You may have seen this quotation from 2015:
“Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.”
The author was Tom Goodwin, and he was clearly trying to make a point about Facebook (and other companies) being “disruptive” in their industries. But, if you ask me, “Facebook creates no content” is really quite a meaningless statement when you compare to the rest of the media industry.
Rupert Murdoch obviously does not personally create any of the content for his print media, nor do any of the other News Corp shareholders, so you might as well say the same for News Corp.
Of course, News Corp has full-time employees who DO create content, while Facebook doesn’t.
But then what about an outdoor media company like JCDecaux? Neither do they have any full-time employees creating content.
What is a content creator, anyway? It’s someone who gathers the attention of an audience, ahead of that attention being sold to advertisers.
In the case of an outdoor media company like JCDecaux, who plays the role of content creator?
As just one example, think of a JCDecaux ad on the side of a bus. Without any bus operator, the bus would remain parked in storage, no one would ever see the ads, and advertisers would stop spending.
In this case, the bus operator is the content creator.
How does JCDecaux access the bus operator’s “content,” to be able to sell advertising?
They have to PAY the bus operator. They can’t just go ahead and stick ads onto the buses, without permission from the operator, and start generating advertising revenue for themselves.
Yet, this is similar to what Facebook does. It sticks ads onto people’s content, keeps all the revenue, and doesn’t compensate the content creators who were responsible for gathering the attention.
Remember, without any posts on Facebook, no one would visit, there’d be no one to see the ads, and advertisers would stop spending.
Facebook doesn’t differ from other media companies because it “creates no content.” It differs from other media companies because it PAYS for no content.
If you were a bus operator, you wouldn’t let JCDecaux stick their ads onto your buses for free. So, if you create content online, why should you let Facebook stick its ads onto your content for free?
That’s why there is now a NEW kind of social media. Ironically, it resembles OLD media, before Facebook came along and decided not to play by the rules.
Just like JCDecaux PAYS the bus operators for the rights to stick ads on the buses, this NEW kind of social media pays YOU and me for the rights to stick ads onto our content.
That’s the way it used to work, and that’s the way it’ll work again, once people become switched-on to the greed of Facebook.
If you want to be one of the first to start publishing content to this new kind of social media, The Online Economy is a 10-step system of training to help you start doing exactly that.
If you haven’t joined The Online Economy yet, go to: https://theonlineeconomy.com