THOUGHT (aka Centric's Blog)

Those of you who follow my other blog may have already read about the MediaPool, the all-media portal with a popularity-based revenue-sharing model that I’m betting on becoming the dominant way content producers will make money in the Brave New Age ‘Tis A-Brewin.

The MediaPool idea was the result of conversations with some high-powered authors and entertainment industry pundits who believe the de facto death of copyright is the end of us all. In a world where organizations cannot control distribution, there will be no way to get the funding to produce the next blockbusters, they say. The entertainment industry will be killed by billions of end-users, furiously file-sharing the last of the greats. The only hope is that the big corporations might step in to fund entertainment that serves their needs, like a medieval patronage model.

But they’re wrong. We’re heading towards a model where nobody will be able to control distribution, true. This will mean fundamental changes in the way we view copyright, true. But it doesn’t mean the end of the world. All you have to do is run the numbers.

In the United States, the movie, music, publishing and gaming industries are, combined, about $100B entity. Given the amount people are willing to spend every month on cable television, it’s entirely possible that all of this revenue can be replaced by a subscription-based, all-media service. Share the revenue based on popularity, retain a percentage for operation of this all-media network, and it’s possible the individual content creators would do even better than they do today.

But–here’s where it gets really interesting–the advertising biz in the US is about a $200B industry. Thats TWO TIMES the size of the combined movie, music, publishing, and gaming industries. So the question becomes: does this MediaPool need subscription money at all? Or can the advertising industry carry the entire new content-and-distribution model on its back?

It’s entirely possible.

Consider Revver, where content producers are paid for every view of their content. Micro-produced shows could turn a healthy profit, especially when tied to affiliate sales and Google AdSense network ads. In this model, there’s no need for monolithic control of content; the creators are rewarded in direct proportion to popularity.

There’s no reason that user-generated content can’t evolve into microproduction, and microproduction evolve into a larger-scale open-source production environment, where people come together to create content to “fish” this huge potential pool of revenue.

This is the MediaPool. This is the new model. Or at least one of them.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 13th, 2006 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Ruminations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.