New Media, New Rules: Reimagining Photojournalism https://petapixel.com/2024/05/11/new-media-new-rules-reimagining-photojournalism/ #photojournalism #paulmelcher #Industry #industry #Opinion #opinion #trends #oped #ai

A Review of Visual Technology in 2021

Within its half-open, half-closed status, 2021 will be remembered as a transition year: A melting pot between ending lockdowns, rising vaccines and masks mandates, new variants, ending and restarting restrictions. But if anything, it did nothing to slow down the pace of online innovation—quite the opposite. If visual tech experienced a landmark year, 2021 could be it.

The Winners

Synthetic Media

Of all the big stories of the year, synthetic media is the most exciting and promising. After years of predicting it, it finally surfaced as a viable, tangible reality. Rising from the “Deepfakes” threat, which mostly succeeded in generating more news about itself than actually fooling anyone, its first iteration was a handful and short-lived anti deepfake tools. Rapidly seeing that there was no business need, at least for the time being, it evolved to mostly photo-realistic bot/avatar builders.

A good example is companies like Synthesia, which recently raised an impressive $50 million with 4,500 customers generating over 6M AI videos this year. Others, like vAIsual, Bria, and Generated.photos, try to accomplish the same in the still photo space. While very still much in its infancy, GAN-produced imagery promises to almost entirely replace photography in the next decade. It could completely erode our trust in visual content in the process. And this is where our second winner of 2021 steps in:

Provenance Certification

Launched in 2020, built-in 2021, and about to be implemented in 2022, the Content Authenticity Initiative is to visual content what passport is to human beings: A provenance certification providing viewers with information on the origin of digital content. Folded into the broader Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), the initiative will soon provide any and all content producers, including synthetic media, with the ability to inform by whom, when, and where the content was created along with information on any alterations.

The Content Authenticity Initiative: Identifying image provenance and editing history inside images ( seen here in Photoshop) © Adobe

It will help viewers make an informed decision on the integrity of the document they are seeing—an explicit declaration of intent. Final specifications will be published in Q1 of 2022, but Adobe has already implemented a beta version in Photoshop and Behance. Other companies are also hard at work, and 2022 should see a flurry of practical executions.

With companies like Twitter, New York Times, BBC, Microsoft as coalition members, the initiative has a lot of potencies. However, its success is tragically attached to its adoption: If it’s not used by a significant quantity of various creators and publishers worldwide, it will fail. There is no middle ground here. And because it will be indelibility tied to an asset, it naturally works with and leads us to our next winner:

NFT

The visual tech comeback kid. The Blockchain had already made a failed appearance in the visual space (remember ICO’s and KodakCoin?). Thanks to NFT deals numbers reaching millions, selling visual files has never been so sexy and lucrative.

Screenshot of a photo NFT for sale on the Opensea marketplace.

Read also : How to Create and Sell NFTs for Free

The cutting-edge tech is mostly out of the grasp of the common person’s understanding, making the perception of value also challenging to comprehend. For the time being, NFTs stand at the tip of sound investments and major scams. Which way it will fall largely depends on the collective hysteria. But it has two major attributes supporting its long-term adoption: It is indelibly tied to visual content, and it offers an option for creators to receive a commission on secondary sales. And yes, it plays well with provenance certification. Highly attractive for our following winners:

Creators

As Kaptur recently wrote: With an estimated 50 million creators and an ecosystem about to generate $14 billion in 2021, the creator economy is bigger than Brunei’s GDP. One of its defining features is its grassroots involvement. A recent study reveals that” 58% of users say that, in the next 12 months, they would pay a monthly subscription fee between $1 and $15 to access their favorite creator’s exclusive content”. Content is directly paid for by those who consume it. Add big platforms competing with hefty incentives to attract the 3% who generate the most traffic, and you have some pretty comfortable creators. And all signs are pointing towards more user interest, more competition, more tools ( like NFTs above), and thus, more revenue. The future looks bright for those who know how to transform content into a story.

