Media transformation 4
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The document discusses the decline of traditional media and the rise of digital media. It notes that magazine and newspaper sales and viewership of television news have significantly decreased as people spend more time consuming online content. This has challenged traditional media business models that rely on advertising revenue. Younger generations in particular are shifting away from traditional media sources and curating their own news and content online instead. The document examines some of the issues facing online advertising models and discusses how media companies are attempting to adapt by moving content online and creating new digital business strategies.
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Media transformation 4
- 1. Time waits for no man …particularly media proprietors and their audience © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 2. © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 3. Australian magazine sales record of 1.4 million copies That was then! © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 4. © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 5. 1988: 80,000 copies per week ―The plan now is for BRW to exist online... we are smashing our digital advertising revenue.‖ Amanda GomePublisher, BRW, SmartInvestor, Asset at Fairfax Media © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au 2013: 33,900 copies per week
- 6. It’s no secret to anyone in the media business that magazines have been an increasingly challenged platform.” Allen Williams, Managing Director - Australian Publishing Media at Fairfax Media © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 7. ―The decision to close a title is never easy … Madison to continue was no longer a commercially viable option. Matthew Stanton, CEO, Bauer Media © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 8. Digital only from December "It is a natural part of our evolution" Richard Meade, editor © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 9. Only about a third (34%) of those younger than 30 say they watched TV news. In 2006, nearly half of young people (49%) said they watched TV news. © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 10. Australians are consuming significantly less traditional media and replacing it with their own personally curated news and content. SMH receives only 5% of the traffic that Facebook garners © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 11. © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 12. It’s also a matter of time… © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 13. Advertising crisis on the Internet too 1994: 78% CTR 2011(FB) 0.05% CTR © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 14. Generational gap in receptiveness to advertising online © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 15. Source: PageFair Ltd 2013 © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 16. All built on advertising dollars. Are facing higher traffic but lower revenues © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 17. Adtech Fraud • • • • • • Publishers buy traffic from dubious sources so their numbers look better. Ad networks offer inventory from publishers that no one has ever heard of. Botnets click on everything, juicing the numbers. And ads are served in places where even legit consumers can’t see them — ―below the fold‖ of the screen they’re looking at, or in ―pop-unders‖ that appear behind their screens. Ad agency trading desks fail to report to their clients how much bogus inventory they’re buying. And clients don’t seem to care that their money is being wasted because the campaigns appear to be performing well — look at all those clicks! As much as $7 million/month wasted on adtech fraud © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 18. Brands are setting up their own private trading desks so they can retain the data and plough it back into their CRM systems. © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 19. An Internet Hour In Australia Internet users spend 14 minutes on social sites, 9 minutes on entertainment and 4 minutes each shopping online and checking out news. © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 20. Source: Reuters Institute © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 21. Source: Reuters Institute © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 22. Source: Reuters Institute © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 23. People pay for entertainment - not news 700,000 digital subscribers © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au 29 million digital subscribers
- 24. If you own a TV station, you are in the same position as a newspaper. There will be other ways to watch content and you’re going to be very challenged. © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 25. © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 26. ―The gap between what consumers want and the way the industry is delivering it has grown so big that the industry now has to start to make some moves.‖ Jim Nail, Forrester Research analyst © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 27. More digital media than TV in 2013 © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 28. © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 29. © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 30. There is a lot more to do before television companies meet consumer demand and create the new business model they need to profit from Internet-driven change. © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 31. What’s next? © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 32. Marc Andreessen advice for old media companies: BURN THE BOATS! © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 33. In one of the first instances of a commercial network providing Australians with a streaming option worthy of use – Ten is offering Homeland for streaming 15 minutes after it begins on America's west coast. © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 34. ―We don’t pretend that we can make people eat their vegetables when there’s potato chips on the table but we want to provide an alternative for those who want some diversity in their diet.‖ © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 35. Brands are seeing success with Flipboard’s custom magazines: The company says that between 10% - 20% of users who click on a brand’s magazine actually end up subscribing to it. © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 36. Can Prismatic fill the role of a digital newspaper — filtering and highlighting interesting content? © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 37. Pinterest is a company whose product has really hit a core consumer use case © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 38. © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 39. © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au
- 40. CONTACT US 95 Nicholson Street St Leonards NSW 2065 www.hothouse.com.au Tel: 02 9432 3600 © HotHouse Interactive 2013 | www.hothouse.com.au SIMON VAN WYK Founder simonvw@hothouse.com.au 02 9436 3600 0417 482 548
Editor's Notes
- Tick, tick, tick,We only have a finite number of hours in a day.24 hours today, yesterday, tomorrow.This is not a new thing.It’s been the same since time began – well since Hipparchus proposed dividing the day equally into 24 hours which came to be known as equinoctial hours.So the Internet hasn’t changed the numbers of hours in a day.But life has more time pressures on us and the Internet has made so many things much quicker for us to do.Things like accessing the media.When we want the latest news we’ll go online and snack on the headlines – who needs to wait for the evening news?When we want the latest sports Cricket score – we don’t need to tune into the radio.When we want the latest showbiz gos, we don’t need to buy a magazineWe can easily and quickly access all the latest headlines and content from across the planet instantly from our favourite sites on our favourite devices no matter where we are, no matter what the time.
