What do we do?
The Montrose Group is committed to ensuring that the future of the world wide web is one full of diverse content generated by experts and individuals with a personal interest in the spread of knowledge. We are focused on finding value in the mountain of websites on the internet and acquring them to ensure that they remain viable economically and retain the quality of content that makes them so attractive. The modern world wide web is not just a platform for spreading information but also a competetive environment where search engine optimization consumes significant resources in any effort to make a website economically viable. Fraud and index-spamming are full-time jobs for unscrupulous operators interested in generating traffic from search engines but not providing real content for users. We are committed to creating a network of websites with independent and high-quality content that can be sustainable and supported by the technical expertise of our support team.
The Future of Diversity
Whether the Internet is the distribution solution for other forms of content is largely an academic matter, but it is clear that today quality, independent websites exist. If you look hard enough you can find them, but the future of these resources is by no means secure. With large media corporations taking a interest in the Internet, content market consolidation and concentration is happening at an alarming pace. This means that two trends are inevitable:
- Conversion of niche content to content perceived to have a 'broader appeal' in a misguided effort to attract more eyeballs.
- Exercising editorial control to push a larger corporate political or social agenda.
The assimilation of independent opeators into larger publishing empires or their disappearance due to economic factors represents a reduction of the Internet's long tail. It represents a loss to society as a whole.
The Long Tail
Analysts have long predicted that the internet would allow niche players to cater to the needs and interests of individuals that are not normally satisfied by mainstream media. Others argue that there are many places that already serve such needs but in the pre-Internet era were difficult to find. This content, the majority of quantity that attracts the minority of attention, is often called "The Long Tail" - the name is best understood when looking at a particular sector of the creative industries.
In cinema the theaters are dominated by less than 100 movies in a year, that form the bulk of the revenue. But every year thousands of movies are released that form the "tail" of movies that individually represent less and less of the overall viewers and revenue.
It is easy to understand that for products that are easily distributed the tail can represent far more total consumers, and their dollars, than the peak. What opportunities does this phenomenon represent? Some say that distribution improvements could canabalize the revenue of the summer blockbuster. Another possibility is that if individuals can easily find this content, the revenue of the whole industry will increase.
Everyone that has looked at the phenomenon does tend to agree that if the potential of the long tail is realized it is the little guy that wins, because the big corporations that control distribution are the only winners under the status quo. If the potential of the tail is realized we can expect it to grow and the creative output of society as a whole to increase in that sector.