Content Specialization

The internet has enabled on a large scale something we've never had before: content specialization. Before the internet, the only way to specialize content for a specific audience was through print. Books and magazines in particular could be catered to a very small audience. But more dynamic forms of media, like television and the radio, could never be used for specialized content. Content on these mediums needed to be very generally applicable because the space for such content was so limited (finite number of TV/Radio channels available), making the opportunity cost of airing specialized content high. But with print media, the opportunity cost of publishing a book or magazine is virtually zero, because an infinite number of print publications could be created.

The internet has enabled for dynamic media what was once only possible for static media like books or magazines. The opportunity cost of putting something on the internet is virtually zero, and the marginal cost per viewer online is also vanishingly small. People have the freedom to find almost anything they want on the internet, and if what they're looking for isn't there they have the power to create it themselves. Due to this, the internet has fueled an explosion of content, some professionally created but mostly user generated. Now specialized news videos, podcasts, and more can be accessed online, and news sites focused on small niche markets have been highly successful (TechCrunch, a blog about startups, and Mashable, a blog about social media, are great examples of this).

It's arguable, in fact, that the internet has been so successful that content producers have been forced to specialize. People aren't drawn as much nowadays to news written for a wide audience because they now have more personally-relevant alternatives. Television and radio viewership has been declining for a long time, and in my opinion this is probably one of the biggest causes of that decline. Furthermore, the explosion of content fueled by the internet has meant that content producers have begun fighting much harder to win viewers. Terms like linkbaiting and SEO, describing the ways in which people drive viewership, have become commonplace.

The internet has completely revolutionized the way we all consume content. But what we've seen so far, in my opinion, is only just scratching the surface of what's possible. Though no technology exists for this yet, imagine the possibilities that machine learning and language processing could hold once completely perfected. It may be possible one day to design a system that learns what content you like and writes new content specifically for you based on these preferences, drawing from a large store of data. Algorithmically generated content would open huge new possibilities, and some companies have begun experimenting with this already.

This post was inspired by an article on Seth Godin's blog, describing what he terms "the scarcity of attention".