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Media disruption

Media disruption forecast in 1931

Thanks to Rob Curley, speaking at the Beyond the Printed Word conference in Vienna last week, I discovered this quote from William Allen White, Pulitzer Prize-winning editor and publisher, in 1931:

“Of course as long as man lives someone will have to fill the herald’s place. Someone will have to do the bellringer’s work. Someone will have to tell the story of the day’s news and the year’s happenings. A reporter is perennial under many names and will persist with humanity. But whether the reporter’s story will be printed in types upon a press, I don’t know. I seriously doubt it. I think most of the machinery now employed in printing the day’s, the week’s, or the month’s doings will be junked by the end of this century and will be as archaic as the bellringer’s bell, or the herald’s trumpet. New methods of communication I think will supercede the old.”

William Allen White, April 21, 1931
in a personal letter to Lyman B. Kellogg

White is right. How we access news and information will change. That it is published will not. This is why the goals of publishers do not match those of their distribution network. We are in different businesses. We must understand that if we, newsagents, are to make our own future. Not today or tomorrow but sometime soon our network will lose its value and, I suspect, be cut loose. We must pursue new customer traffic generating models for the future while ensuring the maximum return from the newspaper generated traffic we enjoy in the meantime.

The best connection I can see with the next generation of news and information distribution is through mobile access recharge. These are transactions of fractional value compared to newspaper sales. Today, we make between 18% and 25% on the sale of a newspaper and 5% on the sale of mobile device recharge. I’d expect the mobile device recharge to fall to 3% within the next year. While recharge generates traffic such customers are not loyal and we cannot therefore rely on them for traffic. So, in reality, mobile recharge is no replacement for newspapers.

Core to our challenge is that our channel was created by publishers. For our entire history we have looked to publishers to lead us by providing new products and partnering with us in their own innovations. This cannot continue given that mobile and other non-print distribution models do not require out network. Hence our need to find our own future.

I’ll have more to say on this at a future time. For now, I wanted to share the prescient quote from William Allen White.

Source: Rob Curley, VP New Products development, Washington Post, Newsweek Interactive.

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Media disruption

News and Fairfax contemplate sharing logistics and more

On the surface it makes sense, Fairfax and News sharing trucks for newspaper distribution. It would be good if newsagents could unlock similar rationalisation so that they too could drive costs down and thereby achieve a better return. For example, it would be good is the rules of the newspaper distribution system allowed newsagents to include other products in a bag delivered to a doorstep with a newspaper.

Newsagents in some states have just been permitted their first delivery fee increase in years – these fees are set by publishers. Data suggests that in real terms newsagent compensation for each newspaper home delivered is considerably lower today than prior to deregulation. With newspaper cover prices – a key determinant of newsagent revenue – showing less than CPI increases, newsagents scramble to make more than a meager income from the delivery of newspapers. Hence the need to unlock their local distribution network for the delivery of other products at the same time as delivering the newspaper. The lack of return is one reason more newsagents are exiting from home delivery than at any time in the past.

It would be appropriate, if the discussions between Fairfax and News proceed further, that the ACCC considers the proposal at the same time as conducting a review of the impact of the 1999 deregulation of the distribution of newspapers and magazines overseen by the ACCC at the behest of the Federal Government.

Prior to deregulation, newsagents operated under a territorial system. Deregulation took that away and while we have an appropriately more competitive environment, newsagents ought to have been compensated by the Government for having their exclusivity unilaterally taken from them.

If newsagents were auto workers, farmers or chemists, the Government would most likely have thrown millions their way as it has done regularly to those industries to facilitate restructuring.

While not wanting necessarily to reopen the deregulation can of worms, there is no denying that newsagents did have something valuable taken from them by Government action without compensation.

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Media disruption

Fairfax cashing in on digital success

fairfax-ifra.JPGMike van Niekerk, Editor in Chief Online of Fairfax Media, delivered an impressive presentation called Cashing in on Digital Success at the Beyond the Printed Word conference in Vienna which ended Friday. It was impressive not only in demonstrating how to leverage excellent revenue from a popular and respected news site but also in the numbers presented as the table on the left shows. The full slideshow presentation is available online at the conference website. Van Niekerk demonstrated the many ways Fairfax is able to generate revenue beyond the traditional banner ads. He listed examples of rich media, over the page, half page, leader board, TVCs and sponsored links and went on to say that their problem was lack of inventory.

