Umair Haque / Bubblegeneration

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Industry Note: Newspapers vs the Numbers

Don't buy the hype.

These numbers are interesting, but strategically almost irrelevant.

We are in the middle of a very interesting project with a major global newspaper publisher.

A more in depth look at a broader set of more strategically relevant numbers reveals that order of magnitude differences are emerging between newspapers and newer strategic groups - in terms of attention depth, breadth, velocity, and prosumption intensity.

As a very basic example, YouTube gets more attention than all these papers put together. And let's not even get into Craigslist...

News publishers would do well to focus not on global averages - but on the new value chain and the structural changes taking place within the larger media industry.

Newspapers need fundamental economic reinvention - the ability to drive marginal, and largely unsustainable, gains in attention share has very little to do with achieving that longer-term advantage.

-- umair // 11:27 AM // 1 comments

Comments:

Couldn't agree more!

All media needs to look at the value chain (from their consumer back) to see where they fit - as the differences across media will become decrease as they embrace web technologies.

What emerges is the type of media influences the type of relationship their audience has with them - and enhancing that relationship drives the new areas of value creation.

On one hand newspapers have a tremendous advantage as they are great at assembling and telling stories - unfortunately if that’s retelling what's of the wire they value just isn't there.

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Peter Childs // 8:08 PM