- Back in the old days when there were no blogs, Twitter, Facebook and Google+ etc. one of the first places we turned to for information was Print Magazines. Nene King oversaw Woman’s Day selling 1.4 million copies a week.If we wanted to learn about Computers, there were magazines like PC Magazine, PC World, Mac World and all. If we wanted to learn more about finance, world news and entrepreneurship etc. there were print magazines like BRW, The Bulletin, Money, TIME, Inc. and Fast Company etc.But now there are millions of blogs, forums and other social networks where billions of articles are shared everyday on various topics. Blog posts are generally more up to date with latest information than the Print Magazines. In the old days, print magazines had their purpose, But these days – it’s hard to justify that purpose.
- And mass audiences of old have fragmented into multiple micro audiences.I’m going to start today by looking a Magazines.On the 31 December last year, Newsweek, the venerable US current affairs magazine published its last print edition, after close to 80 years on the newsstand.As you can see, a black and white shot of Newsweek’s Manhattan office building adorned the cover of the last print edition, with a Twitter hashtag, #lastprintissue emblazoned across the front.It was a fitting farewell. The magazine is transitioning to an online-only format driven of course by shrinking advertising revenues, and an audience that has shifted online.A lifetime ago, few expenses were spared in the name of magazine journalism.Deploying reporters on an assignment for a story that wouldn’t be published for some time was the way in which Newsweek—and other news - went about creating exclusive and exciting must read stories.But the world changed. A younger generation of news consumers were growing accustomed to the free-for-the-taking ethos that permeated the Internet. As editors the world over fretted over declining ad sales – the writing was on the wall.The magazine would become “a brochure” for the website. But printed material requires a complex distribution model. Printing presses and distribution are expensive. Without the advertising revenue they become commercially unviable.
- Of course you must have all heard the news that Fairfax Media is closing the print edition of BRW magazine after 32 years.BRW’s glory days are far in the past. The magazine that was founded as Business Review Weekly by Robert Gottliebsen in 1981 hit its sales peak of about 80,000 copies a week in March 1988.Its average sales were just 33,900 copies a week in the three months to June, down more than 17% on the same quarter last year.In recent years the magazine was kept afloat by its special editions, of which its annual The Rich 200 list was by far its biggest-selling. It is estimated the issue sells as much as triple the magazine's weekly average.However, even The Rich 200 issue looked thin last year at 130 pages, compared with 219 pages for its bumper 2008 edition, with the lack of advertiser support raising fears over the magazine's long-term prognosis.Fairfax will be publishing their ists out through the AFR.Flagship lists like The Rich List, Young Rich, etc will now reach a wider audience through the AFR and where applicable also through the SMH and The Age.The last issue of the weekly business magazine will be published on November 28.
- The news of BRW’s final print run came just a week or so after Fairfax announced the closure of the Sydney and Melbourne MagazinesIn an email to staff, Allen Williams, managing director of Fairfax's Australian Publishing Media, outlined the further "work being done to transform the Australian Publishing Media (APM) division".It’s all aboutnew efficiencies and remove duplication.APM will also change its separate quarterly magazine, Financial Review Capital, to a quarterly newspaper section.In their day, the two magazines had been lucrative advertising vehicles.However the magazines have thinned recently and Williams noted in his email: "It's no secret to anyone in the media business that magazines have been an increasingly challenged platform."The Sydney/Melbourne titles have been great magazines, but it makes commercial sense to make these changes."