What I would like to see from Fairfax and the other publishers who presented at the conference is the income and net return per employee and by capital compared to the print operation. Given that publishers must be driven by share price it is the return which will guide them to the tipping point where the success of the online model, with a lower cost base, forces significant contraction of the print model. Please don’t misunderstand my interest – I am not wanting to talk newspapers down but rather have a better “heads up” when considering capital expenditure related to the sale and distribution of newspapers.

As publishers like Fairfax continue to drive their online operations, newsagents, too, must aggressively pursue new traffic and revenue opportunities. Every day we continue to perform the same tasks with the same revenue model is another day lost to the changing world and to our more forward thinking competitors.

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Media disruption

Publishers plan for life after newspapers, so should newsagents

blogifra.JPGAs the IFRA Beyond the Printed Word conference wound to an end this afternoon in Vienna I was left with more questions than when the conference began. Publishers I talked with see a rapidly approaching cliff in terms of print sales and ad revenue and some are rushing to find replacement revenue. Some openly say that the paid (over the counter or subscription) newspaper as we know it will be dead, in Europe at least, in a matter of years and will be replaced with an entirely new premium print model. They are the early adopters of new models. They are balanced with others who are yet to treat an online presence other than a poor cousin to the print edition.

Back to the questions I arrived with: Is there a common strategy being adopted by publishers to find sustainable online revenue? Who is doing it well? Will online provide the revenue the shareholders in publishing firms are used to? Do the publishers get it that they are no longer newspaper publishers but, rather, media companies? Is there a place for the current distribution system (newsagents) in their thinking about the future? Do publishers really understand the Internet? Is there a revenue model which can work?

In hindsight the questions were naive in that this is all very new and publishers are learning as they go.

I saw heard about some excellent initiatives – Naples News is one, demonstrating what a newspaper with a circulation of 50,000 can achieve. What they are dong is way advanced on any Australian news site. They created this within a year. Core to their success was them taking the online move seriously from the top down and driving change. Check out their restaurant reviews and sports scores – yeah, the sports side of the side is truly amazing. The power available to the reader makes them the expert thanks to smart organisation of data.

The conference is proof that publishers the world over are taking the online challenge seriously and that print circulation marketing today is more about delaying rapid decline than achieving growth. I know there are publisher executives in Australia who disagree with me. Let’s check in in a year, two years and five years and see if I am right. If we follow the US and European examples sales will fall. However, I accept that our marketplace is different so who really knows when the inevitable change will hit. The keys are broadband take up, lower cost wireless devices and peer pressure. My plea to Australian newspaper publisher executives is – don’t get newsagents investing beyond what is absolutely necessary in and chasing paid circulation growth. Newsagents themselves need to ensure that every capital investment is for their future and not just to help publishers tread water.

Newsagents are middlemen. This makes us servants. We are not part of any publisher’s online strategy. I’m okay with that. Publishers need to do what is right for their shareholders. For our part, newsagents need to see the future and act now. We need to break out of being middlemen. We need to get smart about online. We need new revenue streams and they need this now for it will take years to change the habits of consumers.

Just as publishers have come to conferences like Beyond the Printed Word, so, too, should newsagents congregate and discuss their life after print. This is the biggest challenge in the 120 years our channel has existed.

While I am leaving the conference with more questions than when I arrived I have a better understanding of how publishers see the online opportunity and some of the strategies being employed and for that I am grateful.

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Citizen Journalism

What do 16 year olds think of online newspaper sites?

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It’s a brave conference which gets 16 year olds on stage to critique newspaper websites. That’s what happened this morning at the Beyond the Printed Word conference in Vienna. This team of bright 16 years shared their views, warts and all. Here is a selection of their comments:

Ads get in the way of content. They don’t like clicking on a video and having to watch an ad before the video. (You could hear the gasp when they said this.)

Pop up ads are annoying.

Most banner ads are not appealing.

They don’t like sites with too much colour, too much animation or swirling fonts.

Sites need to be easier to navigate.

It is frustrating having to register to get the content you need.

As soon as you are sent to another site, when you click a link, they quit.

Having a dating service on a news site is degrading. It’s useless.

They have a preference for proper news sites as opposed to citizen journalism.

Sites chasing young people should be designed by young people – they can tell when a 40 year old is trying to design young.

