The correct strategy for the Mass Media industries must integrally solve seven requirements content creators, consumers, and advertisers have. These are the building blocks for the correct strategy:
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1. A PRACTICAL MEANS FOR CONTENTS CREATORS TO TRACK THEIR CONTENTS’ USAGE AND CHARGE ITS USERS. The Internet wasn’t originally designed for such purposes. However, that internetwork’s birth from military-sponsored university research provides the lineage to a solution. For the past 28 years, academicians, scientists, and researchers have been using the Document Object Identifier (DOI) system to track the online origin and usages of academic papers, research, data sets, and other forms of information. An assigned DOI number is a persistent identifier or persistent handle, part of an online object’s metadata. It remains bound and remains fixed over the lifetime of that object. Approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), a DOI fits within the Internet’s existing Uniform Resource Identifier system (an example of an URI is any website’s Uniform Resource Locator or URL). The DOI system last year processed more than 390 million objects of content and is administered by the not-for-profit DOI Foundation. The Mass Media industries should license DOI and establish an even more robust version to provide tracking of their contents’ usage throughout the Internet. DOI system’s ISO approval means it will likely be fully compliant with future Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. (For how to charge users or intermediaries, see #4 below.)
2. A PRACTICAL MEANS FOR CONTENT CREATORS TO IDENTITY, TARGET, AND DELIVER CONTENTS TO EACH AND ANY CONSUMER WHOM IT TRULY INTERESTS. During the past two decades, that has been attempted through the rudimentary means of manually including keywords in items’ metadata. A major flaw in that is inserted keywords rely upon the content creator’s chosen human language. To be internationally usable, the best solution should be independent of human languages and automatically analyze and encode the item (while allowing for human oversight). All produced media contents should thus be machine-readable: the content creator’s machine analyzes and encodes it with appropriate metadata from a universal schema. Any consumer’s machine programmed by or for that individual with his expressed or recorded interests uses its online agents (almost certainly AI) to seek sources of what news, entertainment, and other information that individual wants. Intermediaries using similar technology might be involved. The appropriate mix of such information is then sent to that consumer, tracked by the DOI system explained in #1 above.
As Moore’s Law, its corollaries, and their interactions continue exponentially advancing computer-mediated technologies used, this process will continually increase its articulation and reduce its required costs (see the example in the third of these newsletters about how a small media company could implement the solution today). This is a trend that cannot be reversed. Its usage via by Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AAI) has already begun.
Which universal content coding schema should the Mass Media industries adopt? The ideal answer is Dublin Core Metadata Terms (DCMT or simply ‘Dublin Core’), the most comprehensive form of machine-readable eXtensible Markup Language (XML). This Open Standard and ISO certified schema is fully compliant with the standards of the World Wide Web Consortium and the Internet Engineering Task Force. A small number of media organizations nowadays use specialized (i.e.,, approved by the International Press Telecommunications Council) subsets of XML for their metadata (subsets such as NewsML, SportsML, RightsML, etc.). Some others use what they call “ninjs” (‘News in JSON’, a version of JavaScript Object Notation). All are subsets of Dublin Core. However, if the ultimate solution is to be universal, compatible with future technological systems and perhaps future new forms of content, then the best approach is to use the master set from the start.
3. A MULTIMEDIA, MULTINATIONAL, MULTILINGUAL, AND MULTICURRENCY INTERCHANGE SYSTEM ACCOMPLISHING THOSE REQUIREMENTS. Although most media contents produced are consumed locally, it is a fact that globalization and the Internet have also caused rising international consumption. For examples, the website of the Guardian in the United Kingdom routinely ranks among the Top Ten newspaper websites consumed by Americans. Almost one-fifth of The New York Times’s website users are from outside the U.S. Forty percent of CNN.com users are. Those and other globalized sites also provide their contents in multiple languages. Moreover, most users will use websites from newspapers, magazines, broadcasters, bloggers, etc. So, any true solution will have to operate for all of those sources of contents. In addition, if sites would like to charge anything for access, this means such a solution must deal with multiple currencies and other forms of payment (such as PayPay, AliPay, PagoEfectivo, Venmo, UPI Lite, BitCoin, etc.)
Given human nature, creating agreement among common standards and system by all sectors of media in all nations will likely be the most difficult task to accomplish in any true solution. I remember the mid-1990s when I was one of two outside consultants to the New Century Network consortium of eight major U.S. newspaper publishing companies, which were trying to formulate their initial strategy for utilizing the Internet. The staff and we outside consultants proposed that those newspapers companies create a shared online advertising system, a shared database through which all their consumers could find stories, etc. The companies, which during decades had grown used to competing against one another, reject all such cooperative efforts. Hidebound, they’d become myopic to the advantages of common defenses in a ‘converged’ online world. Within 60 months, Google News, Facebook, Twitter, CraigsList, Monster.com, and other startup companies were founded, perceived their weaknesses and eviscerated those eight major U.S. newspaper companies. Moreover, any true solution now will be even more difficult simply because it will require cooperation among, not just within, Mass Media sectors and in internationally.
