I spent yesterday at the BBC in Manchester talking to some interesting people, many of whom want to build businesses providing content of one kind or another.

So I gave my gloomy look at the content creation business, pointing to Monday’s supply squeeze at ITN, and Scott Karp’s post on NBC Universal/News Corp deal, and Jon Hagel’s take on Google vs. Viacom. And generally suggesting that scaling a business out of content supply was madness. They seemed remarkably undepressed.

At business school I remember we dealt with two kinds of proposition:

• Lifestyle businesses that maximised owner happiness
• Real businesses that maximised shareholder value

“It’s a lifestyle business” an MBA classmate would say – the intonation suggesting that the mere utterance was a pointless waste of valuable consulting time. You can’t measure owner happiness, but you can price shares.

Which is to say that content creation has a social, cultural and personal role too, and we find it hard to put a price on that. For example, Philip Larkin made an important contribution to that most uneconomic of content genres – British twentieth century poetry.

Writing An Arundel Tomb certainly didn’t pay for Larkin to quit his day job as a librarian at Hull University. And yet doggerel verse with guitar was the dominant commercial content of Larkin’s time.

If only Larkin had repurposed his content! If only Paul Simon had written him a tune. Still, at least Phil was happy…and you can’t measure that.