Not much interest in using mobile phones to access news. (more mutterings from the audience given many are playing in this space.)

I can’t do the hour long presentation justice here.

Some key take-aways for me were that peer pressure drives site traffic. When asked if they would switch to another social media site most of the 16 year old panel said no unless their friends switched. The big surprise was their strong reaction of advertising and their dislike for paying for anything. This is a huge challenge for any online content site chasing this demographic.

How does this connect with Australian newsagents? Well, we’re chasing this market and since they are buying fewer newspapers than the generation before them, their insights will help determine what we need to do in-store to be attractive to them.

This was an excellent session, most invaluable.

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Citizen Journalism

Newspaper publishers chasing web 2.0 and a revenue model

ifra.JPGI’m at the Beyond the Printed Word conference in Vienna along with 450 representatives of newspaper publishers from 41 countries. Everyone is here to talk about how newspapers can make money from online plays and retain (and even grow) shareholder value in this rapidly changing world.

Day one has been kind of a show-and-tell event with publishers presenting what they have done. For me, the most interesting presentation today was by Mikal Rohde of Schibsted Sok AS in Norway. In just over a year the Sesam search engine developed and launched by this publisher has become the hit of Norway. In a globalisation sense it gives me heart that there are some who can beat giants. They are playing in a space few other publishers play in yet it is a logical place for a publisher because what is a search engine but an aggregator of content?

From an Australian newsagent perspective, what is most important about day one is what has not been discussed that much – that print is old news. Some people on the floor talk as if print is already buried. No, it won’t go away but, boy, will it go through some changes. Everyone at the conference is focused on moving the publisher brands born in print to the online world and while many speakers discuss how their online strategy is supporting their print model, the reality is that profit will determine how this plays out.

Newsagents need to understand that newspapers will not be the traffic driver to our retail businesses in five years that they are today and even less so in ten years. This is why what we spend on our infrastructure must change not only to draw new traffic but also to de-emphasise newspapers and to not provide them the most expensive real-estate in our stores.

I was surprised at what some companies have achieved with very small teams. Some excellent sites and services have been established with teams of ten or less – in businesses employing thousands in their print operation. I was also surprised that most of the companies so far are talking about almost single online strategies. Okay, these single sites have depth. I would have thought that is they were looking to replace a significant portion of print revenue they would need many online strategies. Connecting with an online consumer is not a once a day event to get the purchase and leave them be as is the case with a newspaper. For many, online consumption is 24/7 while with others it is many times a day through many channels – hence the need for publishers to break out from behind the masthead and connect through these channels.

Back to Norway, I like that Schibsted has created their own search engine. The control this provides will prove invaluable to their future.

Live coverage is available in part as a demonstration of some of the technologies on show.

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Media disruption

Free newspapers in London make selling newspapers tougher

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It’s hard to walk any of London’s major streets in the afternoon without being offered a copy of the london paper – the free newspaper launched by News International eight weeks ago. Strategically located distributors (often outside a supermarket or convenience store) stand next to the trademark purple umbrella and thrust the newspaper in front of anyone walking within a few feet of their position. Today’s 40 page edition feels nothing like the free commuter papers I am used to – MX in Melbourne and Sydney. Indeed, comparing it page by page with the Evening Standard (50 pence) it’s a very competitive offering. Sure it provides more celebrity and fashion coverage than hard news but the key news stories are well covered. Mind you, the Standard had its fare share of celebrity coverage.

I also picked up a copy of London Lite, a free daily launched ten weeks ago by Associated Newspapers and distributed throughout the City. It’s from the publishers of the Evening Standard. London Lite today is 48 pages long. It shares key stories with the Standard and in a couple of instances today, provided more detail than its paid for stable-mate. Maybe I am missing something but I don’t get the strategy of giving away a product which is 75% of your paid-for product – unless it’s an advertising play, assuring advertisers of a certain number of eyeballs you can only deliver through a free version. London Lite is playing in the user generated content space and carries some content provided by readers.

These free London newspapers are very different to MX, the only capital city free daily in Australia. They read as if they are targeting a broader demographic than that of MX.
By creating such good free offerings, publishers are presenting a product which must cannibalise the market for newspapers with a cover price.

