Re-purposing: the new king of content?

Here is the theory which, for the purposes of this article, I am going to refer to as the 'old model':

    Content is king. If you own content, you can monetize every human
    head that views/hears that content.

This model has worked extremely well for a long long time now. Content is poured on to some form of physical media having been emitted by some sort of carbon-based life form (i.e. a performing artist/domain expert). Every human head viewing/hearing the content pays separately and possibly per viewing/hearing. The bigger the audience, the bigger the monetization. This is a very scalable business model as long as three conditions hold:

(a) you can cost-effectively make copies of the performance

(b) you can cost-effectively get them distributed to customers

(c) you get paid for each of the copies

The IT revolution has made (a) and (b) easier and easier to the point where the costs involved are negligible. Two things to celebrate if you are in the content business. However every day that passes seems to make (c) harder and harder. This drives a lot of folks nuts. Two out of three. So near and yet so far!

Those who cling to what I have called the old model insist on hanging in there seeking the magic innovation that will deliver (c) with the same stunning low cost with which (a) and (b) have been delivered. Perhaps they are right. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before some genius nails the problem. Personally, I doubt it.

Now a lot of folks get very down about all this. It is not uncommon for doom-sayers to conclude that without pay-per-copy the whole virtuous circle of content creation gets broken. Without a mechanism to earn a crust creating stuff, why would anybody do it? The end is nigh. Personally, I doubt that too.

I doubt it for a number of reasons. First, the world's appetite for physically interacting with experts/performers shows no sign of abating. Absolutely worst case, the content business becomes more service-like. The performer co-locates with an audience and all attendees pay for the privilege. Sure, valuation multiples for this sort of business are much lower but they are still viable businesses. The days of zillionaire performers may be gone but an honest crust can still be earned in a services-oriented content world.

Second, most forms of content are powerful 'carriers' for advertising. There are all sorts of ways to embed advertising in content in a way that yields some element of pay-per-copy. Again the fortunes of yesteryear are not on offer. Less zillionaire performers again but, hey, it is still a business.

Third, technology makes the old big-payment-per-copy more and more difficult but at the same time, it makes identifying re-use easier. No matter what the content is, it is basically one big long number as far as a computer is concerned. The number may have billions of digits but it is still just a number. Computers are good at finding numbers.

Imagine a new model in which content is created and published on a free to view/hear basis i.e. anybody can view/hear the content without paying. (The content creator may be monetizing the content to a degree through advertising etc. but there is no pay-per-view aspect to the model.) The content is published with intellectual property protection that says something like this:

      View/listen to this stuff all you want. Make copies all you want.
      If you want to re-use it - in whole or in part - in your own
      content, contact me for pricing.

I could see this working in some cases. It is technically straight-forward to match patterns of numbers to detect copies. It is technically straight-forward to hide harmless, unobtrusive small numbers inside bigger numbers so that you can find copies even if the copy gets altered (via, for example, steganography[1]). The sheer size of the numbers we are talking about here makes 'it is just a coincidence that mine is similar to yours' a hard defense to mount.

It is not perfect of course. If somebody makes wholesale changes to the original content so that none of the original numbers are present, then simple find-the-needle-in-the-haystack will not work. In these cases, human analysis is required to identify re-use. Take music for example, if I re-use some of your tune in mine but I play it on a different instrument, in a different key and in a different octave, what is left of the original numbers that made up your content?

It gets tricky, but then again it is already tricky in the old model. Since the dawn of time people have used their higher order faculties to creatively re-use the content created by others. Also since the dawn of time, people have used their higher order faculties to spot such re-use and take whatever action they deem necessary[2]). Technology does not change that. This whole area relates to the borderline between plagiarism and 'creative influences'. That borderline has always been fuzzy and subjective. Again, technology does not change that.

Assuming for a moment that some sort of 'free to view/listen but pay to re-use' model proves viable in some parts of the content business, will the nature of content creation itself change?

I suspect it will. A content creator, focusing on monetizing their content, will need to actively facilitate the re-use of their content in pieces and then employ technology to identify unlicensed re-use in other content. This contrasts markedly with the current model of focusing all energies on unlicensed human heads viewing/listening to complete copies of the content.

In the music business for example, we have already seen a complete reversal in the twenty year trend away from singles to album sales. Today the focus is squarely back on singles as these things fit today's technologies - on-line music stores, MP3 players etc. Does this change the way content creators go about their craft? I suspect so. For starters, the concept of using a hit single to pull through album sales no longer flies.

This I think is just the start of the impact that the crumbling of the old model will have on the content business. We could be on the verge of a new model in which content is still king but it is the detectable re-use of that content that will underlie a new business model for creating the content in the first place. There are many technical challenges to making such a model work. We do not have widely available tools for creating steganograpic markers or spiders to help us find them. There are many legal challenges too. The whole concept of copyright and 'fair use' would need to be revisited. Not abandoned - re-visited.

These are interesting times for content creators and technologists alike.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography


[2] http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com/2003_03_23_seanmcgrath_archive.html#200053874