Do Media Executives Need a Lesson in Economics?
On the one hand, you don’t need a degree from the London School of Economics to recognize that excess supply will drive prices down. That’s the basic concept of scarcity, but what the rise of video consumption and advertising is doing is differentiating between, not just video versus text, but mainly, real scarcity vs. false scarcity. Real scarcity is when there is actually more demand than supply. False scarcity leads to a false sense of security about demand for one’s product. False Sense of Security Hollywood’s strategy was forever to create false, or forced, scarcity. Examples are numerous, but the best one is the slotting of a show at 9 p.m. on Thursday evening during the late 1980s, wedged in between stellar shows including “The Cosby Show,” “Cheers,” Night Court,” etc. Invariably, you could slot someone watching grass grow and in between those kinds of established shows, the 9 p.m. show would have built an audience. Fast-forward two decades and you saw how false scarcity led to
