Post written by Justin Judd (CEO & Founder of i-Rights)
At a recent C21 Social Media conference I was one of the speakers alongside Joost’s CCO Henrik Werdelin, Daily Motion’s Creative Director Digby Lewis, Bebo’s Head of Original Productions Kelly Sweeney, and MyVideoRights CEO Ashley Mackenzie. In my session I coined the phrase ‘Accelerated Obsolescence’ to describe how rapidly the digital content sector was evolving and how easy it was for a established and dominant player to be overtaken by a start up, when the former fails to maintain the rate of innovation. Think MySpace and Facebook. (It was galling then to see the phrase used as a headline in a subsequent newsletter that made no reference to the conference but hey, that’s the internet.)
Subsequent to the conference, the axe has fallen brutally at MySpace and former short form content champion Bebo has undergone further management upheaval with Bebo Europe boss Kate Burns moving to parent AOL. Facebook and Twitter are on top for now, but how long might it be before they too are displaced with something cooler, newer, now-er? And all before they too have cracked the most pressing problem of all – in the post scarcity digital world where content can be easily reproduced and effortlessly distributed, how does anyone, especially producers, actually make money?