{"id":377,"date":"2007-04-04T10:13:00","date_gmt":"2007-04-04T16:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=377"},"modified":"2008-12-29T18:50:52","modified_gmt":"2008-12-29T18:50:52","slug":"content-burger-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/04\/content-burger-king\/","title":{"rendered":"Content \u2013 more burger than king"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span> spent yesterday at the BBC<\/span> in Manchester talking to some interesting people<\/a>, many of whom want to build businesses providing content of one kind or another.<\/p>\n

So I gave my gloomy look at the content creation business, pointing to Monday\u2019s supply squeeze<\/a> at ITN<\/span>, and Scott Karp\u2019s post<\/a> on NBC Universal<\/span>\/News Corp<\/span> deal, and Jon Hagel<\/a>\u2019s take on Google<\/span> vs. Viacom<\/span>. And generally suggesting that scaling a business out of content supply was madness. They seemed remarkably undepressed.<\/p>\n

At business school I remember we dealt with two kinds of proposition:<\/p>\n

\u2022 Lifestyle businesses that maximised owner happiness
\u2022 Real businesses that maximised shareholder value<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a lifestyle business\u201d<\/span> an MBA<\/span> classmate would say – the intonation suggesting that the mere utterance was a pointless waste of valuable consulting time. You can\u2019t measure owner happiness, but you can price shares.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> made an important contribution to that most uneconomic of content genres – British twentieth century poetry.<\/p>\n

Writing An Arundel Tomb<\/a> certainly didn\u2019t pay for Larkin to quit his day job<\/a> as a librarian at Hull University<\/a>. And yet doggerel verse with guitar was the dominant commercial content of Larkin\u2019s time.<\/p>\n

If only Larkin had repurposed his content! If only Paul Simon<\/a> had written him a tune. Still, at least Phil was happy\u2026and you can\u2019t measure that<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s supply squeeze at ITN, and Scott Karp\u2019s post on NBC Universal\/News Corp deal, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[211,19,385],"class_list":["post-377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","tag-google","tag-itn","tag-nbc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=377"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2569,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377\/revisions\/2569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}