- In the digital world, magazines have changed. Now they’re just not relevant anymore. Not compared to the power and influence they once wielded.People can find all this information in thousands of online blogs, websites, content aggregators.To survive, printed publications will become online-only, fortified with robust internet-age business models.Just consider the huge number of magazine closures - all these glossies have folded in the past 12 months or so.Bauer Media CEO Matthew Stanton said: ''The decision to close a title is never easy but after recent and lengthy discussions with our joint venture partner, Hearst Magazines International, the conclusion was sadly drawn that for Madison to continue was no longer a commercially viable option.As for the three that are still being published – you could say that they are on life support and I dare say are being closely reviewed.Your figures from August I think show:Zoo Weekly is down from 100,500 to 47,000Cosmopolitan, down from 151,000 to 98,000Australian Geographic, down from 126,000 to 79,000
- Just like Encyclopaedia Britannica, which made its online-only move last year, many more companies will announce the end of the production of print editions in favour of strictly online versions. It’s the start of a new era. Even the world's longest running newspaper will cease printing and go digital only from December.Lloyd’s List, that began life as just a notice pinned to the wall of a London coffee house in 1734, has since inception been considered the bible for the shipping industry on the comings and goings of vessels.But the publication, known as The List, will print its last publication this December after a survey found it had only 25 customers still wanting its print edition.Instead, readers and subscribers had moved to its suite of digital offerings including a website and apps for smart phones and tablets.
- Of course, the same is true for newspapers.The problem for newspapers and magazines is that in the days of print, a newspaper or a magazine controlled a valuable distribution channel -- its printing presses and delivery vans. People would pay a lot of money to use that distribution channel to spread news about their products and services. They owned “the pipes.”In the past, control over distribution was the primary driver of the media model. But these days all traditional media companies have is the news.Google and Facebook now sell a lot of ads because they are the mechanism by which we access information. Looking at US data from the Pew Research Center, the transformation of America’s news landscape has already taken a heavy toll on print news sources, particularly print newspapers. But there are now signs that television news – which so far has held onto its audience through the rise of the internet – also is increasingly vulnerable, as it may be losing its hold on the next generation of news consumers.Meanwhile, online and digital news consumption continues to increase, with many more people now getting news on smartphones, tablets or other mobile platforms. And perhaps the most dramatic change in the news environment has been the rise of social networking sites. The percentage of Americans saying they saw news or news headlines on a social networking site has doubled – from 9% to 19% – since 2010. Among adults younger than age 30, as many saw news on a social networking site (33%) as saw any television news (34%), with just 13% having read a newspaper either in print or digital form.
- This bears out in Australia.Over here, figures published by Hitwise on the number of visits to the top social media sites for the week to 5 October 2013 look like this:Facebook almost 125 millionGoogle mover 120 millionYouTube more than 70 millionCompare this with their data on visits to the top media sites over the same period:The top rating news website – The Sydney Morning Herald (discounting BOM) – gets just 5% of the traffic that Facebook enjoys.
- And this is why this has happened.Sometime in the mid-1990s, the Web began to erode news media’s most commercial elements, essentially the editorial sections against which advertisements could be reliably sold. Coverage of sports, business and market news, entertainment and culture, gossip, shopping, and travel still ran in daily newspapers, but the audience steadily shifted to Web sources for this sort of news because it was more convenient, more accessible, less expensive.In addition to stealing the prized commercial content from newspapers, the Web has also ate the lucrative classified ads market, simultaneously reducing a newspaper’s status as the premier venue for content and advertising.Newspapers never made money from newsOf course traditionally, newspapers made money from ads in the finance section, home and garden, automotive, entertainment, travel, classified and fashion sections. Why? Because that’s where advertisers could target readers interested in those subjects. But with all this editorial content available elsewhere - what sorts of ads can a newspaper show next to a “pure” news story on a petrol tanker crash in Sydney or chemical weapons in Syria? “Pure news” has very high social value to interested readers, but has low commercial value due to the difficulty of showing contextual relevant ads.The business model for the modern newspaper has been to show ads that are contextually related to commercial topics and to cross-subsidize the actual news production with this ad revenue. The problem is that nowadays there are many specialized websites about finance, home and garden, automobiles and so on, so it is much harder to make the cross subsidization model work.
