Category: media

Blind optimism and paranoia in online media

About two years ago now, from my seat as the business owner of an online b-to-b publication, I started freaking out about becoming irrelevant. I don’t mean me personally, though the people still working there may disagree. I mean the idea of being a business that creates content and distributes it.

The key ingredients to success at the time were page views and being important. There was no design you could apply to your web site to remedy the page view problem. Anybody who could think could also publish globally. RSS was increasing the speed of and improving access to information.

Where would it end? Was our island of high quality editorial a strong enough position to grow from?

I’m sure I wasn’t alone then in being afraid of the future, nor am I alone now in being insanely jealous of the YouTube guys.

A startup that didn’t even exist two years ago now pockets well over $1 billion dollars. I can’t even fathom what that means. I have some friends who have done well for themselves in the dotcom gold hunt, but that kind of money is just beyond what I can comprehend.

The good news is that people are much less focused on being afraid today and much more open to pursuing ideas that have an unknown upside. There’s no harm in trying a new idea and seeing if it works. And if it doesn’t, it’s easy to try something else. People everywhere seem excited to explore and do things differently, to empower people, to explore new revenue models, to try new technologies.

It turns out that nobody is relevant everywhere, so the playing field is flat. I like the way Chris Anderson defines the new media model:

“The old model was that if you wanted to be a filmmaker, you had to go to the Hollywood studios. If you wanted to be a musician and get heard, you would go through the label system. If you wanted to be a published author, you needed to get signed by a publisher.

The new model is, “Just go and do it.” Everyone can get out there directly without going through these gatekeepers, and most of what is created is junk, but some of it isn’t.”

This is true of business, too.

Of course, what worries me now is that the high-priced acquisition craze will bring back the bad ideas that made the Internet such an ugly place in 2000. Unfortunately, money motivates people so well that somebody might actually pull off one of my silly ideas or, even worse, sell it for millions and mock me all the way to the grave.

I suppose there’s always something to be paranoid about.

How not to influence change in old media

Jay Rosen’s recent attack on Fortune columnist Justin Fox reminded me that changing old media’s role in this new world is not going to happen by telling them that they stink.


Photo: carradine65

He accused Justin of failing to say anything meaningful in the ‘private vs public ownership of media’ debate. Underneath it all, however, was the more acidic accusation that Justin doesn’t get the Internet:

“There’s an upside, there’s a downside to local ownership. Reasons to be hopeful, reasons to be wary. Where did you get the idea that your peers don’t know this? (After all, it’s common sense.) I’ll tell you where, Free Pass: you made it up so that your column would be easier to write. But the day when you could get by with that standard is over. Gone. The bar has been raised on opinion journalism. The Web did it, especially the magic of linking and the powers of Google. Where have you been?”

Justin then responded in depth to Jay, defending the accusations point by point on his new blog:

“I can’t ignore [Jay’s post], partly because I’m an oversensitive weenie (always have been), partly because past experience tells me Rosen’s blog posts are often worth paying attention to, and partly because buried in his tirade was at least one entirely irrefutable criticism.”

I’m as guilty as the next new media nerd of pressing old media to change their ways based on my own small view of the present and future challenges. I’m equal parts idealist and pragmatist, almost always the former when blogging.

But I also know that there are many editors and executives alike who wish very much to apply the mental shift they may have adopted perhaps years ago and turn it into practical change without losing their jobs in the process. We need those people employed and making change happen in their organizations in order to accomplish the new media goals, no matter how slowly.

As Justin points out, even Time Warner has adopted a multi-threaded approach to journalism where columnists are required to post weekly online in addition to their print columns which require significantly more dedication. If that’s not enough, Justin has recently begun blogging on topic and wrote a book on one of his beats to boot.

Time Warner may not be collaborating with customers as much as it needs to, but clearly that door is opening some. And that’s a good thing.

