Here's the challenge no one wants to stick their neck out and propose answers to.
The alternative, as advertising declines have no reason to rebound, is to continue to lower the costs of content creation and production in order to overcome media company shrinking margins.
So many stakeholders benefit from figuring this one out . . . the creators of content, the media companies, the distributors, and, importantly, the consumer. Yet, there is such uncertainty.
Here is what we know. We know "they" pay a lot for cable, wireless, etc. just for the possibility of finding the desirable needle in the haystack, the play value of interacting with content, and real time communication with friends and family from anywhere. In fact, consumer purchases share of media and communication industry revenues surpassed ad revenues in 2004 (according to Veronis Suhler Stevenson) and media and communication's share of the average consumer's wallet has grown significantly since 1990.
In my post yesterday, "Better than Free" (inspired by Kevin Kelly's article by the same name) I offer two recent studies' findings on why people spend time on the internet. If we can draw a connection between what people will spend time on to what they will spend money on, there are some great clues in these studies to answer the question: What will "they" pay for?
Ultimately, I think "they" will pay, and pay again, for content that stimulates an individual to look outside of himself, in media which facilitate or enable the camaraderie that galvanizes community. I think it is about audience participation - when "they" becomes "we." Here's an example of what it feels like:
