8 ms·

Peak content: The collapse of the attention economy

110 points by joeyespo 11y ago

VLM 11y ago
“when the paper analyzed its online traffic, they found that fully 40 per cent of the paper is read by fewer than 1,000 people.” I wonder what this 40% consisted of. Never forget social signalling, "this is what everyone expects we do". They don't actually read it or want it, but they expect to see it there, like a glass of water at a restaurant table. Consider how some products exist mostly to funnel purchasers up to the next highest product tier. Likewise I suspect some stories exist mostly to funnel readers to stories they want read, not to be read by themselves. With no actual data, its merely theoretical, but there are at least some theoretical models that could excuse the creation of unread content. Not that I would waste much time or money on the unread-by-design content, although literal lorem ipsum as content might be going a bit far.
- mc32 11y ago
  >I wonder what this 40% consisted of. Tangentially, this must have always been the case, perhaps it was even worse when measurements were hard to come by. During pure print media days, lots of what they thought people read was through wholly inaccurate methods. So that forty per hundred is probably much improved over how it used to be.
danharaj 11y ago
> “What if, inside of Columbia Journalism School, we built Columbia Publishing School? And what if we did the same at Missouri, Northwestern, and Berkeley? What if we decided to pipeline, train, and mentor future publishers, chief revenue officers, circulation directors, and sales chiefs alongside the future journalists we are teaching to code?” I know this is specifically about the economics of content creation and media consumption, but talking about the rise of the Internet and the plurality of voices that previously couldn't be heard from the point of view of the owners who can't profit just seems incorrect. It's this kind of thinking that leads to stronger and stronger intellectual property rights, which is a euphemism for more and more restrictive information control. Materially speaking the Internet has ushered in a golden age of media, but its revolution is being held back by outmoded economic relationships. This article is wondering how to reassert those relationships over the Internet instead of wondering what new relationships are possible.
- Animats 11y ago
  "What if we decided to pipeline, train, and mentor future publishers, chief revenue officers, circulation directors, and sales chiefs alongside the future journalists we are teaching to code?" You can probably get all of those you need from the layoffs at Yahoo and Aol. We've probably passed "peak people generating and selling crap content." Have we hit "peak advertising" yet?
ilamont 11y ago
Use your properties to do A/B testing, measure the effectiveness of these experiments and then, most importantly, drive adoption of the most successful. Don’t adopt the Silicon Valley catchphrase of failing fast. Instead learn fast (or, so as not to draw the ire of sub-editors, learn quickly.) Constantly feed strategic intelligence back into the organisation, then refine the strategy and repeat. IMHO, there are real obstacles to these types of experiments taking place. For one, many media organizations still have a top-down, "me too" attitude when it comes to innovation. The boss sees something he or she likes ("Buzzfeed is hot!"), convenes a committee to discuss how to do something similar ("Let's do Buzzfeed for our niche!") and then the team (or consultants) build it out ... sometimes over a period of a year or more to "get it right." In my experience, there is little attempt to gauge (during the planning stage or when it's being prototyped) if the "Buzzfeed for XYZ" is something their audiences want. In addition, in media organizations that sell advertising, resources are more likely to be put assigned to projects that the sales team thinks are important, even if audiences aren't really interested. An example that springs to mind is the brand new feature on a local news website that supports auto dealerships even though most car buyers are not going to the news site to buy cars. Incidentally, I have been working on a framework for the creation of media content (including news, film, websites, music, etc.) called lean media. It draws heavily from the lean startup movement, while attempting to reconcile the emphasis on constant and careful measurement (A/B tests, etc.) with the intangibles that are an integral part of the creative process. If anyone is interested, I have a long writeup on Mediashift (1) as well as a blog (2) and I would be interested in getting feedback. 1. http://mediashift.org/2016/01/lean-media-a-new-framework-for-media-production-and-innovation/ http://mediashift.org/2016/01/lean-media-a-new-framework-for... 2. http://leanmedia.in30minutes.com/ http://leanmedia.in30minutes.com/
Palomides 11y ago
punchline: "There hasn’t been enough ad revenue to sustain..." traditional media institutions.
ddingus 11y ago
"too much content" Really, it's the sugar to shit ratio of the content, as well as the overall quality and compelling nature of the content at issue. Traditional media is producing a lot. Both content and ads, and often it's mixed. "News" has become increasingly unclear, making it difficult to discern fact from opinion. Entertainment programming is often 50/50 AD to entertainment ratio, and the quality doesn't often justify that kind of time investment. People are paying as much attention as they ever did. Traditional media is simply getting it's ass kicked.
