from Hacker News

Why Content Is King

by nbashaw on 12/19/20, 8:13 AM with 74 comments

• by dmje on 12/19/20, 10:43 AM

  Conflating "media" and "content" is the issue here.

  Facebook is successful because of content. Google+ failed because there wasn't any content.

  Heading tech up against content in some way is also a silly argument. Good tech supports the transmission of content. Bad tech gets in the way. Good content is enabled by good tech.

  Ultimately, a web page with some stirring, moving or life changing words on it is going to have more potential impact than all the NerdMagic in the world. But: they're heavily codependent.

• by sid6376 on 12/19/20, 10:07 AM

  I really enjoyed reading this article. One key takeaway for me was how its in the interest of companies like Substack to initially have a lot of high profile creators defect from their motherships (like a lot of journalists have recently done) and then eventually decrease reliance on the superstars so that Substack's value doesnt immediately decrease once these superstars leave.

  Very related to this article is this article about the need for a creator middle class. https://li.substack.com/p/building-the-middle-class-of-the

• by fmajid on 12/19/20, 11:06 AM

  Content is not king, and Andrew Odlyzko explains why:

  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=235282

  At the time he wrote it, the whole of Hollywood yearly revenue made less than 2 weeks of telcos’, and SMS by itself was worth more (SMS has been commoditized since, to the benefit of Apple and Facebook).

• by friendlybus on 12/19/20, 10:21 AM

  Content sells the tech. The tech makes the most money though.

  Microsoft is 1 tril bigger in market cap than Disney. Strange to use a Bill gates quote and then discuss Disney films.

  Nintendo as a company makes more money on selling consoles, than on Zelda.

  The article touches on this and could expand on it. No new tech launch is going to work without content, so in that sense it is king, but the money is in the tech.

• by SarikayaKomzin on 12/19/20, 6:35 PM

  As many have pointed out, this is an obviously oversimplified maxim. But I’d like to add two reasons why I think it is a useful heuristic despite that.

  1. Great content can’t be commodified, despite the industry’s best efforts.

  2. Content lives in extremistan. [1]. Though the average piece of content has little upside, the upside of a great piece of content is nearly limitless.

  At the very least, content is a “prince” alongside distribution (network effects).

  [1] “Taleb provides another example of Extremistan: book publishing. Suppose one randomly chooses a thousand authors, and adds up the total number of books they have sold. Now, add the bestselling author in the world, J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books. Her book sales with vastly exceed the total of the other thousand authors.”

  https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html

• by ddmd on 12/19/20, 9:46 AM

  I am not sure that it is about content. It is more about some important factors of contemporary businesses and especially startups:

  - Scale Economies - the more you invest the more profit you get

  - Network Economies - platform business models like Amazon

  - Counter Positioning - Vanguard and ETFs

  - Switching Costs - this is why Facebook still exists

  - Branding -

  - Cornered Resource - patents etc.

  - Process Power - this is why governments still exist :)

• by buro9 on 12/19/20, 10:58 AM

  Distribution is King.

  Those who control distribution set the price.

• by dredmorbius on 12/19/20, 1:39 PM

  First, the phrase "content is king" doesn't originate with Bill Gates, or Sumner Redstone, who popularised it. It appears in a 1974 book, and pre-dates even that. See: https://lgkmarketingcc.com/content-king-said-better/

  The book seems to be J. W. Click, Russell N. Baird, Magazine Editing and Production (https://www.worldcat.org/title/magazine-editing-and-producti...). W. C. Brown Company, 1974, 274 pages. (Google Books preview: https://books.google.com/books?id=lMpHwLnvsvAC&q=%22content+...)

  Earlier appearances in the 1960s refer to educational films (https://www.worldcat.org/title/toward-improved-learning-a-co...). (Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=LiQgAQAAMAAJ&q=%22content+...)

  A discussion based on this premise should at least get the provenance straight.

  Aguments over provenance notwithstanding, my view is that the aphorism is a convenient bit of stage distraction attractive to media monopolists themselves aware of the real truth: network control is emperor. Andrew Odlyzko argues this; https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=235282 (as @fmajid notes elsewhere in this thread)

  And this goes beyond just getting the proprietor's cut, the vigorish, skimming your 5, or 10, or 30%.

  Central control of a network means deciding what that network is. Where it begins, where it ends, what goes in, what comes out, who can receive, who can send, what interactions are possible, speeds and latencies, what messages are heard, what are not, who pays, who gets paid, who plays for free.

  These factors are wholly ignored by contemporary US (Borkian) antitrust doctrine.

  It's not just the vig.

  Sumner Redstone died this past August at 97; (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/12/obituaries/sumner-redston...) (NYTimes).

• by beastman82 on 12/19/20, 1:21 PM

  While that quote is Gates, the "Content is King" phrase _is_ from a media tycoon: Sumner Redstone.

• by blackcats on 12/19/20, 1:17 PM

  No, PageRank is king. AI isn’t at the level of understanding content yet

• by getdafookoutahe on 12/21/20, 4:20 PM

  content is no longer king. Just paying Google or Facebook is the king these days.

• by sys_64738 on 12/19/20, 2:59 PM

  Bill Gates is the same guy who said I only needed 640K in my Mac.

• by enriquto on 12/19/20, 10:19 AM

  A good start would be to stop using this stupid terminology. Quoting RMS [0]:

  I think it is ok for authors (please let's not call them creators, they are not gods) to ask for money for copies of their works (please let's not devalue these works by calling them content) in order to gain income (the term compensation falsely implies it is a matter of making up for some kind of damages).

  [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20171108235001/http://mail.fsfeu...