Jay is not wrong to press old media to change more dramatically and to do it faster. It’s not just the methods that need to change. The way that they think about the world around them and the value of their perspective both need to accomodate a new and different way of communicating.

In this case, it’s a matter of picking which battles to fight. Attacking those who are influencing positive change at the companies you wish to influence is probably going to turn off those who may be listening to you.

Don’t invite other kids to play in the sand box and then throw sand at them, Jay.

Someone call the conversation police

I find it a bit presumptuous that someone would try to end a discussion on a topic in the blogosphere or, for that matter, assume that they drive a conversation in the market.

In an attempt to stop people blabbing endlessly about bloggerism vs journalism, Steven Berlin Johnson redefined the 5 points of the debate, recapping Jay Rosen’s closing arguments on the topic from over a year ago. His post was a response to Nichalos Lehmann’s article Amateur Hour — Journalism without journalists in The New Yorker questioning the value of blogging:

“Jay Rosen tried to kill off this kind of discussion a year or two ago with his smart essay, Bloggers Versus Journalists Is Over, but obviously it didn’t stick. So let me propose a slightly more blunt approach.”

Similarly, it seems odd to me that Malcolm Gladwell has decided that blog commentary is merely derivitive of mainstream media conversation:

“Any form that consists, chiefly, of commentary and criticism is derivative. We need derivative media sources to help us make sense of what we learn from primary sources.

…although it maybe possible for some bloggers to think of their thoughts as rising, fully formed, from the blogosphere, it just ain’t so. Even people who do not think of themselves as being influenced by the agenda of traditional media actually are: they are simply influenced by someone who is influenced by someone who is influenced by old media.”

He makes this statement in response to Chris Anderson of Long Tail fame (and Conde Nast’s Wired magazine). Chris used a comment Malcolm made to reinforce the point that mainstream media is not as powerful as it thinks it is:

“What we do has great value, but we no longer have a monopoly on leading the public conversation (not that we ever did, of course, but it was easier to delude ourselves before). The blogosphere doesn’t need us to give them something to talk about. When we do what we do well and add new ideas, information and analysis, blogs can be our best friend, amplifying our reach many-fold. But when we don’t, the former audience is very happy to talk amongst itself.”

There’s a bit of chicken and egg here, as I’m not sure it’s clear whose work is derivitive of whose.

A good reporter is a story teller of other people’s experiences. Nothing in the Wall Street Journal happens because the Wall Street Journal said it did. A good media company like the Wall Street Journal is able to catalyze important events and thinking happening in interesting places into meaningful and valuable chunks with a consistent lens, and there’s no doubt the Wall Street Journal influences what people think about.

But that role in not exclusive, even when their coverage of a topic is considered the best in its class or costs a ton of money or takes a lot of research to get right.

The conversations the Wall Street Journal covers are reflections of conversations that in many cases started years prior, and it’s not until the topic reaches some kind of tipping point does the Wall Street Journal then translate it for their lens of the world.

I would never deny being influenced by mainstream media. But that’s more a result of the fact that I have shared experiences with people than because the influence is meaningful or relevant. In fact, it becomes less and less relevant the more my media experience diversifies.

I agree with Steven that this particular topic lacks the juice it used to have. Jay Rosen has done a brilliant job of turning the discourse into a cohesive string that matters and feels complete from my personal perspective and obviously for Steven’s.

But closure for us may also mean it’s time for some fresh perspective to alter the dialog or extend it in sensible ways for other people yet untouched by it or confirm the premise of the argument with more useful research.

The effects of disintermediating media are still unfolding, and I’m betting that leaders at most big media companies will get more clarity on how to deal with that problem from each other and the individuals they know at competing companies or even their neighbors than they will from reading about it in their own publications.

Online media revenues breathe life into print-centric thinking

Media executives are admitting publicly that the print publishing model doesn’t appear to have a happy ending to the heavy beating it keeps taking. Folio ran a story this week titled “The Revenue Tipping Point“. It refers to the point at which online revenue gains outpace the print revenue losses at a magazine publishing company.


