2013: the year corporate media will ascend and all media will spiral

More media leads to even more media

The problem when there is more of any thing, is that the value of that thing is less. Lots of diamonds are valued less than less diamonds — which is why De Beers tries to control supplies.

The value of a piece of media content is determined by how much money can be earned from it, via selling ads, services, etc.

All media companies, traditional and new, know that producing more media creates opportunities for more revenues.

In the print world, producing more media is constrained by high costs of production and distribution but not in the online world. For each media company, the more media it can produce, the more revenues it can capture.

The more it can lower the cost of media production, through using machine generated/scraped content, and user-generated content, the more it can profit.

This is why producing ever more media content is the strategy for every media organization, and since every company is a media company, it’s also the strategy for every company.

But with every company producing more media, the resulting inflation is a killer.

For example, it takes ever more traffic to earn the same advertising dollars from the same amount of content. Companies have to produce more media to make up for the continued fall in the value of their media. But producing more media further lessens the value of all media.

Reporters at popular online news web sites now have to produce five or more stories per day.

Back in the heyday of print journalism, ten years ago or so, newspaper reporters were expected to produce four or five news stories per week. At some of the large national magazines such as Businessweek, Newsweek, etc, journalists could make high six-figure salaries producing five or six articles a year.

More media also means that we see more low quality media being published. It’s like the dirty black water that a tsunami grinds in its wake. If you can produce higher quality media you’ll be able to rise above the rest. There’s a lot more high quality content being produced but so what? It still has to compete against more of all types of media, including more high quality content.

Some are focusing on producing “compelling” content, I see a lot of PR “gurus” espousing the need for compelling content, compelling story telling. It’s true, compelling content is a good thing to have and we are seeing a lot more compelling content being produced. But so what? It still has to compete with more of everything.

The value of all media content as a whole: news media, corporate media, compelling or mundane media, photos, videos, social media, will fall in 2013 and continue falling well into the rest of this decade.

What will this mean? We can expect higher marketing costs for companies. Traditional PR will have less impact. Advertising will become even less effective. And governments will have trouble communicating with their people.

These are just some of the things ahead for us. A cacophony of voices becoming ever more shrill and difficult to hear, the good and the bad, filtered and unfiltered, a mass of media, a media tsunami on an unprecedented scale.

The epicenter is here

Silicon Valley is at the epicenter of this tsunami — it became a Media Valley years ago. Our top companies and startups are essentially media companies — technology-enabled media companies.

Google, for example, publishes pages of content with advertising. Facebook, Twitter, and multitudes of startups are media companies.

Silicon Valley is the source of technologies disrupting the media sector, and the source for tools and services that companies are using to transform themselves into media companies. It’s an incredible place to be right now because it’s becoming a massive Gutenberg machine that’s about to start cranking out new types of media in formats as yet unimagined. It’s by far the most interesting place in tech.

This article by Tom Foremski originally appeared on Silicon Valley Watcher, a Burn Media publishing partner.