Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley made the following presentation at a recent meeting of technology wizards and gurus. (Notably she got the name of the event wrong; it’s the CN Summit.)
There’s a breadth of information here, ranging from adoption of mobile technologies to the potential for mobile advertising to the investment outlook for companies in the business.
The big takeaway for me is how it underscores the increasingly reasonable-sounding claims that mobile computing will change how we think about computing; and, no less, how important it is for media companies of all sizes to recapture their audiences on the small screen.
For those – and there are many – who say the iPad won’t save publishing, here is evidence that the Little Tablet that Could might be more powerful than they expected.
Ordinarily slower than honey from the fridge, the audit bureau’s speed to provide meaningful data across the fast-emerging new-media platforms speaks to the urgency of its customers. The data means media will be able to sell advertising for new online formats almost as fast as they develop. That alone will hasten the already hurried development of unique offerings for smart phones, mobile websites and the iPad (as well as the fleet of act-alike products that others will inevitably produce).
It’s important because it’s a stay of execution for the advertising-based business model on which virtually all media rely but which has so far resisted the digital transition.
Why give the iPad credit for this? Since its introduction just a month ago, the conversation about mobile media has changed dramatically – as have reader habits. Powered by the app, consumers are suddenly willing to buy subscriptions for online content, Google has been declared a declining power in big media’s pursuit of traffic, and at least one of the major audit bureaus has been shaken to innovate. All because iPad provides a different user experience than any previous device.
I’m not ready to declare that the iPad is going to save publishing-as-we-know-it. But I’m pretty sure it will be right in the middle of publishing-as-it-comes-to-be.
I did an interview for Ourblook on citizen journalism. It outlines where citizen journalism works and where it probably won’t, highlights some drawbacks of working with citizen journalists and provides one clear success factor: training and support.
At the beginning of January, I wrote a hopeful post about the coming introduction of what we now know to be the Apple iPad.
On re-reading it, I’m glad to say I was appropriately not giddy. I simply said the new device, if it met expectations, could provide a strong enough platform that media would use it to begin their evolution toward a digital-only era, which is essentially inevitable. (Essentially, because I don’t believe print will go away completely. But it will become a niche solution with fewer players and more limited application).
As the print media watch their business model melt down, they desperately need something that allows them to translate their work into an electronic format. Computer screens and e-zine platforms don’t do it. Hand-held devices don’t do it.
Will the iPad? Maybe. The device looks pretty cool. Myself, I’d be excited to use what is essentially a magazine-sized iPod Touch as a reading device. It’s far more compelling to me than the limited e-book readers like the Kindle. (Some of my most gadget-oriented acquaintances are already dumping their book-reading devices – not in anticipation of the iPad, but because they don’t want to use them anymore.)
Most entertaining to me has been watching the different media report on the iPad’s big reveal. The print media have been agog and amazed. They have, if anything, let their financial needs show from under their skirts. The print media is so giddy about the device that it has probably overplayed its importance.
My favorite lead, from the L.A. Times referred to the iPad as “the most anticipated tablet since Moses’.”
But broadcast reports tell me those folks don’t get it. They are announcing the iPad as if it’s just another gadget. One local pretty face actually said, “I don’t understand what the fuss is about. It seems like as soon as you get one gadget they come out with another that you have to buy.”
Oh, she gets it all right. Just like the average Joe, who neither cares nor understands that an entire industry is pinning its hopes on this thing.
It gives me a bit of a chill, because I’d like to see some real innovation by magazine publishers and newspaper publishers to utilize the full capabilities of a tablet like the iPad. I’d like to see something that brings a traditional magazine to a new level that’s closer to Facebook than 60 Minutes. But most people will just look at the price tag and ask, “Do I really need this?”
Absent some really good media products, I’m not really sure what the iPad is best for; it’s a really expensive e-book reader and not a replacement for a laptop computer. It’s a new category altogether and it demands new content. Or it won’t sell.
So, you print media types, get to work – and fast. If you don’t, the iPad could be deemed a failure before you ever get your chance. (Not that I’m betting against Apple.)
Which raises another concern: If the iPad costs $600-$1,000, and monthly service costs another $30, how much is a subscription to Newsweek, People, Vanity Fair or Playboy going to cost?
Will people pay for a reader and monthly service knowing that what they’ve really done is spent all that money just to enable them to pay for more content? And what about all that other media we all buy: cable TV, smart phones, Netflix, Satellite radio…
How much media will people pay for.
