The Future of the Professional Content Producer

Further pursuing a line of thought I've been following.

On the one hand, there are the producers of content. The painter, the writer, the film maker, the guitarist, the animator.

On the other hand, there are the institutions that have emerged to attempt to pick out those producers that can be profitably promoted. These are the publishers, the record labels, the movie studios, the television networks.

Those institutions all developed in a world where the relevant costs were associated with production and distribution. Printing presses don't pay for themselves, and the costs of distributing and displaying records are way more than trivial.

The rise of digital technology and the internet have completely shifted the relevant costs. Production is becoming dramatically cheaper year after year, and distribution of any content in digital form costs practically nothing.

The old institutions will wash away or change until they are unrecognizable. I don't know what specific form the institutions that replace them will take, but I think I can guess at their functions.

The less physical, and more informational that content production has become, the more it has conformed to the Pareto Principle--a tiny minority of producers enjoy a vast majority of the attention and the income. Content production was this way already in the 20th century; it will only become more so in an era where the medium is digital and the distribution channel is the internet.

Now, the way that most content producers are going to get started in the public eye is by simply putting out their work online for free. A minority of them will at some point become popular. Even when they are getting a lot of attention, however, it is unlikely that they will be able to charge for their content directly--the competition on the internet, given the gigantic amount of alternatives available, will drive the monetary price of content down to zero.

There will be money to be made off of getting a lot of attention, however. Some ways are obvious, and are already being made use of--putting up advertisements, selling merchandise, organizing live events that your charge admission to, that sort of thing.

My feeling, though, is that there are ways to make a lot more money off of attention than some of the most popular online content producers are able to get at just yet.

Say you had someone who made films online, using the technology they could afford. If they managed to get a sizable following, the institutions of the future could be in place to enable their growth; providing them with more resources to buy higher end technology and hire actors. Doing this would likely increase the ability of the filmmaker to gain an even bigger following. On top of supplementing the producer's budget, the institutions of the future could focus on running the entire business end of the operation; getting paid to speak at conferences, finding the best advertising deals--all in exchange for a percent of the proceeds.

In other words, the institutions would allow artists to focus on making art, minimizing the amount they would have to know about the business side of their profession. This is precisely what the current institutions developed to do for producers in the pre-digital, pre-internet world. Minimizing the costs and maximizing the potential profits associated with the current technology, however, will require a drastic restructuring. It won't be pretty for the existing institutions, which are currently being rapidly eroded away. It's only a matter of time before they are replaced.

But really, I don't think that a lot will be functionally different. There will be a tiny group of producers in any particular content industry who enjoy a majority of the attention and revenue, a larger group that makes a decent living in their profession, and much larger group that makes a mediocre living in it, and the vast majority of content producers, who won't be able to quit their day job.

The biggest change will not be in the nature of professional content production, but in the fact that the professionally produced content will be in perpetual competition with content produced by amateurs, and in the fact that consumers will be able to enjoy both for free.