As media companies struggle to figure out their digital future, the elephant in the room is that they have only been able to monetize online audiences for pennies on the dollar compared to traditional media. Here’s why: Traditional advertising formats FAIL on the web. By traditional advertising formats, I mean display ads, video ads, and […]

Fred Wilson wrote the other day about what observing his kids’ media habits tells him about the future of media — I’ve has a similar impulse to try to draw insights from observing real young people’s media habits.

But is this the best way to predict the future of media?

When I was a kid, I:

The maxim goes that new technologies don’t kill off old media — radio didn’t kill newspapers, TV didn’t kill radio, etc. But it’s not clear this maxim will hold true in the digital age. The first industry to suffer the slings and arrows of digital technology was the music recording industry, back when MP3s and […]

Let’s play a game. I’m thinking of a company that identifies talented people who can produce great content that attracts an audience. This company then pays these content producers to publish their content, with the aim of growing a large audience for that content and creating an editorial environment that will be attractive to advertisers.

What […]

One of the many reasons why Techmeme is the leading tech news aggregator among tech insiders is that it aggregates traditional media brands alongside new media brands. No place is this more evident than the new Techmeme Leaderboard — the top 25 is a near perfect mix of media brands that are 2 years old, […]

A new McKinsey & Co. report called ” How Companies Are Marketing Online” draws the astonishing conclusion that many advertisers are reluctant to shift dollars online — despite the massive shift of consumer attention online — because of the “absence of meaningful metrics and adequate capabilities.”

Nearly every major original content brand that publishes in both analogue and digital started in analogue and then extended to digital — and in nearly all instances, the analog operation took priority, which made sense given that the newspaper, magazine, TV show, etc. was generating most of the revenue and profit. That balance of power […]

Linking to third-party websites used to be anathema to the traditional media mindset — why would we send people AWAY? We want to keep (read: trap) them HERE. Attitudes began to change when an online media company that did nothing but send people away started making billions in advertising (i.e. Google).

Still, most media companies resist […]

Two reports out today illustrate how the traditional media industry is working hard to prop up their declining business. First, as evidence of the decline, IBM released a study that says that the Internet is about to overtake TV as the principal medium in most households (via MediaPost):

Nielsen asked 1,000 consumers on its new “engagement” panel if they could recall any TV commercials they had seen — only one third of them could. In contrast, 79% could recall at least one TV show. This is not the least bit surprising because traditional TV advertising creates NO value for consumers in the moment […]

I think Kevin Rose might be on the verge of something big, again. For those not familiar, Kevin is the founder of Digg, the social news aggregator that now boasts over 17 million unique visitors per month… and the latest to get into bed with Microsoft via its sweet ad deal. There is […]

I wrote a long post trying to explain why the page view/CPM model for valuing online media is so problematic, particularly for traditional media companies like newspapers that are trying to transition their business models online. But Jordan Bitterman of Digitas summed it up in two sentences (in a Fortune piece about future of the […]

Why does TV advertising continue to do well in the face of declining viewership and transcendent online video? Here are some examples of the typically contradictory reports that make it so difficult to get a handle on what’s really going on (bold is mine):

Yesterday, to my surprise, I got quite a bit of traffic from the Wall Street Journal. When I checked out the referring URL, I discovered that the WSJ was linking to Publishing 2.0 through the automated Sphere widget related links, which is radical because you could construe my page views as having been stolen […]

In a dramatic turnabout, the Bancroft family, which controls Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, agreed to discuss a sale of the company to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp after initially refusing to do so. There are a number of hints that the turnabout was driven by concern over the future of Dow Jones in […]

Linking to other media companies’ content used to be unthinkable for traditional media brands, but attitudes have changed after Google made $10 billion in advertising by doing nothing but link to other media companies’ content (and run ads on other companies’ content).

Last week, Inform announced that a number of high profile media companies would […]

CBS sure has been walking the walk of a savvy digital media company, with the launch of CBS Interactive Audience Network, the acquisition of WallStrip, and now the acquisition of Last.fm, the popular social music site (maybe this is why Last.fm didn’t have time to launch its application on Facebook Platform).

