New titles, blogs, and ways of monetising content have exploded over the past 5 years. - Jason Krupp >>>>>> Yeah right! SCALE Say Media gives up on publishing digiday/publishers/say-media-retreat/ Heres a story about one of those innovators. A US based publisher Say Media which purchased NZs biggest blog a couple of years ago from Richard McManus has decided to sell all its publishing assets after deciding (it seems) that even with 35 Million Monthly Uniques (roughly double the audience of the entire NZ market - as uniques appear to be roughly a multiple of 4 of actual people) its audience wasnt of sufficient scale to seriously make a go of things and it was better to focus on the profitable end of the business - selling software to publishers. A CYCLE OF BUSINESS MODELS Yes ways of monetising content are innovated. But none of them seem to be capable of generating a consistent revenue stream. Instead there is a cycle. Innovation invented (e.g. video pre-rolls, behavioural targeting) -> for a brief period the early adopting publisher makes some money -> innovation is scaled -> revenue from innovation is driven down by scale and competition (or destroyed by invention of superior innovation or a change in the Google algorithm) -> innovation no longer makes any money. And unfortunately this cycle is speeding up. Id say the life-cycle is possibly now as short as two or three years. Take NZ media darling Wildfire founded by another Kiwi Victoria Ransom. Bought by Google in 2012 for US$350 Million ---> nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10823755 Closed down by Google in 2014 ---> businessinsider.au/google-ends-wildfire-2014-3 AND WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE US? The link that Nigel Horrocks posted in my earlier thread ( theawl/2015/01/some-2015-predictions ) rather neatly and humourously sums up where this leaves us. With publishers surrendering to the social networks. The best example of which is Medium, from one of the inventors of Blogger and Twitter. But its hard to see where the monetisation model is in publishing your content on someone elses proprietary system. Social Networks earn their money by monetising user generated content.
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 07:35:11 +0000
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