The Future of Publishing: Like Minds
With the full knowledge that we are plunging headlong into a confusing and bipolar introduction, let’s just say it: Publishing is concurrently dying a slow death, and exploding in growth. The traditional magazine, newspaper, music, and book industries are all seeing the same cultural shifts influence their environments. It doesn’t take a qualified futurist to predict the further decline of the publishing industry as we know it, but it also is supremely apparent that the act of publishing, that is the origination of content for the purpose of distribution and consumption, is alive and very well. Of course, it is little consolation to the 17,000 newspaper journalists who have lost their jobs since the beginning of 2009, that there are now 500 million people on Facebook, daily adding status updates, notes and photos.
CC Thomas Hawk (flickr)
There is no need to repeat all the woes of the industry, but as Clay Shirky writes, “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” The traditional business model has faced significant and irreversible disruption, as the broadcast model of publishing has been swept away by an open, socially-connected, and internet-enabled revolution of content creators, curators, disseminators, and readers. The publisher no longer has control. The publisher no longer delivers ideas to a passive audience. And publishers that retain their sense of entitlement to past roles are fighting a ‘death-by-a-thousand-cuts’, as readers start blogging, brands start mass-publishing, and independent communities start gathering, not to mention the myriad of upstart commercial competitors that have leaped into action as barriers to entry have evaporated.
So in this disrupted environment, how can we make sense of the chaos? There are several suggestions, some would consider them now truisms, that are worth pondering. Without these fundamental perspectives in place, it is very difficult to build for the future.
Before we start, let’s get one thing straight: There is little useful purpose in looking backwards and wishing for the ‘good old days’. It seems every few months, a publishing executive steps out from behind the parapet to rant defiantly like the proverbial ostrich. Ok, I’m being harsh. But the trouble is that “you get what you pay for” is not economics. It’s just debatably wise consumer advice. Unfortunately, “you’re going to miss us when we’re gone” has never been much of a business model.
Understand the emerging authorities
One of the most significant risks to publishers, much more important than a fall in demand for traditional products, is that their position in the value chain could be removed entirely. Publishers take a financial risk to manufacture, distribute, and promote content. But as this financial barrier to entry disintegrates, competitors start to abound. And not just from new commercial publishers with lower cost bases. Those that publishers previously considered to be “consumers” are now producing content; some curate news via tweets, some inform with blog posts, and some entertain through video. The community gathers around its self-created experts, and with little cost structure to manage, a quality content origination process is activated. It might seem impossible that the value that publishers create will be completely removed, but as we see more and more authors, musicians, and industry experts choose to set up without a ‘publisher’, the likelihood increases. Even beyond these emergent experts, we have an ocean of what is popularly called ‘user generated content’, which is of varying degrees of quality, but on aggregate poses a substantial risk to traditional publishers. This information oversupply reveals the inconvenient truth that many consumers are satisfied with this type of content, for much of their content diet. It might not always be edited and factually accurate, but it is relevant, social, living, spreadable, and everywhere.
Beyond user generated content we find another emergent ‘publishing non-publisher’: brands. As the saying goes, every company is now a media company, and brands are realising that content is a powerful sales and customer service tool. And the budgets that brands can bring to bear are often substantially higher than publishing model can afford. Big brands spend millions of pounds on print magazines, video shoots, white papers, and information sites – which are often then delivered for free.
These factors mean the traditional publishing model is being eaten from inside, as those who would previously have chosen a publisher go it alone, below, by an abundance of user generated content, and from above, as brands get into the high-quality production game.
Go direct to the consumer
So, a major opportunity, or rather necessity, for publishers is to jump the supply chain and build direct-to-consumer relationships. The vertical systems of the past have left many publishers devoid of actual consumer contact, and in a world where consumers are identifiable, trackable, transparent, and easily accessible, publishers must build those relationships. It might sound soft, but relationship is the right word. Long-term, stable consumer relationships where the publisher consistently provides value to the end-user is the only form of competitive advantage.
This means that you already have the audience before you even make the book, or album, or magazines. Getting a review in the New York Times is a shotgun approach to marketing, and paid mass-marketing is a very expensive shotgun approach to marketing. But reaching out to your current community, who have already given you permission to communicate with them, is relatively cheap and very effective. This transition leads to a reduced focus on launch-based sales and marketing activity, and a new appreciation of ‘lifetime customer value’.
