Better than Free?

Think of an industry that has suffered greatly in the internet age, as consumers increasingly turn to free sources to replace what they once paid for. Newspapers may come to mind, thanks to the steady stream of coverage of their increasingly desperate attempts to charge for online content. But it may be more instructive to look at a more dramatic case: Pornography.

The pornography business is suffering. The Los Angeles Times reports that: “A growing abundance of free content on the Internet is undercutting consumers’ willingness to pay for porn, and with it the ability of many workers to earn a living in the business. At least five of the 100 top websites in the U.S. are portals for free pornography… Some of their content is amateur work uploaded by users and some is acquired from cheap back catalogs, but much of it is pirated. Sites like Pornhub, YouPorn and RedTube attract more users than TMZ and the Huffington Post. The porn sites are even bigger than Pirate Bay, the top portal for illegal downloads of movies, TV shows and music.”

It’s important to note that, no matter what your own personal views on the subject are, pornography has always been a leading indicator of the direction of mainstream technology and content distribution. One of the first uses of motion picture film was to make pornography, pornography contributed to the victory of VHS over Betamax and the growth of disc-based entertainment, adult sites were pioneers of the federated subscription and micropayment models hotel room on-demand movies, and on and on.

So while newspapermen like Ruppert Murdoch say that print purveyors provide valuable content that costs money to produce, and consumers simply must recognize this and pay for it, the Porn Experience argues that they may well be missing the point. Here’s what adult entertainment has learned about the battle against free content: Given the choice between professional content that costs money and free content that is good enough, the majority of consumers will take the free option, thank you very much.

Kevin Kelly, of Wired Magazine, has proposed that there’s a “better than free”  future for content creators and owners. A thought-provoking read, Kelly’s piece postulates that there’s a lot of stuff companies could be doing to make money from content, even where the content itself is free. He holds out hope for subscriptions to media delivery, media management services, and a handful of other models that can produce a flow of revenue back to content originators

But Kelly’s assumptions are challenged by a movement that, again, first came to light in a big way via pornography: Not everyone is looking to make money from their acts of content creation or delivery. And when content creators and publishers, whether individuals or organizations, don’t care if they monetize their content, that’s a game changer. Some people might still want the dead-tree version of an encyclopedia for their kids, but, thanks to Wikipedia, they’ve been demoted from mass audience to rare-bird niche. Craigslist, for its part, revolutionized the classifieds business by choosing not to charge a fee for posting 99.9% of its listings and not taking a cut of successful transactions. By some estimates, Craigslist leaves $500 million in potential revenue on the table every year. How do you compete with that?

What we’re looking at is something at once very new and very old. Once upon a time, “media” wasn’t a precious thing to be collected, organized, and distributed for profit. Instead, it was something you made, did, or watched—and it happened as it happened. The circus coming to town was a medium in a time where you couldn’t see a monkey riding a goat on a tightrope within 5 seconds of reading the words “a monkey riding a goat on a tightrope.”

Rather than being a product, what we now call “content” was once something you made and shared with friends. Call it the old-school version of social media: You made the content and served as its medium of distribution. That is, you would go visiting and play piano and sing and dance. Of course, in the past 100 years, piano sales in the United States declined 83 percent, from 364,000 pianos in 1909 to 62,536 in 2007. But we believe that what we’re seeing emerge today is the reversal of this trend, and it’s coming to light in things like participatory gaming, flash mobs, and, well, home-made pornography.

This leaves open a big, juicy question: If the content is free, and the creation and distribution of content is also free… where’s the money? As Kevin Kelly suggests, there’s some money in digital catalog management (like Amazon.com), networking services (X-Box Live, Sony Playstation Home), and file management services (like Apple’s Mobile Me). And there will seemingly always be money in the attention-driving, -gathering, and -getting businesses (advertising/marketing).

But for some companies, the money simply isn’t going to be there anymore, or at least it will only be found in small, niche pools as the value chain moves elsewhere. (Note to Rupert Murdoch: Putting up a paywall on the New York Post’s Page 6 is NOT going to deliver the big bucks.) Instead, the business of unique and/or spectacular participatory events—in person, digital-virtual, and combinations of the two—will become ever-more important forms of media as we go back to the future.

One example of an old-media company making the transition to a world where active events, participation, and community comprise the thing once known as “content” is O’Reilly Media. Consider their “Mook” (magazine/book) called Make, with its companion web site Makezine.com, and affiliated Maker Faire. Is Make just published words on paper for a price? Hardly. It’s more of a massive hybrid of professional plus user-generated content, digital media, active online community, public events, commerce, and just about anything else that can be done to unite a community of interest—that is, the people who are willing to lay cash money down to be in, and of, the media they “consume.”

What content is worth paying for? Doubtless there is more than one answer to this question. But we’re particularly excited about this: Experiential content, at once multimedia and multi-format, existing simultaneously in a specific time and place and outside of it. More than just “being there,” we’re looking forward to being the media.