4. A PRACTICAL MICROTRANSACTION AGGREGATIN SYSTEM. Mass Media companies’ chief financial officers (CFOs) love charging consumers a fixed monthly sum (ranging from $5 to $20) to access to their company’s website. It makes financial planning easier and helps equity market analysts predict the company’s revenues in the next and subsequent annual quarters. Like the eventual demise of an old warhorse, this increasingly antiquated concept will be missed by those CFOs. Yet it will die for three reasons.
● It’s readily apparent in the market: ‘subscription fatigue.’ Consumers demonstrably aren’t willing to pay many or most websites such fees. Research by StartUs Insights, Deloitte, and others indicates that that the average American online consumer visit between 50 and 100 websites per month yet isn’t willing to pay subscription fees to more than 4 to 6 (including the fee that consumer pays for company for Internet access). Consumers’ unwillingness to pay fees to more than those numbers of websites means that mainly the major content company in each media sector (Netflix, NYTimes.com, etc.) get subscribers but not the remaining companies which comprise the majority of that sector. Is that situations what’s best for the sustainability of the Mass Media industries?
● Given that the Mass Media industries’ traditional packages of contents (i.e., a newspaper or magazine edition, a broadcast program schedule, an album of songs, etc.) unbundles and deconstructs once placed online, why would most consumers—particularly when Mass Media websites’ own weblogs demonstrably show consumers use only some of the unbundled parts (i.e., a story, a video clip, a song, etc.), be forever motivated to pay a fix monthly fee for access to the entire package? In a world in which unsolicited marketing postal mails (i.e., ‘junk mail’) receive a 2 to 3 percent response rate, are the Mass Media industries’ websites that convert into subscribers only 3 to 5 percent of their websites’ users doing really that much better than junk mail’s results? I think the current situation is demonstrably unsustainable.
● As the title itself of Chris Anderson’s best-selling 2006 book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, should teach the Mass Media industries a vital lesson about how thoroughly the introduction of computer-mediated technologies has shifted scarcity to surplus. Prior to those technologies, mass marketers of goods were limited by their stores’ physical shelf space limitations. That meant they vended only commonly purchased items, not having space to sell other items. Likewise, the Mass Media industries had faced the limits of page space in each printed edition or else the broadcast time limit of there being only 24 hours in each day. That meant their printed editions and broadcast programming consisted mainly of the the items of greatest common interests, not all interests. What changed was that startup companies (consider Amazon and Alibaba) perceived how computer-mediated technologies can invert that situation. After all, there are virtually no spatial limitations online. Rather than focus their efforts upon selling commonly purchased items, they became phenomenally popular and financially successful selling the huge numbers of items that hadn’t been commonly sold. Amazon and Alibaba realized that there is greater aggregated revenue from selling less common items to more people than selling more common items to only those interested in the common. We all have a few common interests, but more (if not most) of us each have tens or hundreds more less common interests, the unique mix of which makes us each individual. This is a lesson that the Mass Media industries, whose traditional products and services are based upon serving the most common interest, need to learn in this new era.
Those three reasons strongly suggest that the Mass Media industries stop charging $5 to $20 monthly fees from the tiny percentages of their website visitors who might be willing to pay such and instead charge much smaller amounts or even microtransactions from the greater percentage of visitors willing to pay less. Would reducing the fees charged by a factor of ten linearly result in 30 to 50 percent of visitors agreeing to pay that? Or would the resulting percentages of subscribers be greater than that?
Unfortunately, no microtransaction vendor’s current proprietary system has been embraced by all sectors of the Mass Media industries, and particularly not internationally. Most were developed for a particular sector, operate using only a limited number of languages, or can’t process all means of payment. So, I say, why re-invent the wheel? I think a solution is to use the current worldwide system for processing credit and debit card transactions (i,e., Visa, Mastercard, JCB, American Express, etc.) The temporary flaw here is that this current system charges the creditor 0.5% to 3.5% of the transacted amount plus a fixed fee of $0.05 to $0.30. This the systems incapable of processing microtransactons of less than $0.05 unless the creditor wants a loss. However, I think this can be sidestepped if the transaction processor or an intermediary can aggregate the microtransactions and process those as a monthly total rather than each transactions in real time. Internet Service Providers or telephone company might be amenable to doing so if they receive a commission. (Indeed, telephone companies have had more than a century of experience processing small transaction amounts.)
5. A PRACTICAL SHIFT IN TRANSACTIONAL CONTROL, PLUS ADVANCED PRIVACY, FOR THE CONSUMERS. Mass Media industries, as well as the Individuated Media companies (search engines, social media websites, etc.), are used to ‘owning’ their consumers. Yet the epochal shift in information from scarcity to surplus has markedly changed the power dynamics in the media environment. Power has greatly shifted from content creators towards consumers, a trend that will continue for three reasons. First, Mass Media industries are discovering that their traditional ‘gatekeeper’ and ‘agenda setting’ roles are no longer as viable, and that their traditional packaging of contents unbundles and deconstructs once shoveled online. Second, governments are becoming increasingly aware of how the Individuated Media companies’ content selection algorithms are intentionally formulated for addition. Third, as Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AAI) begins to permeate the media environment worldwide, it will do so on the side the consumer because AAI systems vendors realize that the largest target market for services is consumers and not content providers. Mass Media marketers who currently ‘own’ consumers and profit from the sales or manipulation of data about consumers will increasingly find ever greater computational forces counteracting them.
