Peter Svarre - Strategies for your digital business

The reports of the death of the Internet are greatly exaggerated

What I am doing right now is seemingly becoming increasingly antiquated. Writing a blog post is for dinosaurs, whereas writing Twitter updates about X-factor is “a la mode”.

Chris Anderson wrote a Wired article about it and now Global Webindex has recently published a report about the death of the open Internet.

The report is actually very interesting – because it brings real hard core statistics to the debate about the open vs. the closed Internet.

Here is a quote from the executive summary:

The old view of text-based social media, defined by blogs and forums, is being surpassed, moving the impact of social media, from creating content and publishing to sharing other people’s content and ‘live’ opinions about real-world events. In short ‘real-time’ is re-orientating consumer from creator to distributor and moving the focus to traditional media and professional content.

Basically the authors of the report are saying that the open Internet – which was based on heavy cumbersome content creation like writing a blog – is declining compared with the packaged Internet where professional content producers are back in the driving seat, and the social aspect of the Internet is no longer about content creation but content distribution.

As always, I think that the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Yes – traditional media have found their way onto the Internet, but that is mainly because increased bandwidth has made it possible to consume professional content as opposed to crappy Youtube cute-kitten videos. The pure fact that we can now actually watch movies and TV shows on the Internet has of course had the effect that we are watching more of this stuff online.

And yes – a lot of Internet content are moving into more packaged services on mobile phones, tablet computers, TV’s or dedicated websites, but the fact that people choose packaged services does not mean that the Internet ceases to be open. If you are dissatisfied with your country’s president you will still start a Facebook group or your own Blogspot blog, or if you are really dissatisfied with a restaurant you will still write that really nasty review on Yelp. The Internet has opened a door to radical two-way communication and thousands of new packaged content solutions are not going to change the fact that when push comes to shove, we are all (still) in the driving seat when it comes to content creation.

But the report has one really important conclusion which is undisputedly true: Professional content will increasingly be dependent on social distribution. If you cannot get your content distributed by your viewers/readers then your content is basically dead.

But as the founder of www.mysocialnews.com I am of course slightly biased here, because this little project of mine is all about the social distribution of content