The CBS brand is […]

Traditional media sites used to recoil at the idea of linking to any content other than their own. This made these sites one-way islands in the link-driven web ecosystem, but worse is they have suffered disintermediation at the hands of Google, Digg, and other aggregators that don’t discriminate and that prioritize what’s best for the […]

When I read about the private equity buyout of the ailing Chrysler group from DaimlerChrysler, it immediately reminded me of another buyout of an ailing legacy player in a fast changing industry being driven by successful upstarts — Sam Zell’s buyout of Tribune.

Thinking about it, I realized there are many analogues between what upstarts […]

So here’s my perspective on the Calacanis/Winer/Jarvis v. Vogelstein/Wired debate on how journalist interviews should be conducted — both sides are right and also wrong.

Blogging is conversation, yeah, blah, blah, but what’s so unsatisfying about these “conversations” is that too often they turn into linked monologues. Nobody actually TALKS to each other. Everyone just […]

We’ve all heard that page views are dying. Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed pointed out a few weeks ago the problem with scaling an online advertising business based on revenue per thousand page views, an analysis which has now been picked up by the Dan Mitchell at the NYT. Jeremy’s analysis is correct, on one level, […]

The once monolithic media industry is undergoing a radical schism, dividing itself into content creation, on the one hand, and content aggregation and distribution on the other.

The nature of this transformation suddenly crystallized for me when I read Tom Foremski’s piece on the new West Coast/East Coast media industry divide. Tom seems to be focused […]

Discussions of Google’s offline media ambitions — to extend their wildly successful platform for online advertising to offline advertising — typically assume that Google’s success in the offline arena is just a matter of time. But the reality is that Google has nothing but a string of failures to show for itself, most notably in […]

According to SEO Todd Mailcoat, getting three stories to the homepage of Digg puts you in the top 1% of Digg users, and it takes “months” to build up a what Todd calls a “reputable” Digg account. Those statistics struck me as stunning, so I decided to dig into Digg’s top user data (which loads […]

I just got my hands on the new version of the Wall Street Journal, which is one column inch smaller — seeing the physically shrunk paper is jarring — it’s tangible evidence that newspapers are slowly fading into history. Much as I wanted to assess the new design — and I’m sure there is real […]

Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner pushes back on Chris Anderson’s treatise on “radical transparency” in magazine publishing:

I don’t mean to be too much of an old-media-reactionary running dog. And some of the things he says make immediate sense. In fact, I asked all my writers and editors to start blogging a few months ago. (See […]

Chris Anderson of Wired has written what may be the most sober and balanced (i.e. ideology-free) assessment I’ve ever read of the upside and downside of 2.0 openness in publishing, or what he calls “radical transparency.” Here’s a sample:

3) “Process as Content”*. Why not share the reporting as it happens, uploading the text of each […]

Has anyone noticed that the New York Times is completely dominating the tech blogosphere today? Five of the top eight stories on Techmeme today are from the NYT — and the #1 story is ABOUT the NYT:

All of the stories are indeed notable for one reason or another — here’s my .02 cents:

In Web Traffic […]

Has there ever been an industry that faced as much uncertainty and such low visibility as the media industry? Media executives have lately taken to throwing up their hands and declaring their uncertainty in public (all emphasis is mine):

In the next year or two the media world will begin to figure out what consumers really […]

In the continuing (and, I predict, growing) audience measurement saga, Fred Wilson chastises Mike Arrington for calling comScore’s audience metrics “flaky” vis-a-vis Digg’s audience:

My guess is that Digg has something like 5mm monthly unique visitors worldwide. Not 20mm. The difference probably results from cookie counting, multiple browsers, and a few other factors.

Perhaps a better question […]

What’s more amusing? Scoble and New Media folks discover “engagement,” a term that the old advertising establishment has been “engaged” with for quite some time. Or, that hot and utterly hip video blogging has been caught up in a he said, he said spat over audience measurement. Welcome to media! These guys sound like a […]

Isn’t there an odd contradiction in all the thinking about new media? Individuals are now empowered to create content, to publish and have a voice without going through the old corporate hierarchy. You can blog and be heard, all for free, without asking permission. But what about brands? The assumption that online advertising will finance […]

There is now macroeconomic data to support the theory that Media 2.0 won’t be as profitable as Media 1.0 (from MediaPost):

In a break from historical patterns, the equities research team at Merrill Lynch says the rate of advertising price inflation now trails the overall rate of economic inflation. “Interestingly, advertising growth seems to be tracking […]

I thought it was some kind of late summer April Fool’s joke — MySpace is looking into starting a print magazine. That’s right, a PRINT magazine. Other commentators have already made the obligatory comparisons to bubble era magazines from Yahoo, Ebay, and infamously from Pets.com, and they’ve observed how increasingly Old Media MySpace’s strategy seems […]

A eulogy is a speech of praise, typically — although not necessarily — for the dead, which seems fitting for a post about the lingering charms and strengths of Old Media.

