It was interesting when IAC/InterActiveCorp (Nasdaq:IACI) CEO Barry Diller said he came from a world of narrative, at the All Things Digital conference in May. What he was referring to was the way passive viewing of content will continue to diminish as interactive content continues to grow.
Diller added that the desire to share and interact with content and news has changed everything, and there is no way to know what the future will bring, other than the fact that nobody knows at this time, and won't for the foreseeable future.
Now, does that mean that passive storytelling is truly at an end? Not overall, but as Diller says, it is definitely narrowing in use as TV numbers continue to reveal, as well as the ongoing newspaper industry decline.
People still love a good story, although the reading or viewing of them is a smaller part of their lives; that's why the market is shrinking.
Nothing is at an end because of the Internet, what is at an end is mass media and mass audiences. Fragmentation will continue to happen, while a few companies retain a fairly large audience because their content isn't easy to reproduce. I think of the Wall Street Journal as one example of this, although even within the Journal there is commodity content as well as non-commodity content. A significant number of people are more than willing to pay for the content offered by the Journal.
Does a property like the Wall Street Journal tell stories via narrative? Sure they do, although with the Online Journal you're able to interact if you choose to.
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