Poor Jim Cramer. Now the roof of the house has fallen on him—but this is a house he helped in building. For some time now, I have been planning to write a piece calling Jim Cramer a Jerk (or much worse, actually). Now, the clarity of his Jerkness is so much more evident to all. But, do I want to call the guy a jerk for yelling ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater? No.
For some time Cramer has been talking about companies like Google and YouTube, companies that, for their popularity, show that they provide serious value to the consuming public. He says about Google, that “It’s just a parasite… It doesn’t create content, it steals it, borrows it, shares it.”
This is similar to the type of screaming we would have heard in the late ’70s with the birth of home video, and the studios and others were afraid that giving consumers freedom of choice and access to content would destroy the film business. The fact of the matter is that this choice grew the business; it ultimately grew it in very significant ways, including tripling the income stream. What was the harm, though? This screaming and fighting that the content owners engaged in allowed them to gain even more control of a content stream that created more and more profits for them. Then they hoarded these profits for themselves, not sharing them with the content creators, not sharing them with the artists that contributed–unless they were “brand” artists that formed part of their “market insurance” and high cost as protection mindset.
DVD expanded, nay, exploded this market value again, and the control of the marketplace they sought to exert at the big media companies served to give them years of growth, and to ultimately turn this growth into short term profits for their growth machines, but to limit the overall value of the marketplace over time. Pricing all DVDs as sell-through is a recipe for failure of many pieces of filmed entertainment, and now there is almost no going back on that, is one of those mistaken ingredients in the recipe.
We Are In A Window of Opportunity
We are at a new window of opportunity, and Google and companies like that are part of this opportunity, democratizing access to content. A part of access is being able to find the content you want yourself, that you can cleave to your passions, your fetishes, your heart; it’s almost like a right of being human. Humans want to communicate with each other in many ways (and filmed entertainment runs from the sublime to the ridiculous in communication) but there are folks who want access to a broad smorgasboard of content of all types. The Internet, with its search technologies, its delivery platforms, its ease of transaction and/or advertising support (and even when content is just plain FREE)–the Internet is crucial to that access, to the smorgasboard surviving.
Jim Cramer Is Kind Of A Jerk
So, Jim Cramer is a jerk for not seeing that this growth of markets is good for all, and he and those who think that the only way to run a content company is to have it behind gates with armed guards, are very mistaken. All transactions between people and content do not need to be under armed guard oversight. The record business showed us that this mindset creates dinosaurs that are easy to topple and brittle of bone. Crash, go boom and break into thousands of tiny pieces.
The Film Business Needs To Do It Better
In the film business, we need to embrace and create value in these rump marketplaces, and be committed to being where the consumers want to access content when they want to, and we need to give them value for the transaction, not seek to manipulate them into a transaction they then regret.
This is like the over-the-top campaign for a film that is a disaster of artistry. All the cynicism of the marketers takes over and shoves it down unwitting throats. No. We can do better and we can seduce and sell quality content based on a knowledgeable transaction, and have a win-win sale of content to an informed and enthusiastic audience. And we can make money at it and create goodwill, rather than an “us against them” atmosphere. Jim Cramer is part of the old way of thinking, and so lack of control makes him want to get out the transaction police. But look at where this kind of thinking has gotten him–and gotten us all.
Onward and Upward, Jeff