- This is a screen shot of Hotwired.com circa 1994 - the first commercial digital magazine on the web and the offshoot of Wired magazine..And Oct. 27 marks the 19th anniversary of the industry's first banner display ads, which appeared on Hotwired.com. MCI ( a teleco), Volvo (automotive) and ClubMed (travel/hospitality) 1-800-Collect, AT&T and Zima took a leap of faith to place the first banner ads on Hotwired. Keep in mind, this was 1994; the first graphical web browser, Mosaic, was less than a year old (soon to be replaced by Netscape Explorer), and Web access wasdial-up, 24.4kps if you were lucky, meaning these ads took a while to load. At this time the online U.S. population was about 2 million.These "original six" were the first brands to take a leap of faith and place advertising in the unchartered "cyberspace" territory. Now let’s compare the average clickthrough rates of the banner ads that debuted on HotWired in 1994 versus Facebook in 2011:HotWired CTR, 1994: 78%Facebook CTR, 2011: 0.05%That’s a 1500X difference. While there are many factors that influence this difference, the basic premise is sound – the clickthrough rates of banner ads, email invites, and many other marketing channels on the web have decayed every year since they were invented.While advertising remains as the critical financial engine of the Internet – and everything from search engines to social media depends on a continuing stream of advertising revenue to survive and grow. ADVERTISING IS NOT WELL.Despite the best efforts of an industry, advertising is becoming less and less effective online. The once reliable fuel that powered a generation of innovations on the web is slowly, but perceptibly beginning to falter. Even if only a rough proxy, something underlies such a dramatic change in the ability for an advertisement to pique the interest of users online. What underlies this decline, and what does it mean for the Internet at large?This change has happened very quickly. Another model is rising hot on its heels.
- And for the perspective of advertising, not all users of the Internet are created equal. In acontrolled experiment this year on over a million customers to measure the causal effect of online advertising on sales. Researchers found that while customers “between the ages of 20 and 40 experienced little or no effect from the advertising...individuals aged 50 to 80 experience a sizable positive effect on sales.” Perhaps most notably, customers older than 65 years of age, despite constituting only 5% of the experimental group, were responsible for 40% of the total effect observed as a result of the advertising. This was in spite of the fact that younger customers were more likely to see retailer advertisements and also saw more advertisements by simple virtue of their heavier Internet usage. Researchers, however, found no statistically significant effect on purchase behavior for younger subjects.This experiment suggests that there may be a generational gap in receptiveness to advertising online. Ironically, the generation most identified as the “Internet generation” are some of its worst supporters from a purely financial point of view. As demographics shift over time, the overall effectiveness of online advertising will fall.
- Adblocking is threatening the business model of online publishers. In this report we present new data demonstrating that adblock is being rapidly adopted by consumers, and is becoming mainstream. Based on measurements taken from hundreds of websites over 11 months, we show that up to 30% of web visitors are blocking ads, and that the number of adblocking users is growing at an astonishing 43% per year.
- Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Twitter have created large companies, huge communities, and products and services beloved by hundreds of millions of people around the globe. As brands, they are extremely solid. But at the end of the day, despite all the talk of innovation,Plummeting digital advertising rates, and an environment of near-infinite page creation.Higher traffic and lower revenues means either that the price at which they are selling display ads is falling, or that it has less success selling them than it had in the past. Meanwhile, the price per ad that Yahoo! can charge has gone down 7 percent. Like every other internet company, Yahoo! is shifting aggressively to mobile. But that brings its own problems. Google and Facebook are better situated to leverage multiple platforms (like maps for Google) which increases the amount advertisers want to spend.There’s another problem with mobile. Advertisers aren’t convinced it works as a medium, and the small ads on small screens tend to command small prices. they all rely on the tough and unforgiving advertising market.
