Quantity (of Engagement) over Quality

A heartbeat and an internet connection is all it takes to be a “content creator,” the convenient catchall label that’s replaced ones like “artist, “actor” or “pornstar.”??But stripping everything down to the bare essentials of “content” produced by “creators” is a criminal oversimplification that disregards any earned credentials or labels meant to reflect talent or age appropriateness.??

Unfortunately, if you’re in the Creative Industry, this is the new media business model set by the new authorities of media distribution, aka Big Tech:?

• remove any criteria for media distribution and give everyone - kids and dogs included - the chance to share whatever they might create.??
• provide free guidance and content production tools to help them create content that performs better in the environment you’ve created.?
• absolve any person or committee from the responsibility of curation or judgement by letting the algorithm determine what gets prioritized.?

The crowd will decide what they “like” in this infinite supply of ad inventory created and owned by Big Tech.??

The problem is that no one — not the studios, the unions or the government —??ever imagined the crowd would like bite sized, “relatable” content just as much or more than glossy Hollywood productions.??It’s why the soundstages in Patrick Caligiuri’s LA Studio Ghost Town post look like abandoned factories from a bygone era.??They’re unnecessary overhead in what’s become a self-serve media market.??

And this is what we’re all struggling with: the audience that the Creative Industry was built to serve has begun to serve itself (sort of a content FUBU, if you will) and it’s leading to a slow motion replacement of the Creative Industry with the Creator Economy.??It’s not just the collapse of the Cable Industry, but the collapse of the Creative Industry as we know it.??

Everything is in play, as New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz has said, and as a result criticism no longer exists — in order for this new business model to work, I’d argue that it can’t.??Trash and tragedy are engaging, too. It’s why car crashes that don’t block traffic still slow it to a crawl.?

But a more interesting argument might be how we got here.

This new crop of digital ad-driven businesses require incredible scale. Scale isn’t possible without inclusion and let’s face it, the media business is built on exclusion — without it we don’t have the coveted exclusivity of fame.??But the Industry’s exclusions have long been a means of maintaining antiquated race and gender biases.??The worst kept secret is that the system has been rigged and no one was rushing to fix it (#OscarsSoWhite. #MeToo. #NoDiddy are just a few of the examples that come to mind).

But up until the last decade that didn’t matter. There was no alternative. As talent, you played their game because the only alternative “platform” for creators was in the subway.? ?

As fans, we took what we got, hoping to see our lives reflected in the content that we actually paid to see but knowing that it wasn’t likely if we weren’t white, male and heterosexual.??

Years of this has made the audience and the artists “unsentimental for the media conglomerate and traditional distribution models,” to borrow from Andrew Rosen’s post about how disruptive execs like Meta’s Zuckerberg are facing this moment.?

Just a few thoughts I'd share going into the New Year!