When Fred Wilson wrote about Simplified Content Marketing, he got hundreds of comments, many of them saying essentially that this was nothing new.
They are wrong.
There’s something really dramatically new going on, but the shift is so massive, so tectonic, that it’s a little hard to even see while being in the middle of it. It’s like the end of the Cold War—Moscow had peristroika in 1985, but the Military Industrial Complex in the United States didn’t really change course for another decade or so.
So it is now with what I call the Publishing Industrial Complex.
What do I mean by that? Some background:
There’s a great old quote that says, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Back when the only way you could publish was to buy a piece of equipment that cost more than an office building, that meant something.
Then there was a big change in publishing that’s well understood. As the price of a “press” came down to essentially zero, anyone could be a publisher.
(I’d like to think that Matt Mullenweg—my .tt neighbor—was inspired in part by that quote when he founded WordPress.)
Still, as big as that change is, it’s not the massive shift that I’m talking about. The people that published in the old days did so with the idea that they were the publishers.
Then, people said newspapers would die with the advent of radio. Again with TV, they said radio and newspapers would die. And again with the Internet, everybody says everything will die except for sharks and cockroaches.
Anyway, some newspapers did die, but most of them and most TV and radio stations are still around. They should be honored because all the new entries are trying to emulate the publishing model that newspapers created. Craigslist, Demand Media, and even mommy blogs may seem to be totally different from the New York Times, but all have the same model: Create something that people will want to look at and then try to monetize those people.
Even Facebook is a publisher. That may not have been obvious before, but the social network recently started to charge people to reach their own followers. Facebook owns that “press” and is free to charge whatever it wants to its readers. It doesn’t matter that a company spent millions to build up a Facebook following and may even have a staff creating Facebook content. It doesn’t matter because all that content is being monetized by Facebook, which is the publisher and has the freedom to charge whatever it wants.
Google is also a part of the Publishing Industrial Complex. They publish stuff (gmail, search results, etc.) and then monetize you, the person who looks at what they publish. Google brings in more than $100 million a day, and more than 95 percent of that money is in advertising.
So from Facebook through the New York Times and down to the all-advertising papers stacked in the corner of a laundromat, all are a part of the Publishing Industrial Complex. And all of them are doomed. (Well, maybe not Google, and certainly not Xconomy, but all the others for sure.)
Why?
We are all publishers now.
Under the publishing model there were publishers, and then