jwatte 11y ago
How about "stop pumping out thoughtless unresearched crap, and create valuable content that lasts and people will pay for?" (Or is the number of people who value their time so they pay for quality just too low?)
- cageface 11y ago
  The problem is that people have been trained to expect everything to be free. So high value, premium content doesn't get a chance.
- bachmeier 11y ago
  The only thought that goes into many stories is, "What is the best headline to get clicks?" Those sites need to watch out. With the current level of competition, users are fast to blacklist. It's a measurement issue - it's easy to measure clicks but hard to measure damage to reputation.
stuart78 11y ago
Sometime in mid-2015, my old aggregation reader got shut down I had to jump ship over to Flipboard. The most annoying part of this journey has been the total reset of my blacklist of news outlets and topics. Content farming, hat-tipping and "some shit somebody said on Twitter" is just spam delivered differently, and its frustrating that historically respected media has taken so long to think about not only the impact on their value, but how it impacts their core values. Beyond my recreated blacklists, so much garbage has narrowed my focus and sources. NYTimes, a few RSS feeds, HN for tech. Hopefully, as with books, the culture will begin to correct course. (Gonna break out my cane and start waving at some kids any moment now)
- corybrown 11y ago
  I moved over to Flipboard after Google Reader shut down, but it's no replacement. I miss the efficiency of Google Reader, none of the alternatives seem to match up.
  - douche 11y ago
    The closest thing I've been able to find is The Old Reader (theoldreader.com). Best thing is it was able to import all my old Google Reader subscriptions. Although by now, I think that ship has sailed for other people...
  - _rpd 11y ago
    feedly is fine once you configure it a little.
  - cheetos 11y ago
    goread.io is a Google Reader clone.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    To pile on, have you checked Tiny Tiny RSS? It's self-hosted, but there are some people offering it as a SaaS, if you prefer to avoid the DIY route.
Balgair 11y ago
I think that human produced content is at a peak. Like call center employees, the management has to balance the ability for people to shovel out crap articles with the burnout rate. HuffPo, Buzzfeed, and others are clickbait farms that have high turnovers [0]. The content is not very deep, but they put out a lot. This is something that can, and is in the process of being, easily automated. Much sports journalism is already automated [1], why can't these clickfarms be the same too? 538 and other sites that just do stats can easily just have a giant number database that output correlations for click's sake. That would ruin their userbase, but may expand it. The issue at heart is what does a click mean? Currently it is linked to a person that you can then show an ad at to sell something. However, it is more and more likely that those ads are worthless wastes of dollars to the sellers. Other older methods, like mail with a robot that 'handwrites' a note to you from the company, may be more profitable as ads. [0]http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/the-economics-of-blogging-and-the-huffington-post/?_r=0 http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/the-econ... [1]http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34204052 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34204052
- benten10 11y ago
  > 538 and other sites that just do stats can easily just have a giant number database that output correlations for click's sake. Ahh, there you see the problem! you can also output all harry potter novels from digits of pi, but that doesn't get anyone anywhere. : ) The entire point of a good content producer is to understand what the customer needs, and put it out, NOW. So I'd imagine 538 will be automated about when computers start writing Harry Potter equivalents.
  - lmm 11y ago
    I don't think you'll see entirely computer-produced stories for a while, but what you can already see is computer-suggested correlations and framework stories that can be touched up quickly by a human editor. You might need that last 10% of human labour, but if 90% of the job can be done by the computer, that means 90% fewer staff.
rl3 11y ago
This trend has parallels with the games industry. Many publishers and developers decided long ago that monetization above all else was the goal, and it didn't matter if that meant pumping out title after title with terrible production values and sleazy monetization strategies. Zynga pioneered this approach to such a degree that they were essentially the BuzzFeed of interactive entertainment. Later, many AAA games would follow suit embracing the Free-to-Play model. Higher production values with the same sleazy monetization strategies. The end result was games of all types selling their soul in the name of making a quick buck. Web content has the same problem. In the face of content becoming a commodity, the reaction thus far has been to produce more content. More content means lower quality content. Lower quality content results in monetization becoming