This article was heard on the radio program "The Computer Report," which is broadcast live on WCAP in Lowell, Mass., and is syndicated on WBNW in Boston and WPLM in Plymouth, Mass, and is also available as RealAudio at www.thereport.com
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An old friend of mine who works with clients in the entertainment industry, keeps telling me that today's text-based Internet will vanish in a couple years, when most people will have persistent high bandwidth connections, like DSL and cable. He's sure that the show-biz types will remake the whole system, if necessary, to push their style of content in your direction and get at your dollar.
Obviously, multi-media beats out text as entertainment when the high bandwidth is there. But there are four problems with that proposition. First, they are focusing on content as entertainment. Second, the Internet is not just another mass medium; the competitive environment here is far more complex than television and radio. Third, they're far too optimistic regarding the capabilities of today's high bandwidth connections, and how fast such connections will become widespread. Fourth, they are forgetting about another important wave of change -- wireless Internet.
First, content on the Internet can serve multiple purposes. Most of it is intended to inform or to communicate with a circle of friends, and was never intended as entertainment.
And all content on the Internet, if properly designed, can serve as a marketing asset, in addition to informing, communicating, or entertaining. Here text is king, and will be for quite some time to come, because of the nature of search engines.
Multimedia might make the experience at a Web site far more compelling.
But text indexed by search engines is what gets people there in the first place. Regardless of what wild and wonderful multimedia experiences may be available some day over the Internet, people navigate by search engines which are fuelled by text.
Those sites that don't have lots of good and interesting text that is well-indexed by search engines wind up paying far more for advertising to get the same level of traffic as comparable sites with lots of text.
Second, the Internet is not a few-to-many (mass media environment).
With television and radio the medium itself is a limited resource, with very few channels allocated by regulations and licenses to even fewer companies. But on the Internet, there is an infinitely expanding, unregulated universe of content -- nearly a hundred million Web sites already, and growing fast.
And all that content -- the amateur as well as the professional -- competes for the same limited resource -- the time and attention of users. Tens of millions of people use their own Web sites to talk to one another and express themselves. Your buddy in Topeka, that artist in Detroit, the new rock band in Honolulu that few people have heard of yet, that lady in Tampa who sells so much good stuff at auctions, that high school kid in New Orleans who always seems to know what's wrong with your computer.
The proverbial Joe-six-pack isn't just a viewer/consumer, he's also a competitor for the time and attention of his friends. Today he uses just text and pictures, but he'll soon be playing with audio and video as well. In a competitive environment like that, where the level of chaos keeps increasing, it's a very good idea to take advantage of all available means -- including search engines -- to make it easy for people to find your site during the fleeting moments when are interested in your kind of content.
Third, it will be considerably longer than a couple years before the broadband heaven of show business people is a reality -- perhaps as long as 5-10 years. It will take 2-3 years just for DSL to become commonplace, and DSL isn't fast enough, yet, for delivery of quality video.
As for cable, in that case bandwidth is shared, so as more people connect, the bandwidth available to everyone in that same neighborhood goes down, until the cable provider makes significant new investments -- which is a slow, iterative process.
Fourth, while broadband is gradually expanding, so is wireless/mobile. And because of limitations of both screen-size and bandwidth, wireless is likely to give new life to the importance of text on the Internet.
So for the foreseeable future, it looks like text is likely to win the
content wars -- not highly polished professional video content that costs
a fortune to produce and to advertise and that only major media companies
can provide; but rather, plain old words that anyone can post in free Web
space, and that anyone can readily find by search engines. The little guys
are a lot stronger than you thought. Welcome to Lilliput, Mr. Gulliver.
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