The changing nature of content

Infobesity, infoxication – these two words describe the paralyzing effect that information overload has on our ability to make decisions or understanding of a concept, particularly in the digital space. Today’s marketers are finding it harder to be heard, while internet users are finding it increasingly difficult to manage the sheer volume of incoming information, much harder to keep from being distracted, and are increasingly concerned about their privacy. Alan Vesty delves deeper into this topic.

Infobesity, infoxication – these two words describe the paralysing effect that information overload has on our ability to make decisions or understanding of a concept, particularly in the digital space. I have written about information fatigue and the digital content deluge before and will likely do so again – it is one of the biggest challenges facing online marketers and consumers today. As a phenomenon, it should be of particular interest to our content-based industry.
Today’s marketers are finding it harder to be heard, while internet users are finding it increasingly difficult to manage the sheer volume of incoming information, much harder to keep from being distracted, and are increasingly concerned about their privacy. The response of many marketers has been to produce more content, more often, across more channels. This attack, attack, attack approach is as fundamentally wrong-headed and doomed a strategy as the human-wave assaults deployed from the trenches of 1915. Advocates of the content treadmill have been dealt a blow by the ongoing throttling of organic content views on social media timelines, and there is a return to looking at site optimisation and search engine marketing, enhancing opportunities for customer services interaction, and allowing for human to human interaction with online visitors as opposed to forcing interactions with the brand monolith through faceless admins and third-person writing. It is not merely the volume of online content that is interesting, it is also the way content is used and valued online – which is often at odds with our own industry’s models.
As the internet matures, user data has replaced content as the key online commodity – large amounts of quality content is now created and provided free to end-users with the purpose of generating user data and/or a sale of something other than the content itself. In this context, determining the value of content has less to do with the informational worth of the content itself, and more to do with its ability to generate valuable user data – meaning a humorous JPEG of a cat might be more valuable than a scholarly article on cats. Additionally, through sophisticated yet easy-to-use social media platforms, anyone with internet access and a mobile handset can now generate and instantly publish their own content – which they actually pay for by consenting to the collection, use and commoditisation of their personal data by these platforms
The stand-alone, bookish context in which many traditional publishers and booksellers still understand saleable content is in the process of being eroded, challenged, sidestepped and blatantly ignored, whether or not one is referring to print or e-books. This change can be seen across all publishing areas, not only in education. Would your customer still buy a cookery book called Cheese Dishes of the World if they could access free content of similar or possibly even better quality on their tablet or phone, authored by their favourite cheesemaker or personality chef and hosted on their local supermarket’s website? If you answer is ‘yes’, ask yourself which direction you expect sales volumes of books to take, particularly as millennials become the dominant consumer segment. Publishers are sure to be asking very similar questions.
If you look at my above rather cheesy example again, you can pick out a few interesting things:
1) There was still an author, who was most likely paid for their work
2) It is likely that publishing professionals (editorial, proofing) were employed
3) If the content was not an in-house commission, then a commercially viable deal must have been brokered with the supermarket site in order to get them to host the content. This same content could probably be sold to other websites
4) The supermarket could be interested in hosting a curated range of similar content for its website, to support sales of other product lines and to add value to the customer.

All of these point to the future role of publishers and booksellers in a world increasingly dominated by free content and increased reluctance from end-users to pay for content. Quality free content – in other words, free to the end-user, will still be commercially viable and saleable. As the volume of free content increases, the demand for quality, trusted free content will increase, as will the demand for expert curations of quality free content.
The expertise of the publishing house can significantly increase the quality of such free materials and the reputation of its imprint can increase the perceived credibility and worth of the content itself, meaning more views, downloads and interactions for the site hosting the content, and therefore more opportunities for that site to sell their core products.
Booksellers are already in a real sense content brokers and content curators, and many are highly skilled at concluding institutional purchases; where the content (in the form of textbooks) is purchased by an institution and provided free to the end-user (learners).

Author: Alan Vesty, the Digital Marketing Manager at the African Branch of Cambridge University Press.