When our audience adopts a new media, we need to be there. Go too early, you lose. Go too late, a new competitor could steal some of your audience.
By Stephen Laliberte, President, iProduction, Inc.
By the time the publishers roundtable rolled around at the CES show in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, everyone was burned out by the technology overload. We talked publishing rather than fear of technology and we started with some questions.
What do publishers do?
- We create good editorial
- We aggregate audiences through this editorial
- We connect our audience to advertisers
Of course, the old three legged stool from publishing 101!
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Technology represents media. It is a distribution channel. When our audience adopts a new media, we need to be there. Go too early, you lose. Go too late, a new competitor could steal some of your audience.
Where will new revenue originate in the next 5 years?
Print advertising or paid circulation depending on your model, will continue to be dominant. Participants indicated that today, electronic media is as low as 10%. All agreed that the mix would change and in 5 years, events and Internet could account for as much as 50% of total revenue. I believe that print based ad revenue would not go down. I have seen this over and over.
The first time I saw it was with Standard and Poors in 1980. They decided to make their reports available on magnetic tape. Everyone feared it would erode the revenue from print reports. It did not. Print continued to grow. Within 5 years, electronic revenue exceeded print. The source of revenue growth is new media.
What jazz can we give the advertiser to get them to give us ad dollars?
- This is where electronic can help you grow. If you can offer electronic e-newsletter circulation, micro-sites, and electronic lead generation, you can get their attention.
- Getting your ads into the blogosphere could be important.
Our moderator, Clay Hall had some great questions.
- What will consumers value and want from media companies when portable, wireless, broadband, and high-fidelity devices are ubiquitous, easy-to-use, and affordable?
- Convergence—Will everything be played on a single device? We were split on this. Many thought yes. I said no. It is un-American to have one thing. Do we have one kind of car? How long has the car been around? We will have convergence of media but it will be many devices.
- More A La Carte Content—iTunes is a great example of A La Carte. You no longer have to buy all 12 songs on the CD. I agree that this will be a good aftermarket. I think that our audiences define our aggregation. How we put it together is a big value-add. We define what is cool and that builds the demand for the A La Carte.
- More User Generated Content—Maybe? I shared the Byte Information Exchange case from the late 1980s. We had forums and we published 8 pages of BIX forums in Byte Magazine. Then it went down to 4 pages and then 2 pages and then none. Why? We could not sell ads in the space. Why? The content stunk. Readers can not write. We did agree that rating and ranking user content did have value.
- What are the logical next steps for traditional magazine publishers?
- Aggregate email addresses—You will need good editorial delivered under a brand to hold the permission based circulation.
- Build larger communities by lowering barriers and increasing conversion rates—Deliver highly valued content for free. This is nothing more than the controlled circulation publishing model implemented on an email based publication.
- Become multi-platform media based—Easy to say but hard to do. Where do you go first? Let your market tell you. If all your horse enthusiasts have horse phones, you should consider delivering your horse phone edition.What is certain is that you need to begin organizing your content for multi-platform delivery. If you want to disaggregate, you will need a method of reorganizing your content. You need to create an editorial taxonomy of your content. You already do this. It is buried in the sections of your magazine, the advertising markets, and in your editorial calendar.Publishers define industries by how they classify the content. What are your Hot Topics? You need to code your content with this taxonomy, call it keywords. If you have multiple publications in the same market space, use the same taxonomy with all of them. This will enable aggregation and re-building products. This will help you on the web with SEO and it will also position you to select groupings of content that you will spin into multimedia.
- Own Content Rights—Make sure you own it or have the rights to use it in all media.
Conclusion
I think the publishers are in the driver’s seat to embrace new technology. We have a long history of defining markets, organizing knowledge, and archiving content. We manage words.
All good content begins with good writing. We go narrow and deep. I think it will be easier for us to figure out video than it will be for the video people to figure out how to publish. Watch your markets. If they adopt a technology, brand a new publication for that media and test it. If you get a circulation, sell it. If you make some money, you have validated the new media. Above all, get your editorial and you multi-media under control.
An extra 5 minutes per article to identify topics, sub topics, GPS coordinates, and other data will build your asset base for the future. It will be like putting nickels in the piggy bank.
Above all, have fun. Our business has not seen this kind of exciting change since radio and television! Remember, those new technologies did not kill us!
