Disney's counterrevolution

For more evidence of the thin-ness of the participatory media 'revolution' see a Forrester report summarised a few days ago revealing only 1% of people listen to podcasts and "when you include all of the people who are just interested or have used podcasts, they strongly favor listening to existing content like Internet radio or broadcast radio, not necessarily new content."

http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli/2006/04/forrester_podca_1.html

I think you are forgetting long tail economics. There really is no reason to believe that people's taste in television or movies is really that much narrower than their taste in books or magazines. Further the evidence: rise of multiplex theaters, rise of cable TV, rise of video games (and their diversity), rise of the internet to replace television, etc... seems to indicate that there is quite an appetite for diversity. One could argue that everytime consumers are given more diversity they happily choose it.

I agree that branding is probably going to matter, the question is whether its going to matter anywhere near enough to prevent further erosion and fragmentation. The cheaper shows become and more niche their audiences the more easily small dedicated teams will be able to produce shows as labors of love. Very much like the book market today.

The biggest book out recently is the Da Vinci code (4.5 million sold in the US) vs. Desperate Housewives which does 22.5m per week.

I'm afraid that you're right. In fact, as entertainment choices proliferate and it becomes ever more difficult to wade through the options, people will look to trusted aggregators to help them. Those aggregators may start out looking like something new but will likely morph over time into similar profit- and focus-group-driven media filters that ABC, Disney, HBO are now. And they'll likely also get into content creation if that's where the money is.

Irregardless of the quality of the content, Disney has a winning strategy just by creating presence. The saying that "80% of success is achieved just by showing up" rings as true on the Internet as anywhere else.

What impresses me about Disney is that they are moving to infrastructure-like services. It is clear to me that the lines between infrastructure and content services are blurring. Content is the loss leader in their plans.

"Much of the excitement about participative media stems from the behavior of a very thin, and very unrepresentative, slice of the population."

Mr. Carr, you have lost me on this one. What world are you living on? Have you ever heard of MySpace.com? There are almost 66 million young people on this site alone. How about LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, Typepad, Blogger, Orkut, Friendster, Facebook, YouTube, Digg, Slashdot, Second Life, World of Warcraft and many other niche communities? I know where you are coming from, but show me the data, please!

I'm not sure that quoting Anne Sweeney's view of the power of brands really helps your argument all that much, Nick. Of course she would say that -- she works for one of the most dominant "old" media brands around.

And it's fine to talk about what a small slice of the population is reading blogs or listening to podcasts -- probably as small a proportion that was spending a lot of time online 10 years ago. To assume that those numbers won't increase is keeping the blinders on a little tight, I think.

As for your central point, I don't think anyone (other than a few extremists) is arguing that new, participatory media and user-generated content -- or whatever you wish to call it -- is going to replace old branded media. But it will almost certainly give it more competition than it has been used to, and I think that in itself will change (and is changing) things.

I agree, except that niche media will also continue deepening and spreading — driven by recommendations from trusted sources ("word of mouth," etc.).

I believe it is the spam, fraud and junk littering the "digital world" that makes the big brands so attractive. Trusted recommendations also solve this problem — even better than trusted brands.

I guess I am in the slim minority that reads blogs more than watches TV for entertainment?

My Disney is RoughType!

I guess I'll take that as a compliment.

We assume that the cream will always float to the top, but there's a reason why most of the cream is in our coffee in the form of a Starbucks latte. I liken it to being in a strange town and people gravitate towards the familiar first.

The Disney man may be right, but I'm not sure whether the producer of shows can really play a big role in selecting what we watch. The role of editor and recommender will be hugely important, but people will rely on an increasingly large number of different ones, rather than numbly watching whatever happens to be on ITV. It will also be interesting to see how people make money as editors/recommenders. Who will pay for such a service?

Sorry, I disagree. This means using a wrong (old) metric to measure a (new) phenomenon.

You'll never get a correct reading.

Gianni, I'm not sure that I understand exactly what you're talking about when you refer to "(old) metric". That sounds like good, old-fashioned, marketing double-speak. Marketers have been able to pretty precisely measure their responses to print ads and direct mail for a very long time -- the web really presents very little new there. Where is the "metric" that says that I will trust my neighbor when deciding what car to buy more than European Car magazine? After all, my neighbor drives a rusted Saturn.

I regret that I end up agreeing with you. For everything that the Web (/computers in general) has invented, it's yet to come up with a proper measurement of credibility. Technorati is about the only effort I've seen made so far, and that thing is so easily gamed.

Tim, as I am sure you know, there is ample evidence of credibility-driven opinion forming being very successful at orienting consumer behaviour.
A recent example is the Sony DRM debacle (if you're not familiar with the story, here's Mark Russinovich original post, which started everything, and my evaluation of its outcome).
Collaborative-credibility assessment systems, such as Technorati, but also del.icio.us, digg and even Slashdot just to mention the ones I use, are all collectively adding up the wits of hundreds of thousands of people like you and me to decide what makes a good, interesting story.
Simple, free technologies such as RSS feeds and aggregators make this a very simple task, and newer versions of browsers are increasingly embedding them, making their use a breeze.
Look what happened to the music business: 6 out of 10 top dollar artists already derive the vast majority of their income from live shows instead of record sales - do they really need a big name publisher anymore?

I don't think so.

Gianni-

I think you can add Google to your list. As much as I admire these services, I fear that they won't stand up to mainstream use. Namely, the more mainstream they become, the more attractive they are to fraudsters who can game their systems. The automated trust mechanisms eventually fail and must be updated/replaced -- and the race is on again.

I look forward to wide spread peer-based trust systems built on relationships between real humans. I think that's one of the strong, underlying forces powering the blogosphere.

RSS is a strong decentralizing force.

I wonder if the music industry might be a good example of niche media blooming.

P.S., No reason to think big brands will stay out of the niches. The WSJ had an eye-opening writeup on how (again) Disney promoted their Narnia film in various communities. Amazing.

I agree with most of your comments.It reminds me of the philosophical discussion between Foucault and butler. While Foucault was saying our lives have been coded, classified, and our behaviours have been arranged from the very moment that we are into society; therefore there is no space for resistance, Butler was saying given most of the observations are true, there still might be a space for resistance. If you ask me to resist what, I would say the monopolisation of information. It's not like anything else, such as capital in the old Marxist terms, or political power. It's much stronger and carrying the potential of having much graver consequences.

What I believe is that you can leave the distribution of information to the basic supply demand laws. And what makes me a bit more optimistic is that, unlike the conventional central mass media, the peripherial new media could really be the alternative. My forecast is that, while the mainstream -mostly conservative- media would be carried to the new media space without any political transformation, the alternative new media will have the opportunity to present the alternative information, unlike the alternative old-media -sorry to say 'old'-. I'll not repeat analyses on economies of scale, etc., but summarise what I think. Disney will remain as Disney, and will have the majority of the new audience/followers, but for people who want to get the truth, the aesthetical, etc., there will be more alternatives. It will be a dynamic game. Disney will swallow these alternatives as they get famous and have a considerable audience, but new ones will emerge. As it is happening. So, no need to be pessimistic, observing the 'raw' majority.

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