more difficult, and thus prevalent. More prevalent monetization leads to ads. Ads kill page performance, thus driving anyone away who doesn't have an ad blocker. That in turn leads to idiotic things such as paywalls and traditional media being turned into a glorified blogging platform (cough Forbes). It's a race to the bottom. The solution to this of course, is to simply make a high quality product. Ensure the content is top-notch, kill anything that isn't. Make sure page performance is excellent. Hand-curate ads such that they're non-invasive, fast, and not killed by ad-blockers. Admittedly the last point is difficult, but it can be done. If the publication is sufficiently niche, a subscription model could actually be appropriate in lieu of ads; nautil.us is a fantastic example of this. In the end, it boils down to the classic error of the suits screaming "monetize!", ruining their product and shooting themselves in the foot in the process. This same dynamic applies to games, print media, and even startups alike. There's a reason YC constantly reiterates that monetization efforts are foolish in the face of a product that isn't great.
- pjc50 11y ago
  This is pretty much exactly what Marx called the "tendency for the rate of profit to fall ", with the quirk that cheap content requires almost no capital investment to be replicated infinitely. I worry that quality may not be the route back. After all, how exactly do we define quality?
  - andrewmcwatters 11y ago
    Quantifying quality is a complex domain-specific topic with patterns that can be boiled down to, but requires one to be knowledgeable of the expectations of assigned value and image to a given product. What is more vexing in my opinion is when an organization creates works that are widely agreed upon as high quality, whilst still abusing monetization efforts to various degrees. In the games industry, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Dota 2 would be interesting case studies, since, in order of wildly unrelated user generated content from greatest to least, these are probably Valve Corporation's highest revenue churning titles at the moment. Though, this is still an example of quality not eliminating the issue at hand.
MilnerRoute 11y ago
Ironically, I didn't finish reading the article...
Animats 11y ago
Here's a thought. Suppose we had a search engine which tried to figure out the sources behind an article. Build a tree which represents the provenance of the statements in the article, tracing them back to their original sources. Like Wikipedia style, but automated. IBM Watson might be able to do this. The goal is to track facts back to their original source, and identify what's new in each article. The search engine could then discard most derivative articles, even if they'd been reworded. It's a form of automated curation, based on content, not attention.
- sparkzilla 11y ago
  We do something similar at Newslines, a crowdsourced news search engine that is a curated database of news events, kind of like a database-driven Wikipedia meets daily news. We generally source each event to a single news report, but we may add more sources programmatically. By sorting the news into discrete events we can eliminate a huge amount of manual searches on Google and other sites, compiling news from multiple sources into a crosslinked timeline format that saves readers days of work. That said, I think the drive to fact-check every statement in an article is a red herring. Other sites have tried this (Infobitt, Grasswire) and it doesn't work well for general reader.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
There are people who understand the economics of information and those that don't. The interesting thing is that capturing the value of your editorial qualities through advertising is a like capturing the value of a taxi by trying to draft off its turbulence as it drives by. Basically ad fraud pays but actual ads not so much. There is a bargain you make between the reader and your advertisers, you protect your reader from aggressive overt advertisements, you provide your readers with something worth reading. It is hard to make a retelling of a story that everyone has reported on, worth reading. It is also impossible (at present) to lower the friction of reading and subscribing to a point where it gets sufficient market penetration to make it scalable. I imagine that something halfway between flattr and the NY times subscription is going to be an answer.
mark_l_watson 11y ago
A lot to talk about in this article. Network TV advertising woes: I have mostly stopped watching TV except for Hulu Premium. I pay $12/month and watch about 5 hours/month Hulu content. Since Hulu is owned by the 3 bug TV networks, aren't they doing fine with me as a consumer? I also sometimes watch TV reruns on Netflix and I have no idea how much content creators get paid for this older material? Passion writing vs. commercial: I find amazing content on the web that represent huge efforts by authors. But, I still buy a lot of eBooks because the quality is a bit better on average. I spend a ton of time watching conference talks on YouTube. This seems like a win-win-win situation. I save travel and conference costs, and don't miss much (except not getting to personally network), Google gets my YouTube Red monthly subscription fee, and conference speakers extend their reach of who they can affect with their ideas.

