Content Is King (1996)

It&#x27;s fascinating to me that Gates correctly described the content we would see and the problems in monetizing it, but was totally off base in predicting we would have any of it fixed by now.<p>Content is king, and sites with content richer than plaintext have done substantially better. Advertising has done well, and long-term subscription models continue to drive down user counts. The line about &quot;attract attention, not convey information&quot; was a prescient look at a world of shitty, flashing banner ads. He missed subscriptions for premium features, but it&#x27;s a subtle difference.<p>On the other hand, ads still cripple the speed of page loads - smart advertising has added weight as fast as internet speeds have improved. Per-use transaction fees still haven&#x27;t caught on (except in freemium games) because they encourage users to not consume content, and because no one trusts a central authority to set them up. Ultimately, ads are the only effective small-charge technique anyone has found.<p>He was spot-on with the problems the web faces, but wrong in thinking they&#x27;d be solved by now.

Anyone who finds this interesting should track down a copy of <i>The Road Ahead</i> (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Road-Ahead-Bill-Gates&#x2F;dp&#x2F;9573231670&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Road-Ahead-Bill-Gates&#x2F;dp&#x2F;9573231670&#x2F;</a>), the book Gates published at around the same time as this appeared. It&#x27;s an interesting look at his thinking just when he was beginning to realize (very nearly too late!) that the Internet was going to be a Very Big Deal.

Which was more prescient, this or &quot;Content is Not King&quot;? <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;firstmonday.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;view&#x2F;833&#x2F;742" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;firstmonday.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;view&#x2F;833&#x2F;742</a><p>In many ways, it seems like Microsoft&#x27;s late-90&#x27;s obsession with content didn&#x27;t really pan out. Sure, MSNBC is still around but sidewalk.com long since evaporated. It doesn&#x27;t seem like MSFT really became a profitable media company.<p>But look at how many multi-billion dollar &quot;unicorns&quot; are messaging companies.

<i>As connections to the Internet get faster, the annoyance of waiting for an advertisement to load will diminish and then disappear. But that&#x27;s a few years off.</i><p>Still is. And will always be.<p>The annoyance of ads will always expand to fill any improvements in throughput achieved by technology.

This is incredibly clairvoyant. Gates accurately predicted the success that content megaliths would see (I was thinking about Netflix, online news, personal blogs), but he didn&#x27;t exactly predict the huge content landslide we face today and what it has created. For example, he basically urged corporations to create a bunch of content, while some of the most successful sites on the internet today simply exist to filter and aggregate content and to separate the signal from the noise (like Google).<p>Overall he&#x27;s still right--content is king. But I predict that in the future the internet is going to be dominated by user generated content and websites that can effectively show us what we want to see--websites that can refine the ever-growing amounts of information we have at our fingertips.

&quot;If people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will.&quot;<p>Incredible how far we&#x27;ve come from &quot;put up with turning on a computer.&quot;<p>&quot;But within a year the mechanisms will be in place that allow content providers to charge just a cent or a few cents for information. If you decide to visit a page that costs a nickel, you won&#x27;t be writing a check or getting a bill in the mail for a nickel. You&#x27;ll just click on what you want, knowing you&#x27;ll be charged a nickel on an aggregated basis.&quot;<p>I can&#x27;t decide if this sort of micropayment-driven internet would be heaven or hell.

We spend far more time consuming content generated by our friends and family then we do consuming content created by media companies. I don&#x27;t think he could conceive that a company like Facebook could control the means of distribution by providing something that people want more the professional media.

This was written in a time before things like the Ice Bucket Challenge. It was inconceivable to think of that as powerful content that would generate millions of unique views.<p>Content is king, but what Gates could have never guessed was what type of content.

<i>&gt; In the long run, advertising is promising... But today the amount of subscription revenue or advertising revenue realized on the Internet is near zero-maybe $20 million or $30 million in total.</i><p>Look how far we&#x27;ve come.

For video, meaning shows and movies, content is king.<p>For music and writing, distribution is king.