Andrew Savikas says that ‘content is a service business’. Or, in simpler terms – when you’re a digital publisher you’re competing with free content, so the only way to differentiate yourselves would be to sell something better than content: service.

… what you’re selling as an artist (or an author, or a publisher for that matter) is not content. What you sell is providing something that the customer/reader/fan wants. That may be entertainment, it may be information, it may be a souvenir of an event or of who they were at a particular moment in their life (Kelly describes something similar as his eight “qualities that can’t be copied”: Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability). Note that that list doesn’t include “content.” The thing that most publishers (and authors) spend most of their time fretting about (making it, selling it, distributing it, “protecting” it) isn’t the thing that their customers are actually buying.

It appears to me that content is the prerequisite; service only matters when you want to make money. Still a good read, at any rate.