by charitable publishers or donors.

I suspect there is a niche out there for the specialty publications of the
world: your web equivalents of Road & Track, Field & Stream, Wine Spectator,
Robb Report, Foreign Affairs, and so forth. I am not as sure there is a
lucrative niche in general-interest categories, such as news. Even still, I'd
love if any of the niche publications in today's brave new world -- Nautilus,
for example -- would let us in on their business data. Even just a slice of
it.

~~~
rl3
> _Higher quality content generally requires much more expensive production
> costs, and it 's far from clear that the revenue side of the equation will
> support these costs at anything more than hobby-level scale._

True, but high-quality content also serves to build reputation. Positive
reputation can still drive revenue, even in this day and age. If major
publications haven't failed on that front, then they've failed on others, such
as presentation. Excellent products have to achieve and maintain excellence in
all areas, and any chink in the armor is reason for people not to regularly
use a product. I don't know of a single major publication that's checked all
the boxes.

> _I love Nautilus, as I imagine a lot of HN readers do. But how is it doing
> as a business?_

That's a good question. I don't know, but I really hope it's doing well.

~~~
jonnathanson
_" Positive reputation can still drive revenue, even in this day and age."_

Can it drive a business model, though? Again, let's turn to the case of
Nautilus. We can probably assume it has a great reputation amongst an
admittedly small group of readers. But is that reputation driving subscription
revenue sufficient to keep the publication in the black? To keep it growing?
To keep it securely in business?

Once again, I'm 100% aligned with you in my hopes and desires for the
industry. But hope isn't a business model. I'd like to hope that Nautilus is a
great example of how to run a content business; unfortunately, at the moment I
have insufficient economic evidence to back up that claim.

I agree with you that excellent products can outcompete commodified trash
under certain circumstances. I'm less sure that enough people want to pay for
the product at all in this case, however, be it excellent or otherwise.

Whatever the case, thank you for a compelling take on this subject. I quite
sincerely hope you're right.

~~~
rl3
> _I 'm less sure that enough people want to pay for the product at all in
> this case, however, be it excellent or otherwise._

In that case publications like Nautilus would probably have to be ad-
supported. Hand-curated ads would go a long way towards preserving design,
performance and even revenue since most ad blockers wouldn't block them.

However, there's still massive benefits to outsourcing ads—namely advanced
analytics, targeting, and click fraud detection right out of the box.
Implementing any of those in-house is certainly non-trivial.

That said, most publications—especially niche ones—are selling direct to their
audience right now. There's nothing wrong with that, unless consumers prove
adverse to paying for content in a subscription manner. I tend to strongly
agree with you on that point.

While perceived value is one issue on that front, I think a lot of it has to
do with the inconvenience of signing up, paying, and logging in. App stores
don't have this issue, and they offer a lot of print media content these days,
though I don't think they've really solved anything yet.

Film has Netflix. Music has Spotify. Print media doesn't really have an
equivalent. So, it's possible that may be one angle. I know there's startups
that have tried this, but none have approached the scale or success that
Netflix or Spotify has.

------
Balgair
I think that human produced content is at a peak. Like call center employees,
the management has to balance the ability for people to shovel out crap
articles with the burnout rate. HuffPo, Buzzfeed, and others are clickbait
farms that have high turnovers [0]. The content is not very deep, but they put
out a lot. This is something that can, and is in the process of being, easily
automated. Much sports journalism is already automated [1], why can't these
clickfarms be the same too? 538 and other sites that just do stats can easily
just have a giant number database that output correlations for click's sake.
That would ruin their userbase, but may expand it. The issue at heart is what
does a click mean? Currently it is linked to a person that you can then show
an ad at to sell something. However, it is more and more likely that those ads
are worthless wastes of dollars to the sellers. Other older methods, like mail
with a robot that 'handwrites' a note to you from the company, may be more
profitable as ads.

[0][http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/the-
econ...](http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/the-economics-of-
blogging-and-the-huffington-post/?_r=0)

[1][http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34204052](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34204052)

~~~
benten10
> 538 and other sites that just do stats can easily just have a giant number
> database that output correlations for click's sake.

