I often wonder why so many traditional media companies have missed The Technical Divide, and why the internet changes everything. It’s a million dollar (in lost advertising revenue 😉 question.

I think a part of the problem is not understanding the separation of content and distribution. They used to be tightly interlinked – news (content) through newspapers (distribution), tv-shows (content) and channels (distribution). From that perspective it would make sense to apply the same logic to media on the internet.

But the internet is not a medium – it is a carrier of media. The content is not connected to the distribution in the same way as it used to be. Therefore, producing content that is meant to be exclusive for any one specific channel/space/area is not understanding how the internet fundamentally works.

Proprietary thinking is therefore something of the past. And that’s why business models built on proprietary content will always stop short of what they could have been.