The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change

by Bharat Anand

To make sense of what’s happening today, we almost need to forget what’s happening today. We need to take a step back, and make sense of what’s already happened.

The near-zero cost of propagation also means it’s extremely difficult to control content once it’s produced. Digital rights are messy to establish.

Connections, I will argue in this book, are at the heart of what shapes any digitally touched business today and will for the foreseeable future. Being able to recognize, leverage, and manage connections separates companies that succeed from those that fail.

connections between users, connections between products, and connections across an organization’s activities.

Business strategy is about two questions: where should you play, and how will you win.

Understanding your landscape requires thinking not just about products and consumers—as is the trend—but also about the connections among them. Understanding how to win requires looking not to other organizations for answers—another trend—but to the connections among all the activities inside your own.

The Internet didn’t kill news; it destroyed the classifieds subsidy. Where news organizations went wrong was not in failing to deliver faster, cheaper, better news online—to believe that is to fall into the Content Trap—but in failing to protect the classifieds subsidy or to profitably manage its migration online. Papers were beaten to the punch in capturing user connections in the digital arena.

Cook is describing the Content Trap. He’s hardly shy about his views: Content has been a curse. It causes you to think you can make what’s going to delight customers. It causes you to ignore user contributions. It causes you to focus on your own content rather than on how to get the best content in the world—content anyone can make.

The magazine doesn’t strive for balance; it strives for opinion based on evidence—a style deeply rooted in its simple and elegant 1843 mission statement: “The Economist is a publication of sometimes radical opinion with a reverence for facts.” In contrast to the many outlets whose individual journalists may ruminate in isolation, Monday morning meetings at The Economist exemplify a different approach to journalism—team production.

there are two questions any strategist must answer: Where will you play, and how will you win?

Advertising today is consumed by three questions. First, from the advertisers’ perspective, how to reach more eyeballs at the lowest cost. Second, from the publishers’ perspective, how to preserve ad revenue in a world of falling ad prices. Third, what new metrics to use in a world of digital advertising, social media, and hypertargeting. These questions, and the mindset behind them, add up to the Content Trap. View customers as eyeballs to send messages to, view advertising as a business to be preserved at all costs, view digital advertising as the next big thing, and you’ve been ensnared just as the music, newspaper, and book industries were.