How it feels to be in a collapsing cartel

How it feels to be in a collapsing cartel:
Dan Fendel of the Director's Guild of America
That's what we sell, folks. Attention Span. We sell pairs of eyes and ears paying attention to something--a book, a magazine, a movie, a tv show, a website, a radio program, etc. etc. We charge for it in various ways, from admission tickets and buttered popcorn to actually using its very own currency--attention span--to pay for it by making you pay attention to commercials in between our entertaining content, and we give a lot of it away for "free" just for the privilege of trying to monetize it by inspiring a purchase later.

But either way, there's trouble in the Attention Span business we call Show Business[...]

The problem is this: The number of pairs of eyes/ears available to gain attention span from is not growing as fast as the number of venues where such attention span is being sought, and that means that any one of those venues, even the biggest, cannot possibly get the same "market share" it used to get. When there were 3 networks, 9 studios, half-a-dozen major publishing houses and two weekly news magazines, even if you "lost" the "timeslot," you got a LOT of eyes and ears, and you could charge, relatively speaking, a LOT for the privilege of being exposed to them.