Photo: therese flanagan

“While online revenue is still dwarfed by print revenue for most publishers, many are starting to see real revenue growth online exceed the real revenue loss in print on a quarterly basis. That’s a huge justification for publishers investing online; a final warning shot for publishers resisting (and yes, there are still plenty of them out there) online investment.”

The business magazine master himself, Pat McGovern, confirmed the trend:

“At the American Business Media Spring Meeting in May, IDG Communications chairman Pat McGovern, head of a company that has been criticized for not committing sooner to the Web, spoke of how the company is now making more money online than it is losing in print.”

Agencies and marketers have been telling publishers that they were shifting budgets away from print to online media for several years. Circulation has been flat or falling across the print world. Readerhsip time spent figures have all been pointing online.

Colin Crawford also of IDG added his thoughts (and warnings) on the trend:

“Every year our print ad market contracts in terms of total advertisers and total pages and revenue and our print circulations fall. There is nothing on the horizon that indicates any sort of reversal of this trend…Transformation involves a deep cultural shift in attitude to put online first and stop over protecting print.”

The signals are everywhere, crystalized for the shortsighted in big red figures on the balance sheets.

But until only recently the investment and tradition behind print publishing and the print brands have made it very difficult for executives to tell their own staff not to mention the press that print magazine models are failing.

Why is it ok to open the kimono now? Because there’s now a story to match the strategic direction. As online revenue builds, investment will shift away from print at a reasonable pace. “We won’t have to close shop afterall,” Mr. Publisher says. “We’ll make up the losses with online revenues. Everyone just calm down and get back to what you were doing before.”

It’s a step in the right direction, but I find this story a little bit dangerous. This strategy implies that the print model has enough life left in it to make the transition only a matter of shifting money from one pocket to the other. I think many publishers will interpret this strategy as a way to hold onto their jobs while they wait for the combined print and online revenues to match pre dotcom bust earnings. It’s then that they plan to release a big sigh and head back to the golf course.

But the competition for online ad budgets is heating up, too. Unfortunately for the old school print sales guys out there, the online ad model doesn’t look the same as the print model. Banners are not the same as print pages, and, it turns out, there are several other effective and often more profitable methods for marketing online than standard banners. Many of them don’t require the overhead of a sales team. And many of them are based on totally new content production models, in case the editorial staff bought the rhetoric, too.

I guess what I’m suggesting is that spending time thinking about this tipping point is merely the first step in admitting you have a problem. But the race is on, and no doubt a bunch of publishers are going to get crushed both in print and online if they don’t actually really make the investment to turn their online businesses into valuable media vehicles.

What makes a good leader of a participatory community

I’m very interested in what leadership lessons we can learn from the people who drive the successful peer production models on the Internet. What is it about Craig Newmark, Jimmy Wales, Rob Malda, Stewart Butterfield and the other pioneers of participatory media that make the brands that they’ve created so powerful?


Photo: heather

Yochai Benkler breaks down the incentives for participation in peer production models in a very sensible and fascinating paper called Coases’ Penguin and discusses the economics of collaboration in his PopTech talk now available on ITConversations. But there’s a missing thread in his analysis that I think is crucially important.

The creators of the platforms on which peer production unfolds must have some common characteristics that enable these reputation models to reflect back on the people who invest in the platform instead of the company, brand or leader of that vehicle.

No doubt the participants are what make the products sing. But there’s something in common about the way these shepherds have approached their products and their customers that create an environment of trust, utility, gratification, expression, community, etc.

I don’t think any of them one day woke up and said I want to build a massive community of people posting content. Rather they probably stumbled onto ideas that started in one direction and ended up a little different than what they intended. I wonder what it is about the way they approach problems and lead teams that made them capable of identifying where the sweet spot would be for their idea.

