• by Mark Naples , December 2, 2005

For whatever reason, probably because there have been so many recent advances in what we call "publishing," opportunities to cite the First Amendment have abounded of late.

I know that I'm in a very small minority here, as a former U.S, History teacher who's now in digital media. So, pardon the geeky nerd stuff. Having a working knowledge of the First Amendment is, at least to me, pretty vital stuff for anyone in our business. Why? It's because the First Amendment protects digital media professionals so much more than you might guess. It protects freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly and petition. From the First Amendment Center's Web site: http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org: Without the First Amendment, religious minorities could be persecuted, the government might well establish a national religion, protesters could be silenced, the press could not criticize government, and citizens could not mobilize for social change.

And there would be no search engine indexing of media (let alone selling ads into media) and bloggers couldn't blog and RSS wouldn't exist. Essentially, much of what became the Web would have been prevented by lawsuits from those who originally paid for content generation, and other opponents.

All that cross-citation and aggregation that makes ad networks, optimization, and Yahoo home pages possible? That's right, none of it happens without the First Amendment. Where would our industry be without the First Amendment? Fact is--it wouldn't exist at all.

If interactive is going to grow as we all want it to, the same tenets that have fomented our growth to today's position will need to remain in effect. Why? Let's face it--the same thing that has doomed the television serial has also made some of our sites suffer. Original content has become more difficult to generate. It's not about a dearth of ideas. It's about a dearth of range among users and a predictable (and understandable) dearth of courage among advertisers and regulators. If this weren't true, would HBO win so many awards?

So, how do we grow? 2005 will be remembered as the year of user-generated content--the year that something called MySpace sold to the folks at Fox for $580 million because user-generated content is not only limitless, it enables even more precise targeting than anything we'd thought of previously. So, that user-generated content had better be protected, and whoever targets the ads and manages those ads' operations had better trust that the content against which the ads are targeted is copasetic. See, this isn't about the model of user-generated content per se. It's about the entire construct of interactive media, when not just the behavior of users is part of the model, but the ever-dynamic, ever-opinionated, ever-protected content too.

This model of interactive media had better be well-received by advertisers because, while consumers have been moving online in well-documented droves, ad revenues are about to hit their collective heads on the ceiling without more inventory or new, higher-margin products. For those of you wondering why Google's valuation is so much higher than that of Time Warner's, when Time Warner's revenue is 10 times that of Google's--well, think about that ceiling as you ponder Google Base and more limitless inventory.

The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) says that print classifieds were $16.6 billion in 2004. But given Craigslist.com, livedeal.com and others who would offer ads for free or very inexpensively, what happens to that print revenue as advertisers migrate online following consumers? (this has already begun happening, as Greg Sterling pointed out at Kelsey's Drilling Down into Local event this week in Jefferson's state, Virginia) Is the revenue model diminished by the cheaper price point online, and the intense competition that puts downward pressure on prices both online and off?

Or, will someone figure out how to tie such offerings together with user-generated content? Maybe some have already done so, and we'll read about the launch soon, both in print and on the Web. For now we'll read content in both places, anyway. Many more of us will read it online a few years from now, probably on sites branded similarly as print outlets are today.