110 points by joeyespo 11y ago

VLM 11y ago

“when the paper analyzed its online traffic, they found that fully 40 per cent of the paper is read by fewer than 1,000 people.” I wonder what this 40% consisted of. Never forget social signalling, "this is what everyone expects we do". They don't actually read it or want it, but they expect to see it there, like a glass of water at a restaurant table. Consider how some products exist mostly to funnel purchasers up to the next highest product tier. Likewise I suspect some stories exist mostly to funnel readers to stories they want read, not to be read by themselves. With no actual data, its merely theoretical, but there are at least some theoretical models that could excuse the creation of unread content. Not that I would waste much time or money on the unread-by-design content, although literal lorem ipsum as content might be going a bit far.

mc32 11y ago
>I wonder what this 40% consisted of. Tangentially, this must have always been the case, perhaps it was even worse when measurements were hard to come by. During pure print media days, lots of what they thought people read was through wholly inaccurate methods. So that forty per hundred is probably much improved over how it used to be.

danharaj 11y ago

> “What if, inside of Columbia Journalism School, we built Columbia Publishing School? And what if we did the same at Missouri, Northwestern, and Berkeley? What if we decided to pipeline, train, and mentor future publishers, chief revenue officers, circulation directors, and sales chiefs alongside the future journalists we are teaching to code?” I know this is specifically about the economics of content creation and media consumption, but talking about the rise of the Internet and the plurality of voices that previously couldn't be heard from the point of view of the owners who can't profit just seems incorrect. It's this kind of thinking that leads to stronger and stronger intellectual property rights, which is a euphemism for more and more restrictive information control. Materially speaking the Internet has ushered in a golden age of media, but its revolution is being held back by outmoded economic relationships. This article is wondering how to reassert those relationships over the Internet instead of wondering what new relationships are possible.

Animats 11y ago
"What if we decided to pipeline, train, and mentor future publishers, chief revenue officers, circulation directors, and sales chiefs alongside the future journalists we are teaching to code?" You can probably get all of those you need from the layoffs at Yahoo and Aol. We've probably passed "peak people generating and selling crap content." Have we hit "peak advertising" yet?

ilamont 11y ago

Use your properties to do A/B testing, measure the effectiveness of these experiments and then, most importantly, drive adoption of the most successful. Don’t adopt the Silicon Valley catchphrase of failing fast. Instead learn fast (or, so as not to draw the ire of sub-editors, learn quickly.) Constantly feed strategic intelligence back into the organisation, then refine the strategy and repeat. IMHO, there are real obstacles to these types of experiments taking place. For one, many media organizations still have a top-down, "me too" attitude when it comes to innovation. The boss sees something he or she likes ("Buzzfeed is hot!"), convenes a committee to discuss how to do something similar ("Let's do Buzzfeed for our niche!") and then the team (or consultants) build it out ... sometimes over a period of a year or more to "get it right." In my experience, there is little attempt to gauge (during the planning stage or when it's being prototyped) if the "Buzzfeed for XYZ" is something their audiences want. In addition, in media organizations that sell advertising, resources are more likely to be put assigned to projects that the sales team thinks are important, even if audiences aren't really interested. An example that springs to mind is the brand new feature on a local news website that supports auto dealerships even though most car buyers are not going to the news site to buy cars. Incidentally, I have been working on a framework for the creation of media content (including news, film, websites, music, etc.) called lean media. It draws heavily from the lean startup movement, while attempting to reconcile the emphasis on constant and careful measurement (A/B tests, etc.) with the intangibles that are an integral part of the creative process. If anyone is interested, I have a long writeup on Mediashift (1) as well as a blog (2) and I would be interested in getting feedback. 1. http://mediashift.org/2016/01/lean-media-a-new-framework-for-media-production-and-innovation/ http://mediashift.org/2016/01/lean-media-a-new-framework-for... 2. http://leanmedia.in30minutes.com/ http://leanmedia.in30minutes.com/

Palomides 11y ago

punchline: "There hasn’t been enough ad revenue to sustain..." traditional media institutions.

