May
3
Lies, Damned Lies and Irrelevancies
Filed Under Blog, data analytics, eBook, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, STM, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Benjamin Disraeli’s old adage about “lies, damned lies and statistics” is now spinning away from its original placement (he actually meant to say “expert witnesses” rather than pure statistics!) and is moving beyond oxymoron into cliche. But since the UK’s Publishers Association statistics book (www.publishers.org.uk) was published on 2 May, and sparked the usual irrelevant radio and newspaper commentary on its findings, I found myself pondering both our gross misuse of statistics in everyday life, and how increasingly the thirty or so trade bodies in the British Media, and their European confederations and US co-evals continuously mislead us by pretending to be a market measure when they are actually a symptom of change for producers, and an increasingly misleading one.
The statistic from the UK Publishers Association (PA) that got me itching in this rabid manner was this line: “Total physical and digital book sales have fallen from £3.5 billion in 2012 to £3.4 billion in 2013”. This got the chattering classes going at a furious rate. The Death of Reading? The Decline of Britain’s Place in World Culture? Collapse of Educational Standards in a once Great Nation? Well, I am all for firing the current Secretary of State for Education, re-opening the libraries and even, if it helps the struggling book trade, allowing prisoners in our teeming jails to receive books for reading purposes (currently forbidden in the UK), but, seriously, this is not down to the Government, or even the poor old publishers. It could be the start of a trend or a post-Fifty Shades statistical blip, or it could simply be a statistical error. It is not a “market” figure at all, but simply reflects the information collected by the Publishers Association from those publishers who happened in the years in question to be in membership of it. It indicates nothing and has no deeper significance until it becomes greater over time, so why do we fill so much airtime with premature discussion of things that have not yet happened?
The fact is, of course, that we build bricks from muddy statistics to support our own arguments. The wise men at the UK Office of Statistics reserve the right to change major announcements – GDP, cost of living, inflation – in the months following their monthly (absurd time interval) releases, as new and better evidence arrives. In the content, media and technology industries we should do the same, and rigidly differentiate between producer statistics, which reflect segments of sales data , and market statistics, which reflect consumption within a market. Thus the radio interviewer who I caught dilating on the PA figures was obviously unaware that the same report indicates that 43% of UK output from these publishers was exported, even further diminishing their usefulness as a guide to the literacy and reading habits of the Great British Public.
And then there is the Digital Thing. Here I must take issue with the Publishers Association CEO, while sympathizing with his need to sell as many of his reports as he can. The report, he says “shows revenues from books at an interesting equilibrium moment with the total growth up by the same figure as physical sales are declining, showing that digital books are fully pulling their weight in the market”. Apart from the thought that “equilibrium” is a strange word to apply in a market where digital is growing and print declining for the publishers indexed here, there is no acknowledgement of the Howey Thesis – that an examination of Amazon’s sales figures would quickly show that genre fiction sales of self-published works are far greater than publishers believe. It would reveal that, with these self-published elements added, between 70 and 90% of sales were digital. In the view of many, the fiction market has gone digital already, but we have no way of recognizing the change. The only short term hope for the major players is consolidation (Harper Collins and Harlequin this week). With self-publishing for initial publication becoming the order of the day publisher selection of the best for advanced marketing treatment creates a derivative business model. So what is this, Publishers Association, about “Publishers have a strong historical record in driving innovation, providing products and services appropriate to the digital age”. Well, the first part of the sentence would apply to Allen Lane, the last great innovator in British book publishing history, but the last part of the sentence strains credulity. True, independent players like Dorling Kindersley did wonderful things in multimedia in the 1990s, but that soon stopped when they were bought by a conglomerate, and replicating a print book in Epub3 is hardly a startling breakthrough, even for a publisher. But it does point to an issue that I have no statistical reason for asserting: if the UK consumer publishing industry does not quickly find a way of investing in and developing new forms and attributes appropriate to a networked age with mobile technology then it will, in the 2025 statistics, be shown to have expired – like the dodo, or the newspaper.
But, of course, we all love a figure. Buzzfeed is always full of nice stats for us to send to our friends and start an argument. But they are not entirely serious. In the same way I could point out, for example, that the UK publishers output in sales revenue terms have now climbed/fallen to 66% of Amazon’s book sales (believed to be $7.75 billion). And now that Amazon Publishing have sold over 1 million copies of each of two author’s works (Helen Bryan and Oliver Potzsch) surely it would make sense to recruit Amazon into the Publishers Association, and make the stats look vastly better in a single year (Headlines: “New Boost to literacy”, “Education Minister says strategies to get the nation reading have worked” etc).
And a final point. The UK Publishers Association launched, for the first time this year, their statistics on the UK academic journals market. I wonder why. Journals is essentially a global market. “Made in Britain” journals are great, but no greater than “Made in the Netherlands” or made anywhere else. The figure the PA comes up with for British journals revenue is £1.3 billion in sales, of which £850 million was digital. In other words, Reed Elsevier-owned Elsevier is not British, since its revenues are larger than this UK total. On the other hand Wiley does its journal publishing in the UK at Oxford and Chichester – but is presumably, because it is NYSE listed, a US company. In small, fully digital globalized markets this type of geographical output recording is next to useless. The PA would be well-advised to licence access to a good market research database and tell its members something much more valuable – whether the UK grew as a buyer of academic information last year.
