The Slow Demise of Ad-Averse Content: A Look at Books and Movies
The book industry is slowly declining. In China, data from 2024 shows that 63.67% of new books sold less than 100 copies within six months of release, and 84.37% sold less than 500 copies within the same period. This leads to the conclusion that people used to buy and read books because there were no other options.
The music and film industries are similar. People used to go to cinemas because movies had to be watched there; people bought records and tapes because, apart from listening to music on radio and television, physical media were the only way to access it. Before these physical media were invented, people could only listen to live music, going to concert halls to hear performances, much like going to a cinema today.
So, there were two reasons people bought books in the past: first, media forms like film and television had not yet emerged, so people could only consume content through books; second, there were no digital distribution methods, so people had to obtain desired content through books as a physical medium.
The internet changed all of this, also exposing the essence that most people are unwilling to consume serious content. In terms of instant gratification, books are inferior to movies, and movies are inferior to short videos. Most people have already made their choice through their actions.
After the rise of capitalism and before the advent of the internet, there was a very brief period in human history that created the illusion that people would be willing to pay for content, such as buying books or watching movies in cinemas. In this mode of behavior, content itself was a consumer product, and people paid directly for content.
However, rather than paying for content, people were paying a high premium for those physical media. Buying a book was paying a high price for paper, buying a record or tape was paying a high price for plastic, and going to the cinema to watch a movie was renting a space at a high premium.
In the digital age, as these physical media are no longer necessary, these industries are slowly declining. By nature, people prefer entertainment that offers instant gratification; from the perspective of capitalism, the foundation for society's operation is continuous consumption, and the efficiency of profiting from content is far less than providing more lucrative consumer goods. The most suitable role for the content industry is to serve as a medium to promote more lucrative consumer goods, thus inevitably becoming a subordinate consumer product.
Therefore, the content industry largely relies on advertising. For a long time, a tacit understanding has formed between content producers and consumers—audiences consume content products, and advertisers pay the bill.
This understanding has existed since the radio era. Listeners would hear music on the radio but also had to listen to advertisements from time to time. Newspapers were similar; although not entirely free, during their heyday, newspaper prices were often symbolic, far from covering the costs of paper, printing, logistics, and the vast human resources behind them. These costs were naturally borne by advertisers.
Even today, in an era where most print media have disappeared, this remains true. Many digital media have shifted to a subscription model, whether it's The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, or China's Caixin. Interestingly, while these media require readers to pay for their content, they still deliver advertisements to readers. This is because even seemingly high subscription fees are insufficient to cover their content production costs. These costs need to be borne by businesses that can generate profits from consumers more efficiently.
Although advertising accounts for only a small portion of most media products, it is the core of media. Rather than media providing space for advertising, advertising provides a lifeline for media. Without advertising, media simply could not exist.
Because the content industry depends on the advertising industry, it must also adapt to the demands of advertisers. Among content industries, the book industry is the most difficult to adapt to advertisers' demands.
Compared to content products that offer instant gratification, books have a long consumption cycle, and the advertising effect is extremely difficult to evaluate. After a book is purchased, the publisher cannot know if it has been opened, which is simply unacceptable from an advertiser's perspective.
Of course, content industries similar to books exist in another form, namely online articles. As digital content, advertisers can easily measure their advertising effectiveness through data such as readership and click-through rates.
Thus, it's not that people no longer read books, but that they read in a different way; the content of books continues to exist in fragmented forms like official accounts. While fragmented content is less systematic than books, people's choices have shown that they prefer fragmented content.
Fragmented content also has a better symbiotic relationship with advertising. Today, many cinemas also show advertisements before the film begins, but compared to the film's length of about two hours, the five-minute pre-film advertisement ratio is too low, and movies are not suitable for inserting advertisements in the middle, at least not when screened in cinemas. This makes this content industry inevitably decline.
Similarly, even if some films have so-called product placements, for advertisers, an unreleased film has too many variables to be a high-quality advertising channel. Moreover, unless advertisements are inserted as awkwardly as in the movie The Truman Show, people easily ignore those embedded advertisements.
But for fragmented content, everything is easily resolved. Short videos are inherently short; it's perfectly normal for a one-minute video to have five or ten seconds of advertising. This means that audiences watching two hours of short videos in total might have to endure ten to twenty minutes of advertisements. Not only is the proportion of advertising to content higher, but the effectiveness of advertisements in digital content is also easier to track.
So, like the book industry, it's not that people no longer watch movies, but that they watch movies in a different way—in a fragmented manner.
In this era, the only company that can make content a direct consumer product is probably Netflix, whose main revenue comes from user subscriptions. This is likely related to strict copyright protection overseas; practices common on domestic short video platforms, such as "watching a movie in three minutes" with extensive use of copyrighted footage, are simply not allowed abroad. This, to some extent, protects content producers like Netflix.
In recent years, Netflix has also been promoting its advertising business, offering a slightly lower subscription fee option that requires watching ads, and advertising revenue is accounting for an increasing share of its total revenue.
Although Netflix has been very successful, as a platform that sells content products directly to users, its revenue and market capitalization are incomparable to platforms that provide short videos to users for free, with advertisers paying the bill (Douyin, TikTok).
Being able to have a third party pay for one's consumption is a privilege. In the capitalist era, having advertisers pay for one's content consumption is one of the few privileges ordinary people have. Therefore, unless the book or film industry can develop forms that better serve advertisers, such as embedding advertisements through e-book software or directly in cinema screens (which is not impossible), the decline of these content industries is inevitable.
In the future, reading books or watching a two-hour movie in a cinema will be a niche activity. Perhaps it already is.