Who wants to own content?

Published by in blogs, economics, intellectualproperty, literacy on August 26th, 2005

Jeff Jarvis’s post on “Who wants to own content?” is Web 2.0 poetry. Consider this quotation:

Content is transient, its value perishable, its chance of success slight. You think your article or book or movie or song or show is worth a fortune and in a blockbuster economy, if you were insanely lucky, you could be right. But now anyone can create content. And thanks to the power of the link — and the trust it carries — anyone can get the world to see it. Is some of this new load of content crap? Sure. Lots of content in the old media world was crap, too. But don’t calculate the proportions. Look instead at the gross volume of quality: There’s simply more good stuff out there than there could be before. And it can be created at incredibly low or no cost.

I am convinced there should be an economic term for the phenomenon today where content has more value when it is open, free, and accessed widely. If you know a word for this let me know. I need to check with some more economic-minded people on this.

This quotation, also from Jeff, gets at what I am talking about and interested in:

But in this new age, you don’t want to own the content or the pipe that delivers it. You want to participate in what people want to do on their own. You don’t want to extract value. You want to add value. You don’t want to build walls or fences or gardens to keep people from doing what they want to do without you. You want to enable them to do it. You want to join in.

There IS money to be made in this brave new world, as some of the commenters to Jeff’s post wondered about. I am inclined to think in terms Thomas Friedman used in “The World is Flat,” it is about your “value add.” How are you adding value to an ongoing conversation others deem worthy to spend their heartbeats participating in?

I agree with others who take issue with the idea that content has no value, however. Content is what brings people to blogs and podcasts, and quality content is what brings them back. And a shared agenda as well as interests. So Jeff’s post may understate a bit the value of content. Yes, anyone can publish, and yes, the value of those ideas may be transient. But there are ideas which have transcendent value, and are worth reading over and over again– years later even. Quality content matters. Owning it may be less important today and tomorrow than it was yesterday. And certainly the need to own a distribution system is diminishing fast, or almost gone. But the ability to create high quality content is very important. In our current “flat” environment, I think that ability can be recognized and rewarded (perhaps in financial terms, as well as in less tangible ways) more easily and broadly than ever before.

On this day..

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