(13 April 2010)
I am organising a BoF session at the 3rd Media Camp Athens event and want to gauge interest in the above subject.
Am I alone thinking that traditional print-media business models don't make sense in the epoch of paper-less publishing? Probably not, that is why I'd like to invite you to this session.
At the event I want to discuss about sustainable revenue models for paper-less publishing (with a a focus on magazines and newspapers) that are not based on advertising.
My observation is that advertising prices will not go back to their old price levels and that the "analogue dollars to digital pennies" trade-off experienced with on-line advertising will get even worse. As a result I cannot see how existing business models based on advertising can support publishers on-line.
Today, traditional print-media publishers have to deal with the abundance of free and good enough content on-line. The plethora of channels created by on-line (amateur) publishers has created an unprecedented value destruction that is pushing ad inventory prices down. Such pricing cannot support the print-media habits of the past.
“It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.” -- NYU Prof. Clay Shirky March, 2009.
At the same time it seems that on-line advertising is increasingly failing as audiences are learning to technologically and mentally filter-out ads. This is so, because "The problem is not the medium, the problem is the message, and the fact that it is not trusted, not wanted, and not needed", as Prof. Eric K. Clemons from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsilvania puts it.
So, if you are into paper-less publishing what do you do?