Because there cannot be winners without losers, here are a handful for whom 2021 was not so good:

The Losers

Europe’s Article 17

What should have been welcome salvation for photographers worldwide, finally receiving their fair share of the social media gold mine, instead became a dead end. It started with a commendable idea and a promising vote but ended in a chaotic disappointment. It’s a cacophony of uncoordinated implementation, with horrors like Germany’s “uses presumably authorized by law”, resulting in a deepening value gap and enriching more intermediaries. The only winners of this mess will be collective rights management organizations (CMO). They are poised to receive payment from big tech in exchange for offering blanket rights without having to gather explicit permission. Furthermore, they have no obligations to redistribute any of it appropriately— If anything, a perfect example of what happens when clueless legislators leave legal implementation to professional bureaucrats.

Visual AI

While now available for many years ( almost a decade), visual AI came with many promises. Some have been fulfilled, and some remained to be fully realized. But in some areas, visual AI has failed. Take facial recognition: Mostly used for political and law enforcement, it has mainly served to evade privacy regulation. Instead of offering quality-of-life experiences, like face login, it is used to restrict, limit, and supervise. Companies like Clearview have made face recognition and visual AI an enemy of the individual rather than enhance their lives.

Clearview promises facial recognition from 10+ billion facial images sourced from public-only web sources. Screenshot by Clearview.

Auto-tagging, where an AI helps in the keywording of visual content, has also fallen short and led to disappointing results. Not so much because of its limited capacity – no understanding of context is painfully felt here- but for mostly lazy implementations. Using generically trained identifiers to tag more specialized visual assets automatically has resulted in obvious shortcomings and frustrations. And even those training sets are faulty. ImageNet, for example, contains racist and sexist labels and photos of people’s faces obtained without consent. Visual AI is in need of a reboot.

File Formats

Over the years, we had hoped that file formats would evolve. Apple live, Snap’s round images, 3D images, immersive, cinemagraphs, VR, etc… But for now, the old rectangular or square .jpg is still massively dominating. It’s not for the lack of valuable attempts, but it seems that humanity has little appetite for new visual experiences and is quite satisfied with the status quo. Boring…

2021 has continued to make visual content one of the most dynamic elements of our digital lives. With new spaces being promoted, like the Metaverse, it looks like 2022 is well-positioned to be its most challenging competitor. But that’s another story for another time…

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.

About the author : Paul Melcher is a photography and technology entrepreneur based in New York, and the founder of Kaptur, a news magazine about the visual tech space. You can find more of his writings on his blog, Thoughts of a Bohemian. Melcher offers his services as a consultant as well. This article was also published here.

Image credits: Header photo licensed from Depositphotos

#editorial #industry #paulmelcher #photoindustry #technology #trends #visualtechnology

PaaS: Photography as a Service

The age of the camera is slowly coming to an end—especially the bulky DSLR and all its associated declinations. In a very short while, all that will be left will be those pesky in-object cameras, like the one in our cell phones and a query type box in our browser.

The End of Analog

Bulky big cameras have a legacy deeply entrenched in the physical world. They were made to mechanically create images for physical media. This analog world is vanishing. Already, not only are images all digital, but they all end up – the vast majority – in digital mediums. And like with anything in the digital world, its propensity is to diminish in size while increasing in power (Moore’s law).

Yes, the next cover of Vogue magazine will be shot with the latest Hasselblad, even if equipped with a digital back. And yes, there is so much better light quality entering the frame of a full-size Leitz lens than those three circles in the back of the latest iPhone. But for how long?

File sizes don’t really matter anymore. It is just a question of time before all surviving printed publications become a supplement to their online mothership, Vogue included. Billboards are all but becoming digital as well. The need for large, bulky files is now easily met with upscaling. Computational photography is now the norm, and the skills needed to operate a DSLR are now replaced by AI. An iPhone/Galaxy and successors can and will soon outperform any bulky DSLR.

Cameras, Everywhere

Alongside the proliferation of our handheld computerized cameras, almost every appliance in our lives will contribute to the creation of photographs. To monitor themselves and their surroundings, visual data acquisition interfaces are slowly creeping into our lives. Doorbells have cameras, cars and high-end fridges already have some, while others, like automated vacuum cleaners or lamps, will soon have some.

