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Mainstream media’s going nowhere
By Huw Leslie | January 27, 2008
An idea which persists despite my deep irritation at it is that somehow the world of new media, meaning the blogosphere, Twitter, Facebook – whatever the startup du jour happens to be, will replace traditional media. Just as town criers (did they exist anywhere apart from the UK) were rendered useless by newspapers, the newspaper industry will be replaced by blogs. Nothing quite like a list, so here goes:
1. It’s the brand, stupid
Media is all about the brands; brands are what attract audiences and advertisers alike. They engender trust – the BBC or the Wall Street Journal brands are good examples of this. Without even looking at a piece of content, the audience already expects it to be good. They create loyalty – if I enjoyed BBC’s news yesterday, I’ll probably watch them today. Powerful brands are not the preserve of traditional media (just look at TechCrunch or Engadget), but large-scale media, with its massive audience, is in a unique position to create and maintain such brands. And that keeps audiences and advertisers queuing up.
2. Size matters
The massive scope of traditional media operations provides them with a guaranteed spot in the market. The Prime Minister is always going to chose to be interviewed by Nick Robinson, the BBC’s political editor, over Huw Leslie, blogger at For Crying Out Loud, for obvious reasons. Likewise, I’m not going to be reporting on the wars in Iraq or Afganistan for this blog any time soon either. That’s not to say that blogging can’t provide insight on such conflicts; on the contrary, there’s a vast amount of blogging happening, particularly in Iraq, by those who are affected. But there is a valuable perspective that new media just can’t bring because of its scale.
3. Money
Although Google ad revenue in the UK now exceeds that of ITV1, the business model for traditional media remains stronger than that of new media (even including newspaper websites). Part of that is caused by some advertisers’ wariness of online advertising, which will inevitably wear off, but there are aspects of short head ad economics which are more favourable than those of the long tail. First, traditional media, whether online or offline, is likely to have more powerful brands, or at least more reliably strong brands, which advertisers would like to associate themselves with. Second, economies of scale mean that media buyers would rather make a big buy than a small buy, which favours content with a greater audience. Third, user generated content is sometimes undesirable for advertisers to have their brand next to – MySpace has found this a major problem. That means that some significant proportion of advertising dollars will stay with mainstream media.
4. Lost down the tail
Long tail content discovery (the process of finding good content that doesn’t have a big audience) has a long way to go. There’s some great efforts, like Digg and Blog Friends, that are immensely valuable in very different ways, but they don’t solve the problem fully. It still isn’t worth me writing a fascinating blog post that is only interesting to plumbers, even though it might be life-changingly interesting, because it will be so difficult for them to find unless they know that they are looking for it. Inevitably this will improve over time, but it is a major problem that simply isn’t going to go away any time soon and is the major stumbling block to the long tail as it applies to media (and indeed in other contexts as well).
5. OMG!! TMI! (Oh my God, too much information)
Information overload is another problem, in many ways closely linked with content discovery, that is (at least at the moment) inherent to the long tail. I had a quick look at my Google Reader stats; I’m subscribed to 99 feeds, and it looks like I read about 30-40% of all items that come in (I can’t work it out exactly because GReader doesn’t tell me and won’t let me export the data). Of those I guess that I find 50% interesting. Assuming that I enjoy 20% of incoming pieces of content on GReader, that means that 80% shouldn’t have been shown to me, and I have wasted significant amounts of time in disregarding it. I have to spend that time to spend any chance of finding the good stuff – that is an inherent problem with the long tail. Having a quick glance at the Guardian’s homepage or flicking through a magazine when I want some content suddenly seems a lot more appealing.
Caveats
Mainstream media’s survival is, of course, predicated on intelligent leadership. I am merely arguing that it is entirely within their power to stay around. I am not, however, suggesting it will be easy. There will be a squeeze in audience and advertising as both shift ‘down the tail’, and changes will have to be made (and are already being made successfully by some). Neither am I suggesting that newspapers in their current physical form necessarily have a long-term future; whilst they’ve probably got a while yet, it seems highly likely that they will go entirely or substantially digital in the future. Hopefully I have demonstrated that there is a future for the short head, of high-audience, wide-appeal content as well as long tail content; with any luck the years to come will be rosy for both.
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[...] “Mainstream media’s going nowhere,” a strong argument that new media is not about to replace traditional media by Oratos Media (which publishes YouMakeMedia and FOSSwire) co-founder Huw Leslie. # [...]
Posted by: YouMakeMedia » “Mainstream media’s going nowhere” on January 28th, 2008 at 12:57 pm