As one who relies on consumer habits to purchase newspapers I’d be unhappy if free newspapers like these two from London came to Australia. However, I suspect it is only a matter of time. People don’t have the time for bigger newspapers. When sales are flat or fall I am sure publishers will use the learnings from London and the many other cities where free daily newspapers are a key part of their consumer offering.

Newsagents I talk to are not concerned about MX. They see it as not competing with anything they offer. The two free newspapers in London which I have seen today would compete and that’s what newsagents need to be aware of and, maybe, plan for.

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Media disruption

Sensis launches Autotrader classifieds title nationally – chasing browsers or buyers?

I am curious about the move by Telstra owned Sensis to bring their West Australian title, Autotrader, to the rest of the country. When sales of other classifieds magazines are in deep decline and the Sensis flagship print title Trading Post is flat in some areas and in free fall in others why bring another print classifieds product in? Given the focus on dealer ads, I don’t see this as a print only play. Autotrader is more likely to be an extra value offer to online advertisers. List in Yellow Pages and other Sensis online properties and get into Autotrader as part of the deal. It makes sense to me – being online and in print.

For newsagents Autotrader is grabbing space on crammed shelves and using the low cost newsagent channel to give the title retail presence. I suspect that Sensis knows what newsagents know – the vehicle section of a newsagency is the most popular for browsers. Blokes spend anything from ten minutes to an hour browsing the magazines – classifieds magazines especially. You see them look through and note down contact details for cars which interest them.

The cynic in me says this is a browser play by Sensis – a shopper browser play. Getting into newsagencies they get Autotrader browsed. I doubt you’ll see Autotrader in petrol, convenience and supermarket outlets because in those places people don’t browse magazines.

Newsagents ought to be paid for real-estate and labour invested in titles which do not generate a profitable return. Sensis ought to compensate newsagents for making their advertising successful without the need for a punter to purchase the title.

Newsagents allow this situation by not being commercial and placing a value on their real-estate and labour. Good luck to Sensis for exploiting this.

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Media disruption

Talking newspapers down

Courtesy of Romenesko is this exchange between Matt Lauer of NBC’s Today show and Jack Welch, discussing a possible purchase of the Boston Globe. The emphasis is mine.

Matt Lauer: “Newspaper sales are down 2.8%, the end of September, according to the latest study, and yet the word out on the street is that Jack Welch wants to buy the Boston Globe. Isn’t that like buying an Edsel factory right now?

Welch: “It’s one way of looking at it, but we don’t see it that way. We see all kinds of opportunity. But look, we’re in the very early stages. Matt, if we were going to buy a factory at that price, we wouldn’t have all this ink. If you fool around in the media, the ink gets (exposed).”

While it’s a good answer from Welch, it’s Lauer’s question which gets the attention. Newspaper executives will be angry and frustrated at the Edsel comparison. In isolation it could be ignored. But it’s not an isolated view. Outside of Australia many are asking questions about the future of newspapers – not suggesting they will disappear but that the model will radically change. Take the story Newspapers, Nor or Never by Dave Morgan at MediaPost. The opening paragraph sets the tone:

IT’S MAKE-OR-BREAK TIME FOR NEWSPAPERS. Over the last couple of months, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to newspaper companies about their digital futures, particularly when it comes to advertising. While I’ve had these kinds of discussions with them for many, many years, the current plight facing the industry has made these discussions take on an immediacy that I have never seen at any point in the past 15 years. They know that their future is now and that they had better figure it out fast. They know that their chance to dominate local online advertising as they have dominated local offline advertising is looking slimmer and slimmer. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (GYM) are all lining up to take a piece of the $100+ billion local ad market as much of it shifts online.

We’re insulated here in Australia because of tight media ownership and because of a historically strong newspaper distribution network through newsagents. The distribution network is consolidating and along with that customer ‘ownership’ is moving from the newsagent to the publisher, from a local connect to a faceless call-centre connect. This will, in my view, make customers more fickle and put us close to the US situation – hence the value in understanding the challenges newspaper publishers in the US face today.

It is appropriate the newspaper publishers urgently source revenue online. Likewise, newsagents need to source traffic and revenue from non traditional sources. They can no longer rely on guaranteed traffic from newspaper sales.

Is Lauer’s question valid? Is a newspaper company like an Edsel factory? No, not if they are racing online. Newsagencies, on the other hand … now that’s a different question.

