In our Electronic Media Management class, we’ve been reading Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail.”
Anderson says that in the pre-Internet, pre-New Media age, talented people had to earn access to the production tools that enabled them to do creative work. Big companies held the keys to the expensive audio consoles, editing software, video cameras, and printing presses used to make and distribute media. Big companies also had a lock on access to a mass audience.
Today, media production tools are inexpensive (or sometimes free) to access. And more people are making content (web videos, albums of their own original music, self-published books, independent films).
And the Long Tail of available media content gets infinitely longer.
The ubiquitous availability of those production tools, coupled with the worldwide distribution channel of the internet, and sophisticated search technology, allows us all to be media producers.
Anderson says there’s been a shift from “Earn the right to produce,” to “What’s stopping you?”
More and more, we don’t make much of a distinction between media that’s produced independently by a dude in his apartment, and something that was created by a team of professionals working for a production company.
We know we we like, and we can find it … somewhere out there in the Long Tail.
And when the trollers of the Long Tail beat a path to a new media producer’s digital door, there are increasing opportunities to turn something that originally was done for fun into a way to make a few dollars.
Or a lot of dollars.
Check out this article from Yahoo Finance on some new content producers have made over $100,000 a year on YouTube … then try it yourself.
Tags: new media, Video Distribution, YouTube
September 29, 2010 at 12:31 AM |
Wow, it goes to show what you can benefit if you get to the top.
Maybe in a few years my show will be sitting there. lol