The Progress & Freedom Foundation Blog

Cuban on Fragmentation & Attention in the Blogosphere (or Why Power Laws Really Do Govern All Media)

Mark Cuban penned a sharp piece over the weekend entitled "Who Cares What People Write?" in which he explains why people shouldn't get too worked up about what they might read about themselves (or their organizations) online since, chances are, very few people are ever going to see it anyway. To explain why, Cuban identifies two kinds of "Outties" (which is shorthand for someone who publishes on the web): (1) "professional outties" (or "Those that attempt to publish in a limited number of locations to a maximum number of readers or listeners, with a reasonable expectation of building a following.") and (2) "amateur outties" ("Those that attempt to publish in as many places as possible hoping they are "discovered.") But those "amateur outties... really [have] no impact on 99.99pct of the population," Cuban argues, "[and the] vast majority of what is written on the web goes unread and even that which is read, is quickly forgotten." Moreover, "even when something is heavily commented on, it is usually just an onslaught by the 'amateur outties.'"

Thus, Cuban concludes:

Fragmentation applies to 100pct of media. We have gotten to the point where it is so easy to publish to the web, that most of it is ignored. When it is not ignored and it garners attention, the attention is usually from those people, the amateur outties, whose only goal is to create volume on the web in hopes of being noticed.

That's not to say there are no sites that people consume and pay attention to. There obviously are. That's where the "professional outties" come in. They are branded. They have an identity that usually extends beyond the net. They are able to make a living publishing, even if its not much of one. They are the sites that people consume and may possibly remember.

The moral of the story is that on the internet, volume is not engagement. Traffic is not reach. When you see things written about a person, place or thing you care about, whether its positive or negative, take a very deep breath before thinking that the story means anything to anyone but you.

Via Kevin Kelly I see that at some point Forbes magazine produced this chart measuring technology diffusion rates for various media and communications technologies since their year of inception.

I found this of great interest because, since the mid-90s, I have been putting together various charts and tables illustrating technological diffusion [most recently I did this in my "Media Metrics" report] and this particular chart is quite challenging since you are forced to pick a "Year 1" date to begin each of the "S curves." For example, what is "Year 1" for electricity or telephony on one hand, or the PC or the Internet on the other? That's not always easy to determine since it is unclear when certain technologies were "born."

Regardless, no matter how you cut it, the more modern and the less regulated the technologies, the quicker they get to market. Here's a couple of my recent charts illustrating that fact. The first shows how long it took before various technologies reached 50% household penetration. The second illustrates the extent of household diffusion over time.

However, as Kevin Kelly notes, we usually never see any technology hit 100% household penetration (although the boob tube got close!):

As part of our ongoing series that tracks the gradual transition of video content to the boob tube to online outlets, I want to draw everyone's attention to two excellent articles in today's Washington Post about this trend. One is by Paul Fahri ("Click, Change: The Traditional Tube Is Getting Squeezed Out of the Picture") and the other by Monica Hesse ("Web Series Are Coming Into A Prime Time of Their Own"). I love the way Paul opens his piece with a look forward at how many of us will be explaining the "old days" of TV viewing to our grand kids:

Sit down, kids, and let Grandpa tell you about something we used to call "watching television."

Why, back when, we had to tune to something called a "channel" to see our favorite programs. And we couldn't take the television set with us; we had to go see it!

Ah, those were simpler times.

Oh, sure, we had some technology we thought was pretty fancy then, too, like your TiVo and your cable and your satellite, which gave us a few hundred "channels" of TV at a time. Imagine that -- just a few hundred! And we had to pay for it every month! Isn't the past quaint, children?

Well, it all started to change around aught-eight, or maybe '09, for sure. That's when you no longer needed a television to watch all the television you could ever want.

Yes, I still remember it like it was yesterday . . .

Too true. Anyway, Paul goes on to document how some folks have already completely made the jump to an online-online TV existence and are doing just fine, although the idea of us all gathering around the tube to share common experiences may be a causality of the migration to smaller screens, he notes.

Grundyism: n. narrow-minded adherence to conventionality; prudery

There cannot be a word more apt to describe the growing zeitgeist among a certain class of would-be censors in Washington. The flash of Janet Jackson's nipple so outraged the FCC that it fined a broadcaster over half a million dollars. A similar sanction was levied for the utterance on television of a word that one will hear echo in the stands at most any live sporting event in America, a word that is commonplace on streets and playgrounds across the country. The prior FCC chairman was so shocked by the relatively uncultured programming on certain cable channels that he waged a four-year war on the cable industry, while the current Acting-Chairman of the FCC has made it no secret that he regards "rampant vulgarity, sexuality and gratuitous violence" to be pervasive in television programming.

