Building the Media Web

Ian Rogers, former General Manager of Yahoo! Music and current VP Video and Media applications, just published a rather lengthy, but nonetheless insightful post in which he challenges the media community to see that "there is more opportunity in leveraging the scale of the Web than trying to create scarcity." This can be done, Rogers claims, if the community cooperates in building a "healthy ecosystem" of many participants that leverages users as value creators.

Rogers evidently sees the way the "Physics of Media" is changing and asks us to adapt accordingly:

"We’re moving from a world of limited distribution channels and therefore abundant attention (CBS was not scared of losing any of us as customers 20 years ago, I came home from school every day and watched Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island because it was THE ONLY THING ON), to a world of unlimited distribution and therefore attention scarcity (when Zoe watches TV it’s TiVo and she doesn’t even watch TV after school, she gets on the computer, uses Facebook, does her homework with the help of Wikipedia, IMs with friends, etc)."

In the new world of unlimited distribution, expensive marketing campaigns fall short due to limited attention to any single distribution channel and quality becomes "hyper-efficient - if something is good, everyone sees it." Choices are boundless in the Rogers' egalitarian "Media Web"; therefore, people get to watch what what they want or what is relevant to them. This concept is terrifying to old world giants who are accustomed to controlling means of distribution and often sacrifice quality for expensive marketing campaigns to turn various media financial successes. But to the masses, it's beautiful. Future generations have the opportunity to enrich culture and explore diverse media as a result of pulling from several contact points, as opposed to very few channels pushing the content.

One of the main ways Roger's suggests recalibrating in the new world and leveraging scale is by acknowledging the much ignored user-generated value on the web:

"[Users are] writing blogs about your artists, putting bios on Wikipedia, documenting last night’s concert on Flickr and video sharing sites, showing what songs are most popular by their behavior on Last.fm, building “box sets” on community sites, etc. How has the music industry leveraged this? What tools have you created to enable or encourage it?"

He also rejects the proprietary media model and categorically states that open source standards is the solution to optimizing the media experience--the reason being that users create more contexts for content, ultimately giving media more exposure for fewer costs. Here's an example of what he is talking about, using digital packaging as an example:

It will be interesting to see what the role Yahoo! will play in the Media Web. One can only assume that the powerhouses of today will remain in the center of whatever Web is to created in the future. Although Google is breathing down its neck, Yahoo! still boasts the most site traffic on the internet (arguably the company's greatest strength and only hope) and the number one music site on the internet. Could this movement that Rogers is calling for have an alternative agenda for positioning Yahoo! for the future, leveraging its loyal user base to become a distribution channel powerhouse?

In any case, check out the original post for more details and a further discussion of Rogers' plans for Yahoo! in the Media Web. Also, you can download Umair Haque's presentation The New Economics of Media, an extensive re-examination of media that Rogers references.