I suspect that all of them share a handful of key qualities that make them unusual leaders including things like…

  • Total dedication, focus and passion for the service the community is providing to itself
  • A laissez faire attitude toward conflict but quick to identify resolutions
  • Motivated by a desire to do something important, not by money. They want to be part of something bigger than themselves.
  • A very creative mind that thrives on solving problems though not necessarily skilled in traditional artistic disciplines
  • Collaborative leadership styles, the extreme opposite of authoritarian, mandate-driven leadership

I don’t think they are attention seekers. I don’t think they are self righteous. They probably were mischief makers as kids and grew up to be anti-authoritarian. I’m guessing they were heavy video game users at one point if not still and love to compete.

I’m sure all of them also understand the decentralized and collaborative mentality, not as a translation from another model but rather baked into the way they think about what they are building.

I don’t know any of these guys personally, so this is perhaps wasteful conjecture. But I’m very curious about how the mainstream media business is going to approach the idea of participatory and social media given the cultural chasm and even conflicting styles of the leaders in the two categories. So far, it seems, people like Rupert Murdoch (and Terry Semel) have been smart enough to let these companies run and let these leaders lead.

It won’t be long before mainstream media companies start rolling out their own concepts for participatory media models, and I suspect those ideas will often fall flat…and it won’t be because the idea is bad but rather a lack of the key qualities required to shepherd a community.

Idealizing media business models

Jon Udell notes that WSJ’s landlocked articles may in fact help them drive revenue but at what expense:

“PaidContent.org reminded me that WSJ.com is considered a major success not only in the realm of paid online circulation, but also in comparison to newspapers…This may be a successful model of publishing, but it seems to me a curious definition of success.”


Photo: niznoz

How do you measure the opportunity cost of gating your content? The most obvious way is to estimate the number of page views an article would get outside a gated wall and then extrapolate revenue off CPMs.

However, this equation has a fundamental flaw that is not so easy to calculate. It’s the core question of every media company. How do you measure success? Do you exist to make money or do you exist to connect people?

It’s easy to say that media companies have to be both. But which powerpoint slide are you going to show your board of directors first? One of those will ultimately drive every decision at the company.

But even those two metrics fail to measure success in media as I’d like to see it. I’d like to see media brands measuring success based on the quality of the relationships they are able to catalyze. And I don’t see why that’s not possible…it might be hard, but it should be doable.

For example, it’s not how many people read an article that matters, necessarily. It’s how deeply did a story help a person. It’s not how many ad impressions were served, nor is it how many clicks or even the number of sales that result from an ad on a media property. It’s about the types of ways the media property improved the relationship between a vendor and that vendor’s customers.

Imagine how much easier strategic decisions would be if you could look at a report each morning that showed how many of your site visitors were getting promoted in their jobs or referring their friends to particular vendors that advertise on your site.

Imagine going into the board room each quarter and showing that as a direct result of the activity at your web site the average visitor income level increased or productivity in the industry improved or something more substantial like the number of homicides in the area decreased or more people voted in the last election.


Photo: infomaniac

Imagine telling an advertiser that working with your media brand meant that their customer retention metrics would improve or that people would be talking about their products more or even that they could drive up shareholder value. Imagine the rates they would pay to work with you for those benefits.

And imagine the types of people that would want to work at this kind of company and the amazing products that would come out of it as a result of these measures of success.

Yeah, pipe dream, I know. At the end of the day, most of us just want to get paid for their work and live a simple life. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I certainly fit in that camp a lot of the time.

The question in my mind is: Are qualitative success metrics like these measurable and attainable? If they’re not, why not? And if they are, why would you pursue anything else?

Copycat ad networks threaten Google’s stability

Any successful business model is going to have imitators.  Google knows this as well as anybody.   But now the stranglehold on the distributed ad model is feeling weaker than ever with new competitors every day.

The magic formula = isolate revenue collection system into a platform + make it available to other web sites – share earnings back to transaction/click source.

