The Internet drove a wedge through the sanctum sanctorum of analog media: distribution.
Internet wiped out the linchpin of pre-Internet media, distribution. Think of it as a castle's moat being obliterated by F16s. (Neither will F16s spare the moat nor the castle.)
Simply, the Internet changed the basic rules of the game, without changing the game itself. Pre-Internet media monetized information by distribution; newspapers sold their captive readers; radio and TV sold their inventory. The Internet multiplied inventory (cost of an additional webpage was zero), quantified metrics (as it coupled ads with performance), and made captive audiences accessible to all.
As the Internet scaled from ARPANet to an international infrastructure, news content became a commodity, speed became a necessity, ads became the norm. In doing so, the Internet drove up competition for every radio, TV, and newspaper company. It took away the most valuable consumers; it took away the youngest ones as well; it changed the economics of the business model.
And let's not talk about book shops, music shops, DVDs, or CDs; that we find these technologies 'archaic' now, only shows the deep impact that the Internet has made.
Coupled with smartphones, tablets, laptops, and broadband speeds, Internet has encouraged consumers to switch from analog media to Internet media.
The Internet's impacts seem tangible, but they're beyond just redefining the medium. More than distribution, the Internet changed time
as we understand it.
Chronos became Kairos.
In Greek mythology, there are two words for time: chronos and kairos. While the former refers to linear time, the latter refers to the opportune moment. To understand the Internet's impact, then, you have to understand how kairos
interrupted chronos
.
That you can binge watch Netflix, use Discord endlessly, go to Clubhouse and find jobs, or listen to Olivia Rodrigo and The Beatles one after the other, shows how the Internet has created "multitemporality", the superimposition of time, on itself.
This means you don't need to wait to do one thing after another; you can bypass time to do things indefinitely (of course, until you quit or die.) The point is that the Internet has changed how time itself works, and that has percolated into the media we consume.
In essence, as VGR puts it, we've moved from 'schedule-based time', to 'on-demand time', from no (or delayed) gratification, to instant gratification. That you can do 10 things simultaneously allows you to bypass traditional temporal constraints, and move to 'multitemporality', ie when time is multiplied.
Now, no longer do you need to wait for a TV show to be broadcasted at a particular time, and adjust your life around it; you can just stream it...
No longer do you need to physically go into a CD shop and buy a CD; you can just stream music...
Now longer do you have to dream about talking to celebrities; you can just tweet at Elon Musk and he'll (probably) reply.
The second impact of the Internet was allowing rapid asynchronicity
. No longer did you have to wait for a letter to be delivered, or wait at the phone line until the recipient picked up. You could just text or email, or better, connect over VoIP. Of course, this is mundane for us now, but to understand how far we've come in a short time period, it's important to take note of this mundanity. Radio and TV were temporally programmed. After all, you only had 24 hours in a day. But with YouTube first and now OTT, the Internet blew out this temporality and gave rise to rapid asynchronicity.
Finally, the Internet gave rise to abundance
of everything. The biggest constraint was not time, not content, not entertainment anymore — it was simply your appetite to consume. (Netflix spent ~$17 billion last year to create content. Take a second to digest that.)
Notice how, as media evolves, our relationship with time and our behavior changes.
The Internet's Impact on Newspapers
As we talk about the Internet's impact, I find it useful to particularly look at how it has impacted the analog newspaper industry at large.
In his article here, Ben Thompson talks about how newspaper ad revenue has declined over the years. The below graph is telling of what disruption really does to a sustainable business model.
I like to look at the above chart as only one predictable consequence of the evolution of media. That said, have a look at the below chart, showing how distribution has evolved over the years.
From 1880 to 1910, newspapers gained ascendancy; they were, arbiters of information. Newspapers per household were more than 1. Post World War II, though, newspapers declined in three key stages:
From 1.4 per household in 1949, to
0.8 per household in 1980, to
0.4 per household in 2010.
The iPhone had only launched in 2007, so the mobile phone market was picking up pace. From 2010 to 2020, mobile exploded, and with it, the availability of content, news, entertainment, what have you, increased as well. Newspapers, though, still carried the same amount of content — you were physically restricted to broadsheet, tabloid, or other formats.
This is where scale
and distribution
meet again.
The Internet's scale with its rapid distribution capabilities made analog media practically redundant.
So, rewinding a bit, three key points:
Internet divided time.
Internet replicated time.
With its ability to distribute things fast, Internet had multiplicative impacts on media.
As the Internet moved things online, it rendered the production of a physical newspaper obsolete. No longer did you need to cut trees, import newsprint, and use ink or plates to process yesterday's news. Now, you could produce the same news in a second, without any additional cost.
So, the Internet turned on its head, the 'production game' that newspapers played. It played a different game altogether: the game of attention. But as it bypassed practical constraints of time through multitemporality, it soon found a new constraint: attention.
Time is infinite, attention is finite.
To monetize attention, then, the natural response for online players was to leverage Internet's unlimited inventory and offer everything to you: food, movies, songs, arts, medicine, stuff, furniture, houses, cars. In contrast, it's practically infeasible for newspapers to give you this entire multimedia experience. We've talked of the physical constraints above, but it doesn't even make sense economically to try to offer some of these things.
That said, there are still places where the newspaper industry is flat, meaning, people are not discontinuing to read the paper. It could be a habitual thing, but the long and short of it is that newspapers still have a value proposition that the Internet does not match up to, yet.
That value proposition seems to be 'status'. A physical newspaper gives you status, heritage, prestige, things that performance-based advertising of the Internet cannot. Take TV. That the CPM for a Superbowl ad is $50 is telling of what offline, analog media can still offer that the Internet cannot replace: status.
In all, there are things the Internet offers: scale, distribution, multitemporality, asynchronicity, and abundance. But there are things it cannot offer as well: prestige, heritage, status.