Apr
15
Why I’m Okay With My Content Being a Commodity
April 15, 2008 |
I’ve been mulling of Sarah Perez’s post on the devaluation and commodification of ‘content’ today, including the great discussion in the comments.
The following paragraph from her post is a good segue into the discussion that has been raging in the tech blogosphere over the last few days: how much is our writing worth? how can we get paid for it? is it okay if others make money from it by aggregating and displaying it and creating communities around our content like Shyftr does/did?
What this means for us as bloggers and new media creators is that the very technologies that we have grown to love are the same forces that are turning our efforts, be them our words, our videos, our music, our photos, or anything we create, into a commodity - something that has little monetary value on its own, but in aggregate, can become something of value.
As I have said before, I’m quite okay with all of this. Why? I mostly want my writing to be read — actually, I’m quite humbled by the fact that it is read and that a lot of you have decided to subscribe to my RSS feed.
This is where the rift in the blogosphere about this topic is, I think. I am not trying to make blogging on this blog here a major source of my income, but a lot of bloggers are trying to do this and they see this development as a major threat to their (Louis Gray is coming at this issue from a similar perspective, I think). As Tony Hung wrote today, that’s very difficult and not getting any easier - instead, and I agree fully with him here, the advantages of blogging are in the secondary benefits it brings.
For those of us who just want to be read, there is no real problem with our content being distributed and discussed outside of our control. In a way, to refer back to Sarah’s model, this is similar to music becoming a commodity and the musicians making money from concerts, not CDs. That’s why I titled an earlier post on this: Go ahead - steal my content.
Ultimately, I am just not very interested in what my words are worth - I am mostly interested in them getting read at all. Hopefully, at some point, there will be a payout for this is some form or another - but it’s not going to be in the form of a Google AdSense check.
Still, I also understand that this is an important issue for a lot of bloggers who are trying to make a living at this. As Steven Hodson wrote, part of the problem here is metrics. Maybe just looking at pageviews just isn’t the right method to valuate a blog anymore. Maybe instead of monetizing our blogs with click-thru text ads, the answer is in blanket sponsorships (for more on this, also see Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkin’s post on Mashable about this).
I wonder, though, if there really is a problem here. For now, I want to believe that more exposure for a blogger outside of his/her blog, is eventually going to lead to more readers on the blog itself.
This isn’t really evidence, but when FriendFeed started getting traction, everybody started worrying about comments happening outside of the blog - but at least on my blog, I have seen more comments since I joined FriendFeed than ever before.
Wouldn’t more readers of our content away from our blog ultimately not also result in more readers on the blog itself, just like musicians giving their music away for free see more people coming to their concerts?
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Good post! I read Sarah’s post on RWW and the whole thread and wrote a rather long comment there. This is a rich, multifaceted issue. I hope somehow we can find a balance where we don’t have to slow down this whole exciting phase of development exemplified by friendfeed’s *re-use* of content like twitter and blog posts. It’s really getting good and I’m hoping like you that the good effects that we can only hope for now will outweigh the negatives. But everyone needs to have their 2 cents!
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