January 9th, 2006
Too Much Media
Media proliferation and media saturation are well-worn concepts that describe the exponential growth in media outlets and the exhaustion (and utter confusion) we experience from the overwhelming choices. The growth curve in media steepened considerably with the advent of the Internet, but now with blogs, social media, Web 2.0, etc., the curve is nearly vertical.
A new Web 2.0 site for news called Newsvine has reportedly launched in beta by invitation only. According to CynerJournalist.net:
The site is a slick combination of some of the trendiest news-related tools online now, incorporating news aggregation, social networking, citizen journalism, blogging, user ratings and online discussions. Think of it as one-part Slashdot, one-part del.icio.us and one-part Google News, with a few other neat features thrown in.
The site is built around four general actions: reading, discussing, writing and seeding the news.
The site posts thousands of Associated Press articles that users can read.
Among the things readers can do with stories or links: vote for it, to raise it up the Newsvine (i.e. give it better promotion on the home page); participate in a live chat with other users about the story; leave comments; report inappropriate content.
Users can write their own articles, and get to keep most of the ad revenue from those pages. You’ll collect 90% of the earnings from your own domain (yourname.newsvine.com). The other 10% goes to the person who referred you to start writing on Newsvine.
Users also get their own page or “column” — basically a blog-like page that lists all of a users’ posts — with the nice URL of yourname.newsvine.com.
The revenue model sounds like a Ponzi scheme, but leaving that aside, here’s the real question:
Who’s got time for all this?
There’s Flickr, del.icio.us, Digg, MySpace – already I’m too tired to list the dozens (maybe hundreds) of collaborative and participatory media. Surfing cable TV could consume an entire Sunday. Now we’re being asked to tag, comment, create, contribute, vote, refer, subscribe, engage, rate, report, add, chat, seed…
When we’re all creating media, who’s going to be left to consume it?
As an active participant in this revolution, I suppose I should be careful about throwing stones with glass all around, but I see it in the experience of launching this blog. You wouldn’t believe the number of blogs on media, and blogs on blogging, and media articles about blogging. It makes you long for the days when media wasn’t so comprehensive, so completely exhausting. We asked for alternative voices, and now they’re all streaming out of the box.
Do bloggers blog in order to be a voice drowned out in the cacophony? No, we want to be read, to be important, authoritative, influential. But we can’t all be at once, and the more of us there are, the more our aspirations start to defy the laws of physics. American’s in particular don’t like to be bees buzzing in the hive — it’s an affront to our sense of (entitled) individuality.
All of this makes me wonder about unintended consequences on the horizon for media. Wiki’s and Web 2.0 applications have shown the ability of the collective intelligence to make order out of chaos, but what happens when the collective is overwhelmed by too much chaos in need of ordering. Are we witnessing a new media order, or the beginning of media entropy?
In 1880, there were 7,000 newspapers in the U.S. By 1940, before the advent of TV, there were less than 2,000. Markets have a way of regulating the number of choices. Consumers benefit from competition, but in reality, people don’t like too many choices. It makes your head hurt. (Witness the Medicare Part D fiasco.) That’s why so many people succum to the Wal Mart spirit of conformity — it doesn’t matter if I’m buying the same thing everyone else does, as long as I get a good price.
There’s a reason why Google, which produces no content, is the #3 most trusted source of content online — it’s ONE place to go to find what you want. For most people, when something appears in the top 10 of a Google search result, that’s enough endorsement. They don’t keep sifting through all 100,000 results in hopes of finding exactly the right match in result #37,952. (Can’t vouch for the newspaper stats above since I grabbed them from the first Google result.)
Consumers have taken control of media, but how much control do they really want? It seems (as always) we’re caught between right and left, between the (perceived) fascism of old static media and the pure communism of new collaborative media. Modern society has rejected the extreme left and extreme right of political structures, and so it will likely reject the extremes in media.
Is there a glimmer of hope here for trusted content brands? At the end of a long day, most people aren’t going to collaborate their way through the day’s news. They just want someone to give it to them. Maybe that someone will be the collective intelligence of citizen journalism, but they’re still going to pick one outlet they trust.
