Talk is cheap. Content is cheaper still.
It's a supply and demand world, and there is nothing in less demand today than words.
You can easily find dozens of articles on any given topic. Often overlapping in both theme and content. Rehashing each other, writing new articles based on the same finds from the same terms on the same search engine.
Still we produce. Still we hope that somehow throwing our two cents into the bottomless internet wish well will somehow reward us in the future.
If I had bought a lottery ticket for every piece of content I've written on the internet, I'd probably be a richer man. There's no easier way to starve than trying to make a living feeding the webs obesity - unless you're a content platform or a marketer.
Attention is in demand.So you don't write for the audience. You write for the marketers. This is content marketing. People don't need more content, but businesses need more attention.
To get your attention, they need something worthy of it.
This means that the age of democratization of information that the internet was supposed to supply, has already passed. With content marketing, the race is on to create the best content to attract and entertain in order to sell stuff.
So we're entering something like The age of capitalization of information. All the amateurs will be pushed out by professional entertainers with huge budgets.
Nobody on Facebook are telling me what the do anymore. They're all telling me what they read. Facebook is the word of mouth marketing side of content marketing.
Twitter is flooded by agendas more than opinions and reflections.
The blogs that are still alive are professionals. The pewdiepies of the world are taking over YouTube, black wholes that suck every one in.
This is history. In each new beginning there are plenty of actors, then they cumulate power and create new power centers, just like the US has recreated an aristocracy where the rich get richter and the poor get poorer.
The decentralized and networked world was supposed to counter this, but that was until the information economy kicked in. Owning land was power. Owning capital was power. Now, owning attention is power and two of the worlds most valuable companies are content companies, Google and Facebook.
Information want's to be free. It's our attention that costs.
Edit: I think there's room for a new sort of social network, a true network where you don't need thousands of readers for it to be worthy. But a place where you write for and engage with a small group of 5-10 people and where rooms are limited in size. A place where you don't think of your audience as this huge, grey matter but know their names. The local pub of the internet where everybody knows your name. The Cheers of the internet.
Etiketter: Text
innlegg av IT @ 01:15
0 Kommentarer
