The King is dead. Long live the King

There’s never been any question in my mind that content is King.  However, a King’s influence and impact extends only as far as his domain allows.  Trumpeted loudly yet kept within a narrow space, content may have wide awareness and desirability but it has little impact if consumers cannot or will not access it.  Conversely, wide in reach but marginal in value and the content lacks impact and consumers will engage only for brief periods.  This translates quickly to “Regime Change” a la Saddam Hussein.  I’m sure he’d tell us all that that is not a fun ride.

So what do we do?

Today we are an industry of two camps – one says free, free, free – the other says pay, pay pay.  And I actually agree.  Let me tell you why.

First, we have been conditioned to seek out “free” content on the web.  It has been the great democratization agent in our society, giving people the opportunity to access nearly anything legal or not so legal very easily.  This behavior is not going away, nor should we want it to.  It gives publishers, programmers, broadcasters and nearly anyone with content the ability to easily distribute it to those willing to consume it.  There is a vast amount of content – I would actually argue most of it – that lends itself to a “free” model, and trying to force it behind a pay-wall simply makes no sense.

Second, there remains a sizeable amount of content that has an intrinsically higher value than most, whether due to quality, scarcity, uniqueness or we just think it’s damn cool (think Colbert Report as an example).  We as consumers (while not crazy about it) understand and accept the need to directly pay for access.  We recognize that by participating in this type of commerce we’re investing in the creative process that will hopefully yield more highly valuable content that we can purchase and consume.  Anything less would be analogous to asking a farmer to starve himself while we consume his crops only to find that with the crops consumed and the farmer gone, we’re left with nothing.

The funny thing in this whole debate, and what people consistently miss is that there is no such thing as “free” content.  WE ARE ACTUALLY PAYING FOR ALL OF IT – either with our time or with our wallets.  Every ad we watch on these “free” sites constitutes our payment in exchange for being able to consume what the site owner is providing, just as if we hit “OK” on the PayPal button.  The difference is one makes margin at scale while the other makes margin at rate.  In the end, it is ALL getting paid for somehow.

So why all the debate?

Is Arianna Huffington (The Huffington Post) who believes that all content should be freely available, any more right than Mathias Döpfner CEO of German media company Axel Springer who espouses subscription based services?  [Note – I saw both of these very passionate executives discuss this very thing at last week’s Monaco Media Forum.  See it here: http://bit.ly/aDJM8].  I would argue that they are both right and wrong.  It really comes down to a balancing between the two business models.  You use the “free” ad supported business to drive scale, which then offers the ability to up-sell the more valuable premium content to your viewers.  Neither is mutually exclusive to the other, as each is a necessary component to any video distributor’s business model.  If you want an example of this, look at those companies who are simply offering one but not both and you can see the significant lost opportunity.

So let’s quit debating the issue as it’s clear to many if not all consumers – it’s just the pundits who like to make an issue out of it, or those who haven’t embraced the concept of balance.  I know it sounds rather Yin/Yang like, but to me it’s just plain common sense.