Category: Analysis

It should be obvious that the future of online publishing is bright. In the future, people will get a larger and larger proportion of their news and information from online sources, and many of these sources will be profitable. Some could be be extremely profitable.
Some of the audience will come from television viewership, but most of it will come from print.
Newspapers are about to lose half their revenue — the most profitable half. Classified advertising is going away and never coming back. This meanst that in the near future newspapers are going to be thinner and more focused. They’re going to have to make some incredibly difficult choices between hard news and features, local coverage and US and world coverage. I expect newspapers to become a lot more locally oriented. They may look a lot more like the (free) Palo Alto Daily than their owners (or newsrooms) are comfortable with today.
Specialty magazines could lose a lot of their audience (especially at the newsstand) over a somewhat longer period of time as more and more readers discover their needs are met by sites like CNET and dpreview. Also, there are external changes going on in the newsstand market, which is consolidating and squeezing out smaller titles and publishers. Fashion and celebrity titles will dominate magazine readership and advertising even more than they do now.
Book publishing is more complex, but reference, how-to, and other ephemeral non-fiction seem to be the most challenged by the Net. It’s going to be a while before bestselling fiction or non-fiction, literary fiction, or novelty and gift titles are threatened by online media. But, why buy a cookbook if you can get recipes off the Net?
The time the people aren’t spending with newspapers and magazines for news, information, or diversion is going right to the Net. The sources there will be more varied, entertaining, up-to-date, and individualized.
Later:
* How will the business be structured?
* Where does the money come from?
* Who are the winners and losers?
* What do these new sites look like?

I just read a great column by Dale Dougherty about the early days of Web advertising that reminded me of my own dubious contrbution. I was one of the “inventors” of the banner ad.
You may have heard that Wired magazine’s web site HotWired invented the banner. While HotWired was still a secet, we were developing a site of our own at the San Jose Mercury News and looking for a way to sell advertising on the site.
I created the ad format for Mercury Center, based on two models: The banner ads on Times Mirror Videotex’s Gateway service (where I had worked) provided the form factor and O’Reilly’s Global Network Navigator provided the conceptual model of a linked graphic on the page. Once we had come up with a price, I called my friend Dick Peck at O’Reilly to get an idea if our planned price was in the ballpark. Because we didn’t know how many ads we were going to be able to deliver, and because we were still a lilttle stuck in the print/tv model, we sold ads by the month, but designed the price to work out to a cost of $35 per thousand deliveries. This turned out to be pretty close to the pricing that ultimately prevailed.
We have the opportunity to unveil this model at a New Media get-together sponsored by an ad agency in New York in the summer of 1994. HotWired was there and they were contemptuous of the cost per thousand model of pricing, prefering to sell section sponsorships for a (high) fixed price.
Who invented the banner ad? Like a lot of things it had a lot of parents. It goes back to unlikely keyword banners in teletext, Times Mirror and Knight-Ridder videotex, and later Prodigy (pre-internet) videotex. The linked banner that we all know today owes its origins to these early models combined with O’Reilly’s linked ads which appeared on HotWired and Mercury Center in late 1994. I’m not certain if these appeared on The Gate or Nando which were also lauched that year.
But I do know that it wasn’t HotWired.

The Atlantic Monthly’s Word Fugitives is looking for an antonym for “synergy”. Last year, I started using “dyssynergy” for situations where a company’s market cap was less than its breakup value. AT&T is the canonical example of dyssynergy. AOL/Time Warner will probably wind up in a dyssynergistic state sometime in the near future. Certainly AOL/TW’s Netscape home page is a good demonstration of dyssynergy in action.