An article I wrote

[Justin]

Well I got motivated today for some reason and decided to write this article. Let me know what you think....


The changing face of media


The world of media has undergone ground breaking advances in the past, from print to television to the world wide web. At this moment, standard media is in a phase shift, and if you aren’t ready for the upcoming changes, you’re going to be left behind.

As the Internet continues to progress, the opportunities available to us are endless. Many people are now using the Internet as a platform to get their voice heard. If your idea isn’t accepted by mainstream media, taking it online is a great choice. Creating and managing a website to get your message out has never been easier. Your regular Joe Public can have a website designed and hosted for under $200. If you tried to start up your own business, such as a weekly newspaper, $200 wouldn’t be enough to buy your desk accessories at Staples. The Internet has given people with a dream a chance to showcase their talents in front of the world.

Now that we know you can be heard, the content you produce is the most important thing. I think this will be the biggest change in every form of media in the next few years. The general public is becoming more intelligent, and most people are sick of seeing everything dubbed down in television, movies, music and every other media outlet. One of my favorite marketing minds out there today is Seth Godin. Seth’s main focus when talking about business is producing an authentic product. When you produce something that actually is useful, innovative or unique, people will form an emotional connection with your work and be more willing to listen to you in the future. One of my favorite examples that emulates this is the Internet writer Maddox. Maddox has a large cult following online and is pretty much an online legend in the male 18-32 age bracket. He publishes rants on just about anything from parenting to movies to children’s crappy art work. His website started as a way for him to express his feelings about people he knows and has evolved in to what it is today. His original rant got passed around through his friends email lists and within a year he was putting up on average one article each month and getting a massive amount of traffic. Maddox runs no ads on his site and makes no profit from it. But that’s not why he runs his website. He writes because it is fun and it gives him a way to express himself. Now almost 8 years after his site debuted online, Maddox is publishing his first book due out in June. The day his book went on Amazon for presale, he sold over 7,000 copies within 5 hours! The book went directly to number one on the Amazon chart, passing Freakonomics and The Da Vinci Code. This is pretty much unheard of in the publishing world. Hopefully people are starting to see the writing on the wall. In a world that does its best to force feed lies and regurgitated crap at you everyday, authenticity gives people something unique to connect with. Maddox’s authenticity has lead to a devoted following, which is on its way rivaling the size of any mainstream author.

Authenticity isn’t just happening in the publishing world though, it’s happening in other forms of media as well. Let’s take for example television. I think as of right now, HBO is about the only company that actually understands what people want to watch. What shows are people talking about everyday? According to Jim?….. No! Two and a Half Men?……. No! Do you know why no one talks about them? Because they are just rewriting the 90’s sitcoms all over again. There’s nothing unique or challenging about these shows. ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX are all out in left field when it comes to being in touch with their viewers. HBO on the other hand is putting out shows that are talked about all the time and are constantly in the media. Entourage, Sex and the City, The Sopranos and Curb Your Enthusiasm are edgy, fresh and unique to television. It’s not hard to see what is going to happen here. The shows that challenge an audience and push the envelope are soon going to take over the industry, while the shows that are just old sitcoms with different actors, are going to be faded out.

In the same context, if you look at the music industry, there is a huge transformation going on as well. The idea of becoming a large brand in a niche market is going to take over the age old philosophy of trying to market to everyone. If you look at the huge record labels like Virgin and Warner Brothers, all of the corporate executives are blaming huge record sale plunges in the past few years on file sharing. Well if that’s the case, then why have the Independent labels been able to increase their sales more than 15% over the past year? Maybe it’s because the bands have a real connection with their fans, and they aren’t just producing meaningless songs year after year. One band that I think is a great example of working within a niche is Hawthorne Heights. They’re a new band in the emo/pop punk genre. They aren’t anything special, truthfully I think they’re pretty bad, but they have done an amazing job within their niche. One of their main marketing points is MySpace. Through adding friends and posting on people’s walls, they now have 405862 friends on MySpace. Can you imagine how many bands would kill to have a direct contact list of over 400,000 of their fans? I can guarantee you if they just write “hello, we hope you are doing well, hope to see you at the next show” on a fan’s wall on MySpace, that kid will end up going to every show he can and also buying all of their Cds and t-shirts. MySpace is a brilliant new way of staying in touch with fans, and it’s just another example of how new media is taking over.

So what does this all mean to us as webmasters and affiliates? I think everyone really needs to ask themselves why they are in this business. Are you in this cause you love to talk about poker and report on it? Or are you in this because it’s such a lucrative industry and you love the money?

As the industry progresses, the people who are producing authentic content and who have a passion for what they do are going to continue to succeed, while the keyboard jockeys are going to be weeded out and left behind. Sites like PocketFives and PokerAffiliateWorld will continue to grow and get traffic no matter what the search engines do, because they have a devoted group of readers.

Media is evolving and the revolution is coming. Are you gonna be ready?