- And then there’s adtech fraud which looks like this: Publishers buy traffic from dubious sources so their numbers look better. Ad networks offer inventory from publishers that no one has ever heard of. Botnets click on everything, juicing the numbers. And ads are served in places where even legit consumers can’t see them — “below the fold” of the screen they’re looking at, or in “pop-unders” that appear behind their screens. Ad agency trading desks fail to report to their clients how much bogus inventory they’re buying. And clients don’t seem to care that their money is being wasted because the campaigns appear to be performing well — look at all those clicks! Estimates vary, but perhaps $7 million a month is wasted on adtech fraud.
- As the efficacy of online advertising plummets – and adtech fraud rises - advertisers are going to demand to pay less for that advertising. Rather than going through intermediaries like their advertising agency, they are going to keep all their data in house.Already some of the largest marketers in the world are fencing off their data. Brands like Unilever,Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark and Kellogg are all opting to keep their data and what they learn from using it to themselves rather than operate through their ad agencies.While agency holding companies have opened central trading desks to buy digital media for multiple clients based on common pools of consumer and media data, more clients are opting for private systems. One reason is expense -- data and insights cost considerably more on the open market than the actual media impressions -- and another is practicality. Tying up data and insights in a system owned by an agencycould essentially prevent marketers from ever changing shops because of the risk of losing access to the database and having to start from scratch.Unilever and Kimberly-Clark have moved to create their own standalone data-management platforms and trading desks, working with WPP's Mindshare but staying separate from WPP's centralized Xaxis trading desk.Procter & Gamble P&G launched Hawkeye, its in-house data-management and trading desk for digital ad buying.Kellogg Co. Kellogg’s also has brought its programmatic digital trading in-house.Given their global scale and investment in this space, there's so much that brands can learn say in the case of from one brand to the next in their repertoirejust by organizing the datain the right way.This new ad medium is driving efficiencies and scale AND putting considerable pressure on media buying agencies and the old way of doing things.The heightened competition between ad-tech firms and agencies is generating real market changes. It's pressuring individual agencies to reposition their strengths and reconsider the costs of their ad-tech offerings.
- Getting back to time….In research conducted by Experian Marketing Services, if the time spent on the Internet for personal computers was distilled into an hour then 27 percent of it would be spent on social networking and forums across US, UK and Australia. In the US, 16 minutes out of every hour online is spent on social networking and forums, nine minutes on entertainment sites and five minutes shopping.In Australia Internet users spend 14 minutes on social sites, nine on entertainment and four minutes shopping online.And four minutes on News. Believe it or not – we are heavy consumers of news compared with the American and the Brits.But heavy is just FOUR minutes.Offline news reading is a leisure time activity, online news reading is a labor time activitySo it’s also a matter of time…Newspaper readers from a bygone age used to spend an average of 25 minutes browsing through their newspaper.How are newspaper proprietors going to increase that four minutes to 25 in order to wrest back advertising dollars???Late-20th-century newspapers were extremely profitable because they had a lot of readers and the ability to charge a lot for each impression. Today, it's hard to make a profit in Internet news because there are so many news organizations competing for advertising dollars, reducing each publication's traffic share and pushing down the amount outlets can charge for each impression.Getting back to time = Subscribers to physical newspapers spend about 25 minutes a day reading them. The typical time spent on an online news site in the US and UK is about 2-4 minutes, roughly one-eighth as much. Interestingly, newspapers in the US make about one-eighth of their total ad revenue from online ads. If readers spent as much time reading the online content as the offline content, ad revenue from online content would be much closer to the offline revenue.But who’s got the time to spend 25 minutes reading online news content?What about a paywall.??What about ending all this free content and getting users to pay for the convenience of accessing quality news 24X7?
- Looking at some data from Reuters – there is some signs of hope for those investing in original news content. Reuters Institute surveyed a total of 11,000 people across nine countries about where they get their news and how they consume it. The upside for media proprietors is that the study shows that more people are paying for their news, particularly on tablets and phones.On the downside, it also confirms that the vast majority of readers aren’t paying and most say they likely never will.While paywalls and subscription plans can be part of a digital revenue strategy, but they are not a blanket solution to the problems of the news industry. At best, they will likely appeal to one-tenth of a news outlet’s readers or viewers, and while that revenue is going to help bridge some of the gap created by the decline of print advertising, it isn’t going to fill the gap completely.
