The obviously wonderful thing about the Internet is that nobody controls it. And if you can’t control the medium, you sure don’t control the message. This adage seems obvious enough in this age of over 100 million blogs, YouTube, Digg, Delicious, and Twitter mania & Facebook.

Technology is one part of the story, the difficult part is the shift in working and thought processes of the industries that have worked in a specific manner.

One repeated theme often heard in most forums is that to succeed on the Web it is necessary to give up control. This is often delivered as a revelation, even though this is something that the child of today’s world knows. The audience even gasps on hearing this!

However, sectors and industries that are used to control don’t like to give it up. Old media is like that. Even in this day and age, its struggle with control issues continues. Old media knows the relationship with its audience has changed, but it is still not quite sure how to deal with it. Facebook also has a group called End of Control to discuss the issues that arise as control shifts from media companies to consumers.

I guess change takes a while to sink in. For instance,, the digital divisions of newspapers, magazines, and other broadcast media would be part of the new media industry but are also part of the management of the old media!. Straddling the two ends of the spectrum would be the task of a trapeze artist.

This new media team would realize that to engage an audience online, you have to let them comment, vote, editorialize, and even select what stories get highlighted. But the old school prevails wherein, the editorial is highly controlled.

The new media team knows it all. But there is a difference between knowing something, and being able to do something about it—in this case changing your own ingrained habits and convincing colleagues (many whom grew up in the old broadcast era) to do the same.
It is all obviously true – but the mind does not let us accept the hard realities and makes us cling to the old rules of the game.

On the one hand, there are the traditional ways and means of monetizing edit content – that prevail the world over….in the old media.This monetizing is by advertising revenues in the form of CPM, columncm, FPC, IBC, FBC, gatefolds, FPS, ear panels etc.

At the other end of the spectrum, User Generated Content would imply reader comments, Twitters, and blog posts linking to the mainstream stories of the media outlet. This Long-Tail comments and blog posts at this end of the spectrum would run Long-Tail ads from AdSense and other ad networks with CPC, CPA, CPL methods of monetizing the content.

The jury is still out on how this all pans out – the breaking down of the traditional walls, the paradigm shifts, the marching of the user brigade.

Comments

comments