Pretty soon, our whole environment will be taking pictures of every moment of our lives. Instead of actually taking pictures at our next birthday party, we can ask the fridge or lamp to share some of the ones they took. Nothing will be missed.

With a simple voice command, anyone will create a perfect image. Photo by cottonbro / Pexels.

Introducing PaaS

As for professional content? Replaced by a simple query type box. Enter what kind of image you need and hit enter. An AI will produce the picture for you. A photo of a couple holding hands on a beach at sunset, no problem. A photo of Alexander the Great playing chess with Napoleon on the deck of the Mayflower. Piece of cake. And yes, the next cover of Vogue magazine as well. Introducing PaaS: Photography as a Service.

Because of the computational power and software engineering expertise needed, the first iterations of PaaS will be via a handful of companies offering this service via a web interface. But eventually, like everything in digital, it will be integrated into our cell phones or whatever device we will be carrying with us.

Need a photo of a butterfly on a red rose for your Instagram feed? No problem. Tell your Siri/Google, and there you go.

Pros? What Pros?

What about news or wedding photography? Those will certainly still need battle-tested professionals handling bulky DSLR? Yes and no. The proliferation of cameras everywhere combined with an accelerated news cycle and reduced budget make the future of photojournalism extremely precarious.

Even without these replacement technologies in full deployment, it is becoming extremely challenging for anyone to make a living as a news photographer. Already, the local with a cell phone trumps the pro with the heavy equipment. Not much of a future here.

As for wedding photographers, well, sure. They could survive on a few pre-ceremony portraits and outwitting guests with cell phones. But in the not-so-long run, providing a PaaS with two headshots of the couple and a command to create a beautiful wedding portrait will yield some much better photos than anything a pro could do. As for the ceremony, nothing a few cameras with an AI power best scene detection can deliver.

With PaaS, the creative process will no longer be controlled by those who have mastered the tools of the craft, like a camera or Photoshop, but rather by those who have the most creative minds. Imagination will best skills.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.

About the author : Paul Melcher is a photography and technology entrepreneur based in New York, and the founder of Kaptur, a news magazine about the visual tech space. You can find more of his writings on his blog, Thoughts of a Bohemian. Melcher offers his services as a consultant as well. This article was also published here.

Image credits: Header photo by Brett Sayles / Pexels

#culture #editorial #industry #analysis #future #paas #paulmelcher #prediction #trends

The Fragmentation of Photojournalism

In photojournalism, where and how people get their news matters. A quick takeaway of Reuters Digital News Report 2021 shows that the news market is exploding into a multitude of topic-specific verticals and various mediums at the same time.

Whereby all news, weather, jobs, and politics were read via a local printed newspaper, each one now has its top address and is accessed via a different medium ( laptop, mobile, app, social media, etc). For image makers, this means photography has to be multi-lingual, better fitting its readership.

It Is No Longer One-size Photo Fits All but Multiple Images Fits All

Readers find their news on topic specific places, not in local newspaper. Source: Reuters

Take a bad storm, for example. Suppose the photo is taken for a local newspaper front page. In that case, it will need to include recognizable local landmarks along with the menacing skies. However, if it’s for weather.com, those same landmarks would be a distraction, and the whole focus should be on cloud formation.

The local newspaper reader cares about their neighborhood first, while visitors of weather.com cares about the weather first. While the first image should be a nice wide-angle horizontal, the second one should be square, captured with a longer lens. Same weather system, same story, two completely different images.

The Conjugation of Images Doesn’t Stop There. Even New Habits Are Changing

As we all know, news consumption has primarily shifted to social media. Still, as this report reveals, even which social media is changing (already). Facebook, Twitter are declining while “TikTok now reaches a quarter (24%) of under- 35s, with 7% using the platform for news – and higher penetration in parts of Latin America and Asia”. Youtube, Telegram, and Whatsapp are also seeing some significant increases.

Where users find their news on social media. Source: Reuters

For photojournalism, the lesson is clear. The long-predicted transition to video is finally taking place. But not the broadcast, CNN type of videos. This is its fast, 60-second max, vertical, and 100% mobile native version.

Photos, still in high demand, need to be complemented by short blast videos if one is to reach an extensive audience. Which makes the job of a photojournalist today almost impossible. No one can shoot from multiple angles with various framings while filming and editing videos. Primarily when covering breaking news.

