How it all began: content sharing

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and SnapChat are all platforms that allow us to share content with others. While this is the case now, it always wasn’t like this. That’s because for a very long time, media was a privilege of the elite - accessed only by a handful of people. Unfortunately this trend made content creation and distribution difficult and expensive.

So expensive, that the content industry was run by a select few. These people were your financiers and executive tastemakers. They put in place measures of how content was to be created and distributed. Although media workers’ could remix content, they had to abide by the rules given by gatekeepers. Over time, technology simplified things. Production costs fell, quality went up and the distribution of content increased. The media business was beginning to loosen its grip on content creation and distribution.

With the introduction of the internet, content creation and distribution was made much easier. Shachar and Boluk state in their article: http://redef.com/original/age-of-abundance-how-the-content-explosion-will-invert-the-media-industry? “However with this democratisation of media creation, it became easier to create content but much harder to make it a hit.” For many years, media’s top industry players’ were given leverage over scarce capital. They decided on how content would be created and distributed. In recent years there has been a shift in power to consumer attention. For the first time in history, consumers wield the power.

This power shift has enabled sites such as the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed to become tastemakers. Not forgetting video and music sites Netflix and Youtube. Programmers no longer have as much power over content like before. This job has now been passed down to the curator. So, as much as there's still gatekeepers filtering content, curators are coming out top to curb this filtering of content.

The shift from programming to curating is significant. Reason being, for nearly a hundred years, mass marketing programming was an essential capability in business. Content creation and distribution were too expensive and defined only by a select few.

Have a look at the full article on the topic: http://redef.com/original/age-of-abundance-how-the-content-explosion-will-invert-the-media-industry?curator=MediaREDEF

You can also follow Liam Boluk @LiamBoluk or email him at liamboluk@gmail.com

and

Tal Shachar @tweettal or email him at tal.shachar@gmail.com