Problem: Establishing the Value of Content

This post is the last part of an ongoing series on the content challenges facing today’s modern High Impact Learning Organizations. ™  Be sure to read the whole series.

We live in an information-based economy.  Content is currency.  Yet, how do we establish the value of content?  It is not just the quality of content that is becoming comodity; the cost of content itself is in play. More authors equals greater supply; and economics tells us that greater supply usually equals reduced prices.

• Does the fact that we all now have the wherewithal within reach to create high quality, compelling content ourselves drive down the market value of ‘professional’ content? 
• What is the value of a professional?  Of an expert?
• Why would we pay for something we could get for free (from the general populace) or create ourselves? 
• Or, does it increase the value of such content, because – in theory – professionally created content should stand above the masses in quality?
• What does it mean to own content?
• How do we on one hand protect the rights of content owners and the incentive to develop new content (with some ostensible market value) and at the same time support an open flow of knowledge?

These are not new questions.  They have weighed on societies for as long as humans have created things (in other words: all of recorded history).  Today’s technologies, however, exacerbate these problems.  There are now visible cracks in the dam that cannot be ignored. As mentioned in a previous post, traditional sources are truly struggling with these questions. The newspaper business, for instance, is near collapse.
 
No matter how efficient newspapers are, there are still fixed costs which they must recoup.  They cannot escape the reality that: 1) the format of the printed paper no longer works for much of their readership; 2) they face stiff competition from thousands of on-demand sources with much lower production costs (e.g., no specialist journalists to hire); 3) as I talked about in the last post – their readership is not as quick to value the product just because it was created by professionals using bona fide standards; and 4) a primary revenue source, the classifieds, is all but dead due to better alternatives online (e.g. Craigslist).

What are newspapers doing about it? Most are following Google’s lead and turning to online advertising, with mixed results. 

Some, such as Rupert Murdoch and News Corp have made a good deal of noise recently with their announcement that all of their online properties would require subscription access of some kind after next year.  The problem is that other newspapers (the New York Times is one) have tried to get online readers to pay for access, and so far it has not worked (although the NYT has just announced it intends try again – this time with scheme based on frequency of consumption).  Readers just migrate to free options.  Of all News Corp’s brands, perhaps the Wall Street Journal has enough caché, because of its unique status in the business world, that it could convince online readers to pay.
 
The lesson here for providers is: if you want to charge a premium for content, that content had better come with a very obvious value proposition.  Quality content certainly takes a quantifiable amount of time and expertise.  The cost of production may be less; but an expert's expertise is worth something.  The challenge becomes: how do you put a value to the blood, sweat, and tears of accumulated expertise? How do you translate that value into $?  With the open internet expanding exponentially, it now looks like content will forever after be a buyer's market.

At this point you might be thinking at this point: ok – yes – very interesting (maybe not), but how does all of this apply to corporate training?

• Well, first, these sorts of questions are on the minds of the custom learning content providers with which you might already be engaged for development work, or used for such in the past.  For all of the content challenges discussed so far, these providers are under pressure to reduce the price of custom content.  Companies say, “We just need short, rapid content, so that should not cost as much.” Or, “we know how much effort it takes, because we could do same thing ourselves if we had the time.  So we won’t pay more than X.”  When prices are squeezes, something has to give.
• If you engage in a custom project, one of the issues you will have to negotiate is ownership of the resulting intellectual property, a particularly challenging problem with digital assets and open internet connections.
• You may hear similar questions come from business stakeholders questioning the budget you would like to spend on content.
• In the near term, the resulting market pressures are likely to reduce available options to purchase professionally developed content, as sources struggle to find viable business models and are forced to exit the market.

Obviously we not going to solve these challenges in a blog post, not will the learning industry solve them in isolation from other content marketplaces.  We can advance the conversation however.  To be clear, I am not stuck in the past on this one.  I think there is huge, serendipitous value to be had from the open flow of knowledge.  Google has been astronomically successful, not because it sources better content, but because it is easy, open, and free.  There are no OBVIOUS barriers placed in our way - of the technical kind such as logins, of the policy kind such as permissions, or of the monetary kind such as costs. 

Of course, we all want access to the highest quality content, but – for the reasons already discussed – it’s so easy to acquire for free that we forget that 1) it does cost money to create and 2) we already paying for it regularly.  Companies are literally going out of business because they can’t convince consumers to pay for content and yet can’t escape the reality that it still costs money to create.  So the challenge is to find the middle ground – perhaps in the form of new types of exchanges, such as what Apple has done with iTunes, or what the New York Times wants to do with metered reading.  I think those types of solutions will only go so far though.  I think we will need to be active and educated consumers of information, wanting to know where the content came from and to understand the effort involved in its authorship; and we must be willing to pay for good content when we find it.

So, I leave you with one more question: To borrow a coffee analogy, what would “fair-trade” practices for content look like?  Please share your thoughts in the comments.

-David

Author’s Note: You might have noticed that it took awhile to put this last post together.  My apologies, a confluence of several causes to be sure - not the least of which is the fact that I think this is likely the MOST challenging of these content related challenges that I’ve discussed as part of this series.  This post is decidedly more questions than answers.  Fair-trade in content is a society-level problem, and one that is not likely to be solved anytime soon.