Thinking about it, as curious as I am about the iPad, I’m about tapped out. Unless it can replace something else I’m already paying for, I can’t afford to lead the print-consuming audience to its new online Shangri-La.
For what it’s worth, here are some other takes on the iPad:
Editor & Publisher – was shuttered in December by its owner, Nielsen Business Media – has been sold and will continue to publish, according to a report by Folio: magazine. E&P is more than 100 years old, and has been the leading trade publication of the newspaper industry for most, if not all, of its history. Its demise was a blow to the gut to journalists everywhere, who for the last few years have watched the apparent meltdown of their industry’s fundamental business model.
The new owner is Duncan McIntosh Co. Inc., based in Irvine, CA – a white knight that rides in, not on a horse but on a powerboat. Duncan McIntosh is a consumer marine media company whose properties include Sea Magazine, The Log newspaper and, most notably, Boating World.
There’s no deeper meaning to this. It’s just nice to write about a company that sees the value in a storied brand, tradition and a franchise that serves the media industry. No surprise that the company isn’t one of the diversified media giants, for which earnings multiples are the only meaningful metric.
I call them e-book people; they’re publishing types who see a big future for media distribution – not just books, but also magazines and newspapers – through e-readers and tablet devices.
They include folks I know pretty well, like David Nussbaum of F+W Media (the consumer-special-interest giant that touches people who are into anything from creative writing to geneology to knitting or woodworking), to folks I know only by reputation, like Alan Meckler of WebMediaBrands (events and online communities surrounding media and technology).
They’ve been building excitement for months, maybe longer, over the prospect that Apple will eventually come out with a category-smashing tablet that puts Amazon’s market-leading Kindle e-reader to pasture.
Based on the recent press (like this, from the NJ Star Ledger), it appears as if it’s finally about to happen. And not only should the folks behind the Kindle and other first-generation e-readers be scared, but newspaper and magazine executives should rejoice. This is the vehicle that could finally direct them down a clear path toward the future.
The problem with current e-readers is that they’re good for text and not much else. They don’t handle graphics well, so they aren’t useful for technical books or anything with color pictures. E-readers, as they currently exist, are basically good for best-selling books. They’re a single-application device, and the next-generation unit – whether it comes from Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Google or anyone else – will do to them what the Palm Pilot did for the Apple Newton.
Which is the long way of getting to the real point: When the tablet PCs start to come out, newspapers and magazines will have a great opportunity to try and reinvigorate their existing business model, or to build on the more obvious business model that they simply have to make work.
The old business model is advertising, and the high-touch interactivity that a tablet PC could offer advertisers might be enough to entice them back to the traditional media marketplace. I’m sure it eventually will help to flatten out the downward trend for print advertising revenue. But I don’t believe it will ever halt the juggernuat of advertisers who seek to aggregate their own audiences and produce their own content – which is what the new age of marketing is all about.
But the new business model has more hope. That’s the one in which people actually pay for the content they use. It’s the only obvious next place for media to go. But up to now, there hasn’t been a vehicle that presents print media better than the existing hard-copy formats of magazines and newspapers. Those are so expensive to produce that, without growing advertiser support, there has been no hope of shifting their full cost to consumers.
Can the tablet change that? Not in a hurry. But here’s what it CAN do:
It can give publishers a medium that is powerful enough for them to create something new – something that extends beyond the boundaries of the newspapers and magazines they already produce.
This goes back to the old Marshall McLuhan quote, “The medium is the message.” Up to now, solutions like e-zine interfaces have simply been an attempt to push old messages into a new medium. The mismatch has been underwhelming at best.
But the tablet can create a new message – a new set of boundaries for old print media companies to create electronic-only products that generate real excitement among consumers. The kind of excitement people pay for.
For example, check out this proof-of-concept video from Sports Illustrated:
If products like this really come around, I’d pay three or four times what I do now for a magazine subscription. Would that cover the cost of generating the content? It’s a question for the market to handle. But if it also arrested the decline in advertising revenue, there might actually be a business in this.
This isn’t a short-term solution. Tablet prices will start out too high for any publication to convert a meaningful number of subscribers. And ad revenue won’t follow until that changes.
