Very interesting session at yesterday evening 200Club meeting. Presentation and discussion around the issues of digital media and the challenge to traditional publishing channels (esp newspapers).
The main themes
Ubiquity of potential access
- The whole world is one click away
- Physical distribution costs dwindle
- Marketing becomes the challenge
Fragmentation of distribution channels
- Traditional channels don’t work
- The value chain is shorter
- Elephants on your doorstep
- Mice in your cupboard
Everyone is a publisher
- the blogsphere challenges content value
- democratisation of access to facts and opinions questions publisher value add
- competitors can arrive from anywhere – and do
Freedom of information?
- Advertising demands traffic demands free content
- Users assume all content should be free
The Winners
Google, eBay, Craigslist, bbc.co.uk
Information users
- Huge range of free content
- Newspapers individual and collective share of voice is tiny
Search engines
- Huge choice puts premium on navigation
- Google wins traffic and ads
Free web aggregators
- Magenta, Moreover et al grow
- Newspapers putting more and more content online Newswires
Everyone needs news
- Traditional dependence on newspapers as distributors dwindles
- Specialists
Anyone
Losers
Newspapers
- Ads going online, fast
- Monopoly of local supply is breaking
- Users are disappearing – kids don’t read
Business newspapers
- Their news coverage is historic
- Their specialist content is covered more fully by specialist sites
Paid aggregators
- If Magenta can cover 20,000 sources, who needs Factiva?
- Publishers value advertising supported revenue over paid revenue
Information specialists
Proving added value becomes harder
Users go direct to the web – any you cant stop that
Observations
The web creates many opportunities
- But the best require specialist focus, an understanding of interactive and
- transactional publishing that is foreign to many publishers
News is a especially vulnerable to change
- Multiplicity of suppliers, multiplicity of needs, means consumer choice must drive change
Transactional services will dominate
- Web is a superb transactional medium. Information will be given away to support advertising and sales even more than it always has.
B2B publishers time will come
When all court records are online, and state and charitable funders require research to be published, their current splendid insulation will end
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