The answer to the headline is Almost Everywhere Else.
The new wheres are uncountable, and their number and variety are growing.
The transition is from
- the natural world where the contents of media were distributed by static sources built for the natural world’s natural constraints, to
- the digital world, where content can be produced and distributed by anyone to anywhere on the Internet at costs that lean hard toward zero.
Think about the word station. That’s where we got our audio and video before the Internet came along. Some of that audio and video was distributed by or though stations over networks that were closed and private: NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox. Both stations and networks were static and unmoving. The words “range” and “coverage” had meaning. Now they don’t. We are on the verge of ubiquitous connectivity that one can presume anywhere. (Just wait until every car comes with Starlink and you’ll have one you can keep in your backpack. The Starlink Mini is to the future what the iPod was to the iPhone.)
In the digital world, media choices have gone from static to dynamic, and from few to endless. And our appetite for what we call content is served across buffet tables that stretch past horizons in all directions. That some of it is only available by subscription does not diminish the plain fact that all the rest of it is free for the gobbling.
And the plethorization of fuck-all continues. Given where it can go in the long run, we’ve hardly started.
In the meantime, however, getting people interested in what we’ve got is only going to get harder. Not saying this is a bad thing. Just that it is a thing.
Hard evidence for the change is trends in visits to my photo collection over time. Softer evidence is a decline in listens and views to a podcast I hosted for several years, and to this and other blogs.
Let’s start with photos. I’ve been posting those here on Flickr since 2004. Almost all of them are Creative Commons licensed to encourage re-use. For a passive collection (it just sits there and grows), it has always had a lot of traffic. In a typical week my main site there would get 5,000 to 15,000 visits a day. For example, here’s a slice of 2014:
Now it looks like this:
I’ve more than quadrupled the cumulative number of visits while attracting a quarter of what I did eleven years ago.
One reason, of course, is AI. My photo collection is a huge library of photos that I’ve licensed to encourage re-use. But, thanks to AI, fewer people are using search to find useful images, while also using ChatGPT, CoPilot, Midjourney, Gemini and other robot AI artists to create whatever. Me too, though I’ve mostly stopped because I think by now people dismiss it on sight. I don’t want somebody arriving here to think “that looks like AI.”
But the bigger reason is that there is so much more stuff of all kinds available on the Internet.
I saw the same trend for the podcast I did on TWiT from 2020 to 2023. As I recall ,consumption dropped from about 15,000 per episode when I started to about half that by the end of my hosting on the show. I might blame myself, but I thought the show actually got better while I was there. The audience had simply moved on to other choices, of which there was an infinitude.
This blog is a more radical example. In the ’00s, when blogging was hot and authors were few, this blog’s predecessor got up to 50,000 readers per day. Maybe more. (I barely watched stats back then.) When I moved to this blog in ’07, it dropped to about 7,000 a day, and held steady for years after that. But as social media grew past huge, podcasting took off, and it became possible to watch video on rectangles of all sizes, readership fell to between a few dozen and a few hundred per day. That’s where it is now. But I’m not complaining. This is just life in the vast lane.
For public stats on declines in consumption of content from static sources, consider public radio. Shares for public radio stations have been going up in New York, Chicago, San Francisco (strong #1), Atlanta, Washington (often #1), Seattle (also #1), Philadelphia, Boston, Raleigh-Durham (strong #1) and many other places. In Santa Barbara, six public radio stations together total 24.2% of all listening. Yet public radio listening as a whole has been going down. See here, here, and here. Classical music radio too. (Most classical stations are also public, meaning noncommercial.) This means radio on the whole is declining faster than public radio, which is gaining a larger share of a smaller pie.
When I first reported on podcast listening, in September 2004, a search for “podcast” on Google brought up 24 results. Now there are more than 2.5 million podcasts and the totol listenership exceeds half a billion.
For a deeper dive into how media work in general, read What the Internet Makes of Us, published six years ago in Medium, and even more relevant today.
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