“Content is not just king, it’s the emperor of all things electronic [and] without content, these genius mobile products would be lifeless and the world’s large flat screens, e-readers, and tablets would be unloved and unsold.” – Rupert Murdoch Feb 2010
Same quote different post. Let’s begin by examining the veracity of the claim.
How many of you remember what was the killer App that launched the personal computing revolution? Was it news or movies or music or games? No, it was the humble spreadsheet.
As a quick aside should it surprise us that we consume news and content today (e.g. A DIY Lists in Google or Twitter) in much the same fashion that we have interacted with spreadsheets since the beging of the PC era?
What about the mobile phone? Was it news or movies or music or games?
No, this time it was voice and then SMS that sold billions of mobile handsets over the past 15 years.
Now let’s take a look at the internet. What was the killer app that proved to be the catalyst that collected a billion+ PC’s? Actually it was eMail.
In each case media content has proven to be an after thought – a value add if you like - added to the platform after it acquired an audience.
In each case content has proven to be not as popular or as profitable as the content providers or the platform operators would have hoped.
Take look for instance at this chart from 2008 illustrating the break down of revenues for Australia’s leading mobile telco. 
The content data revenues were less than 2%. Take out email and the figure was even lower. And, if we take a look at the media revenue spit from another Australian Mobile Telco provider from around the same period, we discover that it is Games and Music and not News that dominates the subscriber revenue mix.
The bottom line is news represented less that 0.1% of mobile subscription revenues in Australia in 2008. Nothing has really changed since then to suggest that this still is not the case. If anything with the explosion in mobile apps and mobile web sites news revenues are probably even less today.
On the internet we have seen many times before that things are little better. We could run through the numbers once again but the real story is News like all content just isn’t sticky enough to keep an audience. It is consistently the poorest performing experience on the web.
In the end though the killer data visualisation that demonstrates just how irrelevant the news and content business is to the web economy is this rehash of the 2007 US Census data.
If Content was King on the Web it would translate into dollars. It hasn’t and, despite the best efforts of the chattering class to make it relevent, it won’t simply because it never was, and never will be, King of the Web.
Posted on March 31, 2011
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