Because of its fragmentation, only an organization can adequately fulfill all the demands of today’s news landscape by having multiple shooters at one event. However, fragmentation also implies dilution. As their audience diminishes, each news outlet spends less and less while social media pays nothing at all. It’s not sustainable.

For an individual photojournalist, it’s forced specialization. Unable to cover everyone’s need, they have to choose which one they will service and stick to it.

There Is a Little Good News

Readers are slowly starting to pay for their news online. Source: Reuters

Paid subscriptions for accurate and quality news are going up. Slowly, at about 2% overall, but a promising trend. This means an increasing demand for quality, exclusive visual content, which in turn increases payout.

At the same time, the thirst for trustable information is also growing. It’s an area visual content has a lot of influence. The undeniable value here for photojournalists and news organizations alike is building and maintaining an immutable and clearly identifiable brand that is solidly enchained by trust and accuracy.

As unruled social media platforms continue to lose credibility (you get what you paid for), there is a growing opportunity to monetize visual credibility via reputation and technology. If a photojournalist’s content can be 100% trusted every time, there is a strong incentive to pay a premium for it.

P.S. There is lots more to read and discover in the highly recommended Reuters Digital News Report 2021.

About the author : Paul Melcher is a photography and technology entrepreneur based in New York, and the founder of Kaptur, a news magazine about the visual tech space. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. You can find more of his writings on his blog, Thoughts of a Bohemian. Melcher offers his services as a consultant as well. This article was also published here.

Image credits: Header photo licensed from Depositphotos

#culture #industry #news #digitalnewsreport #journalism #paulmelcher #photojournalism #research #reuters #survey #trends

The Inevitable Convergence of Social Media, Commerce, and Visual Content

You walk through the supermarket aisle until you face various choices for the product you wish to eat. In the case of cereals, it can be 20 or more different options. You reach out and pick one, which you feel is the right decision based on a well-educated process.

In fact, when you make that decision, you are executing on thousands of messages received during most of your entire lifetime—each one with the sole purpose of influencing that decision. In commerce, that purchasing act is called the second moment of truth. The moment when millions of dollars of marketing (at least for cereal companies) is converted into a purchase decision.

The second moment of truth.

Traditionally, the two have been geographically and historically separated. You receive marketing messages at breakfast while reading your daily digest on your phone, and you will be buying in the late afternoon.

Ecommerce, for most of its brief existence, has followed the same schema. Advertising here, shopping there. But not anymore. Everything is converging to one all-encompassing moment of truth at one place and one time, with visual content at its core. The customer journey is now reduced to an instant and one visual.

There are three main steps in a customer journey:

The awareness of the product

The consideration of the product

The purchase of the product

Up to now, they all happened at different places and over time. Now, it’s all converging at one place and time and all within one visual content.

Nowhere can this be experienced more than on social media since we spent most of our time. All platform owe their success and operate with visual content as their core interface. Stage one was to use those visuals to capture audiences. Stage 2 two was to transform those views into advertising; stage three adds a “buy” button: Discovery, conversion, purchase, now all in one image or video.

Instagram displays an ad every 3 to 4 posts and uses retargeting profusely. Each ad contains multiple visuals introducing a product you have shown interest in and leading to a shop now button. That one image or video contains the whole customer journey.

A familiar view: an ad on Instagram

The numbers confirm the story: 81% of people out of over 1 billion use Instagram every month to help research products and services. With an average conversion rate of 1.85 percent, that’s 14 million clicks on a “buy” button of an image every month.

Identical scenario for Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Snap. Photography has a new role, one much harder to master. It has to introduce, convince, and sell all within one frame. It has to capitalize on the instant attention span. With video, it’s an identical challenge, all within the maximum of 60 seconds granted by most social media platforms. For brands, the bar is making the brutal journey feel seamless, which is why they rely on influencers’ expertise. They have mastered converting content into captive audiences and come with built-in trust. All that is needed is the “buy” button.

The product now comes to you, fully packaged with all the information you might need to make a purchase decision, including the cash register. Everything is transformed into an impulse buy, one carefully vetted via retargeting by your shown interest. All compressed in one frame or 60-second video, right next to those party pix of last night shared by you BFF.