ddingus 11y ago

"too much content" Really, it's the sugar to shit ratio of the content, as well as the overall quality and compelling nature of the content at issue. Traditional media is producing a lot. Both content and ads, and often it's mixed. "News" has become increasingly unclear, making it difficult to discern fact from opinion. Entertainment programming is often 50/50 AD to entertainment ratio, and the quality doesn't often justify that kind of time investment. People are paying as much attention as they ever did. Traditional media is simply getting it's ass kicked.

jwatte 11y ago

How about "stop pumping out thoughtless unresearched crap, and create valuable content that lasts and people will pay for?" (Or is the number of people who value their time so they pay for quality just too low?)

cageface 11y ago
The problem is that people have been trained to expect everything to be free. So high value, premium content doesn't get a chance.
bachmeier 11y ago
The only thought that goes into many stories is, "What is the best headline to get clicks?" Those sites need to watch out. With the current level of competition, users are fast to blacklist. It's a measurement issue - it's easy to measure clicks but hard to measure damage to reputation.

stuart78 11y ago

Sometime in mid-2015, my old aggregation reader got shut down I had to jump ship over to Flipboard. The most annoying part of this journey has been the total reset of my blacklist of news outlets and topics. Content farming, hat-tipping and "some shit somebody said on Twitter" is just spam delivered differently, and its frustrating that historically respected media has taken so long to think about not only the impact on their value, but how it impacts their core values. Beyond my recreated blacklists, so much garbage has narrowed my focus and sources. NYTimes, a few RSS feeds, HN for tech. Hopefully, as with books, the culture will begin to correct course. (Gonna break out my cane and start waving at some kids any moment now)

corybrown 11y ago
I moved over to Flipboard after Google Reader shut down, but it's no replacement. I miss the efficiency of Google Reader, none of the alternatives seem to match up.
- douche 11y ago
  The closest thing I've been able to find is The Old Reader (theoldreader.com). Best thing is it was able to import all my old Google Reader subscriptions. Although by now, I think that ship has sailed for other people...
- _rpd 11y ago
  feedly is fine once you configure it a little.
- cheetos 11y ago
  goread.io is a Google Reader clone.
- icebraining 11y ago
  To pile on, have you checked Tiny Tiny RSS? It's self-hosted, but there are some people offering it as a SaaS, if you prefer to avoid the DIY route.

Balgair 11y ago

I think that human produced content is at a peak. Like call center employees, the management has to balance the ability for people to shovel out crap articles with the burnout rate. HuffPo, Buzzfeed, and others are clickbait farms that have high turnovers [0]. The content is not very deep, but they put out a lot. This is something that can, and is in the process of being, easily automated. Much sports journalism is already automated [1], why can't these clickfarms be the same too? 538 and other sites that just do stats can easily just have a giant number database that output correlations for click's sake. That would ruin their userbase, but may expand it. The issue at heart is what does a click mean? Currently it is linked to a person that you can then show an ad at to sell something. However, it is more and more likely that those ads are worthless wastes of dollars to the sellers. Other older methods, like mail with a robot that 'handwrites' a note to you from the company, may be more profitable as ads. [0]http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/the-economics-of-blogging-and-the-huffington-post/?_r=0 http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/the-econ... [1]http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34204052 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34204052

benten10 11y ago
> 538 and other sites that just do stats can easily just have a giant number database that output correlations for click's sake. Ahh, there you see the problem! you can also output all harry potter novels from digits of pi, but that doesn't get anyone anywhere. : ) The entire point of a good content producer is to understand what the customer needs, and put it out, NOW. So I'd imagine 538 will be automated about when computers start writing Harry Potter equivalents.
- lmm 11y ago
  I don't think you'll see entirely computer-produced stories for a while, but what you can already see is computer-suggested correlations and framework stories that can be touched up quickly by a human editor. You might need that last 10% of human labour, but if 90% of the job can be done by the computer, that means 90% fewer staff.