Yahoo! rolled out a similar offering about a year ago with YPN.  eBay launched their own version recently.  Amazon has had their affiliate program for years.  Kanoodle, IndustryBrains, Feedburner and a host of others all know this solution with their own twist on it.  Media networks such as IDG smartened up to the opportunity, as well.

The magic formula is showing cracks, though.  Click fraud is not being measured effectively by independent audits nor is payment being adjusted to compensate for it.  And Google has no short term incentive to solve the problem just as Microsoft once had no incentive to fix Windows security threats.

Linux gave Microsoft reason to change.  I wonder who will push Google into panic mode.  They may just sleepwalk into the death trap as long as their search market share remains strong.

Though have no doubt that Google can change.  At some point Schmidt’s insistence that Google is a technology company may actually trickle down and create some revenue opportunities that are more service based.  If they can scale their office products for mass adoption and perhaps create a browser optimized for those products, then they will finally have a potential revenue model to match the rhetoric.

The question is whether the market share losses surely in AdSense’s near future will fracture Wall Street’s love affair with the company before they can not only diversify but also stabilize on a mix of technology service revenue streams.

I can’t even imagine the complexity of the cultural war that will wage internally when/if the “technology” part of the business actually becomes a real slice of Google’s revenue pie.  Manufacturing consent will probably work while Google continues to grow.  I’d still hate to be on a “technology” product team at a company where 99% of the revenue comes from media products…wait…from one media product.

The Google Phd’s are probably predicting the copycats, the corporate positioning conflicts and internal competitive challenges as I write this, but are they smart enough to get their Product Managers and Biz Dev guys to help them actually figure out how to solve the problems, or do they just write papers and send long emails with subject lines in all caps?

“CORPORATE STRATEGY RESEARCH STUDY: IMPACT OF ‘TECHNOLOGY’ MARKET POSITION IN THE FACE OF MULTI-FRONT WAR ON ONLY REVENUE STREAM MAY CAUSE INTERNAL STRIFE”

Maybe Microsoft’s MSN team has some advice for Google’s technology product teams about operating in the shadow of the cash cow.

Why (and how) the online ad model needs to change

Somehow I keep expecting some company to break through and solve the problems with the Google AdSense model. As advertisers, buyers and media vehicles get smarter about efficiency, the holes in the system get bigger and bigger.

AdSense revenues help a lot of mid to large-sized web sites, but really more as incremental revenue. By the time you’re big enough for AdSense to support your business there are several other revenue opportunities with larger payouts avaiable to you.

And there’s no doubt that AdSense (and most Internet advertising) is failing to help people find and buy the things that matter to them. How can it be that we have an ad model that is considered wildly successful when a campaign or ad unit gets a click-through rate of 1%? And the reality is that it’s much much worse than that on average.


Photo: DWS

Why are click through rates so low? Because the ads don’t matter to people. They aren’t relevant. They don’t help people identify products or brands that matter to them. They don’t help people locate the right deal at the right time.

Yes, some people get lucky if they’re paying attention. There wouldn’t have been $5B in search ad revenue in the market in 2005 if nobody was clicking on the ads. But the click performance and subsequent conversion rates suggest this kind of ad network is just a spray hose of wasteful bits showering the Internet with clutter.

It doesn’t work for advertisers, either. Advertisers want more control over their ads, where they appear and to whom they are shown. Blanketing text links blindly across the Internet does not necessarily result in paying customers. They know they’re wasting money, but they can’t afford not to be present in the network.

The AdSense model does much more to help Google and the Google shareholders than it does to help any of the customers it is supposed to serve.

I think the Amazon affiliate program is much closer to a more sustainable ad model for the future. When you can track clicks all the way to a sale then everybody wins. The weakest link in the Amazon affiliate chain is the media vehicle which has to work a lot harder to drive clicks that convert to sale. But the buyer and the seller are both happy, and that’s ultimately what matters most.

I’d love to see an ad network that is able to let media vehicles optimize the ad content and display rules for the ads. The look and feel of an ad is not going to crank up the conversion rates. Media vehicles need to help the right ad get to the right person.