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Media disruption

Mobile is the newsprint of this generation

Mobile is the medium of the future. Certainly News Corp. thinks so having just announced agreement to pay US$188 million for a 51% stake in Jamba. Everything points to this being a smart move. It directly connects News with the generation shunning newspapers and, to a lesser extent, television. When considered with Mobizzo and MySpace it reinforces their investment in the medium and the generation.

Rupert Murdoch is showing that he knows the hot content market. Digital World Tokyo claims claim that there are more mobile users than wired in Japan. Mobile is hot in Australia too – just look at how often mobile devices and connections are being advertised in more traditional media.

We are witnessing a gold rush of a new era.

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Media disruption

News Corp a HUGE fan of wireless

“Mobile could be the greatest media vehicle ever created, greater than even television. ” News Corp. COO Peter Chernin speaking at the CTIA Wireless 2006 Conference earlier this week as quoted at Paid Content.

As I keep saying – newsagents need to invest in future relevance just as our suppliers like News Corp. are doing today. It makes no sense to invest capital in a newsagency to do more of what we do today because tomorrow it will be less relevant.

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Media disruption

Disruptive social media

This video of what one couple saw on September 11, 2006 puts the citizen journalism movement into perspective and demonstrates how disruptive social media can be to mainstream media. While our TVs have been busy these past few days with slick content commemorating, analysing and dramatising (as if it needs to be) the events in the United States, Bob and Bri have released their home video of what they saw 36 floors up from their apartment near the World Trade Centre. The video is amazing. Raw. Unnerving. Shocking. Compelling.

With so many outlets now available online for user generated content newspapers, TV networks and magazines are challenged to keep up. Traffic to sites such as YouTube, revver and others is proof that people enjoy unfiltered material.

Source: Digg.

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Media disruption

Emap cuts US FHM staff

Mediaweek reports that Emap has cut staff from its US operation. The story has this telling paragraph:

Insiders say FHM has been putting more resources toward its Internet property, having recently hired four more staffers to support its Web site. At the same time the magazine has been pulling away from its fashion coverage; last year it shut down FHM Collections.

Many magazines will find ways to more valuably engage with their readers online. This will lead to bean-counter comparison of the value of an online reader versus a print copy reader. Some titles will do much better in an online only form. While, overall, I am okay with that, the magazine retail channel needs depth to be of interest to consumers. Too many titles in any category retreating to online only could kill off the category for retail.

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Media disruption

eBay under the pump on price increase

Check out the eBay user forum to see customer responses to their price changes. It’s good eBay provides this level of transparency. It will be interesting to see if they revise their pricing. The Find It classified site which we are launching through newsagents will offer free ads to most of those affected as our pricing is product based and anything under $500 will be free.

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Media disruption

Deadline With Destiny: Newspaper Industry Faces $20 Billion Gap

Ken Doctor of research and advisory firm Outsell has written a research paper, Deadline With Destiny: Newspaper Industry Faces $20 Billion Gap, which analyses the challenges newspaper publishers face thanks to the impact of online and sharp declines in sales due to generational change. Check out the description:

In this HotTopics, Outsell predicts that the newspaper industry faces a $20 billion revenue shortfall over the next five years due to print circulation decline, pressures on print advertising and pricing, and rapid growth of lower-revenue-producing online news media. Outsell believes the industry has less than five years to remake its future.

Across at his Chew Shop blog, newspaper executive Brad Robertson provides a deeper insight into Doctor’s paper:

The biggest change agent for newspapers, of course, is the march of online services. As print declines, online has assumed its position as the fastest growing business in newspaper portfolios, with annual growth rates typically more than 30 percent.

and…

Going forward, as online becomes more dominant, the challenge is for newspapers to use online to make up for their inevitable print losses. That’s easier said than done.

Robertson’s blog is a must read for newsagents and anyone who makes a living off newspapers. I’d suggest the report is worth reading as well but I’m not paying the US$495.00 to read what I know – that newspaper sales will be flat at best for the next three years before they start to seriously fall. Okay, it may take a little longer in Australia because of our useless broadband/wireless coverage we have but it will happen. Newsagents and others need to take this into account in their business planning today.

This report from Ken Doctor is another weather forecast. There is a storm coming. It’s big. It will hit. There is time to be ready, time to lock in customer traffic with other products and even by embracing. This is one reason we are launching our Find It online classified business and why we are partnering with newsagents as our shop front.