Publishers may not control the distribution of content, or even its creation, but they still have brands that people trust. I guess at the end of the day it’s all about control. If you don’t control the creation or the distribution of the content, what do you control?
I may not want journalism delivered in a static print publication. But I also don’t want to be awash in a sea of stories. Even in a town hall meeting (or any meeting), you don’t accomplish much when everyone talks at once.
So who’s going to throw us a life preserver? Who’s going to find the balance between left and right, an American democracy of media?
Whoever figures this out will have the next Google.
UPDATE: Sure enough, concerns are starting to bubble up in the trade press. The focus of these two pieces is skepticism about the digital video on demand revolution:
First Pet Peeve of ‘06: Media Adulation About ‘Innovative’ Media Delivery
Will Consumers Bite?
Topics: New Media | Social Media
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[…] Brian Benzinger, in a lengthy post: “I have been actually been testing the service for a couple of weeks now and find it absolutely great. I honestly haven’t enjoyed reading the news this much online ever… The environment, community, and interaction makes it unlike any other news site. I have been stuck in the zone of reading about news through services like Digg, Memeorandum, and Blogs, but I never make time to read the actual news online, but not anymore.” Scott Karp (of the Atlantic Media Company): “Here’s the real question: Who’s got time for all this? […]
[…] Jon is right. There is a backlash coming. But not from Big Old Media. It’s coming from the consumer, who is about to rebel against the overabundance of media. […]
[…] Slashdot serves the crucial old media editorial function of helping people figure out what’s important and what’s worthy of their finite time and attention. Even in a democratic Web 2.0 guise, e.g. Newsvine, participatory media is a lot of work, and most people just don’t have the time or energy. […]
[…] I think another big problem is that Web 2.0 is driving Media 2.0 (or “New Media,” the other term I’ve been using). I’ve argued that if Media 2.0/New Media is based on Web 2.0 applications, it’s going to overwhelm the average person. Web 2.0 is a great platform for building applications that make everyday tasks easier, e.g. Google (search), eBay (sell/buy), Amazon reviews/recommendations (shop), and Flickr (organize/share photos) — I think Flickr is the poster child for successful Web 2.0 applications. […]
Scott Karp has been writing some some good stuff of late. His latest (in a series of ‘Setting-the-Cat-Among-the-Pigeons-esque) post, he writes: “I’ve argued that if Media 2.0/New Media is based on Web 2.0 applications, it’s going to overwhelm the average person . …Here’s the problem  Web 2.0 is not a great platform for helping the average person consume media. Consumer-created media is transforming the content landscape for the better, and consumer-controlled media is undoubtedly the new paradigm. But
in which he returns to his previous theme  which is that sites like del.icio.us and newsvine.com and digg.com and so on are not helping anyone except geeks, and that this is all a symptom of the problem he has described before, which is “too much media.†He says Newsvine is way too much work for the average person, and that what consumers want is someone to filter and synthesize for them. Jeremy Wagstaff of the Wall Street Journal says the blogosphere is
[…] Man complains about too much media and blogs in his own blog. […]
– Scott Karp , Publishing 2.0 Tags: Journalism, Newspapers, Media
Just a quick note fromt he article:
A new Web 2.0 site for news called Newsvine
Newsvine is not Web 2.0
Ryan, you may be right according to one or more of the 1,000+ definitions of “Web 2.0″ but the horse is already out of the barn. When the market hypes a notion like Web 2.0 without a clear definition, everything gets caught in the net.
