The biggest culture gap between content and coding is that we have repeatable processes to extract a million dollars (or more) out of a programmer paid $100,000, and can scale that to an arbitrarily high number of programmers, but we do not have repeatable processes to extract a million dollars out of a... "creative" paid $100,000 or $10,000, and to the extent that any business has figured out how to scale that, they have either a) decided that the way forward is to use prometeur talent paid peanuts (+) or b) have large Our Business Model Is Dying signs stapled to their forehead. Techies, who like to think we have the intelligence God gave the average squirrel, do not like imitating dying business models. We prefer killing dying business models instead. This is why Demand Media of X sounds like a semi-attractive proposition as long as X is not "Programming." +
+ I write. I don't have an emotional attachment to the profession of writing. From my perhaps biased perspective, there exists a wide spectrum of writing, and the overwhelming majority of it is not the New York Times editorial page.
There's a market for 5 star chefs in writing just like there is in food, but pink slime and Tyson chicken keeps people from going hungry every single day, and the numbers suggest that pink slime is a sustainable, growing business and 5 star chefs are a perpetually money-losing luxury good hanging on to life via subsidies from rich people who enjoy cocktail parties in New York and the social superiority this gives over people who eat Tyson chicken. If we agree that large portions of the creative industries are producing writing/videos/etc where enduring works of literary genius are neither necessary nor particularly desirable (from "How to roast a chicken" to "3 Adlai E. Stevenson High School Students Got Perfect Scores on the SAT" to "7 year old killed in gang crossfire; Family mourns" to "Her: librarian. Him: mindflayer. Plot: chance brings them together, they hate each other, they go on to have mindblowing sex, stay tuned for more of same in books 2 through 8"), then the really interesting questions are not about quality so much as they are about process / business model / etc. We have good, interesting answers to many of those... and our answers frequently do not include high-paid, high-status creative folks.
P.S. If there is any pink slime in the audience, I apologize for putting you in the same sentence as the New York Times editorial page, it is just adopting a common conceit to make a point.
It occurs to me that today is an impressively terrible time to run a content company but a great time to run a content business. If you are, genuinely, as talented a producer as those rarefied folks who actually did fairly well under the old model and you have business savvy, there exist a variety of new models who have economics which are radically, radically better than any option presented to you under the old status quo.
e.g. If you possess skills and audience equivalent to a midlist genre fiction author, you'd be pretty much insane to take a standard publishing contract right now. jakonrath.blogspot.com has written literally books about how the math shakes out.
e.g. #2: If you're really really talented at explaining very hard things to some identifiable audience of people who have money to spend, you could get a whole five thousand dollars by spending six weeks writing that up for publication as a dead-tree book. If you end up on the NYT best seller's list, you may even receive royalty checks which approach the imposing salary of a municipal water department HR clerk. However, if that field is commercially viable, there exist numerous other paths whose punch-line is "less work, more savvy, radically more money." (Publish and promote an e-book is one of them. That is easy to explain but probably far from the most lucrative option.)
The combination we haven't seen much of yet is "Take the new model, then scale it like the old model." (Outside e.g. platform companies like Amazon / Apple / etc.)
[+] [-] patio11|14 years ago|reply
+ I write. I don't have an emotional attachment to the profession of writing. From my perhaps biased perspective, there exists a wide spectrum of writing, and the overwhelming majority of it is not the New York Times editorial page.
There's a market for 5 star chefs in writing just like there is in food, but pink slime and Tyson chicken keeps people from going hungry every single day, and the numbers suggest that pink slime is a sustainable, growing business and 5 star chefs are a perpetually money-losing luxury good hanging on to life via subsidies from rich people who enjoy cocktail parties in New York and the social superiority this gives over people who eat Tyson chicken. If we agree that large portions of the creative industries are producing writing/videos/etc where enduring works of literary genius are neither necessary nor particularly desirable (from "How to roast a chicken" to "3 Adlai E. Stevenson High School Students Got Perfect Scores on the SAT" to "7 year old killed in gang crossfire; Family mourns" to "Her: librarian. Him: mindflayer. Plot: chance brings them together, they hate each other, they go on to have mindblowing sex, stay tuned for more of same in books 2 through 8"), then the really interesting questions are not about quality so much as they are about process / business model / etc. We have good, interesting answers to many of those... and our answers frequently do not include high-paid, high-status creative folks.
P.S. If there is any pink slime in the audience, I apologize for putting you in the same sentence as the New York Times editorial page, it is just adopting a common conceit to make a point.
[+] [-] patio11|14 years ago|reply
It occurs to me that today is an impressively terrible time to run a content company but a great time to run a content business. If you are, genuinely, as talented a producer as those rarefied folks who actually did fairly well under the old model and you have business savvy, there exist a variety of new models who have economics which are radically, radically better than any option presented to you under the old status quo.
e.g. If you possess skills and audience equivalent to a midlist genre fiction author, you'd be pretty much insane to take a standard publishing contract right now. jakonrath.blogspot.com has written literally books about how the math shakes out.
e.g. #2: If you're really really talented at explaining very hard things to some identifiable audience of people who have money to spend, you could get a whole five thousand dollars by spending six weeks writing that up for publication as a dead-tree book. If you end up on the NYT best seller's list, you may even receive royalty checks which approach the imposing salary of a municipal water department HR clerk. However, if that field is commercially viable, there exist numerous other paths whose punch-line is "less work, more savvy, radically more money." (Publish and promote an e-book is one of them. That is easy to explain but probably far from the most lucrative option.)
The combination we haven't seen much of yet is "Take the new model, then scale it like the old model." (Outside e.g. platform companies like Amazon / Apple / etc.)
[+] [-] yummybear|14 years ago|reply