For its part, Congress has not been unwilling to put its own delicate sensibilities on display, passing a law to increase the fines that the FCC may assess on broadcasters for airing "indecent" programming. And now the latest attack on broadcasting comes in the form of the "Families for ED Advertising Decency Act," H.R. 2175, introduced by Congressman Jim Moran (D-VA). If passed, H.R. 2175 would make it essentially illegal to run advertisements on broadcast television for medications that treat erectile dysfunction.

One can imagine Congressman Moran and his friends from the Parents Television Council - like grade-school children giggling at the use of words that describe bodily functions - counting the instances in which "erections" are mentioned in a given ad, or debating the Fellini-esque imagery of a man throwing a football through a tire-swing, and becoming enraged by the brazen assault on public morals that ED ads represent.

In truth, such reductive, overly-simplistic analysis (if the term might be stretched to include the blatantly political calculus underlying H.R. 2175) diminishes us as a society, potentially deprives some citizens of important medical information, and may further cripple the broadcasting industry - all under the banner of protecting children from harmful words.

Much ink is spilled over the expanding array of video marketplace choices that are competing for the attention of our eyeballs, but much less is usually written about the competition for our ears. As this excellent new Business Week article by Olga Kharif makes clear, competition and innovation in the audio marketplace has never been more vibrant. It's something I've pointed out here before and here's a chart I created for my Media Metrics report to highlight all the new competition for our ears. We've come a long way since the days of my youth, when transistor radios and vinyl records were the extent of audio competition!

Speaking of socializing media, acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps is someone who has devoted much of his life to regulating the media marketplace into the ground. If he had his way, federal bureaucrats would be controlling virtually every aspect of the media universe. Nothing would get done with Big Nanny's permission.

That's what makes his recent comments about the impact of media regulation so delicious.. and hypocritical. According to an article Bloomberg ran on Thursday, Copps is now saying that, with newspapers struggling to remain afloat, the FCC should now reconsider regulations that prohibit combined ownership of broadcast stations and newspapers. The agency should "visit this whole problem" before long, Copps apparently told Bloomberg.

"Visit this problem before long"?? Please! Congress and the FCC have had opportunities to "visit" and revisit this problem for many years now, but it has been Michael Copps and his merry band of media reformistas who have stopped every reform effort dead in its tracks. (See my essays "Congress Fiddles, Newspapers Burn" and "Media Deregulation is Dead" for more evidence of how these radicals hijacked media policy in this country.) As I documented in my 2005 Media Myths book, these charlatans have used hyperbolic rhetoric, shameless fear-mongering, and unsubstantiated claims in opposition to each and every sensible effort to reform our nation's outdated media ownership policies. Those laws and regulations have created artificial market structures and hindered the ability of media operators to find new business models that might throw them a lifeline in difficult times.

Consider the fact that it was just 14 months ago that then-Commissioner Copps issued this gem of a hysteria-ridden statement in response to the agency's last effort to ever-so-slightly loosen the newspaper-broadcast cross ownership rule:

I've got a new essay up over at the City Journal about John Nichols and Robert McChesney's proposal to have the government heavily subsidize failing media enterprises to "save journalism." It follows below:

________________

"Socializing Media in Order to Save It"
by Adam D. Thierer
City Journal March 27, 2009

With proposals to nationalize or heavily subsidize various segments of our economy more in vogue than ever, it was probably only a matter of time before someone suggested that America's media marketplace should be brought into the government fold. John Nichols of The Nation and the prolific neo-Marxist media theorist Robert W. McChesney have now provided the road map for media's march to serfdom. The cost to the American taxpayer would be at least $60 billion, but the cost for the First Amendment and our democracy would be incalculable.

Nichols and McChesney have coauthored several books and essays about media policy that view the world through the prism of class struggle, "manufactured consent" (á la Noam Chomsky), and the rest of the typical Marxoid tripe about history and economics. In their view, private, for-profit media cannot be trusted. As they stated in their 2003 call to arms, Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media, media-reform efforts must begin with "the need to promote an understanding of the urgency to assert public control over the media." "Our claim," they continue, "is simply that the media system produces vastly less of quality than it would if corporate and commercial pressures were lessened."