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Media disruption

Nestle online consumer magazine

plenty.gifNestle has launched Plenty, an online magazine promoting their products through recipes and related articles. This issue has 25 pages and by any measure is quite substantial.

Plenty is well worth a look.

I would be interested to see readership data for this compared to traditional print advertising by the company. Of course, being an online publication and out of their own company, Nestle will have access to more timely and better data than through a more traditional media outlet.

As for the technology behind the online magazine – very nice. Easy to navigate and read. Check it out if you want to see how online magazine technology is evolving.

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Media disruption

Spelling Out the Media Shift

Mark Glaser has written an excellent piece about the shift of control in media. Consumers are in control now more than ever. This movement will grow as their news and entertainment desires are satisfied by independent sources rather than those from mass media outlets. Consider these three examples from Glaser:

Oldthink: Relying on mainstream media TV coverage to follow wars and conflicts.

Newthink: Reading bloggers or citizen journalists who are eyewitnesses to wars, or soldier bloggers who are participants and can share their own stories in words or video. Seeing photos from people with cameraphones at the scene.

Oldthink: Reading, listening or watching media on the schedules set by executives and programmers.

Newthink: Getting the information, news and entertainment we want, when we want it, on the device we want it, with or without commercials.

Oldthink: Turning on car radios to hear the music or radio shows we enjoy.

Newthink: Getting satellite radio or plugging in portable MP3 players to our car stereos so we can listen to hundreds of commercial-free stations on satellite or thousands of podcasts downloaded from the Internet.

I’d add my own:

Oldthink: It was smart to pay to get to the top of a search list or on the front page.
Newthink: Be where people will want you – they will ignore those who pay extra to be noticed.

Oldthink: People trust the masthead and all it carries.
Newthink: People trust people more – now that people have their own voice.

Oldthink: the price of a classified ad is based on the number of gatekeepers.
Newthink: the price of a classified ad is based the cost of providing the service.

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Media disruption

How long before we see more magazines?

Lulu is turning book publishing on its ear by bypassing the gatekeeper – the publishers. You can self publish your manuscript through lulu for nothing thanks to print on demand technology. Authors make a handsome commission when a book is sold. Lulu claims as many as 1,000 new manuscripts a week. Publishers will say that many are of poor quality and while this may be true for some titles, their track record on quality is not all that clean.

My interest in lulu and print on demand more generally is whether this technology will help more people enter the magazine space and professionally produce new, non shelf life restricted, titles. It seems to me that in the more special interest areas a lulu type offering could work well and enable wannabee publishers to enter the space without the costs base of traditional magazine publishers.

Lulu already allows for self publishing of books, CDs, DVDs and calendars so magazines are not a giant leap.

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Media disruption

Trade Me Jobs launches in NZ

The Fairfax owned Trade Me has launched their online employment offering in New Zealand jobs has launched. Here’s the pitch they have emailed to their registered users to promote Trade Me Jobs:

A year ago we launched Trade Me Property and, thanks to your fantastic support, we are now New Zealand’s #1 real estate website.

But your house isn’t your most important asset…. you are!

So… Introducing Trade Me Jobs

We’re delighted that dozens of recruiters and employers have already committed to advertising on Trade Me Jobs. Trade Me members are smarter than most, so we look forward to connecting employers with some great candidates.

To celebrate, we have a special launch offer: list a job vacancy on Trade Me Jobs before midnight Thursday for just $25 (normally $49). Finding a job is, of course, always free.

Given the money invested in and the success of the Trade Me brand, Fairfax would have to be considering bringing it to Australia. My reasoning is that MyCareer and Domain are fixed in consumer’s minds as a newspaper and online offering whereas Trade Me in online only. Trade Me, Trade Me Property and Trade Me Jobs would better compete with the pure online plays.

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Media disruption

Great viral campaign for Snakes On A Plane

jackson.JPGThere is a great viral campaign doing the rounds of email inboxes for Snakes On A Plane, a soon to be released movie with Samuel L Jackson. How it works is that you go to the website, enter some details about a friend and they are sent a personal invitation from Jackson to see the movie. It’s campaigns like this which are disrupting more traditional media, especially for films, TV shows and music.

While it may seem like a stretch, newsagents could play a role in over the counter viral campaigns given their contact with millions of consumers every week.

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Media disruption