- More data from ReutersOne other interesting aspect of the survey is the number of news consumers who literally don’t know where their news is coming from.Anywhere from 16 to 44 percent of those surveyed said they didn’t notice what sites they were looking at when they were reading the news — something that highlights the rise of social media and the increasing use of news aggregators. Which raises an additional problem: How are you going to get readers to pay for your content if they don’t even know where it’s coming from?News is becoming more mobile, more social, and more real-time. For traditional brands – and especially newspapers – these changes bring ever-greater competition and more disruption to business models.
- More data from ReutersThere are continuing shifts in how, when, and where people access the news, with digital patterns becoming more entrenched – particularly amongst the younger half of the population. Audiences increasingly want news on any device, in any format, and at any time of day.
- Another illustration of how hard it is to get people to pay for news….Look at the NY Times for example. The newspaper has a very laudable 700,000 digital subscribers.Now, I know it’s not a totally fair comparison, but look at a company like Netflix.Netflix has something like 29 million digital subscribers.Plenty of people are willing to pay for movies, TV shows and music. They don’t resort to illegal downloads when the content is fairly priced.For many decades, newspapers were the primary way to access news and most people read only one newspaper. After all – we only had enough time to read one newspaper. These days we are disinclined to pay for news.
- There will still be some linear real time viewing of TV for the Super Bowl or breaking news events … but entertainment-based video will move to more on-demand.If you are the content owner, you should not worry at all.You might have to abandon cable distribution and get a slot on Netflix, but content is in such high demand “that you will be able to make money…
- In terms of Appointment TV believe it or not, Masterchef Season 2 finale holds the top spot of the most watched TV show in Australia since 2001. As measured by OzTAM - topping this list – the 2005 was the Australian Open Final followed by the 2003 Rugby World Cup sporting events. The top rating show of last year – The Voice – only comes in at number 8 on the chart.The quaint notion that we all watch the same high-rating show at the same time doesn’t ring true anymore.The rise of digital distribution and portable, media-focused devices has also fundamentally increased potential “demand” for content. The ability to watch content whenever (and wherever) we want means that we can watch more shows than was realistically possible when we were tethered to 2-3 hours of “appointment TV” per night (and we could watch only one show per primetime slot). These days we don’t watch and listen as one.
- Having turned print media upside down, the Internet now is disrupting television, forcing broadcasters to adapt to tablets and video-on-demand to hold onto views and advertisers.According to eMarketer, Americans will consume more digital media than TV for the first time ever in 2013. Among eMarketer’s findings are:Daily TV viewing will fall to 4 hours and 31 minutes this year, down from 4 hours and 38 minutes in 2012.Digital media, meanwhile, is expected to consume more of Americans' time than ever with a daily intake of 5 hours and 16 minutes, up from 4 hours and 33 minutes last year.Print and radio will see slight declines as well. eMarketer predicts radio time will drop to 1 hour and 26 minutes from 1 hour and 32 minutes, while print is forecast to further tumble to 32 minutes from 38 minutes in 2012.Overall, the amount of time people are spending with media is increasing with more multitasking across devices. Total media time is predicted to make up 12 hours and 5 minutes per day this year, an increase from 11 hours and 49 minutes in 2012.The independent market research firm notes that users sometimes use the Internet and watch television at the same time — and that video represents only part of online consumption.That doesn’t stop a group like Netflix, which offers films and original programming on demand, from growing and spawning imitators such as Amazon’s online streaming service.The formula is favoured by youngsters who relish cartoons on their tablet devices and TV binge-viewers who watch multiple episodes of their favourite shows in one sitting.
- For years, Television planning was controlled by gatekeepers that decided what got aired. But with the huge surge in broadband capabilities and the rise and fragmentation of Internet TV, Television executives are clutching at straws to maintain control over their industry.It is no secret that Hollywood and the Television Networks have already been seriously disrupted by the Internet as a new medium for content delivery. For 50 years, Hollywood controlled the film making process and how consumers could consume films and entertainment. Through Cinemas, and then through Videos and DVDs, this was a nice, money making opportunity that was completely controlled by Hollywood executives. But much like Radio, Video and then DVD before it, the Internet offered a disruptive way to deliver and consume content. With peer-to-peer networking, consumers could now share content through decentralised networks, completely out of the control of Hollywood.New opportunities for content deliveryOver here, geoblocking of high-quality streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu are likely to remain thanks to the industry's fatal dependence on territorial licensing.Ignoring the demands of an audience more stratified than ever.But just because the TV companies won’t let us access content when we want – it doesn’t mean we can’t find other means.We are all watching what we want in different ways and at different times. And we’re also doing a lot of illegal downloads to get it.If the media companies over here made quality content available on demand for the price of Netflix – illegal downloads would plummet.
