Content has no value without an audience. That audience is a community that is interested in the topic of the content. The content is only valuable to the extent that it promotes shared experiences, reaction, or activity. Those shared experiences around content help individuals understand each other better. On the personal end of the spectrum, if I go out on a first date with someone and see a movie and we both have wildly disparate reactions to it, I may decide that a second date is not in our future. The sharing of content consumption allows us to evaluate our compatibility and develop connections (or not) with other people. On the business front, content is primarily used to illicit activity - whether that is a decision or a fix to a product or to inform a choice. The content increases in value with its relevance which is often determined by who developed the content, who promoted it to others, and who contributes more content on the same topic.
Now it is a stretch to say that an individual piece of content has a community - but a collection of content around the same topic definitely does (i.e. one episode of Lost is an audience but the Lost series has a community). The other interesting thing is that the content, as a stand alone element, represents the smallest percentage of potential value that the content actually has. The interaction and response to the content, the commentary that is added to the content by individuals, and the action that might result from the content has enormous value on top of just the initial 'eyeballs' that saw the content. In the online world this suggests that if you produce content....and don't proactively provide the infrastructure for the community to congregate...there is an enormous opportunity lost. While a product example (and this does apply to many products too), www.tivocommunity.com gets participation from an estimated 10% of the Tivo owners...but Tivo doesn't get that value because they don't run the community. What a loss.
Big media and publishing companies understand this inconsistently. They are used to getting community for 'free' because of massive broadcast channels that assured a large percentage of the population consumed the same thing. No one needed to create a community around I Love Lucy or the local paper because everyone could chat about it the next day at the water cooler. We all know that those days are gone and online, consumption of content is so fragmented that unless there is an online community, content can lose its value very quickly because there is no opportunity to interact around it.
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