Who Will Pay for Content?

At Publishing 2.0, Scott Karp crystallizes some thoughts on the breakdown of mass media.  He's inspired by a NY Times article called "Someone Has to Pay. But Who? And How?"  The Times article essentially says that all those major TV shows cost money, and someone will have to pick up the tab if viewers keep skipping commercials.

Karp is forward-thinking enough to challenge that premise.  He writes,

If the digital generation is content to entertain themselves with amateur (i.e. user-generated) video on YouTube, why should there be a business around expensively produced video content? The economics of mass media advertising that supported the TV content production and distribution business have ceased to function, destroyed by technology that has reduced the cost of production and distribution to near zero, making the old economics untenable.

And this:

In media 1.0, brands paid for the attention that media companies gathered by offering people news and entertainment (e.g. TV) in exchange for their attention. In media 2.0, people are more likely to give their attention in exchange for OTHER PEOPLE’S ATTENTION.

And here's the rub. The business model of creating content for a mass audience is slowly evolving to a business model of creating content for small audiences: the kinds of audiences that can interact with your business or organization. Eventually, most content producers (the writers, the journalists, the broadcasters) will stop creating stuff for a mass audience and start creating stuff for niche audiences. They'll be joined by millions of others who don't consider themselves "content producers," but who produce content nonetheless.  Businesses and organizations who tap into these content producers (or who become content producers themselves) will get the attention they currently get from traditional shotgun marketing.