New Media, New Companies

Scott Karp has been examining the changing media landscape, and specifically how it’s impacting the publishing industry.  He continues his track record of thought-provoking posts today in a post that further delves into the nature of the transformation that the media industry is undergoing.  For me, here’s the clincher:

Individuals can now make a good living as content creators, without ever creating or becoming part of a scale content business. What’s more disruptive, however, is that in the market for original content, the attention economy is draining dollars out of the cash economy. There remains a zero sum game for consumer attention, so for every minute a consumer spends with content created by an entity whose compensation is in form of attention, there’s a minute not being spend on content created by a for-profit entity.

This puts into perspective the teeth-gnashing, sabre-rattling and legal shenanigans by the RIAA, Viacom, and every other media company that has yet to figure out a new business model.  Consumers will never relinquish the power they now have.  So what’s taking all of these companies so long to create new business models?  Is it that they’re incapable of doing so?  Is it that they’ve already created it, but their companies are bogged down under the weight of the old model?  In order to compete in this attention economy, perhaps these media companies will have to follow the layoff leads of companies like MTV, The New York Times and Time Inc. 

So, if consumer-created media is competing with media company-created media, what will the new, new media company look like?

You can read Scott’s full post here.