Bet on ubiquity not scarcity
Publishers have grown to huge scale based on an acquisition of content assets that are both scarce, and controllable. The physical nature of content in previous decades, has allowed publishers to own, manage, distribute, and carefully throttle, the volume of content. The trouble is that the internet has brought about a new paradigm to replace scarcity: ubiquity. Publishers that still operate under the rules of scarcity are finding they are not even playing the same game as those that have transformed their thinking. There are now no limits to the number of pages of a newspaper. The more stories published, the better. There is no sense to think of a quantity of books, as they become an instantly replicable, and copyable, product.
The interesting thing is that when someone moves from being a book buyer to being a Kindle owner, purchases go up by about 3 times. The same happens with music, where physical product sales are now back below the level of the 1960s and still falling, yet music consumption is going through the roof. A similar effect is seen with news. But the marginal cost of manufacturing and delivering those extra purchases is negligible. So the prices associated with scarce content are not tolerated where infinite shelf-space occurs.
Understand marginal distribution costs
The new content format, digital, has a near-zero marginal cost of distribution. This troubles publishers, who have historically been able to charge for access: the ability to provide the content at the right place in the right time. Now, content is everywhere, anywhere, and always. And most worryingly for content owners, more often than not it is free. Yes, I have finally said it. The dreaded ‘F-word’.
The actual acts of using and sharing physical content degrades it, and entices further purchases. Digital content suffers no such issue with obsolescence. In fact, sharing and copying is very much an inherent part of the digital content experience, whatever the legal system or debatable moral standards dictate.
Monetise the community, not the content
To start to provide a route out of confusion, there is a two-step change of focus that must occur. Firstly, publishers must start to consider their business to be community management, not shipping books. Publishers that have built direct relationships with their most active, vociferous, and passionate customers, have an opportunity to maximise lifetime customer value. Secondly, it’s vital to shift the focus from monetising content, to monetising that community. Digital content, in most instances, is trending downwards in price.
The truth is that there will not be as much money in the selling of content as there has been. That’s a result of content ubiquity. The lie is that most publishers have to go bust. There are a myriad of potential revenue streams when communities are the source of monetisation. To help identify them for any publisher, at idio we have devised a simple ABCD framework:
Audience revenue drivers
This category covers the traditional revenue streams that are a function of the audience size: purchase price and advertising or sponsorship revenue.
Brand revenue drivers
Moving beyond the initial audience, this category denotes the brand extensions that can be implemented. Obvious examples include mobile applications, events and new products.
Content revenue drivers
This shifts the focus from the ‘normal’ consumer of any publisher, to explore the opportunities for supplying the asset to other stakeholders. Magazines can use their writers to create branded content commissioned by other companies, and books can be syndicated for other territories.
Data revenue drivers
As direct-to-consumer relationships increase, data becomes an invaluable asset for every publisher. This might be in the form of selling on marketing lists to interested brands, building insightful research from aggregate data, or selling through ancillary products to the current audience.
Co-create
As focus shifts from product to people, this focus on community does far more than provide a marketing channel. It is the publisher’s best source of new ideas, authors and editors. Wikipedia is by far the most edited and up-to-date encyclopaedia. It is also, in most areas, the most accurate. That has been achieved by providing the community with content creation and curation tools, and a viable (but not-financial) reason for experts to contribute. Dilbert, the award-winning comic strip, is now no longer the inspiration of Scott Adams the cartoonist. All the new strips are driven by concepts submitted by his community. Even in music, many mainstream artists now release remixable versions of their tracks, so that the community can co-create parallel versions.
Co-creation sums up the biggest opportunity for publishers. It might sound scary, loose, unpolished, uncontrolled, and amateur. But if your community are already creating, becoming the focus of that community is the only way to extract value. Simple marketing to a community will not work. The new publisher must be the focal point of the community.
The publishing industry will never return to how it once was. The problems with the traditional industry cannot be excused by claiming they are ‘cyclical’. Sure, the recession has exposed many poor businesses; when the tide goes out, you find out who was swimming naked. But the cyclical conditions have only exacerbated structural cracks. There is no one solution, but by reforming based on openness rather than closed systems, and community instead of control, a sustainable future can be built.
