George Clausen (c. 1927) - The English People ... gathering secretly to read aloud Wycliffe's English Bible
I can’t believe I am still hearing from people that there is money in blogging. I know some bloggers who are in the top fifty world bloggers bracket and they still make bobkes off their blog. On the subject of the recent freemium debate, a blog might be a good vehicle to sell something. This is where the “free for all” gang comes in. As long the content is free online, it can have the beneficial for marketing widest possible reach. This is the good old TV model, max people watching equals max pitch penetration. Peddlers who have things to sell, other than the words, and the lucky few who have figured ways to scale the audience, the “trusted” crowd shepherds, purposely drive the value of the content to zero. Words themselves are meaningless unless they are selling something, even a book deal, etc.
The bible is the bestselling book of all times they say, except no one ever bought a bible, if not for the fancy hide leather collectible buckle. The bibles are given away to hook you up on the “upgrades”. A bible is a souvenir from God. For every “grand” of bibles, there is some dork who will commit 10% of his income, move the priest into a rent controlled crib, bequeath his Bermuda share to the church, etc. Yes, your freemium model!
And than there are the Don Quixote groupies that insist on value of the content. Right, Google can’t figure out how to monetize YouTube and suddenly a blog full of tedious personal revelations is going to pay for the comfortable retirement on top of that wind mill!
Honestly I don’t think content ever had a direct value. During the Renaissance the greatest artists had patrons (aka sponsors) who viewed the paintings as a smart investment in the social stature, etc. The greatest writer of all times Dostoyevsky was ridden with debt. All the posthumous fortunes like Van Gogh, Rothko, etc. never directly benefited the content originators.
Come to think of it, perhaps content was always worthless, not just in the Web 2.0 universe, unless it was a way to sell something.
Images licensed courtesy of Picture Library of the Royal Academy of Arts
Further Reading:
Books as the American Whoredom
1:100 scale model of Herod’s Temple
Business and Life Lived as an Abstraction
