My RSS feeds contain mainly digital media news and blogs. It’s a good way to keep up with what’s happening and to spot new ideas early on.
But what bothers me about Digital Media bloggers, journalists and evangelists is the biased reporting on developments in the online or mobile domain. And it especially bothers me when it’s done in a “old versus new media” style.
This week I came across this post on TechCrunch which looks at some statistics gathered by AdAge. The title of the blog is already totally biased: Top 100 AdvertisersShifted $ 1 Billion to the Web Last Year At The Expense Of TV And Newspapers.
…overall media spending in “measured” categories (TV, print, radio, Web) by the top 100 advertisers was flat in 2007, with 0.3 percent growth to $61.3 billion. But spending on Web display ads rose 33 percent to $4.2 billion. This is yet one more piece of evidence that dollars are flowing from traditional media to the Web.
If you (1) take a look at the original article on AdAge and (2) look at the numbers below, you will see that there is no evidence whatsoever that the ad budget shifts are from old to new media. What’s happening is that certain media have lost budgets and since there is slight growth in the overall budget, this money has gone to other media that has grown. It is even more likely that for instance part of the TV ad spend has been shifted from Network TV and Spot TV to syndicated and cable TV. Same for loss in newspapers, which might have gone to magazines for a great part.
These kind of messages by TechCrunch and other digital media evangelists frightens people at so-called old media companies since they only hear doomsday scenarios while, when you look at the facts, old media still rules (take a look at the numbers below) and even grows; be it not at the pace of digital media.
While I was reading this and this article about website design and usability, I found two valuable lessons for publishers:
The web is more about applications than publications
In print, a design flaw is unlikely to cause a reader to abandon a newspaper or magazine entirely — they are a largely captive audience. But it will cause them to abandon a website.
It reminds me of the number one and two news sites we have in Holland, nu.nl and telegraaf.nl. You guess which one does better.
Facebook, Hyves, LinkedIn all ask me constantly what I am doing right now. Sometimes I twitter what I am doing and more often I post a picture to Flickr to keep a kind of a log of where I am and interesting things I see.
What’s keeping me busy in my working life, you can read in an interview I had for our own internal magazine. So here’s a piece of shameless self-promotion (and some explanation while I haven’t posted anything since January):
Are you one of those people zapping mindlessly from one boring TV channel to another, complaining that there’s nothing on? Do you find yourself online more and more because you are becoming addicted to online video? Then the Sanoma Magazines project ‘Television 2.0’ might just be right up your sleeve! Currently we are exploring our opportunities in ‘moving images’.
Today a short post about Babelgum. It is “the other P2P videoprovider”. In my belief it was supposed to be a European alternative to Joost with all its great content only available to US residents. But it is not. What it is, is a Joost copy concentrating more on independent (smaller) producers rather than on premium content. It has a catalogue of matches of the Italian series A football (soccer), but somehow I was unable to watch any matches (maybe it is restricted to Italian IP adressess). Then there are the short films for a British Film Festival, to a certain group of viewers definitely interesting. The rest of the content is Ministry of Sound TV (again), some travel documentaries, cooking programs, nothing really great. So will Babelgum make it? If they think they can be a real competitor to Joost, maybe on the European market they do need premium (Hollywood, British) international content. In Europe they need another thing: local content and although they succeeded to get the Ialian football on board this could prove to be quite difficult.
Maybe the best would be that Babelgum keeps building its database with European content and then would be bought by Joost. Who knows…
In the next episode more on vlogs, mobile video platforms and the YouTubes of the world.
This post by Jeff Jarvis got me thinking about how to break through the barriers in a formerly single-medium company when talking about New Media:
It depends on the story and how you want to tell it and how your public can best use and interact with it.
So the medium or media you are using depends on the story you want to tell. That’s the real added value of being a journalist or editor in a multi-, cross-media environment. And that’s why I strongly believe in not organizing a multi-media company into separate divisions around one single medium.
But media has always been — and always will be — about scale, and there is only one trend in media now that matters — the only trend that has ever mattered — consolidation to achieve scale. What’s changed is not that scale has stopped driving the media business — what’s changed is HOW you achieve scale.
and:
This is where consolidation converges, where content creation meets attention allocation — new media companies are realizing that they have to do both.
At the end of the day, magazines are about communities of interest, whether professional or lifestyle driven. If magazines keep that driving mantra in mind, and use the Web for all its is worth, things could begin to look brighter and bigger on the monetary side soon.
Most magazine publishers understand the fact that their readers are a community of interest. Then why do online initiatives of most magazine publishers not take off as they should? I think because many magazine publishers still do not understand that online publishing is something completely different than offline publishing. They are separate businesses with their own dynamics in content and advertising and they should be organized as such. Maybe the biggest obstacle for magazine publishers is that their business is still doing too well, and they are not hurt by online business enough. That’s a shame, because it is not about the end of magazines, it is about the opportunities online.
*with the exception of course of the company I work for
Even with all the fetishization of the long tail these days, it’s important to remember that entertainment (and therefore online video entertainment) is a hit-driven business. People flock to hits, advertisers flock to people.
Favorite and promising new television shows beat the Web as the most frequent media conversation topics for all generations
Extensive amplification with the Millennials as they tell the most people about what they like
52 percent of Xers are visiting television show Internet sites
Printed magazines are an integral part of every generation’s life
72 percent enjoy reading magazines over finding the same information online
58 percent of Millennials agree magazines help them learn about what’s “in”
Compared with online activities like surfing the Web and downloading music, all generations aspire to reading a book in the coming year
Advertising Insights
64 percent tend to pay greater attention to print ads in magazines or newspapers than advertising on the Internet
More than one-in-four would pay for online content vs. being exposed to ads
Search engines and word of mouth are the most effective means for driving Web site traffic — 85 percent of Xers are influenced by someone’s recommendation
87 percent of respondents continually visit the same Web sites
Generation Xers are a little more responsive to advertising”
“Millenials” is age group 13-24, “X-ers” is age group 25-41.
In the publishing business copyrights are still extremely important. According to this message at the FIPP site, the World Association of Newspapers and some other publishers interest groups have come up with an Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP): form of copyright control on the Web. Will this standard enhance the amount of quality content on the net?
Probably it will because the standard will enable publishers to control who has rights to see what part of the content. But aren’t copyrights an artefact of pre-WWW times? Read the rest of this entry »
The future of media will be determined by how well legacy media companies survive the unbundling of their business models, how much better legacy companies like News Corp who have acquired a platform (MySpace) can restructure their business, and the degree to which the new native platform media companies like Google can position themselves to dominate the new media landscape.
According to Scott Karp, legacy media companies need to deal with the unbundling of their business model. But what is this business model in case of a magazine publisher? Read the rest of this entry »
Once in a while there is a video out there on the future of media that you just must see. This one is made by an Italian consultancy firm called Casaleggio Associates (don’t worry it is in English, be it with a nice accent) The most compelling idea is that we will have an “agent avatar” or “Agav”, a virtual me taking care of your virtual life. Scary? Maybe. Realistic? Probably.
Posted by laeven 
Posted by laeven 
Posted by laeven 
