Changing Web Content Consumption Patterns

Just as everyone online starts to figure out how to create really cool web content mashups, the web is taking off in a whole new direction. Websites like Indeed.com that aggregate content from other sites that will let them (Craigslist won’t) have been all the rage for the last few years.

This has been due in part to the fact that search engines like Google, while they are much better than they were a few years ago, lack the ability to organize information in ways that satisfy entrepreneurs like myself.

The initial backlash against this movement toward aggregation of content was based on pre-web notions of content ownership. While some of these notions are a bit draconian (i.e. laws that could potentially outlaw individuals from xeroxing a page from a book vs. buying the whole book), they also serve to protect us from those who seek to the content of others and then re-publish it (for profit or personal gain) without crediting the content creator in full or at all. On several occasions I’ve called out other bloggers (including a few who had way more readers than I) for copying my content and essentially taking 100% credit for my words. In short, changing one or two words in an article and then slapping your name to it doesn’t make it yours.

A part of the problem is that publishers, large and small, can’t be everywhere all the time. On top of this, the volume of content online and the distribution channels for it are proliferating at a faster rate than ever before. This represents both a challenge and an opportunity. I’ll talk about the challenge and reserve the opportunity for a future post.

The challenge presents itself as the proverbial fork in the road for us:

The first path is to continue thinking about the web as a one on one theater. In this way, we are thinking about how we write to the people who visit our website. We are not considering what happens if someone picks up our content and the changes it or re-publishes it elsewhere. We can continue to fight the offenders and send them cease and desist letters until we run out of time to be creative at all.

The second path, and the one that I think is better, is to start thinking about the web as an echo chamber for us to use to start discussions that may continue on beyond our immediate audience. In this model of the web, individual publishers are still creating content publicly, but they are doing so in such a way that the conversation evolves along the way. The difference is that the content creator expects, rather than frets, that the message will be modified.

While it may seem like the messengers on down the line may be taking advantage of the initial content provider, appearances may be a bit deceiving. The messengers who are borrowing content are in effect becoming distribution channels in their own right without even realizing it.

For example, if you copied a page out of a book for a research paper and then paraphrased it in an essay that you wrote then you probably talked about what you read with someone later. You might have even gone back to that initial source later, but for future content. The same applies to blogs.

What this means for publishers, myself included, is that we need to be thinking about the different sorts of permutations that our content may undergo after it leaves our immediate audiences. I say this with caution, largely because I want to underscore that once you go down the second path that I’m recommending today, because you may find that you are going to want to throw out quite a few of your ways.

I have lived this second path for a little over a year now, and I can definitely say that it has changed my perspective and my business. I was able to transform how I did business before and have to admit that I do not want to go back.