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missy

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Guerrilla Media and the Cutting Edge

Jun 24, 2003
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I've written about guerrilla media before. Through weblogs, email, and webzines, traditional media have been shaken up. Traditional media have noticed, too, and are even trying to imitate guerrilla media.

Meanwhile journalists -- whether well-known figures like Andrew Sullivan, or comparatively obscure ones like science writer David Appell -- have discovered the power of subscription and donation-based web media. This has led some people to wonder just where the media world is going.

I think the answer can be found in the traditional leader of moneymaking Web media: porn. Because Web porn has already gone where the more mainstream world is just starting to tread, a look at the world of porn may provide a clue as to where the rest of the Web is headed.

Andrew Sullivan raised nearly $80,000 in his first online pledge drive, capitalizing (literally!) on the loyalty of his large fan base. A second pledge drive netted yet more. This was all based on a twenty dollar a year subscription plan. Appell, meanwhile, solicited donations to fund a particular story.

Both were following in the footsteps of numerous porn sites, which charge subscription fees - and, sometimes, solicit particular contributions for particular kinds of performances. And, in fact, Web journalism seems to be following in the footsteps of Web porn.

Originally, Web porn was done by amateurs for free, with a few postings by celebrity porn stars that were designed for publicity purposes. But soon for-pay sites started springing up. Now there are numerous porn sites operating on a subscription basis.

What are they like? Well, it's not as if I've done a scientific sampling. But there are all kinds of sites, at all levels of quality, catering to all kinds of tastes, from busty Latinas to lusty grandmas. And with the cost of producing and distributing porn via the Web falling all the time, even small sites can make a profit. Just do the math. 1000 subscribers at $9.95 per month is nearly $120,000 per year. Even after taking out costs for servers and bandwidth, that allows for a comfortable upper-middle-class living for a couple. And it's often couples that produce Web porn.

What this means, in economists' terms, is that the minimum efficient scale for producing porn has plummeted. Making the 1970s porn classic The Devil in Miss Jones required a big crew, a big cast, and a lot of money. Today's Web porn isn't as artistically sophisticated -- it can be produced by a couple at home using a few thousand dollars worth of computer and video equipment. To make money, old-style porn films had to reach hundreds of thousands of people. Today, it's possible to turn a profit with just hundreds, and anyone who has spent any time on the Web knows that lots of people are doing so. Meanwhile the old-style big-production porn continues, though it has to be leaner and more efficient to compete, and even produce faux-amateur porn in an effort to seize part of the market. As this article notes:[/p][blockquote]

It's notoriously difficult to quantify the massive global flesh business but even a cursory glance online at the number of "amateur" sites is enough to know pornography is becoming a boom cottage industry.

The point about much of this homespun erotica is that these are real people. They are not the unattainable, airbrushed uber-women who dominate the magazine and video trade. Maybe fat, maybe old, maybe just plain ugly - but that also means they are attainable. So attractive has the "girl next door" image become, that even the bigger players are now producing "shamateur" images - pictures of professional models shot so as to look like "average" people.[/blockquote][p]

So what will journalism look like if it follows the same path? We'll probably see the growth of niche journalism journalists who can make a living providing reports to a relatively small number of subscribers. (There's nothing really new about this -- I.F. Stone did the same thing after all, though he was rumored to have financial help from the KGB, and people offering investment newsletters have followed a similar approach but it will become far more widespread.) These people will appeal to different niches, based on expertise, on viewpoint, and on access. Some will do superb journalism, while others will be mere hacks just as is true for their counterparts in Big Media today.

As with porn, the hard part for these journalists will be connecting with an audience. Porn producers often use portal sites to lure readers. Bloggers are already doing something sort of like that, with blog showcases like "The Carnival of the Vanities", and even specialized showcases like "Blog Mela" (for Indian bloggers) and the "Volunteer Tailgate Party", for Tennessee bloggers. In both cases, the hope is that people will like the samples they see enough that they'll return for more.

And we may even see Big Media producing rough-cut efforts that look a bit like blogs. (Dr. Pepper, in support of a milk-based drink with an attitude called Raging Cow, has a bogus blog campaign underway, though it doesn't seem to have caught on). The BBC ran a war-blog during the Iraq war, and we may see more efforts along those lines. But I wonder whether corporate efforts at guerrilla journalism will work, or whether, as with porn, the amateurs will take over a sizable chunk of the market. I think that they will.

Glenn Reynolds is best known as the voice behind Instapundit, often referred to as "The King of Blogs". As a law professor at the University of Tennessee he teaches constitutional, administrative, and Internet law. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, Legal Affairs, the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, Law and Policy in International Business, Jurimetrics, the Columbia Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Wisconsin Law Review, and the High Technology Law Journal.

Dr. Reynolds has testified before Congressional committees on space law, international trade, and domestic terrorism. He has been a member of the White House Advisory Panel on Space Policy and the executive chairman of the National Space Society. He has also co-authored Outer Space: Problems of Law and Policy and The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society.


VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
keith:
BTW, This is her movie: Six

And he linked to us, again! biggrin
Jun 25, 2003
lastbadger:
I'm all about paying for the content you want. Whether it be information or entertainment, on demand content seems to be a reality and I for one couldn't be happier.
Oct 28, 2003

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