this divide presents many opportunities for disintermediation of traditional media companies.

IMO, that’s what brand is for. That actually requires the aggregator to have one, though. Hence magazines with strong identities, hence the specifically conservative bias of Fox news. And hence the forthcoming decimation of the music labels and film studios, which have no brand (the brand is in the content providers – actors, directors, and so on), except for the micro- versions that have a coherent brand. And hence my comment about its continuing importance – maybe . It’s the only defence against the Googles of the world, I suspect. (Was the same with Expedia. Very quickly became the most important driver of traffic. And it was only brand that protected the content providers that could resist it.) I don’t see search as stealing revenue from the content providers. I see as it as displacing the aggregators who can’t really defend themselves well with brand.

My sense is that the only good reason for aggregation has been the high cost of content creation and distribution. Aggregation provides economies for high capital cost, and creates brand to aid with distribution. But as costs drop, I don’t see that there is as much reason for this intermediary to exist. So I see the real story being the atomization of content and aggregation, with each clustering around definable brands. I see search providing a very useful role for unbranded content, but for the rest I’m not really sure. I suspect a variety of tools will emerge to help us relate to content. Search in different flavours, community tools that key in on our preferences, and so forth.

As to YouTube’s foundation, I’m not sure you’re right – I suspect most people go to surf what’s popular or to find something they want to watch. But perhaps not. In any event, I think it’s easy – or very soon will be, I suspect – to replicate channels and communities across different kinds of content.

Interesting question on the commoditization of aggregation. Yes, search may in the end commoditize everything. But I think you’re actually pointing to the commoditization of distribution, not aggregation. You go to search to look for something when you know what you want, but what about when you don’t know what you want?

Perhaps the traditional notion of “channel” is useful here. Channels, whether newpapers or cable channels or whatever, were in the past owned by the entities who created most of the content for those channels. Sure, they bought some content from syndicators, but to a very limited extend.

Digital media has blow up the traditional channel model. Search is one component of that, but aggregation is the other. The foundation of YouTube’s base (or so Google hopes) are the users who go there for the channels and communities. The people like you who go there to search are only losely tethered.

Or maybe search is just a form of aggregation, driven by user keywords rather than some third party editorial control.

In any case, the schism is evident in the standoff between GoogTube and the big media companies, i.e. the aggregator/distributor over here and the content creators over there. Perhaps what is more precisely radical in this divide is that GoogTube has an advertising model. Sure, cable companies have been in the dedicated distribution business, but it has always been fee-based, while the channels controlled all of the advertising. Now, GoogTube, the aggregator/distrubtor, threatens to steal advertising away from the the content creators. Hence, the divide.

I didn’t actually state any degrees of magnitude, so I don’t think I understated anything. The point is that the novelty here isn’t a schism between creation and distribution. “Technically corrrect”? Er, OK. Yes, it’s “much” cheaper, not just a little, and so on. But that ground is very well trod. I just don’t think your model – this “schism” as you call it, is an apt model. The division has always been there, and for good reason. If anything, I suspect that technology is blurring those lines – perhaps leading to, if anything, an ‘un-schism’ to some extent.

As for disruption, you’re preaching to the converted. Atomization is itself of course a destructive process – that’s why YouTube has everyone up in arms, and so on – it’s easier to be a content producer and a distributor. I’m not saying the changes aren’t dramatic. I’m just saying that what you’re pointing to seems to me to be what we’ve all been describing as atomization. And of course that’s what creates the opportunity for Google – lots of eyeballs to monetize and at the same time lots of difficulty finding the content. Search as a proxy for aggregation, essentially. And since the technology is hard to replicate, a role that will likely not be commoditized for some time.

Frankly, I’m wondering whether the real commoditization won’t be in the aggregation side of things. Sure, YT created a lot of value. But how hard was it and how hard is it (not hard in terms of gathering the audience, but in terms of building the platform)? I’m wondering whether as the cost of building the aggregation platform continues to drive to zero, search will begin to make aggregation less relevant. The only reason I visit YouTube is because the content is relatively easy to find there. If there were robust video search, I probably woudn’t visit it at all – I wouldn’t need it to be aggregated because I would be able to find it. Brand can to some extent be a proxy for search too, of course, so I see a continuing opportunity for strongly branded aggregators, but perhaps we’re approaching a time when search and other discovery tools make even brand – except for the creator’s – less relevant.

