UPDATE - This post is speculative, not actual reporting.
What does a 21st Century media company look like? What should it embody and who, if anyone (or maybe that’s everyone), will run it? These are certainly good questions and they are being discussed this week by sages like NYU Journalism Chair Jay Rosen, the Online Journalism Review's Mark Glaser and others on Rosen’s influential PressThink weblog. The question comes down in my mind to what is a sustainable media business model. While Rosen points to a couple of stealth projects that will try hard to create a profitable business around hyper-local citizen journalism when they launch next year, I believe they will face massive competition from a successful company that's already right under our noses - eBay.
eBay and Craig's List are already the leaders in facilitating person-to-person commerce. They have also been steadily growing closer together - in August eBay acquired a 25% stake in Craig's List. In 2005 they will take this to the next level when eBay acquires the rest of Craig's List it doesn't own and then enables customers to blog right on their unified site. This will usher in a new era where citizen journalism is directly funded by person-to-person commerce. eBay community bloggers will be able to earn revenues either from their own auction listings or from classified sponsors who choose to advertise on their eBay weblog. In short, eBay will empower consumers to establish a micro version of the media business model that has been around for generations, but only accessible to the big boys.
The two companies have already eaten away at one of the core underpinnings of big media - the classified advertising dollar. So it's not hard to imagine them getting closer, empowering their customers to blog and thus closing the advertising/commerce/content circle. Consider what Dan Gillmor said earlier this year at the O'Reilly Digital Democracy Forum ...
"The real threat to traditional journalism isn't blogging. It's eBay, the largest classified ads publisher."
Dan is right. We have been trained to categorize Internet companies into little discrete buckets. Yahoo is a portal. Google is a search site. eBay is an auction site. Amazon is an online retailer. That's all well and good, but I bet the the brilliant executives who run these innovative firms, however, are taking a much larger view of where the online medium is headed and they're watching blogs create trusted communities that can spur future revenues. You should too.
