The Uncertain Future: Web Content

6 August, 2009

A great deal of recent nerdery has dealt with the future of web content and if people will pay for it. It seems to have started with Chris Anderson's Free. Though I have a (free) copy of it, I haven't gotten a chance to read it yet, but the basic premise is that since people have become accustomed to getting free content online, and because there is no real commodity to become scarce there is no future for (most) paid content on the web.

The general response to this is either one of the two responses: "Of course, everyone knows that," and "Yeah, but you forgot about ______ " and finally "no, because it will evolve."

Both sides have valid points, the first talks about Google and their combining non-revenue services with their ads to create a unified money making business. The critics point out that Youtube, while being amazingly popular, loses more money than most countries' GDP.

Of course this effects anyone who puts anything on the web, even someone who produces web content of as questionable quality as flamingbuffalo, because the more things are free the harder it is to realistically price content that can't be free. This effects new and small-time content creators exponentially more than large, established creators because they can't possibly fall back onto an advertisement model because they simply don't have an audience large enough to market to.

For illustration look to the similar meme lately is complaining about the Wal-Mart effect that the iTunes store is seeing - it's the same situation. Realistic prices never had the chance there. As more and more Apps cost only 99¢ it gets harder for someone who spends huge amounts of time to build an app to charge anything more.

So what about the web content? What about web designers?

Is Wordpress going to all but kill us? (Short answer: no).

There are no answers yet, but it's scary. It's scary that someone can potentially destroy an entire industry by undercutting the price. And that's what we're seeing with newspapers and that's what I hope we avoid with web content.