What about syndicated content providers in that model? Aren’t they content providers to the content aggregators?

Yes, but it was a very limited and highly controlled system, only a shadow of what is possible and already being done now.

Now it’s purer technology, so it scales better still. But this is a difference of degree only.

It’s always been possible / practical to separate those functions. It’s just cheaper now to be either.

Technically, you are correct, but I think you are understating the case by several orders of magnitude, which, with all due respect, is often a flaw in the “it’s nothing new” argument, which is often proffered in the comments of this blog. It’s precisely the speed and magnitude of the change in “degrees” that has turned the industry on its head.

But this isn’t a schism – it seems to me it’s just the atomization of creation and distribution,

That’s a bit of a semantic quibble, don’t you think? The fact that content creators can no longer seek to profit from their content by controlling the distribution channel for that content is a massive shift. Why do you think YouTube has everyone up in arms? Why do you think so many newspapers are on the verge of going out of business? How is it that a company like Google can be so MASSIVELY profitable without creating any content? Google itself is emblematic of the schism.

The media process has always been about creation, distribution and aggregation. Now, it’s just a lot easier to enter any one of them. Which makes it a lot of fun. We’ve seen the democratization of the creation process. And we’ve seen aggregators arise from nowhere like Youtube, Myspace and google. And there are many smaller aggregators like vertical search engines, group blogs and memetrackers. But, they are fairly insignificant in the scheme of things and difficult to launch.

My guess is that as the new distribution (RSS, open schemas, OpenID) takes hold, we’ll start to see more niche aggregators that can scale quicker. I’d like to see this happen because it’ll reduce the hold that the big aggregators have on our attention, as well as our ad dollars. If open schemas don’t happen, we’ll likely see the rise of great distributors (Zillow, Zvents, Simply Hired) that will enable them and take unstructured date, structure it and license it (or pay people to distribute it if there’s a transaction at the end of the tunnel). Either way, we’ll see a lot more growth and entrants in aggregation. I just wonder what the role of distributors will be and if there is a business there.

You use newspapers as an example of an ‘unschism-ed’ media. What about syndicated content providers in that model? Aren’t they content providers to the content aggregators?

Ditto radio. And hasn’t TV pretty much always had ’schism-ed’ content creation (the individual producers), aggregation (the networks and latterly the cable channels) and distribution (cable)?

Ditto movies (though in the last 20 years there has been considerable concentration of ownership in the distribution (theatre) side)?

It’s always been possible / practical to separate those functions. It’s just cheaper now to be either. It seems to me the real story – and this has been told many times – is that there are more producers and distributors now because it’s so much easier to be either. Distribution is pure technology, so it scales better. OK, but the same was true 20 years ago. Now it’s purer technology, so it scales better still. But this is a difference of degree only.

Had it been this easy / cheap to produce content twenty years ago, radio would’ve largely (more than it does now, anyway) consisted of small and large content producers providing syndicated content to broadcasters (aggregators) – who perhaps would’ve produced some of their own content as well. Newspapers too, surely.

Costs of both creation and aggregation / distribution have fallen. Now one can be both (Rocketboom) or only one of them (Rocketboom could simply provide its content to someone else) or even a hybrid (produce and distribute yourself, and also syndicate so others can aggregate and distribute you), depending on the niche you serve and the way you want to serve. But this isn’t a schism – it seems to me it’s just the atomization of creation and distribution, and the passing of the torch from the old aggregators to the new, that everyone’s been talking about for a while now.

We have been talking about this for quite some time at Touchstone – it’s key to our strategy. Here’s a manual trackback for ya!

http://www.touchstonelive.com/blog/2007/02/major-media-outlets-are-starting-to.html