It's the online truism which keeps on giving: content is king. I've heard that line hundreds of time since the first internet age began. One of its first airings was to headline a pep talk which Bill Gates gave to his Microserfs in early 1996. Bill, he was on the ball back then, writes Jim Carroll
"Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the internet, just as it was in broadcasting," is how he began a range of predictions which have all subsequently hit the back of the net.
"One of the exciting things about the internet is that anyone with a PC and a modem can publish whatever content they can create," was Bill's vision of a user-generated world of blogging, Bebo, MySpace, Second Life, podcasting and vodcasting a decade before it actually came to pass. It will be, said Bill the sage, "an opportunity for personal involvement that goes far beyond that offered through the letters-to-the-editor pages of print magazines."
Indeed, when Bill compared this future interactive goldrush to "the multimedia equivalent of the photocopier", he may well have been onto something, given the proliferation of me-too sites which have come this way. Tired already of MySpace? Well, jump on the Bandwagon.
Perhaps the most striking aspect about the second internet age is that content is still king. Out here, among millions and millions of other like-minded souls, you're only as good as what's on your page. It applies to every web category you care to mention: conventional publications, blogs, gardening advice sites, recipe lists, music sites, online classified ads. Everyone's MySpace page may be created in a similar fashion, but there's a reason why it's Lily Allen rather than Alan Lily who is getting all the hits. Similarly, the reason why satirical sniper Blogorrah is doing the serious page impression business when it comes to Irish popular culture is down to the quality of the content.
When Bill Gates was looking into his tea-leaves, one observation he made was that "for the internet to thrive, content providers must be paid for their work". What's interesting about the second internet age is that the content producers are doing the work for free, especially on those social networking sites currently in vogue. Strange thing is, though, there's a lot of money to be made by these sites. Your first MySpace friend Tom, for instance, made out like a bandit when Rupert Murdoch opened his chequebook. But there's little sign of that $580 million (€452m) cash-in trickling down to the masses who have turned MySpace into the entity which tickled News Corporation's interest in the first place. Similarly, if Viacom or Telefonica buy into Bebo, there's unlikely to be a payday for that site's users. The only change will be more adverts and sucky bespoke marketing campaigns.
Of course, the site originators can rightly claim that they're getting paid for creating the tools which make the pages work. They've also put in the hours, days and weeks to maintain and develop the sites and ensured early investors were happy. But they would not be having lunch with corporate types and talking telephone number-sized buy-outs unless millions of people had gone to the trouble of producing MySpace profiles and Bebo pages in the first place.
It seems the bulk of MySpace and Bebo users are either happy to let others cash in on their collective power or are blissfully unaware of what's going on.
jimcarroll@irish-times.ie
