Old media, even highly focused old media, simply cannot keep up. Look at almost any vertical and the story is the same: There are huge discrepancies between offline reach and online visitors. Too often the legacy publisher continues to think about the brand’s Web site as an extension of the base product and therefore something smaller in reach and ambition than the mother ship.
via AdWeek..
3 Comments
Reminds me of when I ask someone who’s about to take down some information and I ask them if they’ve got a pencil/pen and they say nope, just text it to me. Yes they know what a pencil/pen is and how to use it, but why bother; automated crap (sic) is more “gooder…” Yep.
Interesting that the author has an on-line media company. Ad revenues for internet usage still lag broadcast. Everything advertising cannot simply become television or internet, because the world has bigger audiences than simply those two narrow funnels.
While I agree that many magazines will disappear, there will still be those that survive and thrive. News is a different realm, and unless papers figure out how to get compelling commentary and content, they will fall trying to report what happened yesterday. I can imagine four or five national magazines surviving in the US, but what happens to the ever increasing poor segment of the US that does not have a computer nor an internet connection?
Overall ad spending has declined, and publications depend upon ad revenues. The winners have been the better publications, while most of the losers have gone under (or will soon). Just as the myth of the “paperless office” never was attained, the now popular myth of print disappearing simply will not happen. Definitely there will be changes, but I like to think that just means more places for our images to appear.
If a magazine can be replaced by a website, it should be.
But it’s just a simple truth that the author explains: the relevant magazine brands that embrace online’s strengths and treat the medium as its own entity supported by the brand and NOT one of those gottdamned online magazines (See how you can turn the pages with your mouse?!?!?), for example, will prevail.
Vice magazine/vbs.tv
SPIN magazine/spinearth.tv
dwell/dwell.com
Oh, and by the way, print is certainly not dead. It’s just correcting itself.
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