You could call it in-house back-patting, but I really enjoyed Karina’s recent piece about the growing divide between online and print film criticism (the comments are also very sharp). All of this got me thinking about film criticism as a product, in an economic sense. In a preview of his forthcoming book, Wired editor Chris Anderson offers insights into the shifting economics of the web in Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. The article explores how the dropping cost of processing power, bandwidth, and storage have driven the price of many online goods and services to zero. While the revenues of print media decline, how do readers (and advertisers) place value on film criticism?
Let’s take a look at Anderson’s model of how markets are changing and apply it to the product that is film criticism. Anderson points out that traditional economics are based on scarcities, the push and pull of supply and demand, and the cost implications of limited resources. The two main scarcities have usually been the cost of manufacture and the cost of distribution, two things that now are not so scarce at all.
First, manufacture: In the old world of film criticism, the cost of manufacture was represented by paying a salary to a newspaper film critic. He/she was skilled, not just anyone could write about movies like that, but more importantly, he/she had a trusted readership. Every week people read another review by the same critic, eventually they learned how their tastes compared to said critic, making their opinions that much more valuable. But now, the cost of manufacture has essentially disappeared, there are countless bloggers, fanboys, and would-be critics writing online for free. This worries people in two ways: it potentially devalues the very act of writing about film, and it fills the world of film writing with so much crap, it can be hard to find anything resembling good film criticism.
The world of distribution has been upended even more radically than manufacture. The bandwidth cost of a few hundred words is so astronomically small it can safely be called free. The idea of printing time sensitive material on paper and physically delivering it to the doorstep of millions of individuals is looking increasingly ridiculous in a world where an entire movie can be downloaded in a few minutes.
All this is not to say that the economic model that allowed critics to pay the rent has vanished, it hasn’t, but it has changed. The primary scarcities now, according to Anderson, are time and respect. We’re seeing the emergence of an “attention economy” and a “reputation economy.” While both of these things played a role in traditional print criticism, they now take center stage. I’m vividly reminded of the power of time and respect in regards to online media whenever I try to find something fresh to watch on YouTube. Broad keyword searches, browsing by category, or just randomly fishing have *never* netted me something I didn’t think was a waste of time. Of all the videos on my YouTube favorites list, not a single video was found randomly. Every one was either featured on a blog or recommended by a friend. As a consumer and potential ad clicker, clearly I find value in anything that points me to worthwhile content.
The top of the pyramid still exists, it’s just a different pyramid. If film bloggers are able to write consistently solid film criticism and point their readers to other items of interest they would have missed otherwise, the readers will keep coming back. And if the readers keep coming back, there will always be someone who’ll pay to put an ad on the page. There will be Roger Eberts and A. O. Scotts in twenty years, but they probably won’t be on network television or in major newspapers. The film critic giants of tomorrow will be those who find loyal readers and capitalize on the economics of attention and reputation.
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