Hi Andrew, Great post. You hit the nail right on the head. Here at SuperLiving we have always regarded information as a key to our web site, so as well as selling physical products we have also sold books. We have done OK with this in the past, but the sales are now just a trickle and we are moving from physical books to affiliate sales through Amazon and ClickBank and audios from Audible. The small effort we have put into this has already resulted in higher sales than our physical books. We are also in the process of creating e-books to publish from our web site and also through Kindle etc. Things change and we are moving from being a book seller to a recommender and publisher. You just have to keep trying new formats and go with what works.
Colin – thanks for stopping by
Didn’t see you at Like Minds this year.
Absolutely – we must all focus on metrics. And being the “recommender” or gateway for your audience is a powerful place to be – even if you are not actually the vendor. Great to hear that is working for you.
Many years ago those swimming naked were bathing dressed in a suit of gold. Unfortunately, it seemed to weigh them down when the currents changed. When the tide did turn against them, which was without doubt the moment that the world wide web, as it was once called went live. At this point maximum creativity was required. Oddly enough for an industry built on creativity, publishing reacted with a total lack of imagination and foresight. Those thousand cuts you spoke of were mostly self-inflicted.
We should take care not to focus too much on newspapers, however. They are merely a part of publishing, they don’t represent the entire industry and neither do their statistics. Although I’ll admit, much of what we call ‘traditional publishing’ is in a death throe.
Care should still be exercised when suggesting that journalism is a poorer place, one where making a living is harder than before. It never was the easiest place to make a living and the majority of those who attempted it failed, they gave up and got a proper job. It took guts, contacts and luck to make it in media pre-html. The present scenario, far from a world of fewer opportunities for the content creators, is in fact a landscape of almost unlimited potential.
If the publishing industry would only harness the incredible creative talent that lies within it, it’s future could be clothed in gold again. While I am not about to predict the death of the media giant, I do foresee a time when some of those giants are made up of lots of collaborative pieces.
Whatever the future trends, money always provides an opportunity to subvert or control something which may have once seemed like a popular movement. It happened to punk rock and it’s now happening to that other great anarchy movement, the Internet.
One thing is for sure though. Whatever the future of content, media and publishing might be, I intend to be part of it.
@lesanto
Great comment Glenn!
Agreed we must look at all publishing sectors – there are lessons that each sector can learn from each other.
Love your point about journalism vs media conglomerates. As you say, the future is bright for journalists on an individual level, even if the corporate structures are in danger.
This is an absolutely cracking post you have written here Andrew. Absolutely superb; well-argued, ambitious, articulate and helpful. I hope a lot of people see this
One thought to add to the discussion is a point made by Molly Flatt articulated at your publishing immersive last week. To paraphrase, she effectively said that for all the freedoms and benefits afforded by new media, those that operate and actively champion online platforms (e.g. bloggers) would be the first to say, “Look at me everyone, I’m in The Times” if cited or even jump ship to work for a newspaper if the opportunity presented itself. The thrust of her point was that so-called ‘old’ media still retains a huge ‘pull’ and attraction culturally on many in the digital landscape – regardless of the fact that the bottom is falling out. Out of interest, would you (Andrew) rather be the Editor of The Washington Post or IdioMag?
Whilst you can make a compelling case for this new digital publishing landscape, I think that ‘old’ media will continue (although, of course, not thrive) for longer than you think in its current iterations because although it may no longer have the monopoly on ‘authority’, it does benefit from the triple-combo of ‘tradition’, ‘prestige’ and ‘sentiment’. Something of which very few online platforms have been able to generate convincingly.
Your thoughts?
PS I appreciate that I am well out of my depth in this discussion, but I have a huge affection for these monolithic media outlets of old and just needed somewhere to vent against you inspiring young upstarts!
Good thoughts and questions Jonny.
Firstly, The Times is probably the weakest of the possible “old media” examples – given that some of its own journalists are choosing to leave the publication because of the paywall (eg http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/jun/21/thetimes-paywalls) and the resulting loss of audience! They write for the large readership, and now the audience is down 78%.
