Consumer Driven Media is the new media

There has been a shift in media in the past 5 years. Although this shift is moving quickly, little has been reported about this until very recently. First there was the decline of original programming and sitcoms on television. Then the decline of traditional CD music sales followed by lower movie theatre ticket sales.

I think what's happening is that people have access to so much personal media with video games, Tivos, online movie downloads, and websites. There are tools to allow anyone to create and edit their own movies, create extensions of published video games, and computer programs based on open source code. There is a media convergence (websites, television, and mobile entertainment) and a shift towards the growing consumer driven or user generated content such as blogs (web logs), vblogs (video blogs), moblogs (mobile blogs), podcasting, wikis, etc.

The recent media attention of consumer driven media have been about the falling sales of CD's, movies, and software. Others have written about the shift away from traditional Madison Ave advertising to online, viral marketing.

Tha Wall Street Journal has had articles about bloggers getting more media attention and whether or not traditional media (newspapers) should sponsor bloggers.

The online media/finance blog, The Big Picture frequently writes about the fall of CD and DVD sales.

Finally an article from the May 23 issue of BusinessWeek:
Titled, "How Unilever Scored With Young Guys", shows how Unilever is using traditional 30 sec TV spots as well as video blogs to create compelling entertainment for the 18-24 yo audience and creating brand awareness and viral buzz.

Looks like we'll see more and more of this shift. Current TV, the new network that airs viewer submissions using the face of Al Gore, has created some buzz, but as more and more shift, consumer driven media will drive content forward.