On the dysfunctional internet

[marsden_online]

via http://twitter.com/publicaddress/ , a piece on The dysfunctional internet. There are a couple of good points I'd like to pull from it.

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The "stupid publisher" notion has gained wide currency. It stems from the view that the internet is very different and "old media" publishers are set on bringing old media thinking to it. But the main piece of old thinking that publishers like Colman are trying to bring to the internet is the idea that publishers should be able to pay people real wages to create content.
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Contrary to popular belief, people already pay for content. The trouble is, they mostly pay their ISP who presently remits almost nothing to the content creators.
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That's a twist I hadn't run into before. Compare Sky TV, Free to Air TV and the Internet.

I pay Sky, they pay the content networks. Theoretically the content networks pay the content creators.

Advertising (and some of my taxes) pay for Free to Air TV. Free to Air TV pays the content networks for syndicated programs (as above) and also commissions local content (theoretically paying the content creators).

I pay my internet provider, but none of that gets passed to the content creators. Instead they have to merchandise, scrabble for ad clicks, beg for donations or provide something that is so far above all the 'freely' available content out there that people really do see the value of paying for a subscription. It's the worst of both previous models.

This cutting out layers of middlemen is often touted as a strength of the internet, allowing both the consumer to pay less and the creator to get more. But it's also something of a weakness. Instead of a few networks who are good at what they do collecting the money from the consumer and distributing to the creator, every content creator and service provider essentially has to go it alone.

And it seems we still have a middleman in the system, happily getting rich without actually having to give anything back to the content creators. The comparison isn't perfect, because ISP's don't (usually) source the content, but without it there would be no reason for them to exist.

I'd actually be happier about the amount I pay for internet if I knew it was going somewhere other than Telstra's profit margin. As it is I'm a fan of donating to webcomics when I have a bit of spare cash and actually paying for cheapware that I find useful. I'm not a fan of clicking on ads, except occasionally the useful contextual ones google serves up when I actually do a search. That's theoretically how they get paid for the service they provide me, after all.

Comments

[cthulhu-dream.livejournal.com]

But the internet is different from TV. It's an interactive medium. It's more of a place to conduct business rather than a "content provider".

[marsden-online.livejournal.com]

It's exactly the two-way nature of the internet which results in the direct connection between content creator and content consumer, but that's still the relationship. We consume news (replacing newspapers, radio, TV) information (replacing encyclopedias, print journals), entertainment (replacing books, newspapers, radio and TV again). Someone has to write this stuff.

We even (most of us) 'watch' the content through images on a screen.

The internet in this context can be seen as an amalgam of content providers. So can a TV network, but the internet doesn't have a programme manager picking and choosing what we get to see in a particular time slot from the available content.

There is still an infrastructure we pay to access - with a TV station it's the broadcasting network ('paid' via advertising, govt funding). With the internet - well, accurately, with the world wide web it's the internet (paid with $$ to the ISPs).

I guess my point is that from our end the experience is similar - information comes to us. We're so used to the business that we pay for our newspaper or that collects money from the advertising on TV then paying for the content that we forget (or never realise) that those transactions at the other end of the pipeline exist. So when we get to the internet we pay our money to the ISP, soak up the content and at a subconscious level assume whoever made the content is getting paid somehow.

[slothphil.livejournal.com]

My ISP doesn't pay the sites I visit on the Internet in much the same way as the bus company doesn't pay the places I visit when I go into town.

[marsden-online.livejournal.com]

Which is another different mental model from the one I'm postulating many people have. I like it, I may have to use it :)