According to a recent survey, New Media still has a long way to go to earn the public’s trust, at least in the UK:

Respondents were […]

A debate has erupted over the definition of blogs and the value of blog “influentials” as drivers of advertising CPM rates, which is so Old Media in the particulars it’s really quite astonishing. Scoble challenges Windows Live Spaces’ definition of a blog and then plants this lightening rod:

What does Microsoft do when it says “we […]

Gawker’s Nick Denton has announced a restructuring, including a staff shake-up and the sale of two under-performing sites. Nick is a smart guy, and he’s clearly getting ready for the inevitable moment when the new media bubble begins to deflate — a “perversely countercyclical move” he calls it.

What I found most fascinating is the […]

Robert Young provides the latest example of the unbearable lightness of 2.0 business strategy, arguing that media companies should create American Idol-like platforms for individual self-expression:

Think of this way… what if “American Idol” had been produced solely by the capabilities of the contestants themselves, without the expertise and talent of the show’s producers, directors, writers, […]

In the televison “upfront” selling frenzy, TV networks and media buying agencies are in collusion, seducing weak-minded advertising executives with raw hucksterism. Jon Fine describes the scam brilliantly:

This is all very old-school stuff: vaudevillian dazzle, copious applications of food and alcohol to lubricate the ad spigots, a frenzy of dealmaking primarily compressed into several days […]

Reading about Yahoo’s new search-advertising software code-named Project Panama, I can’t help wondering whether any other form of advertising can compete with search advertising’s projectable ROI and hyper-efficiency:

But as advertisers enter each bid, they will see an estimate of how many clicks they will receive each day. More important, a graph will show how many […]

The advent of web-based e-commerce fundamentally lowered the costs of doing business, increasing the scalability (and in many cases the viability) of thousands of small businesses. The introduction of micro-marketing through Google AdWords gave a huge jolt to this trend, making marketing scalable and profitable for these same small businesses. Two companies — Google and […]

Web 1.0 gave us “internet,” “HTML,” “email,” “hyperlink”, “online,” and, of course, “web.” Web 2.0 has given us “social media,” “citizen journalism,” “tagging,” “blog,” “podcast,” “Web 2.0″ (of course) — and the list goes on.

Web 2.0 is still in the wrangling over terminology phase — especially over Web 2.0 itself. Recently, there’s been some […]

How deeply ironic that, despite thousands of blog pages devoted to Web 2.0, it took stodgy old Newsweek to bring the hype to the masses — and they had to re-brand Web 2.0 as the “Live Web” to make it comprehensible to the average person who doesn’t understand version-speak:

The generic term for this movement, especially […]

I’ve been very skeptical of Google’s Print Ad program since its inception. So I’m hardly surprised by the news from BusinessWeek that the program is a dud (thanks to David Utter for passing on the article):

Carl D. Haugen, president of BluePenguin Software, spent $3,000 on an ad through Google, which ran in the November issue […]

So Dave Winer wants to stop blogging, and Mike Arrington says, NO, you can’t, because Scripting News belongs to “us,” the readers. Mike is half right — Dave does “own” Scripting News, but the blog has become an institution, like any other Old Media company. Dave suggested that he should sell Scripting News to TechCrunch, […]

So New Media is about conversation — but what is the point of conversation?

If it’s the never-ending blogger conversation about snarking, A-Listers, link baiting, traffic envy, ego bashing, etc. etc. then the point is to act like an algae bloom and block out the sun — witness tech.memeorandum today (it’s a Sunday).

But what about […]

The newspaper and magazine industries are trying to buy back some of their rapidly dwindly credibility with advertisers, with $50 million and $40 million ad campaigns respectively (via Jeff).

