Is Print Dead?

Recently on Charlie Rose and then in AdAge an ongoing discussion about Print and how New Media, specifically the Internet has been affecting it.

Excerpts from the AdAge Article:

Print is Dead

Nope, this is about newspapers, and to some extent magazines, having their once-enviable franchises disintermediated by the web. Every publication now must compete with every other around the globe, many of which are willing to offer their content for free. They also face competition from thousands of aggregators, who take journalists' content, monetize it for their own profit, and, in many cases, give little or nothing back to its originators.

Unsurprisingly, those who come from print-media backgrounds, such as former Time Inc. editor Walter Isaacson (who made his case for micropayments in one of the smallest issues of Time in recent memory), fall heavily into the former group. Then there are those who've had a bad experience trying to charge for content, such as Slate co-founder Michael Kinsley, and those who make a living from the web, who believe it is lunacy.

Law of nature_"Consumers won't pay; it's just that simple," said MSNBC.com President Charlie Tillinghast. "They'll read amateur blogs and everything else first before they pay for general news and information. Those are the physics of our business."
Easy for Mr. Tillinghast to say: MSNBC was built from the ground up on the free model, augmenting licensed content from the AP, Reuters and NBC News with content produced by a small newsroom supported by online revenue.

High demand -The pro-pay advocates argue that demand for news has never been higher. Indeed, traffic to newspaper websites was up 12% in 2008. MSNBC had 45 million unique visitors in January, probably the largest audience for any single news outlet ever.

But certain news categories, such as sports, business, national and international news, have been commoditized, and differences in quality haven't been enough to get people to choose to pay over free alternatives. "If we were to charge for our content, someone would be out there with the same content -- not as good or as deep but a percentage of our quality -- and would offer it for free, and we would lose overall reach," said Forbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller.

Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson said the problem is that while Google is great at getting people to content, it does nothing to distinguish quality. "And if you are going to get people to pay for content, you have to encourage them to make qualitative decisions about that content," he said on PBS's "Charlie Rose."

In the past two weeks, plenty of industrywide solutions have been proposed, including a tax on the $30 a month most internet service providers charge for web access, similar to the TV taxes in the U.K. that support the BBC. Editor & Publisher columnist Steve Outing endorsed a start-up, Kachingle, that would allow people to pay a monthly fee to access participating websites.
Collective schemes have been mulled since at least 1995, when nine newspaper chains, including Knight Ridder, Gannett, Hearst and the New York Times, launched New Century Network to compete with Microsoft.

Smaller businesses_But assuming that the horse is out of the barn and publishers must convert to an online world supported by ads, is it possible? Online publishers say yes, and while it won't be dollars for pennies, as NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker is famous for saying, it will be dollars for nickels and dimes. The businesses are simply going to have to get a whole lot smaller.
In addition to the generally crummy economy, the display-ad model that funds newspapers online is broken, which is reflected in their slowing growth rates. That's partly because the bottom fell out of midmarket banners, the ads that fall between low-end direct-response ads and high-end branded advertising and account for half of revenue at some publishers.
Mr. Tillinghast laid that partly at the feet of publishers themselves and trade associations such as the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which pushed for standardized ad formats that commodified banners and created even more competition in the form of ad networks.

IAB President Randall Rothenberg took issue with that assessment. "Standards allowed the market to scale, and grew it from nothing to $20 billion market in about a decade," he said. "If you were to remove standards from interactive advertising, the marketplace would collapse overnight."

Ironically, just as they're pushing down ad rates, networks have become critical to newspapers' ability to compete with Yahoo and Google locally and move their own unsold inventory. Yahoo even operates an ad network for papers called Apt to allow them to increase their local scale.

In addition to the generally crummy economy, the display-ad model that funds newspapers online is broken, which is reflected in their slowing growth rates. That's partly because the bottom fell out of midmarket banners, the ads that fall between low-end direct-response ads and high-end branded advertising and account for half of revenue at some publishers.
Mr. Tillinghast laid that partly at the feet of publishers themselves and trade associations such as the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which pushed for standardized ad formats that commodified banners and created even more competition in the form of ad networks.

IAB President Randall Rothenberg took issue with that assessment. "Standards allowed the market to scale, and grew it from nothing to $20 billion market in about a decade," he said. "If you were to remove standards from interactive advertising, the marketplace would collapse overnight."

Ironically, just as they're pushing down ad rates, networks have become critical to newspapers' ability to compete with Yahoo and Google locally and move their own unsold inventory. Yahoo even operates an ad network for papers called Apt to allow them to increase their local scale."

The most interesting part of the debate is that while many believe Print is Dead, many believe Print is alive and well, it is the owners of the Print brands that are not. That they are buried with debt, and that print is doing fine.

Whatever the case, the suggestion that Print is Dead is hurting it. And it serves as another excuse for Marketers and Advertisers to pulls back from expending dollars on any media product.

Print is not Dead as the people are saying, but it is in a transition period to be sure. What is overlooked in the debate is "Content." It is content that drives people to websites and also purchase a newspaper or magazine. President Obama's election and the headlines that followed provided an increase in all Print Media, people wanting it for commemorating history. It seems if the content is meaningful to the individual they'll shell out to acquire it. But why isn't that true of the Internet.

The Internet will be all about content in time, but again, directories or ads will be required to get readers. what amazes me is how many Websites don't have video augmenting the site - especially the big packaged goods manufacturers. For whatever reason, they stick with a traditional print and picture format instead of bringing action video to their sites.

Soon time will change that too. Astute Marketers and Advertisers know that all Media is in a transition period adjusting to New Media, especially the Internet. How it is leveraged to promote brands will determine its value to marketers and advertisers.

Print is in a transition period, the outcome is not yet clear. But one thing is certain, it is not business as usual when so many choices are out there. This is probably the best time for experimentation for Marketers to determine impact upon their brands and creating their own metrics exclusive of the noise everyone else is making.