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“This book is about the most important issue the media business is facing as it tries to move forward: control. …. In my work as speaker and advisor, the tough issue of control emerges, again and again, as the key contention point within TV companies, publishers, record labels, and broadcasters: How can a commercial venture that is based on so-called “intellectual property” thrive and prosper in an environment that seems to continuously and progressively remove control from the creators/owners/providers of content, and hands it over to the people formerly known as consumers (aka the users), effectively making them more powerful every single day? But the reality is that every click inadvertently makes another case for the consumer’s ever-increasing rise in importance. Within all the conversations I have had about things like commercial content versus shared content, about the read-only or the read-write web, and about copyright versus Fair Use, the crucial question always seems to boil down to WHERE IS THE CONTROL HERE, i.e., questions such as “Who will control this new media universe” and “How much control do I need to run a revenue-generating business?”

…read on Look forward to seeing you at LeWeb3 in Paris!!

Just look at your own words:

“But in this new age, you don’t want to own the content or the pipe that delivers it. You want to participate in what people want to do on their own. You don’t want to extract value. You want to add value. You don’t want to build walls or fences or gardens to keep people from doing what they want to do without you. You want to enable them to do it. You want to join in.

And once you get your head around that, you will see that you can grow so much bigger so much faster with so much less cost and risk.

So don’t own the content. Help people make and find and remake and recommend and save the content they want. Don’t own the distribution. Gain the trust of the people to help them use whatever distribution and medium they like to find what they want.

In these new economics, you want to stand back and interfere and restrict as little as possible. You want to reduce costs to the minimum. You want to join in wherever you are welcome. ”

You’ve explained all the ways that they shouldn’t try to make revenue, and all the ways they should avoid high costs. But how are they supposed to *make* revenue off of new media?

As someone who follows the scene, I’m guessing the answer is “advertising”, and surely there’s some companies that are making a killing off of that (i.e., Google). But can every company make strong revenue off of it? I doubt it. And even of those that do, I’m guessing the revenue will be lower than they’ve made off of print media. (See Henry Blodget’s recent analysis of the NYT’s financials at http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/08/its-easy-to-say.html for an example.)

You make it sound as if all they need to do is adapt to change and they will survive, and that they’re fools not to see that. But I think that’s not true at all – adapting won’t solve their problem. Their existing business model is ending and even the new business models won’t replace it. And THAT is what they’re scared of.

Thoughts?