Writer Kevin Kelly has suggested that those publishing in a new media environment need to consider intangible value that can be added to information. He terms these elements "generative value":
"A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold." (Kelly, 2009)Kelly's eight ways to add generative value to information in order that it becomes more viable as a commercial offering:
Immediacy
Although information is increasingly easy to access, it is often the case that timeliness can add significant value to your work. The first review of a highly-anticipated product will be far more popular than the 100th. One way of gaining relevance for your audience is to respond to developments in your area quickly.
Personalisation
The idea of personalisation is one that we have explored in the earlier weeks of this unit, if not explicitly. By focusing on a particular group with particular interests, it is possible to create content with specifically that audience in mind. Kelly extends this idea to all types of media and forms of distribution, suggesting that personalising content creates a two-way relationship that an audience is often reluctant to break.
Interpretation
Discussing interpretation, Kelly points to open source software models where the software itself is free but manual and support come at a price. The same idea can be applied to specialist writing. If you understand and can explain something in a way that simplifies it for your audience, you have created value.
Authenticity
In the age of infinite replicability, what does it mean to hold a copy of the real thing™ in your hands? By offering audiences and consumers a seal of authenticity that tells them this is an original work from the author, we can add a value to a product.
Accessibility
Although we have become accustomed to thinking of the Web as being located on our personal computers, the increasing rise in mobile Internet devices such as phones and PDAs, along with a growing reliance on these devices to serve up media means that consumers are less concerned about 'owning' media as they are in having easy and flexible access to it.
Embodiment
As much information and writing as there is on the Web, there is something attractive about the tactile nature of a book. A number of bloggers have turned their work into published books. Similarly, although digitally stored music and video are convenient, physical media remain popular.
Patronage
Kelly has famously proposed the notion of "1,000 true fans". As he points out, there are many examples of audiences paying for content voluntarily - particularly when they know that the creator will benefit directly. Given a convenient and direct opportunity, audiences are happy to pay artists and creators they truly want to support.
Findability
As Kelly points out, even a free text has no value if no-one can find it! You need to make sure that your work is made available to people who might be interested in it. Perhaps the most obvious way of doing this for an independent publisher/creator is to nurture links with other writers who are working within the same area and to make yourself visible to the niche audience you are catering to.
Readings
Comments on Clay Shirkeys blog, 'Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing'
'Weblogs are not a new kind of publishing that requires a new system of financial reward. Instead, weblogs mark a radical break. They are such an efficient tool for distributing the written word that they make publishing a financially worthless activity.'
Comment: Interestingly, I read somewhere that this also is the case with music. Publishing music on the Internet also requires a new system of financial reward - in terms of music the solution is branding.
(make reference in the discussion board and use what I wrote about Dick Dale and The
2. Rading: Anderson, C. (2004). The Long Tail.
Interestingly Anderson confirms what I always thought - that major publishers of music and books simply tried to dictate a mainstream taste by overriding everything else available with ubiquitous marketing and advertising out of economic reasoning. There always has been the so called underground, but with online media the undferground is much easier accessible and people will find out that there is an almost infinite variety of interesting material that might attract them.
This is only possible because the regime of distribution and sales numbers does not exist in a virtual world.
Interesting remark:
'The other constraint of the physical world is physics itself. The radio spectrum can carry only so many stations, and a coaxial cable so many TV channels. And, of course, there are only 24 hours a day of programming. The curse of broadcast technologies is that they are profligate users of limited resources. The result is yet another instance of having to aggregate large audiences in one geographic area - another high bar, above which only a fraction of potential content rises.'
...and referring to digital jukeboxes:
'With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.'
...and referring to CDs with a hit and otherwise crap:
'There's also a lot of crap. But there's a lot of crap hiding between the radio tracks on hit albums, too. People have to skip over it on CDs, but they can more easily avoid it online, since the collaborative filters typically won't steer you to it. Unlike the CD, where each crap track costs perhaps one-twelfth of a $15 album price, online it just sits harmlessly on some server, ignored in a market that sells by the song and evaluates tracks on their own merit.'
In general The Long tail asks the reader to rethink the concept of hits and bestsellers in the aim to browse for the really interesting stuff that usually falls beyond awareness of the consumer. In the virtual world all titles can be made easily accessible as they do not require shelf space and they are available 24/7 on top. As a result, online suppliers make more money out of the unnkown than traditional stores do with their limited shelf space.
Here is a link to Netflix:
3.Reading Kelly, C. (2008). Better Than Free.
As we've learned before, publishings as such are worthless as they are no longer limited to the number of issues in a physical edition. There are large numbers of copies produced on the Internet.
What cannot be copied are human qualities like trust. Looking at them from the user perspective makes it easier to understand the value. The qualities in detail are already discussed above in the first reading.
However, what is important is, that 'the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits' (Kelly, 2008)
Reference
Kelly, K. (2008). Better Than Free. Retrieved October 24th, 2009, from http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly08/kelly08_index.html.
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