And it will take years of education before consumers understand why tablet-based publications are the future of media. Just consider some of the comments that people left after viewing SI’s video:
There are probably many kids here that think this is wonderful but i am not sure if they have the capacity to think! What will most likely happen is that the selling price (books, magazines, etc) will not reflect the savings and? they will be able to control what you have on your device and how long you have it for. This is not good for the consumer. It is not a good idea that content providers decide how you have access to information (be they Apple Microsoft or Google).
Do I need another electronic product to add to my cumbersome life?
How? many other things you have to carry around with you 24/7 to keep you up-to-date?
I don’t see the point of this. Nobody is going to buy this thing just to read e-magazines. Why not just load the …damn website? Seems like people are desperate to save print-based magazines. Make this smaller, like the Kindle, and strip away all this excess so it reads books. Then I’ll consider.
OK, so people don’t get it yet. And they aren’t ready to pay for a digital subscription. But as more and more magazines disappear, and more innovators build great content for tablets, the correct path for media will begin to unfold.
E&P was such an institution – it’s been around since 1901, but existed under a different title since 1884 – that it’s hard to imagine a media world in which it doesn’t exist. That’s why it’s closing is so surprising.
On the other hand, The Nielson Co. had been trying to sell its media publications group, including E&P, Adweek, Brandweek, Mediaweek, Backstage, Billboard, Film Journal International and The Hollywood Reporter. Most of the group was just sold; E&P was not included in the deal.
I don’t know anything about E&P’s finances, but you don’t need an MBA to understand what that means.
Trade books that cover the media industry are chronically short on advertisers. They all live a subsistence existence. E&P’s folio has been razor thin since I first saw it in the early ’80s.
If E&P ever made good money (high margins), it never made big money. And in times of recession, small-money magazines do worst in the effort to maintain their margins.
I’m sure E&P is in the red, and that any forecast in which it could become proftable again doesn’t deliver enough earnings to justify the turnaround project.
And with the dire condition of many newspapers, E&P’s expiration is a symbolic event that was probably inevitable.
In that context, that E&P should die broke and alone isn’t a surprise at all.
I’m sorry to see it go, and feel for everyone on the staff. It was a great institution right up until the end.
If this were April 1, I’d write it off as a joke. But this close to Christmas, it might be a sign of the Second Coming.
The Dallas Morning News has reorganized; the people who generate editorial now report to people who sell ads.
Under the plan, editors of sports, real estate, entertainment, auto and travel now report to sales managers – who have been given a new title: General Manager.
In The Dallas Observer, a news blog, the extensive report includes an interview with Editor Bob Mong – who has been given a new title: Pimp.
In that interview, he told The Dallas Observer: “There’s no journalist in our organization who will allow a business person to cross the line. It just won’t happen. I’m not going to allow it to happen. [Managing editor] George [Rodrigue] isn’t. [Executive sports editor] Bob Yates or [Lifestyles deputy managing editor] Lisa Kresl won’t. But I think it’s an attempt to go to market in a different way.”
Look, I know times are tough for newspapers; I’ve written about little else since I started this blog. And coming from the B2B world, where editors are expected to be as rigid as Silly Putty, I know it’s possible to operate on the up-and-up without a huge barrier between sales and edit.
But perception is reality. And it’s already near-impossible for newspapers to operate without the perception that their coverage has been bought. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t strengthen the paper’s case when editors get their annual reviews from sales managers. The reality is that journalists have always had the dominant voice in newspaper decisions. That needs to change; the voices of journalists and advertising folks need to be heard together. In a 167-year-old institution, I don’t think you can achieve that by simply turning it upside-down and saying, “OK, the ad guys are in charge.”
If advertisers think there’s a chance they can influence editorial decisions, then that’s what they’ll try to do. And when a news executive puts himself in the position of saying, George Rodrigue would never let anything like that happen, he’s one unforeseen circumstance away from becoming a liar. It’s an untenable position.
Further, I don’t believe this kind of change addresses the real problem that newspapers are having. They aren’t losing ad revenue because advertisers have suddenly decided there’s something wrong with the product. They’re losing it because advertisers have decided there’s something wrong with the medium.
You can’t directly measure the full response to a print ad, and advertisers now live in a culture where everything can and must be measured. They’re spending more money online, and the funding for those initiatives has to come from somehwere. It comes from print.
