AOL is buying Bebo. That’s further proof that social networking at least factors in the future of the traditional media company model. This week I received validation that mobile is not far behind.
This week we presented at the Montgomery Technology Conference in Santa Monica. The format, aside from the very informative content track, is essentially a marketplace of startups, buyers and investors. Michael, Jamie and James sure know how to put on a productive conference, and they sure as hell know how to throw a party. (I have incriminating pictures to prove it. Just kidding. Not really.)
The most interesting meetings we had this week were the ones with media companies. Based on what I learned, the very definition of what a media company will be in the future is now completely in question. Broadly speaking, the media companies we met with see themselves in the “audience” business, which includes in various combinations the following key elements:
- content
- distribution
- audience
- advertising
- direct revenue
I guess it really is pretty simple on the surface of it, but it gets fascinating when you hear the visions and aspirations of these very different players in the same space. The universal aspiration seems to be “engage the audience no matter where they are.” People literally only have so many hours per day to be an audience, and of course the goal of any media company of any sort is to gain the largest possible share of an audience and its time and attention. So say you are a newspaper publisher and you see your audience leaving your medium in favor of the web. What do you do? You redefine your business from “newspaper” and engage that audience on the web. This is ostensibly why Time Warner bought AOL at the time. Ok, so now say you are an internet portal and you are losing your audience to a closed community you cannot reach. You further redefine your business from “content” to “communication” to further engage that audience. This is ostensibly why AOL is buying Bebo.
We spoke with a few different media companies and of course asked the same question: “So why are you interested in talking to Intercasting Corp?” And the universal response was, “Because engaging the mobile audience is an important part of our future.” Of course, we fully believe this as well, but 2008 is the first year that I am hearing a universal commitment to “engaging the mobile audience” from all media companies. (Viacom is a partner of ours and they had this vision over a year ago.)
I did not use it in my presentation this week, but the movement I see toward a Mobile Media Era is best described in the Shawn Conahan’s Media Eras Infographic. Catchy title. I pulled this together a couple of years ago to compare the differences between the media eras we have seen in the last century. When I talk about it, I give it these labels:
Broadcasting (TV)
Multicasting (Cable)
Singlecasting (Internet)
Intercasting (Mobile)
The key distinction I make about the concept of “intercasting” and why I think it is descriptive of the Mobile Media Era that we seem to be entering is the fact that the mobile phone is the first device to have a camera and be always connected. This means the flow of media in the Mobile Media Era goes in a different direction (namely upstream) than it has gone in previous media eras.
To simplify, compare it to the cable model. John Malone built a media empire by being the gatekeeper between consumers and the television programming they wanted to reach. Cable is a “downstream” model, where consumers sit back and let the MTV wash over them. Being the exclusive distribution point is not unlike having a license to print money. Between 500 channels and the hundreds of millions of people they want to reach is a lucrative business model.
But what happens when media is moving “upstream” instead? Invert the cable model and you have the media company of the future. If John Malone were starting today, he would see hundreds of millions of ordinary people like you and me sending our pictures and videos from our mobile phones to…where? How about roughly 500 destinations, including Bebo, MySpace, Flickr and wherever else people communicate using their personal media? Just like you cannot mandate which channels people watch on TV, you cannot control where people will send and share their photos and videos. But if there is a manageable universe of destinations, (the same way 500 or so channels is a manageable universe in the cable model) then being the broker of all of those transactions is every bit as valuable as being a broker in the cable model.
That is the general premise on which we founded Intercasting Corp, and we have made great progress toward enabling the link between consumers and communities.
Of note lately is the realization by media companies that the upstream model truly matters in their future, and that it starts with the mobile consumer. The example I used in my presentation at the Montgomery conference was that you cannot roll a news van to a tsunami – when something happens, someone with a camera phone is there to capture it. The goal is to be in the stream of the content no matter where the user is sending it so that you can repackage it for other channels. So that tsunami footage from someone’s cell phone can be used in a media company’s broadcast news channel even though the user originally sent it to their Bebo page or to their Photobucket account. (Everything of course subject to the proper terms of service agreements, etc.)
The point is that the traditional media model is being augmented by an inversion of itself due to the popularity of social networking. “User-generated content” is really just a form of communication the same way that “mass media” is just a form of communication. It just happens that before social networking, the distribution friction of user-generated content was too high. Media companies like News Corp or AOL recognizing the importance of user-generated content by buying MySpace or Bebo represents the brilliant first step toward enabling the consumer. The next frontier is establishing the link between the mobile consumer – at the nexus of content creation – and the myriad destinations through which all the world’s content will eventually be shared. That so many traditional media companies are seeing the importance of the mobile audience is very exciting.