The other day, my 2-year-old daughter observed that all of the snow from the recent East Coast storm had melted. “Go to the store and buy more […]

A great synthesis of 2.0 thinking on new marketing paradigms for social media from, no, not a blogger or Web 2.0 evangalist, but from the president of OLD Market Research company Yankelovich Partners:

These days, the best way to get people’s attention is not to engage consumers with a brand, but to host or facilitate a […]

Media is about conversation and participation. Consumers can create their own media. Value is being created at the edge. You’ve heard all the New Media maxims.

The problem, as many people have stated many times, is that the more everyone participates in content creation and content interaction, the harder it is to navigate the sea of […]

Everyone in Old Media, and many in “New” Media (which isn’t as cutting-edge as it thinks it is), should fear the radically different media habits of the Digital Generation now coming of age. As Jon Fine points out:

Today’s teens are the first for whom self-created content competes with teen-aimed media like videogames. There are now […]

The Wall Street Journal will be combining it’s print and online news operations:

IN YET ANOTHER CLEAR EXAMPLE of the inroads online publishing is making against its traditional print counterpart, Dow Jones announced a reorganization that includes a combined print and online Wall Street Journal news operation.

Dow Jones also signaled its belief in the power of […]

Michael Arrington declares that BlogBurst Can Save Big (print) Media. To suggest that the lack of blog content is all that ails Old Media is deeply naive. Old Media needs to follow bloggers into the new content creation frontier, but that in itself will NOT solve the problem of business models.

I will give BlogBurst […]

Nathan Weinberg at InsideGoogle wants to know why Google has extended the deadline for its print ad program:

Does this mean that responses and bids have been less than stellar, or that Google realized twelve days simply wasn’t enough time for most people to get their bids in?

Can someone please give all these Google watchers a […]

Blogs don’t matter. Web 2.0 doesn’t matter. Old Media doesn’t matter, and neither does New Media. So what does matter? — talent, insight, and, most of all, ideas. George Will makes this point elegantly:

The more journalism I read and do, the more convinced I am not merely that ideas have consequences, but that only ideas […]

So Google thinks they can measure the ROI of advertising in offline media. Good luck! For years, Corporate America has been putting the screws to marketing departments to find a way to measure the ROI of advertising, but until recently the results have been mostly smoke and mirrors.

One of the (many) empty promises of the […]

It’s New Media brands vs. Old Media brands, according to Daniel Orkent, former ombudsman for The New York Times:

“The good news, I think – my fingers are crossed – is if the responsible, serious members of the so-called mainstream media live up to their own standards, when you see something by okrent.com and nytimes.com you […]

The Guardian wonders whether “massive media companies have a compelling reason to exist in an era of media fragmentation”:

The argument is simple: as global media conglomerates struggle to hold position against falling sales in publishing, a fractured TV market, music piracy and advertising migration to old fashioned billboards, what are these groups for? The market […]

The other day I suggested that bloggers need a “Chinese Wall” to separate their editorial and commercial interests, in order to avoid perceived (or actual) conflicts of interest. Here’s a memo from the world of Old Media — the trusty wall is crumbling under the weight of “product placement” (or the more insidious “product integration”), […]

Conde Nast has a problem unique among Old Media companies — they’re out of ad space — “premium” ad space that is:

As much as that might sound like closeout-sale speak, it’s actually a positive sign, and an indication that the company’s $3.5 million marketing campaign might have been worth the investment. “Out of inventory” supposedly […]

Bloggers are great at channeling outrage, but when it comes to their own affairs — or pet topics — they are uniquely defensive (I include myself in this critique). I’ve been trying to sort through the FON “scandal,” and the efforts to defend the bloggers involved has lead to some rather tortured explanations. Take […]

Old Media executives have been stepping forward lately to assert their will to survive — even thrive — in a New Media world. Only time will tell whether Old Media brands can indeed survive, but there is ample evidence of forward thinking and emerging digital strategy.

