Spend some time on any New England beach and some well-meaning soul may point out that the beautiful purple-tinged Quahog clam shells strewn across the sands were once used as currency by Native Americans. But even a child can quickly appreciate why wampum beads were not destined for greatness: they’re a plentiful resource that once required intensive labor to convert into beads. But with modem tools, they’d require relatively little effort to manufacture and duplicate.
In our modem content economy, words have become wampum. Words, generally speaking, are increasingly cheap to produce and available in a seemingly infinite supply. Words are now manufactured into content on a massive scale by both humans and computers alike. Content has become so devalued that the most successful publishers in the past decade have been those whose business models revolve around paying nearly nothing for content.
The resulting explosion of cheap, mediocre content has meant that as readers, we’ve become awash in noise.
And many content creators are now as nervous as a 17th century clamdigger. We think at least part of the problem is how content is currently valued: a word count makes a lousy predictor of value.
Like wampum, a word count is a kind of proxy for the cost of creation, the time and craft of the creator. In the print journalism world, a cost-based approach to content made sense. An article of 500 words might be a perfectly acceptable predictor of value if the article filled a certain amount of physical space in a publication that was accompanied by paid ad pages or subscription revenue. Individually, the article might have very little measurable effect on the overall revenue of the publication.
Online content, however, is a different beast. It tends to stand alone and generate revenue independently of the rest of the content.
When it comes to revenue (value), one 500-word article is simply not like another.
Of course, publishers and authors aren’t truly pricing “by the word.” They try to use other proxies to determine a fair price, including the subject matter, the “market rate,” and the reputation, experience, and expertise of the author. But these intangibles also make poor containers of value, in the sense that they’re also not helpful in predicting whether an article will find an audience.
If a publisher can’t predict the revenue a 500-word article will create based on quality or reputation, they eventually turn to price to choose a content provider. As cheaper alternatives enter the market, prices for content rapidly start to decline.
All of this has been happening in the publishing world for the past ten years, and it’s painted a fairly grim picture for bloggers and other content creators and publishers alike: lower wages and more noise.
But in the past couple years, a new and predictable way to value content has emerged that’s transforming the content economy. Many bloggers have begun to develop a built-in following through social networks and search engines, which are becoming a legitimate new channel for content distribution. We call this “the Author Channel.”
With the advent of social media and author ranked search, authors (that’s you, if you’re a blogger) now have a surprising amount of control, in aggregate, over content distribution. On sites like Forbes.com, over 50% of the traffic now comes from the audiences of its own contributors.
Authors now have the ability to build audiences on their own blogs and move them, which allows them to predictably affect the value of their content. Soon they’ll be compensated according to tangible yardsticks of value such as audiences and engagement, and per-word pricing will disappear.
The beauty of this new author channel is that it realigns the value created by authors and bloggers with the value captured by publishers and brands.
They’re now both speaking the same language.
This may also help solve the “noise” problem, as the audiences of successful creators grow in direct proportion to the authors’ quality and expertise. Indeed, the search engines are beginning to focus on signals like “Author Rank” and “engagement” instead of “Page Rank” to determine the primacy of content.
Soon publishers will work with bloggers to develop market rates not for the words of the content they create, but for the attention of the audience they hope to bring. While this model of performance-based “entrepreneurial journalism” was pioneered at the low end by search-based “content farms” like Demand Media, incentive-based compensation actually turns out to be most effective for premium content creators such as Seeking Alpha, Huffington Post, and Forbes, where authors have significant social followings.
Of course when freelance journalists, bloggers, and influencers of all stripes are compensated based on audience distribution and not an arbitrary “per-word” rate, they’ll become essentially indistinguishable from publishers of custom content.
For authors, this approach means that they’ll soon be expected to manage (and be compensated for) many of the distribution responsibilities that have been the purview of publishers. Having a large social distribution network and search presence in this new world takes on substantially enhanced importance.
The good news is those bloggers who can deliver an audience by engaging the public with their distinctive brands will be able to capture much more value from a content transaction. Content has become a commodity, but the attention of a target audience is inherently limited, and can never be commoditized.
The future of media, then, is a single transparent currency shared across the digital ecosystem between authors, brands, and publishers, through which value is measured and exchanged.
And that currency is audience, not words.
Understanding how to maximize the valuation of the currency is critical to maximizing your value as a blogger.