Shop and share. The lines are blurred. Your friends, brands, product, purchase, parties are all part of the same flow. Click Like here, click buy there; who is that at my front door? A delivery or a friend? The beginning and end of your buyer journey are all in here, in one frame.

About the author : Paul Melcher is a photography and technology entrepreneur based in New York, and the founder of Kaptur, a news magazine about the visual tech space. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. You can find more of his writings on his blog, Thoughts of a Bohemian. Melcher offers his services as a consultant as well. This article was also published here.

Image credits: Stock photos licensed from Depositphotos

#educational #industry #culture #ecommerce #instagram #marketing #paulmelcher #shopping #trends

What’s Really Behind Getty Images’ Acquisition of Unsplash

It was so close to the first of April, it sounded like an April’s fool hoax: the gentle freedom-loving all sharing company would be selling to the greedy capitalistic money-making titan. Or, in other words, Getty Images was acquiring Unsplash. The two unlikely partners officially became at the end of April, sending ripples through the stock photography world and beyond.

World’s Apart?

They couldn’t be more different on the surface: you would imagine them at each other throats rather than sharing office space. Getty Image is a formidable content licensing operation, generating probably in the $800 million a year, and Unsplash, a free photo platform, small, nimble but extremely popular. But a closer look reveals a different picture: They are complementary. While Getty images adequately serve professional image buyers with very specific image needs, Unsplash caters to more casual users with a more inspirational approach. More to the point, both are providers of increasingly indispensable visual content to an ever-growing population of versatile consumers.

Some of Unsplash impressive traffic numbers…move over Instagram

A Better Mousetrap?

Getty has long understood that free content is an indispensable feeder for new paying customers, and there are not the only ones. Shutterstock has many very lucrative referral deals with free photo sites, and Adobe Stock has just recently made a good chunk of its offering entirely free. Attracted by free offerings, customers end up paying for a more suitable image. With commercial stock photo prices hovering in and about a few dollars an image, it’s an easy decision for customers, especially when on expense accounts. For stock photo agencies competing for new buyers, it is a cheaper customer acquisition than the increasingly costly google ad word auctions and other digital marketing schemes. Especially when those customers have small budgets.

Beyond the Obvious

The success of Unsplash is not based on its freemium approach. There were and are plenty of other sites offering the same. Instead, its rise is to be attributed to an extremely tight and accurate curation. Somehow, the team behind Unsplash hit directly into today’s visual Zeitgeist and delivers a perfectly curated flow of “authentic Instagram-like mobile photos taken by your friend”-inspired images. This editing “magic sauce” is at the core of its continued appeal to an audience who is exhausted by those other massive collections of cold images catered by insensitive algorithms. Getty could gain a serious competitive edge by using this approach.

The real financial value for Getty is Unsplash’s formidable number of API relationships. There are 11,135 applications currently connected directly to Unsplash’s image database with an All-time API request of 100,312,415,477. That is over 100 billion requests. While not all those requests correspond to an image download, even at 1%, that still represents 1 billion images! It is a huge potential market for Getty.

And because these are accounts locked in via an API, they are most certainly repeat and probably exclusive relationships. It’s priceless.

Unsplash took over $6 million investment in 2018, in the height of the ICO / crypto craze, with part of it in SimpleTokens, probably a wash today. It came with the now undelivered promise of some sort of blockchain/token scheme to reward its users. Unsplash has since rolled out advertising (visible on the pop-up download windows), paid content, and gig hiring out of necessity to generate revenue without changing its free model. It is unclear if any are successful. If anything, its sale to Getty would confirm that they are not. Or at least, not fast enough, especially for their investors.

What Next?

Getty now owns a laboratory to continue testing its free/advertising-based revenue model, something they have been investigating for the last eight years. They know that selling the audience rather than the image is where the real revenue is, as proven by Instagram and Pinterest. And Unsplash, with its already formidable audience, brings them that revenue potential. It certainly has the traffic.

It’s an opportunity for Getty to pivot from the traditional licensing model and unleash its collection’s real value.

