is content king?

Filed in archive Technology on August 4, 2004

My gut feeling would have pressed me to a "YES" but Michael points me to a 2001 paper from Andrew Odlyzko that argues with great inside against it:

"Although Table 1 makes a powerful case by itself, it is worth reiterating the basic theme, which is that the vaunted "content" is not where the action is. The postal system alone collects almost as much money as the entire movie industry, even though the latter benefits from large foreign sales. For all the publicity it attracts, entertainment is simply not all that large, because people are not willing to pay very much for it. The dream of the early 1990s of financing the "Information Superhighway" through "500 channels to the home on the cable TV network" was an obvious fantasy."

"Content is not only a small part of the economy, it is often paid for indirectly. Well over two thirds of newspaper revenues, and almost all of broadcast TV and radio revenues come from advertising. Thus content is being given away in order to attract people to goods and services they are willing to pay for. Although spending for content (whether by consumers or advertisers) has been rising, it has been doing so at a sedate pace, and is unlikely to explode."

Andrew has written another cool paper on pricing that might be worth checking out .