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!
Feb
18
Waving And Drowning
Filed Under Blog, data analytics, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized | 2 Comments
From the seashore the poet could not be sure if she saw waving or drowning. And so it is with nations, if you are a London correspondent of the New York Times (16 February: Roger Cohen/Intelligence): “It is not difficult these days to imagine Britain as a flooded speck of land bobbing around in the North Sea, reduced to rump status by the secession of Scotland, cut off from Europe by its exit from the European Union, ruled by a bunch of Old Etonians squabbling over how to dredge a river, plagued by officials issuing frantic edicts on “health and safety” and criss-crossed by a barmy prince declaring that “there is nothing like a jolly good disaster to get people to start doing something.””
Yet appearances are deceptive. This land is flooded, but all the other statements in this quotation contain truth, or are aspects of truth, but none are absolute truths. Yet what has been written is perfectly valid. And I was thinking of angles and aspects of the truth when studying the mass media as I have done since Marshall McCluhan identified them for my generation) when this week a wise friend in the US sent me this idea (https://medium.com/p/e7ed95079a43) “There are in fact no masses,” said sociologist Raymond Williams, “there are only ways of seeing people as masses.”
So I was well-prepared for this week’s new battle ground – how big is self-publishing and how much of a threat is it to the natural order of things (e.g will it displace publishers from the top of the heap)? The big story of the week was Hugh Howey’s assertion that most fiction publishing is now digital self-publishing. And as the dams burst on blogs and innocents were drowned in a millrace of speculation and accusation on self-publishing, I took comfort in that old (and now electronic) stand-by, The Times Literary Supplement (13 February), whose NB column records “Self-publishing has a rich past, as well as a digitally-enhanced and off-puttingly successful future. “The past is represented, says the TLS, by Proust, Blake, Walt Whitman, Jane Austen, Beatrix Potter and Stephen King, but it turns out that the only target here is the unfortunate Ms Debbie Williams (no relation?) who has had the temerity to launch what they describe as the world’s first MA in Self-Publishing at the University of Central Lancashire. And if this claim is wrong, tell them, not me.
I am sure that they see things differently in the USA. It all depends where you are sitting. Self publishers buried blogger and self-publisher Hugh Howey last week in accolades, praising his research into statistics derived from Amazon on the proportion of eBooks self-published in popular fiction genres. Here is a pleasing sample:
“There’s a second and equally important reason to doubt a 25% e-book penetration number: The other 75% of those titles includes textbooks, academic books, cookbooks, children’s books, and all the many categories that are relatively safe from digitization (for now). Print remains healthy in these categories, but these aren’t the books most people think of when they hear that percentage quoted. E-book market share is generally spoken of in the context of the New York Times bestsellers, the novels and non-fiction works that are referred to as “trade” publications. If we look specifically at this trade market, it’s quite likely that e-books already account for more than 50% of current sales (some publishers have intimated as much). Factoring in self-publishing and further limiting the scope to fiction, I’ve seen guesses as high as 70%. But that can’t be possible, right?…
“Did the smelling salts work? Are you with us? It turns out that 86% of the top 2,500 genre fiction bestsellers in the overall Amazon store are e-books. At the top of the charts, the dominance of e-books is even more extreme. 92% of the Top-100 best-selling books in these genres are e-books!”
So at the heart of this is an argument that states that when publishers say that the market is 25% eBooks, they are grossly misstating the position, since they are not counting self-published eBooks who account for the difference between the 25% that publishers acknowledge and the higher figures that Mr Howey discovers in his Amazon data dump. Please go and get the full story at http://authorearnings.com/the-report/ – the report is long, but the effort is worth it, if only to enable an appreciation of the publisher backlash, which starts with the politics of dispute – the man knows nothing of statistics – and ends with the politics of envy – how dare he speak so when his own self-publishing is backed by movie contracts!
For the fight back against the Howey Heresies see http://boingboing.net/2014/02/13/self-published-ebooks-the-sur.html and http://dearauthor.com/ebooks/how-not-to-lie-with-statistics/. Like the author of the latter, I too have “no dog in this hunt”. But I have heard hunts like this before, some baying sonorously and some anxiously in pursuit of an inadequate argument. Mr Howey’s samples are probably too small, his arguments too far-reaching and his data source too limited. But he has put his head above the parapet to say that traditional publishing business models are threatened and that the publishing value position, in mass market popular fiction, is being disintermediated. A few weeks ago I made similar comments here about the rise of self-publishing of academic research articles. And having observed the impact of the network – global scale inter-networking on the level that we now know it – I have to say that it twists every business model out of shape, flows around obstacles like flood waters and leaves few real world players of the previous generation intact. Mr Howey may be wrong on current measurements, but he is almost certainly right on direction of flow and eventual outcome.
Lets step back a bit and put ourselves in the position of confidential and trusted advisors to Rupert Murdoch, or Arnaud Lagadere or Dr Thomas Rabe (interestingly not a native born American in sight when it comes to the ultimate decisions on global consumer book publishing). Can Harper Collins, Hachette and Random House continue for ever on the Big Bestseller model? Will the agents let them? Will the stance of Amazon be decisive? Will initial publishing be self-publishing – and will consumer publishing be selecting already published winners to be groomed for stardom? Will social media be the marketplace and will advertising/sponsorship be part of the business model? We have already had Amanda Hockings and Fifty Shades – how many signs in the night sky do we need? Above all, can the big players re-invent – not transition/migrate – themselves in alignment with this new world. If the answers are negative, then should we advise these managers of assets to re-invest in consumer publishing in their current major holdings?
There are other games to be played, as the Netflix/Game of Thrones story in a parallel entertainment market shows us. Perhaps we should stop criticizing Mr Howey’s statistics and start fundamentally re-thinking what all of this means for a global networked society which shows interesting signs of reading more, by all measures of that word, each year.
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