About the author : Paul Melcher is a photography and technology entrepreneur based in New York, and the founder of Kaptur, a news magazine about the visual tech space. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. You can find more of his writings on his blog, Thoughts of a Bohemian. Melcher offers his services as a consultant as well. This article was also published here.

#editorial #industry #acquisition #analysis #business #commentary #gettyimages #paulmelcher #stock #stockphotography #unsplash

What’s Really Behind Getty Images’ Acquisition of Unsplash

It was so close to the first of April, it sounded like an April’s fool hoax: the gentle freedom-loving all sharing company would be selling to the greedy capitalistic money-making titan. Or, in other words, Getty Images was acquiring Unsplash. The two unlikely partners officially became at the end of April, sending ripples through the stock photography world and beyond.

World’s Apart?

They couldn’t be more different on the surface: you would imagine them at each other throats rather than sharing office space. Getty Image is a formidable content licensing operation, generating probably in the $800 million a year, and Unsplash, a free photo platform, small, nimble but extremely popular. But a closer look reveals a different picture: They are complementary. While Getty images adequately serve professional image buyers with very specific image needs, Unsplash caters to more casual users with a more inspirational approach. More to the point, both are providers of increasingly indispensable visual content to an ever-growing population of versatile consumers.

Some of Unsplash impressive traffic numbers…move over Instagram

A Better Mousetrap?

Getty has long understood that free content is an indispensable feeder for new paying customers, and there are not the only ones. Shutterstock has many very lucrative referral deals with free photo sites, and Adobe Stock has just recently made a good chunk of its offering entirely free. Attracted by free offerings, customers end up paying for a more suitable image. With commercial stock photo prices hovering in and about a few dollars an image, it’s an easy decision for customers, especially when on expense accounts. For stock photo agencies competing for new buyers, it is a cheaper customer acquisition than the increasingly costly google ad word auctions and other digital marketing schemes. Especially when those customers have small budgets.

Beyond the Obvious

The success of Unsplash is not based on its freemium approach. There were and are plenty of other sites offering the same. Instead, its rise is to be attributed to an extremely tight and accurate curation. Somehow, the team behind Unsplash hit directly into today’s visual Zeitgeist and delivers a perfectly curated flow of “authentic Instagram-like mobile photos taken by your friend”-inspired images. This editing “magic sauce” is at the core of its continued appeal to an audience who is exhausted by those other massive collections of cold images catered by insensitive algorithms. Getty could gain a serious competitive edge by using this approach.

The real financial value for Getty is Unsplash’s formidable number of API relationships. There are 11,135 applications currently connected directly to Unsplash’s image database with an All-time API request of 100,312,415,477. That is over 100 billion requests. While not all those requests correspond to an image download, even at 1%, that still represents 1 billion images! It is a huge potential market for Getty.

And because these are accounts locked in via an API, they are most certainly repeat and probably exclusive relationships. It’s priceless.

Unsplash took over $6 million investment in 2018, in the height of the ICO / crypto craze, with part of it in SimpleTokens, probably a wash today. It came with the now undelivered promise of some sort of blockchain/token scheme to reward its users. Unsplash has since rolled out advertising (visible on the pop-up download windows), paid content, and gig hiring out of necessity to generate revenue without changing its free model. It is unclear if any are successful. If anything, its sale to Getty would confirm that they are not. Or at least, not fast enough, especially for their investors.

What Next?

Getty now owns a laboratory to continue testing its free/advertising-based revenue model, something they have been investigating for the last eight years. They know that selling the audience rather than the image is where the real revenue is, as proven by Instagram and Pinterest. And Unsplash, with its already formidable audience, brings them that revenue potential. It certainly has the traffic.

It’s an opportunity for Getty to pivot from the traditional licensing model and unleash its collection’s real value.

About the author : Paul Melcher is a photography and technology entrepreneur based in New York, and the founder of Kaptur, a news magazine about the visual tech space. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. You can find more of his writings on his blog, Thoughts of a Bohemian. Melcher offers his services as a consultant as well. This article was also published here.

