10 Predictions To Help Define the Social Media Revolution
Richard Stacy writes about PodShow in Social Computing Magazine
“Now we get to the crunch. You may have heard of a company called PodShow – arguably the most innovative company in developing the podcast sector. The two guys who run PodShow are called Adam Curry and Ron Bloom (check out Adam Curry on wikipedia to get an idea of his credentials). They are operating their business to something they call the 5:50 Prediction. This is that within 5 years, 50 per cent of the media that consumers consume will be produced by other consumers. This is this much talked about consumer or user generated content, the stuff of YouTube, blogs, podcasts and MySpace.
Now if these guys are anywhere close to being right in this and we accept that the amount of hours that people will devote to media consumption are not going to increase dramatically – the only conclusion we can reach is that the reach or bandwidth available to the traditional media is going to collapse. And if they only reach half the numbers, they can only charge half the price – hence the prediction. The only factor mitigating against this is the possibility that people will see their engagement with social media as being something sufficiently different from consumption of traditional media, that they will create additional time for it, by cutting into leisure time or other activities. This might be possible with teenagers, but for people with more time demands and more structured lives this is unlikely to generate many more hours in the week.
Are the PodShow guys right? Well think about youR average teenager today and recogniZe that teenagers are the early adopters here. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that social media is, and will always be, a youth thing and that as people get older they will suddenly re-discover TV and newspapers. Most teenagers today are probably already there. Even an oldie like me is already there – because even where I consume the product of the traditional media, I tend to access it through new channels (RSS, newsreaders etc) – i.e. the channels that don’t, and probably can’t, carry the subscription or the ads and deliver the money to the media owners.
Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the traditional media, or rather the type of content the traditional media currently produces. But what is does mean is that the business model that supports it is in its death throes and to survive the traditional media and advertisers are going to have to find themselves a whole new model.
There is going to be a big shake-out as a lot of the content of the traditional media falls into new channels and the challenge in constructing a new model is to work out how to hold onto the content in a profitable way. The answer will probably lie (as per Prediction Two below) in the traditional media cutting themselves loose from expensive and outmoded distribution technologies and focusing instead on being syndicated branded content producers. As a side issue – advertisers are going to have to work out what to do with their “un-used” advertising dollars. Is the answer simply to shift the budget into on-line? Probably not, since much of the new on-line spaces are inherently advertising unfriendly. Also, despite the fact that there is much current talk about how sites like YouTube are going to produce revenue streams, these new forms of media don’t need the same amount of advertising dollars to make them run – precisely because they don’t have expensive distribution or content production infrastructures.”
