The internet now falls under what is called “media” by industries. A term that many in the early days of the internet opposed, fearing that it would suffer the same fate as TV and radio. Nonetheless, it is still “new” media, since traditional media outlets such as TimeWarner and the big three broadcast companies owned by GE, Westinghouse Broadcasting, and Disney are still grappling with how to move their traditional advertising model online. Over the past decade, we’ve seen many of these companies buying “internet” and .com companies, such as the AOL and GE deal, to inject know-how and reach into their existing organizations.

Lesson Learned: The broadcast industry (i.e. Radio and Television) has been consolidating outlets for as long as the industry has existed. The revenue model is dependent on reach. Hence, there is always a strong incentive to cannibalize competitors if you can’t beat them.

Media companies are now trying to consolidate content away from the decentralized nature of the internet. With the launch of content providers such as Hulu, a joint venture between NBC and News Corp, produced content is now being used to sell advertising. The same produced content that is distributed without any monetary return to content producers, by those they describe as pirates. The wild west character of the internet may be dying, but is it a bad thing?

We are in what has been coined as Web 2.0, a term that appears to be authoritative to the laymen since it uses the same ubiquitous system for tracking changes in software and web development to now generational changes with the internet. This is misleading since it makes an inherently flawed presumption – the internet is moving along a linear path. This is certainly not the case. Ironically it is a technology that is in a perpetual beta, as has become commonly popularized by the likes of Google, constantly tweaked and changed and improved upon yet ultimately flawed. The internet has always and continues to develop in a multidimensional and ahistorical form.

More to come in this series.