The content ecosystem is broken!

The content ecosystem is broken! Which sounds like a bold claim is in fact the status quo in 2018. But what is the content ecosystem? Why is it broken? And why does this especially affect content creators?

What is the content ecosystem?
The content ecosystem consists of all participants in the process of content distribution and creation. It is a complex network of dependencies and needs between the individual actors, which is constantly changing.

Not so long ago, the system consisted roughly of two actors: senders and receivers of messages. Senders were newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations — basically anyone with enough money, influence and the right infrastructure to produce and distribute mass media. The recipients were the audience — newspaper readers and television consumers — who acted as a mass but were unknown to the sender in detail. The preferences and interests of the audience could only be determined for the collective, not for the individual, on the basis of quota and circulation.

Many things are different these days. Broadcasters and newspapers no longer have a monopoly over the creation of news, as external producers such as freelance journalists or bloggers are manufacturing news as well. The main source of revenue for news portals today is advertising, with about a third of newspaper advertising revenues in 2017 coming from digital advertising. This is where the fourth player of the current content ecosystem comes into play: Advertisers. In a digital environment, they need much more precise information about the individual consumer in order to be able to successfully place advertisements online. So everybody and everything is deeply connected in this ecosystem.

Why is the content ecosystem broken?
What has been roughly outlined above is the ground concept of the content ecosystem. Like natural ecosystems, problems or changes that initially affect only one of the actors and appear unimportant at first glance have a long-term negative impact on all actors and thus on the entire ecosystem.

Many such small problems currently exist in the content ecosystem. Due to the sheer mass of potential news and the rapid speed with which they are distributed, news portals can no longer keep up with the production of relevant content, resulting in thematic content blind spots appearing. Thus they not only lose readers, but also advertising revenue.

Advertisers however have another problem. They don’t know who to advertise to because they don’t know their potential customers well enough. What results from this is clear: All too often content consumers are shown irrelevant and annoying advertisements.

All this has a particular influence on the weakest part of the content ecosystem: Content Creators. They are often not adequately included in the advertising revenues and thus in the success of their articles. Or they can’t monetize it at all or only via third party platforms, because they have no contact to news portals. The consequences of this will be examined in the following.

Why problems of the content ecosystem affect Content Creators especially?
Content Creators can be divided into two archetypes, which we may call freelance journalists and bloggers. Freelance journalists are independent journalists who are not employed by a media organization. They produce content and can theoretically sell it freely to a news portal of their choice.

Bloggers, on the other hand, produce content for their “own brand”. They publish it on their own websites or via platforms such as Medium or Youtube. Monetisation is usually achieved through advertising revenue.

As already said, these two terms are archetypes. In reality there are often freelance journalists who are also bloggers and vice versa. For a better comprehensibility they should be considered separately here.

The number of freelance journalists is growing and growing. An example: between 2000 and 2015 the number of freelance journalists in the UK increased by 67%. In some Eastern and Central European countries, freelance journalism is the main form of work for journalists.

At the same time, newspapers and other news portals have been unable to keep pace with the digital transformation and have struggled to generate sufficient advertising revenue, which has resulted in budget cuts for journalistic products or even some news portals changing to subscription-based models.

The consequence for freelance journalists: less work and less income. Headlines like : “One in three freelance journalists in the UK are on state benefits”, are by no means uncommon in 2018. And relief is not in sight. Although news portals are slowly but surely gaining a foothold in the digital world and recovering, freelance journalists are not involved in the advertising success of their products.

To top it all off, freelance journalists can only choose to whom they sell their content in theory. Demand, but also the number of professional contacts limits freelancers in selling their journalistic products.

The problem with “bloggers” is in essence very similar. Let’s take Youtube for example. With 1.8 billion active monthly users, YouTube is the largest platform for users to upload their (video) content to and monetize it through the partner program. Once users have joined the partner program, they are able to monetise their videos by implementing ads in their videos. For the year 2018, YouTube is forecasting advertising revenue to reach $4.43 billion for the US market.

Youtubers are really the rockstars among content creators. PewDiePie, the most successful Youtuber of all time has over 60 million subscribers. However, even on Youtube, most content creators cannot make a living off the advertisements from their videos. A study by the University of Offenburg found that even YouTube stars with 1.4 million monthly views earn less than $17,000 a year in ad revenue.

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