If you’ve been a regular consumer of information on the Internet, chances are you’re used to seeing large digital content providers constantly try to get a good grip of the market, only to fail. The main reason is that they are still working under the rules of print media, where content’s main purpose is to be read. With the Internet, the dynamics of reader and content have changed, to the point where adherence to the outmoded rules will only result in poor performance and lack of readership.

Scanning as Opposed to Reading

One of the key changes that the Internet has brought is the fact that website visitors are no longer reading as much as they are scanning the contents of a page. Extensive studies on eyeball tracking have proven that long copies no longer work, with people simply scanning around for text they can click and relying on headers to decide on whether content is worth reading.

Basically, all of the studies point towards content that is broken up into smaller, easy to digest information as what’s needed on the Internet, and what is exactly what visitors are looking for.

Content as a Service Offerings

The main problem, then, for digital content providers is that they need to rewrite all of their existing content in order to fit the new bite-sized format, but this is a massive undertaking that will require time and manpower. This is where “Content as a Service” comes in.

Essentially crowdsourcing of content, Content as a Service lets content publisher offer content that are not necessarily theirs, but coming from the content creators who can ensure the integrity of the content based on standards that the publisher specifies.

The main benefit of providing content as a service is that the owners can become authority for their content, since their focus will be on improving the content instead of having to worry about design and user interfaces, as those things are handled by the content publishers.

Media as a Service

When people say Content as a Service, it’s mostly referring to text content, which gave rise to the term Media as a Service. However, for all intents and purposes, the two terms basically work under the same principle, and both are finding success as models in the current industry.

Purpose of Content and Media as a Service

At the end of the day, the similarities with the cloud industry is no coincidence, as the main benefit of Content and Media as a Service lay in its ability to free up time and effort from people, allowing them to divert their efforts into fields that are well suited to their skillsets – that is, creation of content – all of the other unrelated tasks are handled by digital content providers, who are now able to get exactly the content they need to survive in the Internet age, and do what they’re really good at, which is running a business.