For example, when I post on my blog, I should be able to flag a stream of ad content and define the type of algorhythm that makes the most sense for that post and the users who are most likely to read it. This post should probably link to lead generation service providers even though I haven’t explicitly used the term “lead generation” anywhere in the post…uh, well, you get the idea.

Likewise, users should be able to self-identify as buyers. I haven’t yet setup a wifi network in my home, so I’d love for every tech-related web site I visit to show me the latest deals and setup guides and retailers for wifi gear. I’d actually like the content on all those sites to adjust, as well. I want to see what’s new and interesting at these sites, but they should be able to surface content from deep in their archives that is relevant to the things I’m actively pursuing. My intent should edit the home page for me.

I guess I’m saying that somebody needs to build a service that on one side connects directly into an advertiser’s sales conversion or transaction systems and on the other side distributes marketing links and images for media vehicles to take and optimize. The system should track performance across the chain and offer optimization options at all points along that chain.

Pieces of this exist and some of it is very complicated, I know, but I don’t see why efficiencies can’t be improved. And if enough advertisers are able to offer affiliate programs to track impression-to-click-to-sale, then they may even start competing with eachother and offer better incentives to media vehicles that find customers for them.

Users would see ads for things they want to buy. Advertisers would sell more product. And media vehicles would earn more from the revenue share.  Where’s the down-side?

Media needs to reflect attention, not collect attention

The “Edge” economists generated a swirl of activity over the last couple of weeks inspired by an attention economy paper apparently written in 1997 and referenced by Esther Dyson in a WSJ article.


Photo: eva8

In this paper, Michael Goldhaber wrote about the inherent desire for and scarcity of ways to get attention. He talks about how mainstream media created demand for getting attention and that the Internet then created the means for getting attention. It’s an excellent, thought-provoking paper. It’s particularly interesting today since most media insiders have been focusing on ways people give attention.

Here’s one particularly good excerpt:

It is a very nice feeling to have respectful attention from everybody within earshot, no matter how many people that may include. We have a word to describe a very attentive audience, and that word is “enthralled.” A thrall is basically a slave. If, for instance, I should take it in my head to mention panda bears, you who are paying attention are forced to think “panda bears,” a thought you had no inkling would come up when you decided to listen to this talk. Now let me ask, how many of you, on hearing the word “panda” saw a glimpse of a panda in your imagination? Raise your hands, please. Thank you. … A ha.

What just happened? I had your attention and I was able to convert it into a physical action on some of your parts, raising your hands. It comes with the territory. That is part of the power that goes with having attention, a point I will have reason to return to. Right now, it should be evident that having your attention means that I have the power to bend your minds and your bodies to my will, within limits that in turn have to do with how good I am at enthralling you. This can be a remarkable power. When you have superb control over your own body, so that you can perform great athletic feats, it feels great; likewise, it feels good when your mind feels focused and powerful; how much more wonderful then to be able to have the minds and bodies of others at your disposal! On the rather rare occasions when I have felt I was holding an audience “in the palm of my hand, hanging on my every word,” I have very much enjoyed the feeling, and of course others who have felt the same have reported their feelings in the same terms. The elation is independent of what you happen to be talking about, even if it is to decry something you think is horrible.

Several different bloggers have fleshed out intersesting perspectives on this topic including John Hagel, Umair Haque, Esther Dyson, Scott Karp, Nick Carr and Andrew Keen.

One of the important lessons from this discussion is for media companies to think of themselves more like a mirror. If online media brands can successfully help their customers to get attention then they will win.

That doesn’t mean you should resurrect that old message board system you trashed or stopped linking to. It means that you need to stop pushing content out and start introducing your online audience to each other.

After reading things like this I start wondering whether publishers should stop creating content completely. The efficiencies of leveraging an online media brand merely as a way to conduct 1-1, 1-many, and many-many conversations only amongst the audience itself seem intuitively more powerful and future-proof than almost any form of broadcasting we have today.

