Bill Martin, a smart guy who started Raging Bull in the go-go days and now writes for various financial services publications, today noted: “Will the independents [stock analysts] be able to scale their models in a world where information that is widely disseminated becomes less valuable?” This comment raises one of the questions that has long puzzled me about the Net. I’ve always thought that people who say that wide dissemination makes information less valuable must be seeing only part of the picture. So, maybe this is how it goes. If information is extremely exclusive, then one can charge a lot for it; if information is extremely broadly available, then there’s power — and ultimately value in economic terms — in that, too. It seems to me that perhaps what’s “less valuable” is the information in the middle zone, where it’s neither exclusive nor extremely broadly read. The Net is a trap for the unwary in this regard. If you keep things close and don’t use the Net for dissemination, you might lose access to some potential readers. If you are aiming for broad circulation and you come up short, then you end up with something of little value.