In a new Nation essay, "The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers," the authors bring their earlier work to its logical conclusion. Saving journalism, they argue, essentially requires that media become an appendage of the state. Journalism, they claim, is a "public good," which--like education and defense--requires constant government oversight and support: "A moment has arrived at which we must recognize the need to invest tax dollars to create and maintain news gathering, reporting and writing with the purpose of informing all our citizens." They propose that government devote $60 billion to "subscription subsidies, postal reforms, youth media and investment in public broadcasting." Think of it as a "free press 'infrastructure project,'" they say. "It would keep the press system alive. And it has the added benefit of providing an economic stimulus." (Isn't it amazing how everything stimulates the economy these days?)

In an interview yesterday, Acting FCC Chairman Copps said that the FCC should "reconsider restrictions on combined ownership of broadcast stations and newspapers as daily publications struggle with a plunge in revenue." This follows a letter from Speaker Pelosi to Attorney General Holder suggesting restrained antitrust review of transactions involving newspaper assets, and a proposal from Senator Cardin (D-MD) for a quasi-government bailout of newspaper firms.

They've all now suddenly discovered that the business model for daily newspapers is under strain and may not be sustainable? Was it the New York Times slouching toward bankruptcy that got their attention, or the failure of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer? And what about those claims, made little more than a year ago, by Commissioner Copps that the newspaper business was robust and newspaper profits were double the S&P average?

The sad truth is, the newspaper business has been heading toward a cliff for the last ten years; only willful ignorance can explain the failure of these people who have so recently come to be concerned about the fate of journalism to acknowledge the threat. Time will tell whether their new-found concern has come too late, or whether they have poisoned the political well too thoroughly for any effective policy change.

Indeed, had some of these same people, including Commissioner Copps, worked with then-Chairman Powell six years ago to forge consensus around changes to the structural ownership rules, both the newspaper business and the local broadcasting business (the next shoe to drop, one might well imagine) would be much better positioned to survive and thrive in the new, highly competitive, media marketplace. Instead, they railed about media consolidation and stoked irrational fears of mass mind control by "big media."

In civil society, one might expect an acknowledgment of past error, touched with a hint of shame, and even perhaps an apology for some of the less genteel things that were said of Chairman Powell during the 2003 ownership proceeding. This is Washington, though, where gentlemanly behavior is too much to hope for.

In the wake of the recent dispute between Warner Music Group and YouTube, much nonsense has been spouted about "fair use" on commercial user-generated-content (UGC) sites. Examples are here and here.

By contrast, the ABA Journal offered a more thoughtful review, but it too overlooked a critical aspect of the evolving relationships between copyright owners and operators of UGC sites like MySpace or YouTube.

Disputes like Warner/YouTube are inevitable (and healthy), but they should not obscure a larger truth: during the past two years, copyright owners and UGC site operators have been cooperating closely and effectively. I have written about the Copyright Principles for UGC Services, and YouTube has pursued similar cooperative measures using internally developed technologies. These efforts are innovative and commendable, and all involved deserve great credit.

Two closely related factors can explain why cooperation and efforts at licensing have predominated in this particular context:

First, the § 512(c) safe-harbor for hosting sites prescribes an array of conditions that are intended to make it difficult, particularly in the long run, for a "harbored" hosting service to rely heavily upon infringing or questionable content to generate traffic to its site.

Second, most major UGC-site operators are trying to build profitable commercial businesses. Their commercial nature significantly affects eligibility for many copyright limitations or exceptions, including fair use.

I read a letter today from Speaker Pelosi to Attorney General Holder in which she notes that the media markets have become hyper-competitive, newspapers are struggling to survive, and fundamental First Amendment newsgathering itself is threatened. So what is the Speaker's suggestion to Attorney General Holder? Ease up on that antitrust enforcement a little bit - after all, there newspapers compete with a whole new host of electronic media.

When I read the letter, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. For the uninitiated, I spent the better part of 2002-03 helping to develop, and then publicly defending, a new set of FCC media ownership rules that were intended to . . . wait for it . . . preserve newspapers and broadcast outlets ("traditional media") in an increasingly competitive environment. At the very heart of those rules and my efforts to defend them was the notion that traditional media now are faced with competitive threats from a variety of new media including, most importantly and most dramatically, the Internet. "If you value an independent press," I said on countless occasions, "you had better allow the companies in that business to organize in economically efficient ways so that they can continue to invest in newsgathering and journalism. You can't love reporters without also loving the companies that hire them and pay their salaries."