Content is No Longer King

Stephen Shapiro is a business writer who has earnt a living in the traditional manner associated with consultants. He has written two books to support his innovation consultancy. No difference to the norm here!

However his blog "Content is No Longer King" is about his journey of discovery seeking to understand who makes profits from his writing now Amazon's Kindle threatens to revolutionise book publishing and distribution by taking his books on-line. Shapiro demonstrates clearly in this article that we are repeating the business models of old - business models stretching back to the turn of the 20th century to the Tin Pan Alley days when popular sheet music was first introduced to the masses.

The profit takers in those days were the entrepreneur distributors who travelled door to door selling the sheet music - not the songwriters. The only difference now is the distribution method rather than being human is on-line and once it gets on-line there is almost no cost to the distributor!!

The content aggregator becomes the king not the content creator and this is how it has been always!!

"Content is king" was a poorly constructed metaphor in the first instance designed by the IT aggregators to tease out content when they had none.

Now there is so much information (don't confuse knowledge with information, by the way) on the internet for free, it makes it almost impossible for a writer, regardless of experience or quality to make any sort of reasonable income because their royalties haven't changed.

The only thing that has changed is the cost of publishing and that has dropped to almost zero once the first copy has been published.