What in Media is Growing; What is Not

Just about anything touching the Internet grew in 2009, as did professionally-produced video, Internet advertising and video games, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Just about everything else shrunk in 2009.

How to Save Newspapers, Maybe

Newspaper readership has been declining for decades. Proposals to have the government subsidize them seem not only dangerous (the press is supposed to be a watchdog for the people against the power of the government) but stupid. Should we subsidize the telegraph because everybody uses telephones, mobiles, IM, SMS, microblogging and blogging to send messages?

Distribution channels and formats change over time. So does media. I don't know whether this is the answer. But it's interesting.

New York Times Equity Now Worth Zero?

Quantum changes--such as when a liquid turns to gas or solid--are highly disruptive. That's what we've seen this year as decades of gradually-worsening business models have toppled major U.S. newspapers. Now one financial analyst says debt at the New York Times is so high it essentially values the company's equity at zero.

http://jacksonville.bizjournals.com/jacksonville/stories/2009/04/20/daily36.html?ana=yfcpc

Theater Attendance Also Flat

Lots of legacy businesses are flat to shrinking these days. Theater attendance seems to be one of the "flat" sorts of legacy video businesses.

"Ticket sales at North American movie theaters totaled $9.7 billion, a four percent increase over the previous year, according to Media by Numbers, which tracks box office receipts. More important: attendance was flat, after a narrow increase in 2006 and three previous years of sharp declines.

Some of that sluggishness historically has been attributed to the rise of alternate formats: cable, satellite TV, widescreen TVs, DVD rentals and VCR tape rentals. Add HDTV, larger screen sizes, PC viewing, download-to-TV services and user-generated content and one has a recipe for continued sluggishness at the box office.

No business based on communications, information or entertainment now is immune from the rise of new electronic alternatives.

Why It is So Hard to Do Media These Days

Different audiences now prefer different media. Older users continue to be more comfortable with traditional media. For users 41 and younger, the Web makes more sense.

The Web surfing habits of boomers and over-60s are more firmly rooted in traditional media than those of their younger counterparts, according to a Deloitte & Touche study conducted by the Harris Group.

The study found that 67 percent of boomers visited Web sites after seeing ads on TV or in print. Matures, those between 61 and 75, were just as likely to be driven to the Web by print ads and less likely by TV ads.

Yet these two age groups were less likely than Generation X (25 to 41) or Millennials (13 to 24) to visit the Web as a result of an Internet search engine or ad on another site.

A Lumin Collaborative study reinforced the connection between boomers and traditional media. The company found that boomers, defined as those currently ages 42 to 62, spent an average of 2.69 hours a week online, versus 2.83 hours watching TV and 1.93 hours listening to the radio.

The trends were flipped among the echo boomers (ages 18 to 31) and Gen X (32 to 41), who spent more time online than watching TV or listening to the radio and whose time spent online also exceeded that of their boomer counterparts.

Lumin also noted that only 39 percent of respondents in the boomer demographic regarded the Internet as their primary channel of information about companies or products. This rate was substantially less than Gen X (53%) or echo boomers (60 percent).

Boomers were the most likely group to choose newspapers, broadcast TV or magazines as their main source of information.

All of which means all content has to be delivered dual mode these days: Web for people under 41. Other traditional media for users older than 41, to a certain extent. But the direction of the shift is inexorable. The Web wins.

Just like AT&T

All media, not just all communications, are being forced to change because of IP and the Web. You all know that. Believe me, it is something we grapple with all the time as a "print publisher." We all know a transition to online and Web-delivered content is inevitable. How well we succeed will be measured by how fast any Web-based portion of our business grows, compared to the inevitable rate of decline for anything we do in print form. Oddly enough, we are in the same position the old AT&T was in. Our legacy business probably cannot be expected to do anything more than decline at fairly predictable rate.

Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons argues that the company's "publishing" operation can be successful, and grow at eight to 10 percent a year, "for a long time, if we successfully make this transition to digital.”

So that's the issue, isn't it? Cost controls only get any of us so far. And digital revenues have to grow fast, from a small base, to make any significant contribution to overall revenue. And one thing is certain: no matter what publication we are talking about, over the long term, the economics of the business are changing enough that tweaking through cost controls will be exhausted.

At some point, quality will have to be diminished, as painful as that will be for any entity that prides itself on such things. That doesn't mean "poor" quality: simply "uneven" quality. More and more of what we and others do will be like the Web itself: some really good stuff; some useful stuff; lots of irrelevant or shabby stuff.

Like most communications service providers, media will have to make hard choices. Free, cheap, more costly options will surface. Quality is going to get more uneven as a result. Still, we are just at the front end of the process. Change has been largely incremental up to this point. It won't stay that way for much longer.