And it probably also means throwing out terms like “audience” in your corporate lexicon unless you are referring to the “audience” of one of your customers. This model suggests that media brands don’t have anyone listening to them. The sites’ “users” or “visitors” are interacting with each other instead…competing for attention amongst each other.

How many medium to large-sized publishers will be necessary when a few figure out how to enable people to get more attention? I would bet all of the teen magazines are panicking in the big shadow of MySpace’s market share. It suddenly feels like there’s another wave of disintermediation on the horizon, this time aimed squarely at publishers who are slow to shift gears.

The problem with being popular

Several people have complained about the quality of the content that comes out of a site like Digg, a site that captures popular consensus to reflect back to its participants what matters at any given moment.

I actually agree with these people but for entirely different reasons than most of them. There are few things in this world more important than giving people platforms for speaking their mind and being heard, and there’s something valuable to take away from every individual. But ranking voices based on popularity ultimately creates the opposite of empowerment.

Competition is a fantastic incentive to evolve. I’d argue most of the critical commentary of citizen journalism is positioning by the people who have more to lose from the success of commons-based journalism than they care to admit. The argument is largely protectionist fear of a populist attack on mainstream media. They aren’t competitive, and they know it.

The real problem with popularity-driven models is not the existence of reporting that hasn’t been vetted or the increasingly fuzzy lines between perspective and truth. The real problem with popularity-driven models is that they reduce both the breadth and depth of the sources, topics and viewpoints being expressed across a community.

Popularity-driven models water down the value in those hard-to-find nuggets. They normalize coverage and create new power structures that interesting things have to fight through.

Slashdot requires that a participant build a level of karma high enough to breakthrough the controlling moderator hierarchy. Digg removes many of the layers that close Slashdot from wider participation, but it also creates its own power structure as the core voters develop an unwritten etiquette for reducing the noise.

Our current advertising models reinforce the popularity-driven systems and reward the sites that can win the most traffic over those that may actually provide more meaning. The more popular your articles are, the more ad inventory you create. The more inventory you create, the more revenue you can capture.

Rather than broadcast what a few people think matters, the Internet should be used to help people help other people discover and find what matters. Personalized recommendation engines and social networks have fantastic potential because they are learning how to surface relevance in ways that have real meaning without the filter of the popularity overlords or gameable search algorhythms.

And advertisers should begin rewarding sites that capture the right customers at the right time with higher rates. They should value media based on the how well the vehicle initiates movement of the right kind of customer at the right point down the marketing funnel rather than by the volume of touch points.

“Good Night and Good Luck,” the recent film about Edward R. Murrow’s battle with Senator McCarthy challenged the television industry to rethink the value of the medium to society. Murrow’s speech in the beginning of the film is a harsh criticism of broadcast-style media:

“We have a built in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surplusses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it may see a totally different picture too late.”

He then goes on to fault popular opinion for allowing McCarthy to frighten everyone with his tactics:

“[Senator McCarthy] didn’t create this situation of fear. He merely exploited it and rather successfully. Casius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.'”

Finally, Murrow has to confront the station management and their desire to maintain strong sponsor relationships. His boss apologetically demotes Murrow:

“‘$64,000 Quesion’ brings in over $80,000 in sponsors and it costs one third of what you do. I’ve got Tuesday night programming that’s number one. People want to enjoiy themselves. They don’t want a civics lesson….I never censored a single program. I never said ‘no’ to you. Never.”

Murrow replies:

“I would argue that never saying ‘no’ is not the same as not censoring.”

I’m not saying popularity isn’t important. What other people think matters profoundly. It’s the root of being a social creature. And anyone who creates would be lying to you if they claimed they weren’t hopeful that what they create becomes popular.

The method for finding and consuming what’s popular, however, shouldn’t be controlled by dynamics that value what’s entertaining at the expense of what matters.