6. ADVERTISING WILL BECOME NOT ADJACENT, INTERSTITIAL, OR INTRUSIVE, BUT SIMPLY A CO-EQUAL FORM CONTENTS. Traditional Mass Media marketers might be alarmed by how much the epochal change from scarcity to surplus in information has shifted the transactional power balance in the media environment. They need to adapt to that fact. During the previous era, consumers had little choice but to see printed advertisements adjacent to the stories they read in newspapers and magazines or to forebear advertisements interrupting the radio or television or cinematic content they consumed. Moreover, neither they nor the marketers were satisfied by the old power balance. During the 19th Century, marketer John Wanamaker famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half!” The fact that many online consumers are willing to pay extra fees to receive ‘ad free’ contents clearly indicate their dissatisfaction of intrusive, interstitial, or even adjacent advertising.
How much could the power balance between intrusive advertising and consumer preference change now that the power has shifted so much? Enough so that online marketing guru Seth Godin proposed a ‘Permission Marketing’ solution, in which marketers would directly pay consumers to receive ads. If the cost of those payments is less than the costs marketers currently pay intermediaries such media companies, that could work.
However, advertising is more likely, or in addition to, become simply another form of content, co-equal with news, entertainment, and other information. It would be to delivered via the same systems to consumers. The consumers select the types, categories, and topics of products and services which they want to purchase now, in the future, or when a price they are willing to pay is accepted, and such information is sent to them, paid for by the marketers. A consumer’s AAI could also formulate and predict a consumer’s unexpected needs, interests, and tastes, based upon past queries, purchases, lifestyle, and types of information used by that consumer.
I realize that such proposals might not please marketers who want their advertisements to be seen by all consumers “in case those consumers become interested.” However, surveys indicate that consumers are much more displeased seeing the sheer numbers of advertisements for which they’re not interested than they are by missing advertisements about products or services they hadn’t realized would interest them.
7. THE NEED FOR ALL THAT TO BE DONE WITH ‘OPEN SOURCE’ TECHNOLOGIES. Two apt aphorisms are ‘There is no limit to what can be accomplished provided that no one take credit’ and ‘The perfect is the enemy of the good.’ I’ve all too often seen proposed solutions to problems shatter for no reason other than someone holds too proprietary an interest in the solution. Would more than six billion people (73 percent of humanity) currently be using websites if the World Wide Web’s inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee had required that anyone using it to pay him a license fee? Likewise the Internet itself? Using Open Source technologies eliminates the competitions among proprietary vendors delaying any agreement upon implementations. Moreover, vendors themselves find that building system using Open Source technologies tends to make other vendors who want to build atop, further, or otherwise fitting versions of what was built. Open Source best ensures that something will be most widely accepted and used. Open Source’s successes indeed are the reason you’re reading this on the Open Source Internet.
Based upon clearly observable empirical evidence from the first quarter of the 21st Century, we can reasonably conclude that the Mass Media industries, whose products and services arose from the Industrial Era’s analog production technologies, are demonstrably evaporating. Those legacy industries need to accept that the epochal informational shift from relative scarcity to surplus caused by the introduction of personal-computer mediated technologies into the media environment has caused their traditional products and services (no matter if in print, broadcast, or online), packaged to satisfy a demographic or topical group rather than each individual, not only unbundles and deconstructs when placed online and has thus become unpopular, obsolete, as has their traditional business models.
It has become blatantly clear during the first quarter of the 21st Century that what has already superseded those failing products and services and instead has become billions of people’s predominant means of obtaining news, entertainment, and other information, are the online services of relatively new companies which perceptively realized the hallmark advantage of computer-mediated technologies isn’t online replication of legacy media’s demographically-targeted products and services but the aggregation, mass customization (and even bespoke individuation), then online delivery of whatever mix of news, entertainment, and other information that best matches each individual consumer’s unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes. In other words, not just mass production and mass reach but mass individuation. That’s why billions of consumers during the past 20 years have abandoned the Mass Media’s product and services and instead shifted to using the services of new companies that offer such individuation. These novel companies (the search engines, social media, genre-specifics such as Spotify, Pandora, etc.) have become among the fastest growing in world history; are now used daily by dearly 6 billion people; and already reap more than half the world’s online advertising (nowadays the world’s largest sector of advertising).
Executives of the Mass Media industries must accepted the obvious factual reality that Individuation of contents has become the major media trend of the 21st century. Fortunately, the technologies needed for the Mass Media industries to begin offering individuated services not only not readily exist but now have become affordable costs and increasingly easy to use. All media industries must implement these and adapt. Especially when you consider that the exponentially accelerating advancements in computer-mediated technologies (particularly Artificial Intelligence) during this century will only exponentially increase the success gap between media companies using such technologies and those that don’t.