Category: data availability

In this excellent summary paper ‘Did Google and Facebook kill the media revenue model?‘ Frederic Filloux takes a deep insight on the evolution of media advertising evolution in last decades. It benefitted initially paper media and it got completely upended by Internet. The interesting part is that its actual value has also plummeted – making it cheaper for people to advertise but also diminishing the possible revenue stream for media.

“The inefficiency of advertising in print, radio, and TV has always been its historical flaw.” By providing a far more targeted solution, internet advertising suddenly increased dramatically advertising efficiency. In addition, it was suddenly possible to much better measure the effectiveness of a campaign to improve it.

In addition, availability of advertising channels created a major deflation of advertising expenditure and the post contains staggering graphs (out of which the illustration of the post is extracted) showing how total advertising value plummeted in the last decade, with total media adverting expenditure diminishing by more than 25% in most developed countries (after an historical increase that was much more than inflation, so it is also sort of a correction).

Could printed media have reacted earlier? Maybe, but as Frederic Filloux concludes, the changes were so systemic and overwhelming that some exceptions may have transformed sufficiently, but certainly not the entire industry. “Most of the legacy media were in denial. They acted too late and too little. But they were not in a position to do otherwise.”

At the end, media advertising is another area where internet has upended the value chain, and at the same provided more value to advertisers. It should be seen as a quite positive shift for the overall value chain and consumers, were it not for the overwhelming position of Google and Facebook.

This article explains the position of Ellen Pao (ex CEO of Reddit and now quite opposed to Silicon Valley giants for a number or reasons including accusations of gender discrimination) ‘Social Media Reward Bad Behavior’ or another similar interview in Inc.com ‘Why the Trolls Are Winning the Internet‘. Her point is that she observes that social media today rewards bad behaviors because it is not managed in the interest of the people, and because possibly the teams managing the current tools are not sufficiently diverse.

“It makes me really sad, because the internet is such a powerful tool, and it introduced this idea that you could connect with anyone. And it’s been turned into this weapon used to hurt and harass people.” She is quite strong in her words about the impact of social media on the users today.

One of the reasons she mentions is that “One of the big problems is that these platforms were built by homogeneous teams, who didn’t experience the harassment themselves, and who don’t have friends who were harassed. Some of them still don’t understand what other people are experiencing and why change is so important.”

An important point is that she does not believe that this problem can be addressed at the scale of the current social networks. “I don’t think it’s possible anymore except at very small scale, because the nature of interactions at scale has become very attention-focused: “The angrier and meaner I am online, the more attention I get.” This has created a high-energy, high-emotion, conflict-oriented set of interactions. And there’s no clear delineation around what’s a good or a bad engagement. People just want engagement.“

All in all, her view is quite negative on the possibility for social media to change quickly because of its interest to engage people to spend more time on their platform. Still she provides an interesting path for improvement, which is to make sure there is an increased diversity in the social media teams.

Refer also to our previous post ‘How Facebook Model is Addiction and Growth – and Why It Can’t Change‘

As the Fourth Revolution progresses, we can hear a lot about the rise of inequality mainly in the field of finances and income. But modern inequality is also very much – and increasingly- informational. We already discussed for example in the post ‘How the Transformation of the Press Business Model Makes Access to Quality Information More Difficult‘, but let’s take a wider view of the situation.

There are good quality news outlet out there, that try to stick to journalistic principles. They may be orientated one way or the other, and the editor may favor a certain view on things, but this is generally known as the editorial line of the media. The thing is, access to this media is increasingly paying. Be it traditional press, new news portals and edited aggregators, access increasingly requires subscription.

If you can’t afford subscriptions, or if that’s not culturally on your priority list, what does remain? Public news outlets that are free, some traditional outlets that still manage to be ad-funded, or social networks. And it is this reliance on social networks that is at the origin of quite a number of issues today such as the polarization of society and more extreme groups. Before, the newspaper was displayed to be available for all to read on crowded streets, but not any more.

Thus in the past few years, access to information inequality has grown drastically up to becoming a real societal concern. It certainly needs to be fixed more urgently than income inequality, because the situation may create substantial disruption with groups of citizens living increasingly in parallel worlds.