Content: kingmaker, not king

A cliche we hear a lot is “content is king“.   I’ve heard it in speeches from Rupert Murdoch to Eric Schmidt, and it just seems to be an accepted fact.   It was said a lot in the late 1990′s to fuel part of the dotcom boom.  And in the last year or so, this meme seems to have taken an upward trend again.

But is content king?  If you look at the most successful brands and companies, I don’t think so. 

It depends partly on how you define what a content company is:

• Google: doesn’t own, generate or create the majority of its content.  It seeks it out, takes a copy and indexes it
• Facebook: doesn’t own, generate or create content.  It provides tools for creating it
• Twitter: doesn’t own, generate or create content.  It provides a tool for creating it
• Microsoft: doesn’t own, generate or create content (on the whole, especially the profit-generating unts of Windows and Office).  It provides tools for generating it
• Apple: doesn’t own, generate or create content (on the whole).  Again, its profit-generating units are those that participate in revenue from other people’s content

… and so on.  There is a pattern, at least in the digital giants, for companies that make or provide tools or platforms to be the most valuable ones.

For example, out of the top 10 sites on Alexa’s global traffic list, only 2 could be said to be content…

… and from Interbrand’s best global brand list, only Disney sneaks in at number 10 with a real content pitch.

So maybe content can create kings (for Google et al would be nothing without it, arguably), but it isn’t a king itself.

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