A clash of cultures

I came across this interesting development on Paul Conley’s website. Where he’s referring to some recent moves by the incumbents of the traditional media space.

It’s true. While the internet and its new breed online audience acquisition providers rely on content referrals, the traditional media industry relies on practices that somehow are opposed to the concept of “free trade”. Consistently serving up quality content has a price and we all know there is no such thing as a free lunch. There’s nothing wrong IMHO protecting your assets. The blogosphere is not going to replace everything neither.

However, AP’s recent move to charge for links to “their” content makes me scratch my head. Nor do I completely understand why a publisher (like Paul, I’m also not linking to them) would like to limit the amount of inbound links. If you cannot talk about certain content, it’s going to be hard to refer to it… And then the question is: how will you ever find it?

Back in the 90’s the advent of the internet was seen as the ultimate weapon to weed out the (costly) middle men in supply chain environments. Everything was going to go “direct“, they said. Well, things didn’t exactly turn out that way, but what did happen was that middle men were forced to prove value more than ever.

That value usually meant “information”. Knowledge about how to access the right (local) customer, how to get that access faster or simply how to deliver the goods: i.e. by adding specific skill sets like additional services, etc. The lack of transparent information made it easy for middle men to exist. The internet and its abundance of information is wiping that out.

I interpret AP’s pretty clumsy struggle in the same light. They are a middle man. Granted, they still provide value, but restricting access, or worse charging for content, the way they do probably isn’t the answer to secure their positions on the super information highway

And what about those publishers that are trying to regulate incoming traffic? They already have been losing lots of ad dollars to Google. Are they now accelerating this trend by trying to make themselves completely unknown? Isn’t (their) content a means to a greater end? I.e.. the ability to generate an audience and then monetize things? Limiting your ability to make your audience find your content feels a little bit opposed to that, no?

The internet IMHO does not change the fact that valuable content has a price. But it has changed the access routes to get to “value”. Not sure the actions of the traditional players are in synch with this trend.

I think, I hope, Paul is right, in that their marketing folks probably do get it. It’s their legal departments that probably don’t. But that doesn’t make it go away, does it? It’s good to protect your assets but if its value is the direct result of people’s ability to find it, then all legal is doing is inflating the value. Things might be worse than the nineties. It seems like this middle-man is even destroying value.

Funny trend…