How technology change the media industry and viewer behavior
In few decades ago, people used to watch TV, newspapers and magazine to receive information. Nowadays, the internet influences strongly to the architecture of media industry and also the viewer behavior.
In the past, the traditional ways dominated the information sources. The position, opinion and value from the media owner and editor decided what we saw. And we were also willing to pay for their profession in filtering the useless information and control the quality of news.
However, because of the rise of internet population and community site. There are more and more channels on internet to receive information. The cost of publishing information is also affordable for each individual. The traditional media industry in TV and paper-based publication are forced to transform into internet-base. They provide their news for free and employ high click through rate to attract the investment from advertising agencies. Although there is no cost on printing and marketing channel, there are additional costs on servers, digital file management, web design, and the same costs on maintaining reporters, writers and editors.
For viewers side, now we have too many choices to get information through formal or informal channels. We can also do the reporter’s work with our mobile phones such as taking a picture and leaving a comment or a tag for any event we’ve met. The community sites intend to make the priority of our posts be higher than the news. Moreover, there will be no longer “exclusive” news on internet. In the past, since the deadline was in the previous day, it was possible to make some exclusive news on newspapers. But now if there is a exclusive news posted on internet, no more than 3 minutes, there will be several re-write or re-organize news on other sites. No matter how outstanding your reporter is, I can always hire some low-technical editors or deploy programs to copy-and-paste and re-order your news on my site immediately. According to above reasons, I think the amount of viewing news cannot make enough benefit to survive.As a result, I take a pessimistic view of the transformed traditional news industry.
If there is no support from other rich enterprises, what is the future of the traditional media industry? In my opinion, content producer will dominate this industry. Since the exclusive news will disappear, the content of media industry will become M-shaped — the news becomes unimportant and the delicate content written by valuable content producers becomes worthy.
The valuable content producers are reporters, editors and also novelists. They may be the kings in this industry. The more kings the company owns, the stronger it is. In this way, these content producers are more like idols. They’ll build their own personal brands.
So the character of media companies will be like management companies. In the initial stage, they will compete in signing with famous content producers, and then they will try to cultivate talent by themselves like NBA and MLB. And for their operation format, they may provide technical support and platform for content producers.