-By Patrick Ruffini
In this space yesterday, Scott Cleland laid out an argument for why business should launch a “counter-movement” against the ongoing revolution in media and the distribution of digital content, writing:
The recession has created new urgency for multiple content industries to find a better way to protect and monetize their property/content in the digital world. The dot-com bubble ethos that “information wants to be free” is like a gross mold destroying the incentives to create valuable content and distribute it digitally.
Cleland defends the business models of traditional media concerns like the New York Times, CBS, and MSNBC who generate $40-60 in revenue per user as exemplars of the “real economy” as contrasted to the pennies on the dollar per user generated by many Internet companies (the “ecommony” or digital commons). It’s easy to laud old media for how well they monetize their audience — until you run headlong into a profit-and-loss statement.
Conservatives and free-market advocates should want no part of a rearguard defense of old business models built around pre-digital media. (Indeed, many on the right will feel a certain sense of schadenfreude at old media’s decline, given traditional newsrooms’ bias against conservatives.) Above all, the free market is about enabling disruptive innovation — and like legacy industries before it, traditional media will once again be forced to adapt or die. This isn’t a socialistic commons. It’s the free market deciding that it wants to easily access any piece of content from a multitude of online sources, as opposed to in print or on TV or in online walled gardens, where distribution is closely circumscribed by geography or an elite group of editors deciding what you should read or watch.
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Conservatives Should Embrace the Triumph of Disruptive Innovation Over Old Media”