- Of course the availability of great TV content has never been better – but we don’t have to wait for the networks to program it for us and tell us when we can watch it.When it came to watching Walter White in the series finale of Breaking Bad, Australian had a number of options.We could pay for a Foxtel subscription and view the episode four-and-a-half hours after the show was aired on the US west coast. We could have used a VPN to bypass geographical restrictions and hooked into an overseas streaming service like Netflix which offered legal streaming the next morning. Or we could have bought a season pass for the show on iTunes and waited a number of hours to start downloading it in the wee small hours.Or we could have simply illegally downloaded the show, along with approximately 500,000 others within 12 hours of it finishing on the American cable channel AMC. illegally downloaded it.And it seems that 90,000 Australians chose this option – indeed making up 18% of Torrentfreak's total figure. Why? Well for a ground breaking show like Breaking Bad watching the show legally by waiting six and half hours after the episode ended on the US east coast – and paying handsomely for it doesn’t really add up. Only 71,000 people actually watched the finale on Foxtel on the night it aired. It’s not just the cost - the policy of viewers having to buy packages of channels together is both expensive and inflexible.And even if you are prepared to hand over the cash you still have to wait for the show to air after the US. Until Foxtel and broadcast networks realise that the only way to get straying audiences back into the fold is to make them feel like their money is worth something legal downloads will persist.
- Australians are watching five hours less live television per month than they were a year earlier (an average of ninety-two hours per month). With viewers in the sixty-five-plus age group really doing their time, contributing 150 hours of television viewing per month, this downward trend will only continue.Mass audiences of old have fragmented into multiple micro audiences.
- Legend has it that when Cortes landed in Mexico in the 1500s, he ordered his men to burn the ships that had brought them there to remove the possibility of doing anything other than going forward into the unknown. Back in 2010 Marc Andreessen,, the creator of Netscape, who is now partner of venture capital company Andreessen Horowitz, and an outspoken purveyor of online wisdom, had the same advice for old media companies: “Burn the boats.”His longstanding recommendation is that print newspaper and magazine publishers should shut down their print editions and embrace the Web wholeheartedly. “
- If the Australian TV networks are going to survive – this surely is the big opportunity for them – to deliver content on demand -available any where via any device. Australia’s network chiefs are slowly responding to changing consumer habits – the era of view supremacy.The Seven Network’s CEO, Tim Worner, confirmed recently that Seven’s hybrid broadcast broadband TV (HbbTV) would start operating in May 2014.HbbTV will combine broadcast television services with broadband, allowing easier access to broadcast channels, catch-up TV and video on demand on TV screens. We are very determined,” he said, “that our traditional model will fully harness the opportunities that broadband access can provide.”In one of the first times a commercial network over here has provided Australians with a streaming option worthy of use – Ten is offering Homeland for streaming 15 minutes after it begins on America's west coast. The episode airs in the US at 9 pm on Sunday evening, which is 2 pm Monday, Australian eastern time. Ten's online catch-up service tenplay has the show available to stream from 2:15 pm on the east coast. The episode will then screen on Channel Ten's regular terrestrial network at 8:30 pm. While I applaud this move – the user experience – from my point of view – has not been optimal.
- Countering TwitterWith Medium, short-form online writing pioneer Ev Williams is trying to rebuild waning Web attention spans.“We don’t pretend that we can make people eat their vegetables when there’s potato chips on the table but we want to provide an alternative for those who want some diversity in their diet.”Medium seeks to create a home for something all too rare online: Well-reasoned articles that can generate meaningful compensation for their authors. Trying to make it as easy as possible for people who have thoughtful things to say to get those ideas and stories out there, and to tie it into a network where it has more than a snowball’s chance in hell of getting the audience it deserves.Medium isn’t developing a conventional ads-for-page-views model—Williams says he can’t imagine a banner ad on the site. To change the dynamic of online writing, however, the company has to figure out a way to make money and pay its writers. (Matter, a similarly minded science and technology journalism site that Medium acquired earlier this year, charges readers 99¢ per month and pays contributors.) This could be the answer media proprietors are looking for when they need to increase the amount of time people spend consuming news???