Ahh, there you see the problem! you can also output all harry potter novels
from digits of pi, but that doesn't get anyone anywhere. : ) The entire point
of a good content producer is to understand what the customer needs, and put
it out, NOW. So I'd imagine 538 will be automated about when computers start
writing Harry Potter equivalents.

~~~
lmm
I don't think you'll see entirely computer-produced stories for a while, but
what you can already see is computer-suggested correlations and framework
stories that can be touched up quickly by a human editor. You might need that
last 10% of human labour, but if 90% of the job can be done by the computer,
that means 90% fewer staff.

------
stuart78
Sometime in mid-2015, my old aggregation reader got shut down I had to jump
ship over to Flipboard. The most annoying part of this journey has been the
total reset of my blacklist of news outlets and topics. Content farming, hat-
tipping and "some shit somebody said on Twitter" is just spam delivered
differently, and its frustrating that historically respected media has taken
so long to think about not only the impact on their value, but how it impacts
their core values.

Beyond my recreated blacklists, so much garbage has narrowed my focus and
sources. NYTimes, a few RSS feeds, HN for tech. Hopefully, as with books, the
culture will begin to correct course.

(Gonna break out my cane and start waving at some kids any moment now)

~~~
corybrown
I moved over to Flipboard after Google Reader shut down, but it's no
replacement. I miss the efficiency of Google Reader, none of the alternatives
seem to match up.

~~~
douche
The closest thing I've been able to find is The Old Reader (theoldreader.com).

Best thing is it was able to import all my old Google Reader subscriptions.
Although by now, I think that ship has sailed for other people...

------
Animats
Here's a thought. Suppose we had a search engine which tried to figure out the
sources behind an article. Build a tree which represents the provenance of the
statements in the article, tracing them back to their original sources. Like
Wikipedia style, but automated. IBM Watson might be able to do this. The goal
is to track facts back to their original source, and identify what's new in
each article.

The search engine could then discard most derivative articles, even if they'd
been reworded. It's a form of automated curation, based on content, not
attention.

~~~
sparkzilla
We do something similar at Newslines, a crowdsourced news search engine that
is a curated database of news events, kind of like a database-driven Wikipedia
meets daily news. We generally source each event to a single news report, but
we may add more sources programmatically. By sorting the news into discrete
events we can eliminate a huge amount of manual searches on Google and other
sites, compiling news from multiple sources into a crosslinked timeline format
that saves readers days of work.

That said, I think the drive to fact-check every statement in an article is a
red herring. Other sites have tried this (Infobitt, Grasswire) and it doesn't
work well for general reader.

------
danharaj
> “What if, inside of Columbia Journalism School, we built Columbia Publishing
> School? And what if we did the same at Missouri, Northwestern, and Berkeley?
> What if we decided to pipeline, train, and mentor future publishers, chief
> revenue officers, circulation directors, and sales chiefs alongside the
> future journalists we are teaching to code?”

I know this is _specifically_ about the economics of content creation and
media consumption, but talking about the rise of the Internet and the
plurality of voices that previously couldn't be heard from the point of view
of the owners who can't profit just seems incorrect. It's this kind of
thinking that leads to stronger and stronger intellectual property rights,
which is a euphemism for more and more restrictive information control.

Materially speaking the Internet has ushered in a golden age of media, but its
revolution is being held back by outmoded economic relationships. This article
is wondering how to reassert those relationships over the Internet instead of
wondering what new relationships are possible.

~~~
Animats
_" What if we decided to pipeline, train, and mentor future publishers, chief
revenue officers, circulation directors, and sales chiefs alongside the future
journalists we are teaching to code?"_

You can probably get all of those you need from the layoffs at Yahoo and Aol.
We've probably passed "peak people generating and selling crap content."

Have we hit "peak advertising" yet?

------
ilamont
_Use your properties to do A /B testing, measure the effectiveness of these
experiments and then, most importantly, drive adoption of the most successful.
Don’t adopt the Silicon Valley catchphrase of failing fast. Instead learn fast
(or, so as not to draw the ire of sub-editors, learn quickly.) Constantly feed
strategic intelligence back into the organisation, then refine the strategy
and repeat._

IMHO, there are real obstacles to these types of experiments taking place. For
one, many media organizations still have a top-down, "me too" attitude when it
comes to innovation. The boss sees something he or she likes ("Buzzfeed is
hot!"), convenes a committee to discuss how to do something similar ("Let's do
Buzzfeed for our niche!") and then the team (or consultants) build it out ...
sometimes over a period of a year or more to "get it right." In my experience,
there is little attempt to gauge (during the planning stage or when it's being
prototyped) if the "Buzzfeed for XYZ" is something their audiences want.

In addition, in media organizations that sell advertising, resources are more
likely to be put assigned to projects that the sales team thinks are
important, even if audiences aren't really interested. An example that springs
to mind is the brand new feature on a local news website that supports auto
dealerships even though most car buyers are not going to the news site to buy
cars.

Incidentally, I have been working on a framework for the creation of media
content (including news, film, websites, music, etc.) called lean media. It
draws heavily from the lean startup movement, while attempting to reconcile
the emphasis on constant and careful measurement (A/B tests, etc.) with the
intangibles that are an integral part of the creative process. If anyone is
interested, I have a long writeup on Mediashift (1) as well as a blog (2) and
I would be interested in getting feedback.

1\. [http://mediashift.org/2016/01/lean-media-a-new-framework-
for...](http://mediashift.org/2016/01/lean-media-a-new-framework-for-media-
production-and-innovation/)

2\. [http://leanmedia.in30minutes.com/](http://leanmedia.in30minutes.com/)

------
jwatte
How about "stop pumping out thoughtless unresearched crap, and create valuable
content that lasts and people will pay for?"

(Or is the number of people who value their time so they pay for quality just
too low?)

