Web Content: Getting it all wrong
Mark Cuban has a blog, a pretty smart, snappy and well-tended blog. I wish I could post as often as he does and I find it hard to believe I have less free time than he does, so my excuses are limited.
His most recent post is regarding the death of web-based content, more pointedly the death of video-based content on the web. Now I know what you're thinking, "What?? How can I be the funny guy in the office if I can't forward links from youtube or break.com??" Take it easy champ, he's not directly refering to that type of content, Mr. Cuban and many other smart folks feel that highly produced (and already leveraged) content like television shows, movies and such cannot swim in the ether for reasons disclosed in Mr. Cuban's and Mr. Moffet's articles.
I have to agree with Mr. Cuban though. Right now big television studios waded onto the web (with much trepidation) with the SAME BUSINESS model as their broadcast model. Now, the emperor still has his clothes on, or at least that what TV execs think. So no one has sat down and looked at all the broken pieces and wondered where they went wrong. I can hear them now, "We pre-empted every episode of Charles In Charge with 60 seconds of advertising, how did this fail us?"
Well, the reason it fails is simple. Charging for content does NOT work. At all. The only business that makes money for online content is the porn industry (and Nexis-Lexis). Even that industry has vastly altered it's revenue models. They went from pay-only sites to viral snippets of content with embedded links. Now I'm not a super successful businessman but I do know one thing: The porn industry knows how to make money off content.
Now I'm not suggesting Ted Turner follow The Porn Kings in terms of content, but taking notes from their highly profitable business model does sound like sound advice.
Now there are glaring holes in this. The first of which people won't pay for content they can get for free just by watching TV. The second is that of piracy, which is a bit out of scope here. But the first problem rings true, people simply won't pay for *most* content. Now if you put a few funny out takes of Friends online with embedded links to NBC's portal and offer all the funny out takes for a reasonable price, people might just buy it. (And pirate it)