#editorial #industry #acquisition #analysis #business #commentary #gettyimages #paulmelcher #stock #stockphotography #unsplash

The Licensable Web: Creators, Get Ready to Be Paid for Your Content

The first iteration of the Internet, the one we are still somewhat experiencing, was built on the fundamental belief that content should be free.

In its early days, it was to be this fantastic social experiment where anyone and everyone would be able to share anything, anytime, with anyone. It was built on the premise that people would use it to share information and knowledge and ultimately make the world a better place.

Decades later, we are far from that result. As more entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to turn part of the Internet into lucrative businesses, the early dreams of sharing world knowledge and the free exchange of ideas has more or less vanished. With exceptions like Wikipedia, everywhere your browser ends up is now a revenue source for someone. Yet, strangely enough, it does not seem to eradicate the initial conviction that content should be free.

The Root of All Evil

Media companies’ early foray into space didn’t help. They timidly entered by offering for free everything they had previously charged for when in physical format. Financed by the advertising-supported television model, some even poured millions of dollars into creating fresh (free) content for their online division. While it made no one rich, it indeed confirmed in people’s minds, for a long while, that content should be free.

The notion of free content allowed others to take root in this fertile ground to build multi-billion dollars businesses. Feeding itself on this abundance of free content, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube, cynically took advantage of the situation. They offered to organize this “free content” into digestible silos based on taste, affinities, and genealogy. In other words, match an audience to a specific type of content, package the whole thing and sell it to advertisers. With the only cost for them being the package and not what is in the box. It’s the TV set without the cost of the programming. Imagine how much more revenue networks like CBS or NBC would have if they never had to pay for the programming.

Creators will have the right to decide if their content should be free…not platforms.

Show Me the Money

But times, they are changing. Media companies have run out of money- and optimism. Their free content is now bordered by paywalls. Publications are seeing a healthy intake of paid subscribers who are not shy of paying for quality and exclusive content. NFT’s craze demonstrates people’s willingness to pay a large amount of money for the right to own digital content. Like Netflix or Disney +, streaming channels demonstrate that free content ( in exchange for advertising) is no longer the panacea. And Web services like Patreon or Onlyfans clearly confirm that users are more than happy to pull out their credit cards if they perceive value. Not for the packaging, but for what is inside.

The old Internet of free sharing is dying even if a whole slue of passionate and vocal old-timers – ironically aligned with multi-billion dollar companies – claim it shouldn’t. And for a good reason. Free content is not sustainable. A business should not expect to have access to free raw material and labor forever. It’s call slavery. Without compensation, creators are forced to find other sources of income to live.

Some companies have seen or were forced to see the changes ahead of others. YouTube has long offered profit-sharing, making some of its creators very successful. Others have let parasital businesses grow on their back, like Instagram and the influencer industry. Others, like Snapchat, are outright paying creators out of pocket to secure their content. As with Article 15 for news content, Article 17 of the Europe Directive on copyright is taking care of those who have yet to figure it out. With its implementation, it will be the start of the licensable Web.

Adapt or Die

The next Web is where content, where ever it might originate, will be compensated for. A place where if you want to build and sustain traffic, you will have to incentivize your content producers. But also a place where it will no longer be against the “Internet principle” to charge for content.

Already the pieces are getting into position. Google now includes licensing information with pictures search results, same as it has been doing for product searches for a while now. It will undoubtedly follow suit with video and, why not, text ( Forget music which is already well managed and the only piece of content currently adequately compensated.). Companies like “Catch & Release” help companies easily find and legally secure content wherever it might come from. It is not a stretch to see content licensing giants like Getty Images offering similar services.

Free sharing will not disappear, obviously. Museums and knowledge institutions will continue to make their library of public domain content available for anyone. Some creators and artists of all kinds will continue to offer their content for free, as they have done for millenniums. But unlike the last 30 years, it will be a choice rather than an obligation.

About the author : Paul Melcher is a photography and technology entrepreneur based in New York, and the founder of Kaptur, a news magazine about the visual tech space. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. You can find more of his writings on his blog, Thoughts of a Bohemian. Melcher offers his services as a consultant as well. This article was also published here.

Image credits: Stock photos licensed from Depositphotos

#editorial #commentary #forecast #internet #licensing #opinion #paulmelcher #prediction #trends