Is Silicon Valley Funding the Wrong Stuff? — Eye-opening: “Consider this. The entire market for advertising is around $100 billion a year in the U.S. (Globally it’s close to $500 billion.) Yet the nation’s gross domestic product is more than $16 trillion. That means every venture-backed startup chasing advertising revenue is going after just 0.6% of the economy. Put in employment terms, the ad-related economy employs just a few million people, versus 140 million Americans whose job it is to do everything else. Still, the pursuit of advertising dollars includes about every startup that is going for scale first and says it will figure out how to ‘monetize’ its users ‘once it has the eyeballs.'”
Number of Statehouse Reporters Is in Decline, Study Shows — “The nation’s statehouses lost more than one-third of the journalists devoted to covering legislative matters full time, according to a study released on Thursday morning by the Journalism Project at the Pew Research Center.” Potato salad Kickstarter coverage remains unchanged.
Under Tariff 8, Barenaked Ladies would need 9,216 plays of “If I Had $1,000,000″ to earn enough royalties to buy one box of Kraft Dinner — A recent decision by the Copyright Board of Canada has set one of the worst royalty rates in the world for music streaming.
Taking on Amazon — If you haven’t checked out Scott Timberg’s blog CultureCrash, I highly recommend it. A great blog that covers issues relating to the sustainability of creative individuals and industries. Here he reports on several items related to Amazon and its dealings with authors and publishers.
A Notice of Author Obviation — “Dear Content Creator, We are happy to announce that our recent efforts in fiction generation have been successful, and we are now able to feed the entirety of any individual writer’s output into our computer and procedurally generate new works using a combination of Markov chains and random syntax sampling. A regular expression-based pattern matching system then determines which sentences are most similar in style to ones you would have personally constructed, and arranges them in terms of plot development (or what passes for plot in your novels). In essence, we have rendered you obsolete.”
Copyrights are more than just federal “privileges†— As Tom Sydnor explains, copyright “alone creates a system for producing expressive works that lets private creators and investors make the risky, long-term investments of financial and human capital needed to produce expressive works designed to inspire or entertain large numbers of private, ordinary citizens – rather than works designed to indulge the preferences of Tenure Committees, rich philanthropists, or government bureaucrats.”
From Google to Amazon: EU goes to war against power of US digital giants — “Google’s earnings from search have drained advertising spending from European newspapers, magazines and radio stations. Piracy, facilitated by search engines and broadband, has hit revenues for record labels hard. Bookshops and electronics stores have disappeared from high streets as sales migrate to Amazon and even Apple’s bricks and mortar retail outlets. Europe’s mobile phone networks, once considered global technology pioneers, have handed fortunes to Apple and South Korea’s Samsung in subsidies for mobile phone handsets. The sense of injustice has been reinforced by revelations about tax. Amazon, Google and Apple have found ways to reduce their corporation tax payments on international revenues to single-digit percentages of profits. Now fear has been added to the mix, with Edward Snowden’s revelations about digital surveillance.”