• April 27, 2021

Who will survive the content wars?

 

When was the last time you went online to look for a premium content subscription to pay for?

Not for at least 10 years for most people!

In order to get your business, publishers first have to create content you actual want before they can sell you anything whether via ads or god forbid an actual premium subscription.

For a long time this has been a problem plaguing publishers of all shapes and sizes.

Getting anyones attention these days is no joke.

 

 

The Content Dilemma

When everything consumers want or desire is now only a “google search” away, the battle for their attention has now become the war.

But up until recently the pawns of the war have been traditional media publishers. But that has changed forever.

For example, YouTube is now the second largest search engine with how-to videos.

Podcasts are now exploding in growth with over 900,000 podcasts delivering amazing insights on any topic.

Anyone with a blog is now a “media site.”

In other words, anyone can create and compete in the media game. And so everyone is.

If you have anything to sell. You’re now part of the content wars. Here’s why…

 

The Death of Traditional Media

When  digital content took over, consumers were no longer willing to pay a premium for content the way they did in the past…Why should they it’s free?

For the first time in history, publishers had to ask themselves; what the hell do we actually sell?

Content? That’s what they thought they sold. But the digital age proved that idea wrong.

Publishers of all types, from news to music, are less than pleased that consumers won’t pay a premium price for content anymore.

What they’re learning to understand now is that they never sold content. They just sold access to content, and the price consumers paid was dependent on the cost of the format.

 

The music sector sold records, then tapes, then CDs. Now, they sell the devices to streaming services.

Print publishers sell paper via magazines and books, the content of which, only determines how much paper they can sell off each author or issue.

Publishers simply sell paper in binding form.

Economically, the print media are in the business of marking up paper. Now, traditional publishers are realizing that they never really sold content. They just assumed that’s what the consumer was paying for.

Traditional publishers had a monopoly and ability to the access the information we wanted.

But now that access can be created by anyone who produces content. Traditional media is dead.

 

Music Platforms Don’t Actually Sell Music…

Building an audience in the digital age is about capturing the access point to where consumers consume content. That’s why traditional media can’t keep up.

It can’t move where consumers prefer to consume their information. Take music for example.

Napster (the original digital stream source for music), crashed the music party in 1999 and started giving music away for free.

They attracted the masses onto one platform (illegally) to consumer music the way they wanted it (free).

Then advertisers took note and copied the model, taking over the music industry by controlling the distribution (legally through royalties (that they were willing to pay for on behalf of the consumer).

Now the industry doesn’t care about making money selling music anymore. They pay to give it away instead.

 

Today, iTunes is the new version of the brick-and-mortar record stores of the past.

Apple promotes extremely discounted music to sell Apple’s lucrative products, such as phones, tablets, earbuds. Music is just he bait.

Think about it. How is it that music streaming services like Spotify and Pandora, whose sole business model is to make money from the streaming of music, DON’T ACTUALLY MAKE ANY MONEY selling music?

• 80% of Pandora’s net revenue comes from the ads playing to people listening to free music.
• Only 20% comes from users who pay for ad-free listening.

In turn, Pandora pays musicians ridiculously low royalties established in 2016 at $0.00176. For each single song played by a single artist for one million times, the artists grosses $1,760.00. This fee is treated, essentially, as Pandora’s marketing expense.

 

They Sell Ads. Content Is The Bait

The kicker? THEY DON’T EVEN SELL CONTENT! They provide access to it. They pay to give away content for free, in order to sell advertising.

Pandora hasn’t turned a profit since it started in 2000.

After 13 years and 96 million subscribers, Spotify finally reported a profit for the first time in 2019 of $107M. They plan to spend all of it and another $500M to acquire podcast networks to build the same model.

They’re not in the business providing music to customers as that would require consumers to actually pay them for that service.

They are advertising companies, which we allow to advertise to us, in exchange for listening to the music they purchase, just like advertising during television programming.

 

By now you’re wondering, what the hell’s your point?

 

The Rise of Content Marketing

In 1995, internet pioneer, Esther Dyson asked an important question about the burgeoning web.

“What new kinds of content-based value can be created on the internet?”
– Esther Dyson

More than 30 years ago, Dyson observed that as the internet would become more populated with various content, and that the content owner’s intellectual property would depreciate in value.

“The likely best defense for content providers,” she argued, “is to distribute intellectual property free in order to sell services and build relationships.”

What worked in the past, won’t keep working in the future.

In a world with unlimited competition for attention, we must find a way to deliver value to our customers before they ever pitch to sell because if we don’t, someone else will.

The modern era of marketing has been an entire shift from advertising benefits, to teaching what we know to help the most people.

Businesses today are treating their content as the carrot to capture people who may be interested in learning about their field and who may likely become customers.

The Rise of Value-Rich Content

Subject matter experts today are standing out by providing the most useful, easy to find content to create a community around the passion they share for their subject matter.

The term, “content marketing” isn’t new.

It was simply adopted by the marketing industry wishing to put a stake in the ground.

In 2007, the industry wanted to highlight the shift away from annoying traditional interruption advertising to a more mature discipline of differentiated value-oriented content creation that would help people not just sell people.

 

 

78% of CMOs believe custom content creation is the future of marketing in order to sell our products and services in today’s cutthroat digital battlefield.

It’s not surprising, given how it influences 61% of consumer’s buying behavior with a 6x higher conversion rate compared to marketing that does not include a digital content strategy.

Businesses today that produce the most relatable content WIN.

 

With Today’s High-Volume of Experts, You Can’t Move Up If You Don’t Stand Out in YOUR Field!