“The process of making mice look like elephants, has, as a necessary side effect, the result of turning real elephants into mice” – Nassim Taleb on “mental displacement caused by press” (media).
Felix Salmon takes off from the story about Toxo, I linked to it yesterday. He writes that allegedly “within 36 hours of being uploaded to the Atlantic’s website, the story had already amassed half a million pageviews — and was “well on its way to becoming the most visited piece ever” in the history of the site.” This means that the Toxo story is going to beat out the former all-time-Atlantic-most-read-piece on Introversion by Jonathan Rauch.
So not unexpectedly, “more is more” on the internet, yet the key ingredient is missing from Salmon’s analysis, it didn’t have to be that way. It is all because of the single structural flaw in the way the Internet evolved into a free and ad-supported medium. It is still avoidable, as Jaron Lanier highlighted again in the NYT:
“The obvious strategy in the fight for a piece of the advertising pie is to close off substantial parts of the Internet so Google doesn’t see it all anymore. That’s how Facebook hopes to make money, by sealing off a huge amount of user-generated information into a separate, non-Google world. Networks lock in their users, whether it is Facebook’s members or Google’s advertisers. This belief in “free” information is blocking future potential paths for the Internet. What if ordinary users routinely earned micropayments for their contributions? If all content were valued instead of only mogul content, perhaps an information economy would elevate success for all. But under the current terms of debate that idea can barely be whispered.”
By the way, did anyone notice that as the content volume increased in the NYT, it is “less and less” of what to read there, never mind the pay-wall, their flawed strategy is still volume.
Further reading:
{ 2 trackbacks }