THE CONTENT CRUNCH

Dick Pountain/22 July 1998/Idealog 48

I was on the phone to a man who owed me money, for some articles I'd written for a now defunct computer magazine. There was no unpleasantness as we both agreed on the sum involved, but what grated on me was the way he kept referring to "your content", by which he meant what I prefer to call my articles. Looking at those words now, on the page, it's hard to understand what so offended me - after all 'article' is just about as abstract and impersonal a word as 'content' isn't it? I hardly expected him to call them 'oeuvres', or 'artworks', or 'little bundles of enlightenment'. I guess what rankled, and what rankles still, is that while 'article' implies a discrete object - something that was produced out of my head, and formed by my fingers on the keyboard - 'content' is a collective noun with industrial connotations, like 'cargo' or 'consignment'. It suggested an undifferentiated mass of stuff that's all to be treated the same way,  shovelled from one pile to another.

To me it sounded an offhand way to describe something I'd put a lot of effort into, but to a buyer and seller of content it was the appropriate word - he buys empty magazines and fills them with content, period. I understand that Hollywood novices are similarly aghast the first time they hear the film they are crafting referred to by lawyers and agents as "the property" (that is, the studio's property, not theirs). We writers better get used to such terminology though, because content is the way of the future - a commodity market in words, sounds and pictures - and being precious about it is only likely to lead to severely reduced caloric intake.

That defunct computer magazine perished because it had too many readers and not enough advertisers, a rare but not unknown disease (the innovative fashion magazine Nova perished of it in the 1960's). This should be a warning tale for that handful of PC Pro readers who occasionally complain to us that we carry too many adverts, and that the thump is causing damage to their doormats. In magazine land, unlike fashion land, you can never be too fat. The truth is that we can only offer you the high quality 'content' of PC Pro because our advertisers are prepared to pay us for the opportunity to reach you. If we were to carry no advertising at all, then the cover price would have to rise to around £10 per issue to pay for that content. Hand on heart now, is even Pro worth that much to you? 

Maintaining this equation between content and revenue seems to be getting harder to do. The very same week as my phone call saw the resignation of Tina Brown from the editorship of the New Yorker. Brought in to modernise a stagnating magazine, in six years Brown pushed up its circulation by some 30% to 800,000 copies, but also incurred losses of around £70 million because the way she chose to raise the circulation was by hiring the best writers, with an editorial budget running in the millions. That same week also saw Jerry Seinfeld arrive in London to do his old stand-up act at the Palladium. Until recently Seinfeld starred in the most successful, most highly paid and (after The Larry Sanders Show) the next funniest comedy show on American TV. He correctly calculated however that by refusing to make any more series, and quitting at the peak of his fame, he would become not simply a millionaire but a billionaire, solely from future repeats of the show.

It seems to me there are two trends happening here; the relentless rationalisation of the information and entertainment industries, in pursuit of maximum profits, is causing content to be regarded at the same time as both a cost overhead (to be reduced to a minimum) and a capital asset (to be exploited to a maximum), which is producing a variety of bizarre effects. It's now more profitable for Seinfeld not to make new shows than to make them. Continuous recycling becomes a mandatory part of any business model - the latest cult viewing in the USA is Pop-Up TV, which consists of old programs onto which irreverent commentaries have been superimposed, graffiti-style, using digital editing tools. Mainstream production values get forced ever downward, but you can compensate for that by applying large amounts of irony and attitude, which come cheaper than artists and technicians.

Digital technologies are rapidly stripping the mystique from previously saleable crafts like animation, illustration, photography and graphic design; you could probably knock up a cartoon like South Park yourself if you have access to some bratty kids to supply the attitude. Hollywood studios are already investing in 3D graphics companies like Pixar, in the hope of replacing human actors with virtual ones that won't hold out for a percentage of gross. Digital technologies present less of a direct threat to us writers, because generating human language with original meanings (rather than just correct syntax) is still beyond the capabilities of software - those automatic news writing programs occasionally deployed on web sites produce truly atrocious copy.

Writers are threatened indirectly though, by the "winner takes all" effect, first analysed in the book "The Winner Takes All Society" by Robert H Frank & Philip J Cook (Free Press 1996). The new economics of content production dictate that only blockbusters with huge sales (like a Grisham or a Titanic) and ultra-cheapo efforts with minimal overheads (like South Park) can ever be sufficiently profitable. Anything in between - anything outside the mainstream but intelligent and of high quality - will tend be crushed in the jaws of the Content Crunch.