Content Businesses Don’t Scale Anymore
Scott Karp with excellent analysis of the media industry, convergence and business model innovation when scaled content businesses are becoming rare. Recommended.
Can anyone think of a content business – meaning a company that produces original content – that has scaled dramatically in recent years? I can’t. Look at the businesses that have scaled – Google, MySpace, YouTube – all platforms for content, but not producers of content. Compare those to original content businesses like Weblogs, Inc., Gawker, TechCrunch, Paid Content – they are successful at their scale, but that scale is still tiny compared to the scale of the aggregation businesses. Even portals like AOL and Yahoo are much more aggregators of content than original producers of content.
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The result of unbundling, disaggregation, the loss of pipe control (to use Andy Kessler’s construct) – i.e. the inability to force people to consume content they don’t want – is that content businesses don’t scale anymore.
