Back in 1996, when I started my internet company, people would say, “On the web, content is king.” What they meant at the time, was that in the new web space, quality content would rule the day. More and more people would be surfing the net, and therefore there would be an appetite for content like never before. Mass content, niche content, all kinds of content. A great marketplace of content. Also, the predictions went, the control of content would be democratized. Users could decide– not big studios or publishing companies– what kind of content was published and consumed. Content would be both subscription-based and ad-supported.

Then, the dot-com nuclear winter happened. A lot of sites failed, and content sites seemed anything but kingly. People at the time were also laughing at ideas like

• An online grocery business succeeding.
• People buying luxury goods (diamonds, houses, cars) online.
• The arrival of broadband on every desktop.
• Community sites making money.

No one’s laughing any longer. And content is surely back. Like the queen in chess, she has every move open to her. So we call it the Content-is-Queen (CIQ) era. Some evidence of the CIQ trend…

• eBook (Sony’s and Amazon’s)
• YouTube
• Bloggers breaking into the media mainstream
• iTunes

We believe that an idea– nearly 15 years in the making– is finally gaining a foothold. And that the internet is transforming into a place where content is queen. But it’s more than that, the internet and new technologies are transforming the nature of the content itself. That means new forms of expression are being invented. This goal of this blog is to chronicle and comment on the CIQ phenomena.