

Bridging the Culture Gap Between Content and Coding - brandnewlow
http://www.jennifer8lee.com/2012/04/16/bridging-the-culture-gap-between-content-and-coding/

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patio11
The biggest culture gap between content and coding is that we have repeatable
processes to extract a million dollars (or more) out of a programmer paid
$100,000, and can scale that to an arbitrarily high number of programmers, but
we do not have repeatable processes to extract a million dollars out of a...
"creative" paid $100,000 or $10,000, and to the extent that any business has
figured out how to scale that, they have either a) decided that the way
forward is to use prometeur talent paid peanuts (+) or b) have large Our
Business Model Is Dying signs stapled to their forehead. Techies, who like to
think we have the intelligence God gave the average squirrel, do not like
imitating dying business models. We prefer killing dying business models
instead. This is why Demand Media of X sounds like a semi-attractive
proposition as long as X is not "Programming." +

\+ I write. I don't have an emotional attachment to the profession of writing.
From my perhaps biased perspective, there exists a wide spectrum of writing,
and the overwhelming majority of it is not the New York Times editorial page.

There's a market for 5 star chefs in writing just like there is in food, but
pink slime and Tyson chicken keeps people from going hungry every single day,
and the numbers suggest that pink slime is a sustainable, growing business and
5 star chefs are a perpetually money-losing luxury good hanging on to life via
subsidies from rich people who enjoy cocktail parties in New York and the
social superiority this gives over people who eat Tyson chicken. If we agree
that large portions of the creative industries are producing
writing/videos/etc where enduring works of literary genius are neither
necessary nor particularly desirable (from "How to roast a chicken" to "3
Adlai E. Stevenson High School Students Got Perfect Scores on the SAT" to "7
year old killed in gang crossfire; Family mourns" to "Her: librarian. Him:
mindflayer. Plot: chance brings them together, they hate each other, they go
on to have mindblowing sex, stay tuned for more of same in books 2 through
8"), then the really interesting questions are not about quality so much as
they are about process / business model / etc. We have good, interesting
answers to many of those... and our answers frequently do not include high-
paid, high-status creative folks.

P.S. If there is any pink slime in the audience, I apologize for putting you
in the same sentence as the New York Times editorial page, it is just adopting
a common conceit to make a point.

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patio11
I feel the need to refine this:

It occurs to me that today is an _impressively_ terrible time to run a content
company but a great time to run a content business. If you are, genuinely, as
talented a producer as those rarefied folks who actually did fairly well under
the old model _and_ you have business savvy, there exist a variety of new
models who have economics which are radically, radically better than any
option presented to you under the old status quo.

e.g. If you possess skills and audience equivalent to a midlist genre fiction
author, you'd be pretty much insane to take a standard publishing contract
right now. jakonrath.blogspot.com has written literally books about how the
math shakes out.

e.g. #2: If you're really really talented at explaining very hard things to
some identifiable audience of people who have money to spend, you _could_ get
a _whole five thousand dollars_ by spending six weeks writing that up for
publication as a dead-tree book. If you end up on the NYT best seller's list,
you may even receive royalty checks which approach the imposing salary of a
municipal water department HR clerk. However, if that field is commercially
viable, there exist numerous other paths whose punch-line is "less work, more
savvy, _radically_ more money." (Publish and promote an e-book is one of them.
That is easy to explain but probably far from the most lucrative option.)

The combination we haven't seen much of yet is "Take the new model, then scale
it like the old model." (Outside e.g. platform companies like Amazon / Apple /
etc.)

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joeag
I think you could add to your examples curation.

As shown by the gentleman that publishes HackerNews Monthly, there's
definitely a market for the collection/curation of content, and that business
probably scales pretty well.

There have to be all kinds of audiences out there that don't have time for a
deep dive into the 'net to find the content they are regularly interested in,
setup RSS feeds, etc. Bringing quality content to them that either entertains,
educates, or enlightens (not to mention enriches) would seem to be a good
business with a very good future.

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yummybear
That is a truly horrible font choice... :(

