The trend of the last decade or longer within the media industry has been one of acquisition and consolidation. By gobbling up other media properties you could have access to massive libraries of content, a much broader range of distribution options, and you could cross license this content across these new distribution options. My favourite example was when NBC merged with Universal Pictures giving Conan O’Brien free access to a whole library of silly, out of context, Walker Texas Ranger clips. Every night Conan would surprise us with a new clip, absolutely hilarious, and all because of media mergers.
While I loved the Walker Texas Ranger clips on Conan, I think the problem now is that a number of media companies have gotten too big, and too difficult to manage. By and large media companies are tightly connected, or they should be tightly connected, with the zeitgeist. That used to be the case for big media, for traditional media, but they are failing to stay connected. With the internet and social media taking hold of a whole new generation of media consumers traditional media companies are struggling to adapt.
Traditional media companies are used to an editorial model where they get to dictate the conversation. They tell us what we get to read, listen to, and watch. Our options are limited to what they are offering, which is not as broad as we would like it to be. The internet has increased our ability to connect and communicate with each other like no other invention since the telephone did, and as a result we have the tools available to create content for every type of interest. Traditional media companies are going to need to learn how to collaborate with their audiences, to ask them what stories they want to here, and to ask for their help in creating these stories.
Eventually media companies are going to start shrinking again, at least from the content production side of the equation. The new media companies are going to be leaner, size won’t be as important as profitability. The real money is going to be in connecting people together, in consolidating audiences together, and then segmenting them for your advertisers to reach the most specific of niche markets. That’s how Google will become the most powerful media company, and other companies are going to need to find ways of doing a very similar thing.
I think exactly the same. Big media companies don’t use new opportunities to opereate more effective..
Do you have exparience to operate new media business?
Cheers,
Dmitri
Yes, I’ve started a number of blogs over the last 4 years, I’ve worked with some online media outlets, and done a bit of consulting for small businesses who wanted to take advantage of online media.
Big companies have one strong advantage – they are BIG. Lot of people, investments and so on. At the moment, then financial crisis is going worse. Small and internally affective business models have good chanse to start and compete with BIGs.
We are trying to do this in allied{}, but have a lot of questions: teambuilding, audience, internal processes and so on.. Because we have no strong experience in media we don’t try to repeat the same processes here. May be it’s good, may be it’s not.
Anyway, if somebody small want to beat existing businesses it need to vital from the beggining.
For we it’s the question – what kind of competences the core team shoud have… What do you think?
I think it’s important to understand how online communities work. Online media is all about community, trying to build something that will take on a life of it’s own. An understanding of social media is particularly useful in this regard, if you can leverage websites like DIGG, Stumbleupon, Facebook, MySpace etc then you can drive a lot of traffic, and hopefully retain some of it. Also, many people focus too much on traffic alone, but instead should be focused on RSS readership, average number of comments per post, how many members their site has etc which are all indicators of how many repeat visitors you have and how involved they are.
As far as programming, design, and other more technical skills, I believe a very superficial understanding of these areas is all that is necessary because you can outsource all of this type of work to people through Elance and other sites, and as long as you know the basics you can get work done at a high quality, and very reasonably in terms of price.