- Is this the future of magazines?Some publishers see Flipboard as middlemen that simply piggyback on the media content and siphon off value – including the relationship with readers – that would otherwise go to the publisher.Flipboard’s response to these criticisms is that it is a partner for publishers — some of whom may not have a presence (or at least not a very good one) on mobile devices like tablets — and that it allows them to reach readers they may not otherwise reach, and then convert them into paying customers. That said, however, some publishers seem to be growing increasingly restless with the Flipboard model, and want to maintain control over monetizing their content.However Flipboard now boasts more than 90 million subscribers – That’s a big number and certainly carries a lot of weight.
- Surrounded by an overwhelming amount of digital content, many people are looking for something that can fill the role of a digital newspaper — filtering and highlighting interesting content.In its heyday, the printed newspaper provided the information-delivery system of choice. A collection of news and other interesting content, selected by knowledgeable editors from a wide range of sources, presented in an easy-to-scan format. Now, the supply of information we have available to use is almost indefinite — but we still need an easy and efficient way to filter it, and find what is interesting and relevant, and share it with others. Prismatic might just solve that problem.Is this the future of news?What Prismatic does is analyze as much as it can about you when you connect to it with your Twitter/Facebook or Google account and then starts recommending stories to you based on what it thinks your interests are, using semantic-filtering algorithms and so on. You can click an X to hide an article, or you can click a plus sign, which is both a vote for that content and a way of saving it to an internal bookmark list You can also tweet directly from a post, or retweet someone who has posted it.Prismatic says: “We want to be like the daily newspaper for our generation, and so we wanted to see people visiting multiple times a day and hopefully about six days a week at least — and we are definitely seeing that, which really shows our concept is working.”
- Discovery is a core tenet of the InternetPinterest is one of the fastest growing sites in the history of the Internet.That use case is discovery -- or a way to start your online quest for a new backpack, first-date dress, or vegan meal to cook for dinner.Launched in 2010, Pinterest is the most modern example of a consumer Internet sensation.The site, which is dominated by women who seek inspiration around fashion, food, home, and travel, unofficially reaches around 45 million people monthly in the U.S., according to Quantcast. Media companies would die for that kind of reach
- And of course, let’s not Jeff Bezos and other high profile Silicon Valley stars are suddenly investing significant sums of money in preserving news capacity and quality.Bezos of course bought The Washington Post for $250 million a couple of months ago and the world awaits to see what he can do with the ailing news behemoth.Likewise, the founder of eBay, Pierre Omidyar is backing the seasoned journalist Glenn Greenwald and his colleagues in a newly conceived news site also to the tune of $250 million. These two deals alone pump half a billion dollars into serious news production.They are not alone.Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs has also invested in media – in this case a news start-up called Ozy Media - the go-to daily news and culture site for the Change Generation. Ozy describes itself as the place where you get a little smarter, a little sooner. Their mission is to help you see more, be more and do more.Chris Hughes used his Facebook money to buy The New Republic and provide financial support to Upworthy, an aggregator of quality material. Next-generation news companies including Vice, Vox Media, BuzzFeed and Business Insider have all recently received significant investment. Tech people like investing in stuff that’s disruptive.These leaders will continue to change the world, and how we get our newsI think this is a very exciting space to watch.
- We’re almost out of time…What’s true of Pinterest, Prismatic, Flipboard, and Medium and the TV networks combining broadcast television services with broadband – they’re all making finding and consuming interesting content easier to do. Visually appealing, easy to use. The content is curated for you, where you want it, when you want it.Fragmentation an indelible feature of the marketing landscape. More channels mean smaller audiences despite more time spent with media While more consumers watch TV, and indeed, by eMarketer’s calculations, watch more of it, but those larger audiences are dispersed across multiple screens, or stream TV content to their PCs and smart devices. With rare exception, the mass audience accustomed to appointment viewing is long gone.