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The difference with radio is that the content you were creating generally had to be good. Bad content would get bad ratings, few listeners, and would fizzle out

The difference with radio is that the content you were creating generally had to be good. Bad content would get bad ratings, few listeners, and would fizzle out. It didn’t last. Radio is a hard business. Good content was hard to monetize, bad content was impossible to monetize. The magic it Facebook, TikTok, et. al is that they figured out how to generate revenue from content that is just fractionally better than nothing at all. The algorithms can monetize content with a value that is just fractions of a cent less than zero and they do all this without having to pay real money for most of it. An entire generation now aspires to make a living creating what is effectively content spam. Filler. Junk for the algorithm to promote. And what’s incredible is that they aren’t wrong. You can make a living doing this. The payouts and sponsorships are insane. It won’t last forever though. Eventually we’ll just have AI created content. You’ll have an infinite stream of “Sick car, what do you do for a living” videos at no cost. The TikTok of tomorrow is one where you just type in a few words about your interests and it generates an infinite stream of fake videos.

shadowgovt 4y ago
It's not so much good vs bad as long-tail vs median. A lot of content that wouldn't have flown in the mainstream during the traditional radio era because it didn't capture the median demographic that the players were competing for can fly online because it captures the long tail and satisfies enough the interests or desires of a single content creator or small team to justify their efforts (where a studio organization can't survive without the kind of advertising revenue you get by being median popular). A combination of lower costs and wider reach (allowing you to find more of the long tail) changes the mathematics on what is worth someone's time to publish. And that's without getting off in the US-specific weeds regarding the fact that there was content that categorically could not be on the radio because the otherwise -assumed First Amendment right to freedom of speech / the press was curtailed in the United States by the FCC acting as arbiter on parceling up a finite national resource (whereas the internet is not considered such a resource and therefore there's no central US governing authority telling you what you can and cannot put online in the same way).

shadowgovt 4y ago

It's not so much good vs bad as long-tail vs median. A lot of content that wouldn't have flown in the mainstream during the traditional radio era because it didn't capture the median demographic that the players were competing for can fly online because it captures the long tail and satisfies enough the interests or desires of a single content creator or small team to justify their efforts (where a studio organization can't survive without the kind of advertising revenue you get by being median popular). A combination of lower costs and wider reach (allowing you to find more of the long tail) changes the mathematics on what is worth someone's time to publish. And that's without getting off in the US-specific weeds regarding the fact that there was content that categorically could not be on the radio because the otherwise -assumed First Amendment right to freedom of speech / the press was curtailed in the United States by the FCC acting as arbiter on parceling up a finite national resource (whereas the internet is not considered such a resource and therefore there's no central US governing authority telling you what you can and cannot put online in the same way).