s still very early in the game to tell which strategy is going to win but I will side with the model where reader’s trust is honored, maintained and shared with the reader. Update: Found few relevant links Topix, Emergic, and Scott Karp
[…] Consumer-created media takes a lot of time and energy — unless we develop economic models to meaningfully compensate the long tail, the ego payoff for most people won’t be enough to justify the effort. The cost of entry to create content is low in terms of dollars, but the cost of sustainable content creation is very high in terms of time, which in this short life is our most valuable commodity. […]
[…] So what are we to make of these statistics? I can’t help recalling a quip I made in Too Much Media, for which I was much harangued at the time: When we’re all creating media, who’s going to be left to consume it? […]
Today’s bit of wisdom comes from Scott Karp at “Publishing 2.0″: Consumer-created media takes a lot of time and energy  unless we develop economic models to meaningfully compensate the long tail, the ego payoff for most people won’t be enough to justify the effort. The
[…] The problem, as many people have stated many times, is that the more everyone participates in content creation and content interaction, the harder it is to navigate the sea of information to find what’s useful. […]
external to the firm — think user-generated content. He then succintly summarizes the digital media problem: The problem, as many people have stated many times, is that the more everyone participates in content creation and content interaction, theharder it is to navigate the sea of information to find whatÂ’s useful. He goes on to state that the problem with a lot of digital media sites like Digg and Reddit is that the audience just isn’t that proficient in certain topics, and hence the result is collective decisions being made by people
[…] I’ve tried to make this point many times, but never as incisively as Greg has. […]
[…] Excerpts from Scott’s post title “Too Much Media” There’s Flickr, del.icio.us, Digg, MySpace – already I’m too tired to list the dozens (maybe hundreds) of collaborative and participatory media. Surfing cable TV could consume an entire Sunday. Now we’re being asked to tag, comment, create, contribute, vote, refer, subscribe, engage, rate, report, add, chat, seed… […]
[…] A good piece on the exceses of today’s Web 2.0 collaborative software worlds–and the increasing demands they make on our time and attention. […]
[…] Ever since I began my “2.0″ indoctrination, I’ve had this nagging feeling that something wasn’t right — I knew it had to do with the problem of too much choice and with the unclear returns on the effort of 2.0 participation. But despite much writing and reading, the hammer hasn’t found the nail. […]
[…] Trop d’infos à la sauce sociale? A considérer cet article de Publishing 2.0: Too Much Media - publishing2.com/2006/01/0… - via Newsvine ( http://www.newsvine.com ) […]
[…] I’ve been wrong to complain about too much media — just as Seth Godin is wrong to suggest that excessive blogging is cluttering the “blog commons.” Thanks, as always, to Umair for the beacon of light: More to the point: should we see the new world of micromedia as a limited resource; a commons, like Hyde Park, or a fishery? Are we really having externalities on each other when we blog, podcast, and vlog? […]
[…] You mute TV commercials, you went through your mail only to find most of it is junk, a stranger phones you (usually at dinner time) asking you to answer a survey, or give to yet another worthy cause. Interruption marketing does just that. It interrupts you, and steals your time. And it is the darling of mass marketing, which is the child of the mass media, which was born in the 19th century with large circulation newspapers, and thrived in the 20th with radio, TV, and the international media. Now, there’s too much of it. This is what’s begin referred to as non-scarcity or as some have dubbed it, simply too much media. People ignore or skip ads. Think Tivo. In these days of non-scarcity of content, it’s all about the filters baby. […]
[…] You mute TV commercials, you went through your mail only to find most of it is junk, a stranger phones you (usually at dinner time) asking you to answer a survey, or give to yet another worthy cause. Interruption marketing does just that. It interrupts you. And it is the darling of mass marketing, which is the child of the mass media, which was born in the 19th century with large circulation newspapers, and thrived in the 20th with radio, TV, and the international media. Now, there’s too much of it. This is what’s begin referred to as non-scarcity or as some have dubbed it, simply too much media. People ignore or skip ads. Think Tivo. In these days of non-scarcity of content, it’s all about the filters baby. […]
[…] NATALIE JOST Web Designer Positive Feedback: 93.3%Articles Posted: 8; Links Seeded: 25 About AuthorLinksArticlesArticles & Links WelcomeYou’ve made it to Newsvine! A place to read, write, and discuss the news. To get started:1. Click around and get comfortable. You can find wire news here faster than any site on the web, as well as contributions from people all around the world.2. Head over to the Help Section and read more about what you can do here.3. Sign up for a free Newsvine account and begin commenting, chatting, and writing your own column. (And replace this big space with something useful).BackyardThe GreenhouseRecommended ArticlesMLB ScoreboardPublishing 2.0 » Too Much MediaNews Type: none — Seeded on Thu Jan 26, 2006 5:24 PM ESTArticle Source: publishing2.comblogging, del-icio-us, digg, flickr, google, media, myspace, news, newsvine, not-news, tech, technology, writingStart Chatting2514 !Seeded by Natalie Jost […]
Too Much Media