The Atomized Web

One of the greatest fears the media has about its future in the wake of the Web is it will be atomized. (Here’s some good atomization, from Marren Fuel Injection.)

Large audiences will prove impossible to generate. No one will be able to afford real reporting any more. News will become just opinion.

I see this through my work at ZDNet. The business model pays writers based on traffic. The incentives are there to generate heat, not light, and to create troll bait, not detailed journalism. Some readers complain, but every time I try to concentrate on interviews the size of my check goes down.

It’s a very Darwinian environment, with more bloggers added all the time, all competing for attention. It’s very hard to maintain an audience without being outrageous. Some readers complain, yet their clicks are driving the site toward trivia, on the wings of that rarest of species, a viable online business model.

Blogs in general are harder-and-harder to break into. I look at the traffic patterns here, and if I weren’t as dedicated to writing as breathing I’d probably stop. You can’t make a living as an individual blogger anymore. You can’t break into the top 1,000. You have to associate with someone, something, or try video, which itself is a shared, group-oriented industry.

There’s also a model for where this is heading, one the news industry fears even while they can’t say its name.

Porn.

I have long looked at the porn market as a case study because it features
high amounts of disposable income and an embrace of advanced
technology. This means porn pioneers technology business models.

Videotapes, 900 numbers, viruses, interactive DVDs and online video delivered through BitTorrent are
all business models which were pioneered in porn, then filtered into
the general Internet. It’s reached the point where whenever a new technology hits the market, you will see a magazine article claiming it’s just a tool for porn. (An example is this from Time.)

Now, name a porn star. If you thought of any name, it was probably Jenna Jameson,
who has proven one of the most able entrepreneurs in the industry’s
history, becoming one of the few to make crossover appearances in the
general culture. But Ms. Jameson is nearly 35, which as Mark Knopfler
notes in Sucker Row is "a dangerous age."

Since the Web was spun the porn industry has slowly atomized. DVDs, like music CDs, are going the way of the dodo. It’s all singles now, which means it’s divided by participants, subdivided by actions, resulting in tiny niches where there’s barely enough money to toss the "actors" a few C-notes and pay for the camera.

You can actually write the industry as a Java program. The formula is:

While x + y do a + b

All the variables in this case are string variables. For x and y you can insert instance variables of sex, age, or body type. For a and b the instance variables are sexual activities, no matter how disgusting or perverse. As a business proposition, in other words, there’s no difference between the filth of child pornography (for which no penalty is too extreme) and what used to be considered mainstream fare. There is no such thing as mainstream fare.

The good news, if there is any, is there is tremendous opportunity here for a clever prosecutor to roll-up the whole industry, simply by associating the mainstream with the extremes. There’s little practical difference.

That’s atomization in action, The practical result, in the mainstream Web, is that it takes ever more-scaled business models to break through the clutter, but you’re serving ever more-niched audiences with ever more-direct fare. General interests are slowly being subsumed into special interests. We’re all surfing alone.

Is there a way around this?

I think there is.

A news brand can group writers engaged in newsgathering with a hybrid business model. The writers and editors get a barely-livable basic wage, written in the form of a freelance contract, but they share monthly bonuses based on the performance of the site as a whole.

Divide the excess revenue into points and share them among the staff and management. A starting reporter may get a portion of a point. A star writer might bring several. You’re measuring performance daily so managers know who the stars are. There are only 100 points in total, however, so you hold his data on who’s getting what close.

So let’s say you’re CBSnews.com. You offer tiny salaries to your employees, all of them, but they share in the success of the whole site through points. Now, when someone hits a home run with a great piece of troll bait, that success can be shared generally with people who are doing work which is vital to a well-rounded news organization but less popular in terms of clicks. You also have an internal process for rewarding and disciplining people who meet or don’t meet standards of excellence. You can even hold out some points until the end of the year and distribute them based on your own criteria.

In this way you can build a free site with a large audience which rewards people based both on traffic and their contribution to the site. It’s closer to the model you’d see at a law firm or an investment bank rather than a newspaper.

But that’s the best way to prevent atomization. Go with the flow.