From Time Inc. president Ann Moore:

We will continue to look […]

There is a bubble in the tech industry, but it has nothing to do with the behavior of venture capital, as so many people are discussing. There’s a bubble because the tech industry is trying to be the new media industry, and very few people in the tech industry understand what’s really happening to the […]

The news that Google is testing rich media supports the view that traditional brand advertising is not about to go away. Having wrung every penny from smaller advertisers with more transactional businesses — which are the ones that work best with text ads — Google is aiming now at the BIG advertisers who have […]

Tom Foremski answers “yes” to Dave Winer’s question, “is the publishing industry the new technology industry?” I think that is like saying the printing press industry is the old publishing industry. Web 2.0 applications, like the printing press, enable publishing — but they don’t define publishing. (A distinction that Tom makes.) And the current crop […]

There have always been generation gaps, especially when it comes to politics, but if you believe the latest hype about the Digital Generation (such as this Times article), the new generation gap is more like a gapping chasm. The argument goes that the Digital Generation doesn’t just consume media differently, they also think different:

“What’s hard […]

Beneath all the buzz about Google re-taking the top spot as #1 Global brand is evidence of a worrisome trend for content brands, which supports the theory that Google is a brand killer. If you look at the U.S. & Canada results for the brandchannel survey across the last five years, you’ll see that content […]

The quality of analytic thinking in the blogosphere is too often marred by sloppy reasoning, lack of cogency, groupthink, unreasoned orthodoxy, and just plain laziness. I’m no master of analytic precision myself, but it’s something I care about and something I wish the blogosphere would care more about.

In fact, I think the poor quality of […]

Who decides what’s worthy of your attention — a Web 2.0 application, a newspaper columnist, a talk show host, an editorial staff, an influential blogger, a community of thousands, a community of millions?

(UPDATE: Oy vey, this post is NOT about getting links, although it’s completely my fault that it’s been misread that way. […]

Despite all the buzz about the intersection of Buzzmetrics, Intelliseek, and VNU/Nielsen, I haven’t found anybody looking at it through the lens of Old Media, who knows what it’s like to have their market under the thumb of the dominant research provider, i.e. Nielsen.

The blogosphere is understandably excited that they’re finally going to get […]

Simon Dumenco’s Ad Age Column, A Blogger Is Just A Writer With A Cooler Name, misses a crucial distinction between blogging and writing — it’s technology that enables the conversation. Steve Rubel almost makes this observation by linking throughout his response to the column, but he doesn’t draw it out explicitly. Steve is absolutely right […]

The problem with the current debate over Old Media vs. New Media is that most people see it in binary terms — either Old Media dies and the web becomes a completely open marketplace of commoditized content (as Jeff Jarvis and countless others have argued), or consumers rebel and cling to the structures of Old […]

Instead of fearing and/or chasing after New Media, perhaps Old Media should seize the opportunity to organize the chaos that still defines the New Media universe.

Drawing on my complaint about the overabundance of media, Lloyd Shepherd took the thinking a quantum leap forward in his post, Kicking against overabundance?:

Take podcasting. I find it acutely difficult […]

Until recently, a principal business objective of publishing was to amass an audience that advertisers would pay to reach. A good publishing business plan clearly defined the audience and how advertisers would value the audience.

Bloggers are so enamored with their ability to publish without going through the gatekeepers of Old Media. But they could learn […]

Many open web advocates would hold up Slashdot as an archetype of new media democracy. Don’t let those authoritarian old media editors decide what’s important — let the people decide.

Well, it turns out “the people” are really just a small cabal of dedicated (fanatical) users, with names like Zonk, CowboyNeal, and CmdrTaco who decide […]

If Rupert Murdoch has it right, old media companies need to become more like Google and Yahoo, i.e. technology companies:

MySpace, a social-networking Web site, soon will add free video downloads, revamp its instant-messaging program and eventually offer Internet calling, Mr. Murdoch told a media-investor conference sponsored by Citigroup Inc.

Murdoch has certainly drunk the koolaid –the […]

The Wall Street Journal is shifting it’s center of gravity away from print in the wake of Peter Kann’s ouster. Kann’s replacement, Richard Zannino, has big plans:

One of the things he stresses is the importance of making the Journal’s content available via every imaginable outlet, whether it is the Internet or handheld devices like […]

There is so much wrong with the blogger view that the monoliths of old media will be brought down and consumers will bask in the glory of infinite media choice — discussing, creating, tagging, rating (meta-ing) each other’s content in one big solipsistic frenzy. Everyone can create media. Everyone controls their own media. Everyone is […]

You can’t blame print publishers for having a bad case of cognitive dissonance as they try to figure out the future of their business. Try digesting this:

From BusinessWeek, January 9, 2006, page 29 (for those of you following in print), Call it Gutenberg’s Revenge:

Upstart Internet publishers, helped by low costs that go with signing […]