The three trends most affecting content providers for the past decade – falling cost of data storage, the democratization of content creation/distribution and media fragmentation – will only accelerate over the next few years, so now is the time to catch up, warned David Eun, Google’s VP of Content Partnerships at MPA’s conferenceMagazines 24/7: Connecting with the Consumer.
Despite a failed laptop ("This has never happened before"), Eun connected Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory, Moore’s Law ("the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 24 months…"), Kryder’s Law ("the storage capacity of hard drives doubles every 13 months…"), and how all have informed Google’s approach to content.
Eun, a former Time Warner and NBC executive who is now charged with serving as a goodwill ambassador to the major media companies, also insisted that Google’s initial identity as a search engine will not change: “We don’t want people to spend time on Google, we want to send them to other sites, that remains our objective. At Google, we don’t own it or create content – we help people find it and use it. Users want information and want to be sure there ‘s no funny stuff behind it. We don’t want people to stay on Google forever. It means they’re not finding what they’re looking for. When you think about the billions of pages we’ve indexed and how – in milliseconds, most often – we can find it for you, it’s amazing. And we’re trying to do more.”
Eun also said that Google is only interested in partnerships, the more open-ended the better. “With respect to content, we have specific principles. I posted some thoughts on this on the Google blog a few months ago. I essentially said that we respect copyright. Our success depends on those who create content. We let owners choose whether we index their product or not. We make ask you not disadvantage us against our competitors, but we don’t necessarily demand exclusivity either.”
He then noted that consumers will soon be drowning in a sea of content, offering a panoply of allusions and metaphors to make his point. Essentially, such an abundance will make the Googles and YouTubes more crucial as consumers search for content that will still have a personal connection to them:
“An iPod can hold roughly 10,000 songs. Increase the storage capacity every 13 years, something the size of an iPod could store one year of video in another few years. By 2015, you could store all the music ever produced. By 2019, you could 85 years of video – a lifetime’s worth of video. By 2020, the same sized device could store all the content ever created. I’m not saying it’s going to happen, but it should think about the way we think about our businesses. It’s made the Long Tail viable – the theory is that our culture is shifting away from small number of hits. As costs fall, less need to lump consumers into one size fits all. Narrowly targeted goods can be as successful as mainstream fare. Because there’s no constraints on shelf space, you can get a lot of singles and doubles instead of just a few home runs. There will continue to be room for home runs, To not address the long tail is to miss a huge opportunity.”
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