Our current methods for content distribution are broken. News outlets get paid for page views rather than quality journalism. There are a lot of people who see the problems with ad-driven content and later in this post we’ll talk about some potential solutions.
First, let’s dive deeper into the problem. When you click on an article, you see an advertisement on the side. That page view gives the producer three tenths of penny, for example. If you get 1000 people to click on the article and “view” the ad, the producer gets $3. Advertising like this is measured in CPM (cost per thousand impressions). A $3 CPM is in the ball park of what a banner ad would get. (The numbers can vary widely depending on the type of ad and the placement of it.)
When you incentivize someone to maximize clicks, you get clickbait and fake news.
It would be great if content creators didn’t use these tactics, but the economic incentive to do so is just too high right now. This is where people are seeing an opportunity to improve the system. What if the economic incentive was to build trust? Or to leave readers more informed?
Here are some of the companies trying to revolutionize the current system:
Brave is a new web browser that aims to use micro-payments in order to pay content producers for their work while delivering a seamless experience for the user.
Medium.com released a new $5/month member subscription
Steem is a blockchain based platform that rewards readers for posting and curating content
The other option is to accept the system as it is, and carve out your own niche. Many companies use content marketing to build trust with a group of readers and eventually sell them something. This is what a lot of great creators do. (Seth Godin gives away most of his stuff for free, Ramit Sethi gives away 98% of content for free and the other 2% is super expensive) That’s inbound marketing in its purest form.
There is no one right answer out there. The technology players like Brave and Steem have developed innovative prototypes that are yet to penetrate mass markets. I’d argue there are plenty of great ways to make money as a content producer, but you need to get creative. The only thing I’m confident is that ad-driven content needs to go and content producers need to leave behind this broken system for more promising horizons.