Control

I'm noticing a confluence of debates on the Internet this past week, not an unusual occurence, but one of particular interest to me at the moment since I have a couple of clients who are looking to monetize their content in the middle of the collapse of the traditional online advertising revenue model. The debates are those over Google's indexing and linking to news organization content, and over Digg's recent inclusion of a "toolbar" which shortens the URL (or address) of other pages on the Internet.

There are probably many readers of this blog who don't even know what Digg is or what URL shortening does so I am going to start there since it's an essential part of the conversation; the rest of you can skip ahead if you like.

Digg is one of the darlings of Web 2.0, a social networking/link aggregation site, where users both submit, and vote on, links to other sites on the Internet. Digg is a phenomena that assumes force of nature status on the Internet; a link to your site from Digg which is popular in the voting (or "Digging" in the parlance of the site) can overwhelm your servers with intrigued visitors, and can make a previously unheard of site the flavor of the day, massive and popular, almost overnight.

In a recent update, Digg included a feature which allows users to view links posted on the site via a shortened address (with Digg itself as the originating site, similar to how other URL shortening services work a la "http://digg.com/xxxxx") and a toolbar laid over the top part of the linked site allowing the user to use certain Digg features even as they are reading the content at the other site. The producers of some other sites object that this amounts to "theft" of their content (I'll avoid digressing by pointing out which of these vociferous objectors were previously able to correctly distinguish between "theft" and "infringement" when they were discussing the RIAA and its own quest for respect of intellectual property, an argument that holds considerably more legal weight than their own) and diminution of revenue streams.

The other debate is the one you're more likely to have heard of: the Associated Press and other news content producers are upset that Google is indexing and linking to their sites from its Google News service. Google News decideds what "news" is by secret, independent algorhythms that rank sites by relevance and include snippets of the site text and the option to click through to read more. You'd think this wouldn't be controversial, as it allows providers to reach users who might not otherwise be aware of them, but Google serves ads on its pages and the provider's position is that Google is making money off their content without giving the providers a cut.

In his usual incisive manner, Nick Carr points out that this argument is not actually about what either party says it is about, but rather is a continuation of the eternal debate between middlemen and content providers over the appropriate margin due the middleman. In this case, due to the nature of the platform, the middleman doesn't have to pay the content provider in the first place and the margin can be driven rapidly toward negative territory.

Though they are occuring in separate forums right now, these are really both aspects of the same debate (as befits the less staid neighborhood of the web in which it is occuring, the Digg argument has devolved into outright fisticuffs already, with some sites blocking Digg users from viewing their content via the shortened URLs). Digg and Google are both middlemen poised to control access to content; the producers, having apparently lost control of their distribution channels, are fighting for what they see as their cut. Their argument is that they are producing the value, and the middlemen are only appropriating it.

Nor are these arguments new; back when the Web was still young, a feature called frames was used extensively to present content from third-party sites inset into the site you were visiting, with varying degrees of transparency as to the origins. More recently, services such as Stickis and Diigo allow users to overlay their own content on top of sites, where other users of such services can see and sometimes modify it. This isn't always welcomed by the producers of those sites, who maintain that modifications, even by users for their own purposes, constitute infringement of some sort... the technology is new enough that existing copyright law isn't clear enough to apply consistently. Should you be prevented from highlighting sentences in books you have purchased? What about putting sticky notes in the pages?

This all points out something that has been missing from these debates (except, briefly, as a piece of ammunition for Digg and Google to pick up and throw at the content providers): the users. Some detractors are claiming that these are not innovations that users are in favor of, although I think that's a pretty difficult point to argue; unless you go out of your way in some Orwellian twist to stretch the definition of "user" to instead mean "content provider", it's pretty clear that users actually, well, use these features. How is it not to your advantage to stop in one place and see a broad selection of information sources and commentary on a topical news item? Why would you not want, were you a regular Digg user, to be able to comment, rate, e-mail, or otherwise make use of the features of that site as a social network while you are viewing a site you found there in the first place?

One argument is that you are ceding control to these sites when you allow them to do this, and getting back to Orwell, that you are allowing them to decide what it is you see and how it is framed. Thus far, this has been a hard argument to make, since Google is search-driven and you can look for any story you want, and all of Digg's content is brought in by users, so those warning of the danger have come off sounding a little paranoid and disconnected. They also overlook the open nature of the web; the day that Google starts openly corralling stories that people are interested in is the day they flood back over to Yahoo, Microsoft, or any of a dozen eager startup competitors.

A more insidious version of this has the aggregators starving out all the providers, until there is nothing left to aggregate. This is equally silly, as it doesn't benefit either Digg or Google to put contributors out of business. Google, in fact, has gone out of its way to strike deals with major news organizations to avoid this outcome.

The harsh reality is that, much as has happened with the recording industry, the nature of content generation is changing on the web. It's worth noting that many of the "producers" who are complaining so vociferously about this new order are not in fact content producers at all, at least not in the originating sense... they are merely aggregators themselves, packaging and reselling the works of other individuals. Newspapers are not merely going away because Google is cutting into their margins; hyperlocal news sources, the West Seattle Blogs of the world, started by the actual producers themselves, are also springing up to take their place. There is no inherent natural law stating that these reporters must work for newspaper or television media outlets. They are quite capable of investigating and writing content independently, and now of publishing it directly. The problem of the individual revenue model that these people require has not been solved completely yet, but there are a lot of experiments taking place, and so long as consumers value what is produced, the situation will find a way to work itself out.

There is no reason that the ultimate working out needs to look like what everyone currently expects that it should. And there are a number of reasons to believe that this accomodation that is occuring will be of benefit to the consumers, and not necessarily in the temporary, burn-it-all-to-the-ground-in-your-shortsighted consumption manner that many producers have been hinting at. Consumers haven't been willing to pay in the ways that the old school media producers would prefer, but they have been willing to part with their attention sufficiently to have made Google very, very rich from its ad network. They are acknowledging the value of the combination of the providers and the middleman. That combination will continue to exist in some form so long as they continue to find value in it.

If I had to guess, I would imagine that the Diggs and Google Newses of the world will find a way to share some of their revenue with individual content producers. The problem of oversupply will sort itself out as most of these producers are unable to maintain their operations on such a vast playing field. But the control, as ever, will ultimately come down to the users. Digg and Google aren't leaching, they are adding value to their users' day by their methods of aggregation. That's a service, and if it is a useful one, then it will be made sustainable via one revenue stream or another. The revenue, apparently, is already there. It's just the distribution channels which want sorting out. Producers--the real producers, those who write the content--would do well to start looking ahead as to how they might do this, instead of chaining themselves to orgnanizations which are most likely going to sink in the maelstrom.