Over 50 years ago I secured a vacation job at Gallup Poll to keep a penurious student going. After a frustrating first day I returned to the office and asked my controller whether anyone ever told the truth to pollsters, or had I encountered an unrepresentative sample of London liars. He thought, and replied “Well, the polls that derive from these interviews are surprisingly accurate – if you allow for a statistical error rate of 5% either side of the result” Quite.
Mar
6
The Media Regeneration Game
Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, social media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
The last two days at Digital Media Strategies (Kings Place, London, 4-5 March 2014) have been amongst the best that I have spent in a conference hall in a decade. And I have wide experience to call upon! But Neil Thackray and Rory Brown and their team at the Media Briefing company pulled out all the stops to advance the game on their inaugural effort last year, and in the process pulled over 340 delegates and some first class “big names” and an even better class of “previously unknowns” from this diverse industry. And they really set me thinking: where were all these newspaper bosses and magazine tycoons during the long years when “it will never happen here” was the rule. Some still looked a bit nervous – Simon Fox, CEO of Trinity Mirror, caught in the headlights of a tigerish interrogation from Thackray, looked as if he were about to confess to war crimes at HMV and indecent assault on “The People”, but most of his colleagues were self-assured to the point of near-arrogance.
That at least could be an explanation of Mike Darcey, the News Corp CEO and his decision to spend 8 minutes of his own allotted time taking apart what he fancied to be the strategy of the next speaker, Andrew Miller, CEO, The Guardian Media Group. At least this precluded further dwelling upon the comparative failure of paywalls and the comparative lack of impact of digital advertising. And it enabled everyone to say that they were faithfully following the user experience. Yet it had the odd effect of making News Corp into a sort of John the Baptist warm up act for the Guardian, to which one felt that Andrew Miller responded by indicating that he had a better plan, but not revealing fully what he had up his sleeve. To those in the audience inured to the media having no plan at all, this was a tonic. At the moment the Guardian seems to be a connectivity junkie, rightly glorying in its content re-use and the amount of referral traffic it gets, celebrating its brand positioning as a global voice of liberal values and trying to draw the advertising it can get on this pitch. But I get an underlying feeling that they know that advertising is not the answer, and the room sat up when the topic turned to Guardian Membership.
Clearly if the Guardian can monetize its community effectively then it may be possible to get millions of people to subscribe to its values and buy into aspects of its content feed. Andrew Miller showed a picture of C P Scott and laid tributes before the lares and penates of great journalism, as indeed he should (and neither he nor I care that Edward Snowden appears to be a right wing Republican with a wholly eighteenth century view of the rights of the individual). However, if you have large populations of like-minded people with a strong community ethic then you can create – Guardian (Eye)witness. I well remember, while chairing Fish4, the frustration of the regional press competing with Mr Miller as he distributed free AutoTrader software to every used car dealer, enabling them to organize their inventory and upload easily – to AutoTrader. As a Guardian Member will I get the equivalent, thus broadening the scope (and reducing the cost?) of Great Journalism. Too early to say it yet, perhaps ? The editors would be talking quality control and the journos would be talking to the National Union of Journalists, but…
But at least we are all talking now. As a digital participant from 1980 and an internet – watcher from 1993, I am interested by how much of the industry response was fear and loathing. Hearst, at this conference a great example of digital thinking, spent the early years of the internet buying medical databases and B2B applications. Brilliant purchases, but what did they say about management’s view of their existing media futures? In the same terms, DMGT has turned itself in these time periods from being a newspaper company into a B2B player. No harm in that, but could earlier action have preserved the original structures. Or maybe the media is best re-invented not by its current practitioners but buy complete outsiders – great examples in this conference from Buzzfeed and from Business Insider? And then, what do we make of what seems to be a very European trend at present – letting the staff who know the markets create and test the ideas for recreating media and beyond media services.
I had heard a little about Sanoma’s regenerative Accelerator programmes before, and so was full of anticipation when Lassi Kurkijarvi covered the stage with energy and enthusiasm. With both internal and external venture activity he had a lot to cover. It is now fairly common for media players to invest in start-ups and develop incubators (Reed Elsevier have been venture capital investors for a decade; Holtzbrinck have their seed corn funding and efforts like Macmillan Digital Science and Digital Education; Gruner und Jahr spoke of their activities here) but getting 150 employees into a boot camp and encouraging ideation? Only for the Finns? Not at all, said Lassi. Here was a a planned process of open innovation starting with a mass kick off meeting, a webinar-based process, staff making quick pitches to get support for ideas, an initial selection of 20, crowd sourced selection of 5 for a boot camp experience and the result is 3 ideas which the company is now developing. So look out for Spot-a-shop, Huge or ClipScool – they did not come from Silicon Valley or Tech City, Old Street, but they may be none the less valuable as they express the knowledge of customers built up within a diversified media conglomerate like Sanoma.
So what does this mean? That media corporations can be regenerated from within? What would we have given to know that in 1993!
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