If anybody should know this already, it would be the DMN’s advertising staff, which is in constant contact with its customers. But instead of taking on the real issue of delivering advertising response, they’re going to try to satisfy advertisers through more interaction with the content side of the business. So they, just like the journalists, are in denial. They’re going to fix the wrong thing, and I suspect they’re going to do it poorly.
It’s true: Newspapers have to reinvent themselves. But this isn’t reinvention. It’s not innovative. It’s not courageous. And it’s not the prelude to a long and prosperous future. It’s rolling over and submitting. It’s giving up.
Seth Godin is one of my favorite bloggers, and I quote him regularly. He’s been a source of clear thinking and wisdom for me since long before blogs existed.
But in today’s blog, he writes about News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch’s idea to control how news content is indexed on web sites. He got it wrong. He writes, in entirety (and you’ve got to admire Godin’s brevity):
Rupert Murdoch has it backwards
You don’t charge the search engines to send people to articles on your site, you pay them.
If you can’t make money from attention, you should do something else for a living. Charging money for attention gets you neither money nor attention.
If Murdoch were just another blogger, or just another guy with another product to shill, I would agree with Godin. But Murdoch owns one of the largest news-gathering organizations in the world. And here’s the point that Godin misses:
When search engines index vast troves of original content, such as Murdoch’s News Corp., the impact is synergistic:
It drives traffic to News Corp.;
It provides the kind of top-of-the-charts, original content that makes a search engine valuable;
It provides a large class of users with the kind of content they’re seeking.
Here’s the nuance; there is less and less original content of the kind that News Corp. produces. Anyone who has ever used the Web has had the experience of following one good link after another to find they’re all connected to the same piece of mediocre content. The money dedicated to generating high-quality content has evaporated; it’s down by more than $1.5 billion in the U.S. newspaper business alone – not to mention all the other businesses that pay content providers to create information that people want and need.
So anyone who wants this kind of content to continue, must make some kind of investment in it.
When search engines index to content like that provided by Murdoch’s company, they profit by selling sponsored search results in the space around it.
But the news organizations’ only means of profit from this activity is to sell advertising around the content. But advertising isn’t selling – nor is it expected to significantly recover. Further, a portion of the money that marketers no longer spend to advertise in newspapers and magazines has been reallocated to the paid search function of search engines.
So why shouldn’t they pay for the right to index high-end content?
The attention that search engines generate is doing less and less good for newspapers and other free-content websites. If News Corp. can’t sell ads around its content, it has no reason to care if search engines promote the content.
So Godin has it wrong. He supposes that news media get the larger share of value in their relationship with search engines. In fact, to the consternation of anyone in the news business, it’s the other way around.
Further, the search engines may be able to extract even more value. Right now, one search engine is much like another. But if one could brag that it’s the only search engine to index the world’s largest news generators, that might make a difference to consumers. I know it would to me.
I don’t know if even Rupert Murdoch has the juice to take on Google. But he may be able to set the big search engines against each other. I don’t know if he’ll succeed in getting paid by one search engine and in locking out the rest. But to me, like it or not, it sounds like the kind of clash that isn’t likely to go away without creating some kind of change that affects everyone.
A study by Boston Consulting Group indicates people are increasingly willing to pay for local and national news delivered to their mobile devices.
On average, according to the study, the price would have to top out at about $3 a month, which admittedly isn’t much. But it offers two strong points of optimism:
People are willing to pay SOMETHING for what was previously assumed to be of no commercial value.
$3 a month, for a product that no longer has the production or distribution cost of a printed product, is worth far more in the way of earnings than it would be for a traditional media product.
No, this isn’t proof that consumers will pay the full cost of journalism. But does demonstrate that they are aware of the pressure that traditional media models are under as advertising revenue continues to erode; and that they are warming up to being part of the solution.
For those – and there are many – who say the iPad won’t save publishing, here is evidence that the Little Tablet that Could might be more powerful than they expected.
I did an interview for Ourblook on citizen journalism. It outlines where citizen journalism works and where it probably won’t, highlights some drawbacks of working with citizen journalists and provides one clear success factor: training and support.
At the beginning of January, I wrote
Add another surprise that’s not a surprise to the long list of publications that died in 2009: 
imes are tough for newspapers; I’ve written about little else since I started this blog. And coming from the B2B world, where editors are expected to be as rigid as Silly Putty, I know it’s possible to operate on the up-and-up without a huge barrier between sales and edit.