~~~
cageface
The problem is that people have been trained to expect everything to be free.
So high value, premium content doesn't get a chance.

------
VLM
“when the paper analyzed its online traffic, they found that fully 40 per cent
of the paper is read by fewer than 1,000 people.”

I wonder what this 40% consisted of.

Never forget social signalling, "this is what everyone expects we do". They
don't actually read it or want it, but they expect to see it there, like a
glass of water at a restaurant table.

Consider how some products exist mostly to funnel purchasers up to the next
highest product tier. Likewise I suspect some stories exist mostly to funnel
readers to stories they want read, not to be read by themselves.

With no actual data, its merely theoretical, but there are at least some
theoretical models that could excuse the creation of unread content. Not that
I would waste much time or money on the unread-by-design content, although
literal lorem ipsum as content might be going a bit far.

~~~
mc32
>I wonder what this 40% consisted of.

Tangentially, this must have always been the case, perhaps it was even worse
when measurements were hard to come by. During pure print media days, lots of
what they thought people read was through wholly inaccurate methods. So that
forty per hundred is probably much improved over how it used to be.

------
MilnerRoute
Ironically, I didn't finish reading the article...

------
Palomides
punchline: "There hasn’t been enough ad revenue to sustain..." traditional
media institutions.

------
mark_l_watson
A lot to talk about in this article.

Network TV advertising woes: I have mostly stopped watching TV except for Hulu
Premium. I pay $12/month and watch about 5 hours/month Hulu content. Since
Hulu is owned by the 3 bug TV networks, aren't they doing fine with me as a
consumer? I also sometimes watch TV reruns on Netflix and I have no idea how
much content creators get paid for this older material?

Passion writing vs. commercial: I find amazing content on the web that
represent huge efforts by authors. But, I still buy a lot of eBooks because
the quality is a bit better on average.

I spend a ton of time watching conference talks on YouTube. This seems like a
win-win-win situation. I save travel and conference costs, and don't miss much
(except not getting to personally network), Google gets my YouTube Red monthly
subscription fee, and conference speakers extend their reach of who they can
affect with their ideas.

------
ddingus
"too much content"

Really, it's the sugar to shit ratio of the content, as well as the overall
quality and compelling nature of the content at issue.

Traditional media is producing a lot. Both content and ads, and often it's
mixed. "News" has become increasingly unclear, making it difficult to discern
fact from opinion. Entertainment programming is often 50/50 AD to
entertainment ratio, and the quality doesn't often justify that kind of time
investment.

People are paying as much attention as they ever did. Traditional media is
simply getting it's ass kicked.

------
ChuckMcM
There are people who understand the economics of information and those that
don't. The interesting thing is that capturing the value of your editorial
qualities through advertising is a like capturing the value of a taxi by
trying to draft off its turbulence as it drives by. Basically ad fraud pays
but actual ads not so much.

There is a bargain you make between the reader and your advertisers, you
protect your reader from aggressive overt advertisements, you provide your
readers with something worth reading. It is hard to make a retelling of a
story that everyone has reported on, worth reading.

It is also impossible (at present) to lower the friction of reading and
subscribing to a point where it gets sufficient market penetration to make it
scalable. I imagine that something halfway between flattr and the NY times
subscription is going to be an answer.

