One score and seven years (and, fifty-three weeks) ago, Microsoft’s father brought forth the new notion that content is king. Bill Gates conceived that, like the licensed broadcast era, the real money of the Internet would be made on content. Nope. Way off. Even his thesis was wrong.
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Bill Gates envisioned publishers winning. Because, “The Internet also allows information to be distributed worldwide at basically zero marginal cost to the publisher.”
Just wow.
Had he waited just until Y2K (if you’re under 35, look it up), he would have seen that the Internet’s sprawl was brought to us courtesy of the advertising industrial complex. Knowing that, he could have predicted the valuelessness of content and he may have hewed toward distribution. And, he still would have been wrong. Today, isn’t about getting content to-and-fro.
He was right on one topic, “The definition of ‘content’ becomes very wide.” Today, tons of user generated content (UGC) courses through the veins of the Internet in ways impossible to imagine when it exploded from its humble origins.
Not only can we all create content; we can create any kind of content. In any kind of format. Text. Pictures. Audio. Video. With AI, we can have a bot generate content in any of those formats just by thinking of an outline. Our stuff looks professional, shows up on the evening news, and reaches mass audiences instantly. All at no cost.
Formats have always had a pecking order. Movies on a big screen (generally) beat in-home video. Which are better than audio. Which beat text. And, for the attention deficient, short beats long.
It still holds today. You might want to ask Bonnie Kintzer if user-gened videos are better than digests of texts. She runs Trusted Media Brands, Inc. Back in the day, it was known for its short-ish text platform called Reader’s Digest. Nearly three years ago, TMB bought Jukin Media. Jukin finds and licenses videos we make that they think will be liked.
My ad tech innovator friend, Ari Rosenberg, texted me that Twitter’s biggest problem is TikTok. Makes sense. Twitter is short (mostly) text. TikTok is short video. Video bests text. Ergo, TikTok bests Twitter. QED. He might have texted Elon Musk because, on cue, Elon Musk said Twitter/X is video-first. Even people on Twitter known for short-form text will stick around to watch long-form video.
Did video kill the text star? Not necessarily.
A platform that can present media in any format should outperform a platform that presents media in one format. Just like the set of whole numbers is always going to be bigger than set of integers. That’s so obvious it doesn’t even need a QED.
The problem isn’t the format. It’s putting a kid’s macaroni art you bought at a yard sale alongside van Gogh’s Starry Night. We junk up media and leave curation algos to figure it out like we’re living an episode of American Pickers.
There’s too much junk on these platforms. And, in many cases, stuff much worse than junk. If Abe were here, he might say, “Now we are engaged in a great uncivil war, testing whether that notion, or any notion so conceived and so dedicated can endure.” Or, something more eloquent, quotable, and timeless.
The preceding two paragraphs are my thesis. It’s not content OR distribution that are king. It’s the ability to quelch the worst of the content. So, I’m going to throw the last quote to a famous King.
Media winners one score and seven years (and, fifty-three weeks) from now will be the one who understands this:
“It’s not about the format of your media. It’s about the character of your content.”
Or, something more eloquent, quotable, and timeless.