The Death of Mediocre

I'm not interested in about 95% of everything Hugh Macleod (gapingvoid) publishes. Ironically, it took him publishing an article about how 95% of advertising is dreck to get me to realize that. The 5% that I am interested in is so powerful that I wade through the other 95% to find it. But I'm not here to discuss the merits and pitfalls of following Hugh, well actually, I am, in a way.

There's a fascinating video in Hugh's latest post with Clay Shirky discussing "Gin and the Cognitive Surplus" at Web 2.0 in San Francisco. And this is what really got me thinking.



(read the transcript here)

What Clay is talking about is the shift from media as consumption (i.e. watching TV) to media as producing, sharing and yes, still consuming but to a lesser extent. He estimates that Americans spend 200 billion hours watching TV in an average year. If the whole of Wikipedia represents 100 million hours of human thought then all that TV watching is equal to 2000 Wikipedias being created each year, if all of that time was shifted to something else. Of course, all of that time isn't being devoted to other projects, but even a small shift can create big changes. Think of all the things you see on the internet and wonder "Where did they get the time?" Well, there's your answer.

So back to Hugh, and his 95-5 "dreck intolerance" principle. If we take and combine it with Clay's thoughts, what do we get?

We get people moving away from TV due to the fact that 95% of it is shit, or dreck. We get people moving into other realms, for example the net where 95% of it is still shit, but it's a much bigger pile overall. I don't believe that anyone can claim to even have read 5% of the net. You'd be hard pressed to have even viewed 1% of all of the sites that are out there. Compare this to the fact that most of us have seen 95% of the channels offered on TV (even the obscure cable ones.)

What you get is the internet as a giant filter. There are so many sites you can possibly go to, you can only possibly go to a small handful.

Therefore, you only spend time going to those that interest you.

And thus, the internet filters out the dreck, the boring, the mediocre, even the very good for the most part (look at all those Youtube videos with 10 views.) That is the shift that Hugh is talking about when he discusses what is really killing advertising (as we have known it.) Watch TV for a few hours (as Hugh mentions) do you think any of those ads you saw would garner more than a few thousand views on Youtube, where people have a choice in their consumption? Most likely not. And yet they are still produced because too many people in too powerful a position still believe that the public is a consumer waiting to be force-fed.

Those who understand that every eyeball has a choice, that every input must pass through a filter, that people want to share and interact with what they consume and that modern media consumption is no longer a well-balanced plate but rather a limitless buffet of choices, those are the people who will prosper in the future.

The producers, whether they be ad agencies, bloggers, or something else, who continue to survive on mediocre output will find that their days are numbered.

Mediocre is dying a slow death.
Thanks for taking the time to filter through the dreck and find this post.