In the early 90s, I kept hearing on popular media channels (TV, radio) that someday in the near future, there would be a million channels of TV. While that hasn't quite happened yet, with web feed-based features such as podcasting and vodcasting, as well as cheap webcams, that million-channels idea may not be far off.

The question is, who's listening or watching? Who's going to watch? The most recent estimate of Internet users (that I've seen) puts the number at about 1 billion people worldwide, with most of those users no longer in the United States. If there really were 1 million "channels" of, say, pod/vod netcasts, who would watch? On average, that would be about 1000 viewers per channel. That's not enough to keep a publisher in ad impressions-based revenue, and certainly unlikely to generate a lot of click revenue.

The blogosphere alone is reputed to be growing at about 70,000 new blogs per day. Who's reading them? Will they last? Sure, the number of Internet users is increasing. But so are the number of "publishers" on the Internet. That includes website owners and bloggers/ netcasters.

Maybe I'm stretching here, but I think that the laws of attrition apply to Internet publishing. Some publishers just can't keep up their Internet activities if their returns don't support it. So eventually, they'll move on to something else.

So there may be thousands of new blogs added daily, but very few of them will last. If human beings have a lower average attention span today, compared to, say, 10 years ago, before the Internet went public, then doesn't that apply to activities like publishing as well as reading?

For some, blogging will be a fad. They may continue to consume other blogs, but many bloggers will cease to blog. Only those that starting promoting their content early, and stick with it, are going to earn sufficient traffic motivation to continue.

I think that this can be achieved by extensively promoting RSS-invisible applications (both software and hardware). Personally, as I've said several times, I'm pushing for hardware-based RSS usage - such as podcast radio and video players, powered by wi-fi and city-wide networks, or via satellite. Content quality will generate demand, and demand will determine a publisher's life cycle.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/

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