 On-line and Print Publications  A trend reversal is occurring in the content business: print-based publications are becoming interesting again while on-line magazines and newspapers have lost a lot of their luster The absence of a valid business model for on-line publications will push pure content sites out of business, or reduce them to an add-on for traditional publications This trend reflects a maturation of the Internet and of the content market as a whole. Users are becoming increasingly aware that various media have different strong points |
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 Analysis Formulated this way the question sounds incongruous, doesn’t it? How could on-line content, one of the most important pillars of the Internet, be threatened? Impossible, you say. Nevertheless, what is brewing in the background is preoccupying indeed, and should be of concern to anyone involved in content creation. About a month ago, just as the publishing world was getting ready for Seybold San Francisco, Inside. com, an on-line magazine focused on media and technology (and backed by Industry Standard magazine) announced... guess what? A print publication based around the same concept. Some pure content Web-sites close down because of insufficient resources, other on-line magazines complain about poor or inexistent ad revenues, and some publishers have written the Web off entirely (at least as a moneymaking proposition comparable to traditional magazines and newspapers). At Seybold, in the meantime, a number of industry pundits (John Warnock and Andy Tribute, amongst many others) could be heard saying that, of course print is not going away - how silly to ever have considered such an option. The new buzzword is no longer ‘media convergence’, but ‘device diversity.’ We will access content everywhere, on a variety of devices and carriers, and for now that seems to include the dead-tree variety. Major shifts in store What is happening? On the simplest level, publishers are watching the bottom line much more than in the heated, early days of the Internet. In those days, you had to be part of the revolution, whatever the cost. Let’s face it: in most cases, on-line content does not make money. Ad-revenue is disappointing, paying subscriptions are almost universally rejected (except for very specialized areas), and usage analysis tends to show that visitors of on-line magazines and newspapers spend much less time reading an electronic publication, than with print. In other words: there is trouble brewing for on-line publishers. The magazine and newspaper market has perfected its current business model over many decades. These publications not only deliver content in a compelling, easy-to-read form, they are also well-received, and efficient carriers for advertising (and more specifically, local advertising). As the Web gradually moves from the content-centric sites of the early days to a service-centric, e-commerce model, the content itself will undergo significant, profound changes. For one thing, pure content sites will fold at an increasing rate, unless they find novel ways of funding. If there is no way of supporting the considerable cost of on-line publications, either directly or indirectly, many sites will have to close down. Others will consider their on-line presence necessary, but will view it as an add-on, akin to the magazine section in a Sunday paper: something you’ve got to have, even if the ads don’t cover the whole cost. Towards a new phase in on-line content What this trend means in the meantime, however, is that we are moving to a significant new phase in on-line development: content as service. This is the end of the on-line magazine or newspaper that is basically just a revamped version of a print-publication. The new online content model which has started emerging will be a resource, a service, a complement to other forms of content delivery. The Internet is not a replacement for current information delivery models but an extension of them: statistics show that most users of on-line newspapers visit them to get complementary information to something they have seen in the printed publication. Most users who have lived with the Internet to get their information on a regular basis appreciate the immediacy of the Web, the ease of accessing information, but also find it quite limiting in many ways. Market Implications As far as the market goes, the implication is that we are going towards a phase where on-line content may be on the verge of going out of fashion; yesterdays cool thing which isn’t that interesting any more. If you have doubts, consider how easy it would be today to find financing for a purely content-centric Web-site, without any e-commerce or service angle to it. You get the picture. This phase is already building up, and it will last until the next, more mature generation of content sites appear, which have learned from current mistakes. Some may argue that this is what portals are all about, and perhaps one day they will become so. For the time being, however, just from a content point of view, most portals are very unexciting delivery mechanisms for poor or at least flimsy content. And even an impressive and successful portal could probably not support the level of staffing of a major newspaper. Even if we envisage a new generation of on-line publications, genuine concern for the long term perspective remains. If they are to have an on-line future, Web-based publications will have to re-invent themselves down to the business-model. Traditional publishers will be able to incorporate on-line activity as part of the overall publishing project; some major sites will be able to survive with ad-revenues and associated income streams. But for most publications (in other words, the on-line equivalent of the thousands of magazines which fill newsstands around the world) it is still not quite clear what a valid on-line business model could look like. Does this mean that, in the long term, serious, professionally executed on-line publications will have largely disappeared? It is too early to tell - but the problem is a real one. 20Sept2000 ©2000 Pfeiffer Consulting |
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