rl3 11y ago

This trend has parallels with the games industry. Many publishers and developers decided long ago that monetization above all else was the goal, and it didn't matter if that meant pumping out title after title with terrible production values and sleazy monetization strategies. Zynga pioneered this approach to such a degree that they were essentially the BuzzFeed of interactive entertainment. Later, many AAA games would follow suit embracing the Free-to-Play model. Higher production values with the same sleazy monetization strategies. The end result was games of all types selling their soul in the name of making a quick buck. Web content has the same problem. In the face of content becoming a commodity, the reaction thus far has been to produce more content. More content means lower quality content. Lower quality content results in monetization becoming more difficult, and thus prevalent. More prevalent monetization leads to ads. Ads kill page performance, thus driving anyone away who doesn't have an ad blocker. That in turn leads to idiotic things such as paywalls and traditional media being turned into a glorified blogging platform (cough Forbes). It's a race to the bottom. The solution to this of course, is to simply make a high quality product. Ensure the content is top-notch, kill anything that isn't. Make sure page performance is excellent. Hand-curate ads such that they're non-invasive, fast, and not killed by ad-blockers. Admittedly the last point is difficult, but it can be done. If the publication is sufficiently niche, a subscription model could actually be appropriate in lieu of ads; nautil.us is a fantastic example of this. In the end, it boils down to the classic error of the suits screaming "monetize!", ruining their product and shooting themselves in the foot in the process. This same dynamic applies to games, print media, and even startups alike. There's a reason YC constantly reiterates that monetization efforts are foolish in the face of a product that isn't great.

pjc50 11y ago
This is pretty much exactly what Marx called the "tendency for the rate of profit to fall ", with the quirk that cheap content requires almost no capital investment to be replicated infinitely. I worry that quality may not be the route back. After all, how exactly do we define quality?
- andrewmcwatters 11y ago
  Quantifying quality is a complex domain-specific topic with patterns that can be boiled down to, but requires one to be knowledgeable of the expectations of assigned value and image to a given product. What is more vexing in my opinion is when an organization creates works that are widely agreed upon as high quality, whilst still abusing monetization efforts to various degrees. In the games industry, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Dota 2 would be interesting case studies, since, in order of wildly unrelated user generated content from greatest to least, these are probably Valve Corporation's highest revenue churning titles at the moment. Though, this is still an example of quality not eliminating the issue at hand.

MilnerRoute 11y ago

Ironically, I didn't finish reading the article...

Animats 11y ago

Here's a thought. Suppose we had a search engine which tried to figure out the sources behind an article. Build a tree which represents the provenance of the statements in the article, tracing them back to their original sources. Like Wikipedia style, but automated. IBM Watson might be able to do this. The goal is to track facts back to their original source, and identify what's new in each article. The search engine could then discard most derivative articles, even if they'd been reworded. It's a form of automated curation, based on content, not attention.

sparkzilla 11y ago
We do something similar at Newslines, a crowdsourced news search engine that is a curated database of news events, kind of like a database-driven Wikipedia meets daily news. We generally source each event to a single news report, but we may add more sources programmatically. By sorting the news into discrete events we can eliminate a huge amount of manual searches on Google and other sites, compiling news from multiple sources into a crosslinked timeline format that saves readers days of work. That said, I think the drive to fact-check every statement in an article is a red herring. Other sites have tried this (Infobitt, Grasswire) and it doesn't work well for general reader.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

There are people who understand the economics of information and those that don't. The interesting thing is that capturing the value of your editorial qualities through advertising is a like capturing the value of a taxi by trying to draft off its turbulence as it drives by. Basically ad fraud pays but actual ads not so much. There is a bargain you make between the reader and your advertisers, you protect your reader from aggressive overt advertisements, you provide your readers with something worth reading. It is hard to make a retelling of a story that everyone has reported on, worth reading. It is also impossible (at present) to lower the friction of reading and subscribing to a point where it gets sufficient market penetration to make it scalable. I imagine that something halfway between flattr and the NY times subscription is going to be an answer.

mark_l_watson 11y ago

A lot to talk about in this article. Network TV advertising woes: I have mostly stopped watching TV except for Hulu Premium. I pay $12/month and watch about 5 hours/month Hulu content. Since Hulu is owned by the 3 bug TV networks, aren't they doing fine with me as a consumer? I also sometimes watch TV reruns on Netflix and I have no idea how much content creators get paid for this older material? Passion writing vs. commercial: I find amazing content on the web that represent huge efforts by authors. But, I still buy a lot of eBooks because the quality is a bit better on average. I spend a ton of time watching conference talks on YouTube. This seems like a win-win-win situation. I save travel and conference costs, and don't miss much (except not getting to personally network), Google gets my YouTube Red monthly subscription fee, and conference speakers extend their reach of who they can affect with their ideas.