I am certainly not arguing that traditional publications don’t hold prestige and in many cases actual reach that exceeds newer publications. But neither of those facts help when we come to the tricky question of how to build a publishing model in a present (where traditional publishers are firing journalists regularly) and in the future (where traditional models cannot continue). Once again, ‘having a great brand legacy or a prestigious title’ is NOT a business model.
To answer your question – one thing is for certain, where I am in my career, I don’t really want to be in charge of a business where savage cost-cutting and radical transformation of the legacy staff/process/structures is the way to survive, with little hope of ever regaining the good old days. I do want to be in a lower cost, growing business, where I have a chance to build a business that makes commercial sense in the new environment.
The prestige of which you speak is largely a factor of time. New publications have not had the time to build that yet. The largest blogs/news sites draw equally big/larger audiences that traditional publications (Huffington Post etc). The question is “Can traditional publishers find a way to trade off their prestigious brands for long enough to find a new model?”
To be clear: everything I have written in the post above is to traditional publishers – in fact probably more so than to new media (for which most of the above arguments are taken as given). I want traditional publishers to survive. But they won’t survive without changing considerably. Most of them are in the midst of that process as we type.
Yes, I (would) love being quoted in The Guardian or The Telegraph. But I don’t pay for either – and that’s the problem I am addressing above.
FYI – there are also some great comments over at The Media Briefing on this post – http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/2010-10-29/the-future-of-publishing-like-minds#comment-92729330
Very useful and valuable piece, Andrew. The first post on our new conference curation site here. http://amplifiedconferences.amplify.com/2010/11/02/the-future-of-publishing-likeminds-the-new-rules-of-engagement-29oct10/. Amplify is designed for sparking discussion, so please leave comments.
Hello Andrew, Relevant to your point about monetizing the community not the content, we responded to another post commentor who asked “If you were running the NY Times, what would you do?” http://www.comradity.com/comradity/2010/11/if-you-were-running-the-ny-times-what-would-you-do.html
The response is based on the design we envision to galvanize both on and offline communities by making sense of all the dots and how they could connect. Wondering if your technology would be relevant to integrate into this vision? Contact me at katherine (at) comradity (dot) com if you think so.
Best,
Katherine Warman Kern
@comradity
Thanks Jan – looks good, although its placed punctuation in some funny places!
Thanks Katherine – have emailed you
The role of publishers may change, but their function– or the function of some entity– to set apart professional quality writing from writing that has not been polished– is highly valuable to consumers. They need some way to tell the wheat from the chaff; to find the book that someone besides the author and her mom thought was worth printing. There is a good chance it won’t be in quite the form it takes now. One of the questions now for authors, amid all the gloom and doom about publishers not buying anything– is how to self-publish in a way that generates the kind of respect that traditional publishing does. We don’t seem to be at that point now. Even though getting past those gatekeepers to get published is frustrating, I’m glad I started at a time when it was necessary because it forced me to be patient and listen to feedback to hone my craft. I believe that type of filtered system will find a place along side the– for want of a better word– amateur material. Having a system that requires people to jump through some hoops co-existing with one with fewer hoops might be the best of both worlds, allowing some works that might otherwise fall through the cracks to get an audience.
Hi Laura,
Thanks for your comment. Totally agreed that there MUST be filters to separate wheat from chaff. As more content is published, this becomes an even more important task. Unfortunately, I don’t think that traditional publishers are currently set up to do this in a world where anyone can build an audience directly. Part of the problem is that when I go into a bookstore and see bookshelves of celebrity-authored trash titles, it really doesn’t increase my perception of a publisher’s ability to deliver quality…
This is a fine analysis. To anyone who has been paying atention for the past few years, most of it is blindingly obvious, but I get the feeling that it is still news to many of those working in the traditional book business. Do UK publishers have the wit, energy, drive, and technical knowhow to transform themselves into profitable publishers of the 21st century? I would be hard put to offer any evidence that they do. On the contrary, there is quite a lot of evidence that they seem determined to commit suicide.
Thanks for the comment Michael. Yes the evidence seems to be strong… As the commercial reality of the future models become closer, I think there will be some brave moves by traditional publishers, but I hope it’s not all too little too late.
Amidst all these dire predictions, we have gone ahead and launched a print literary magazine http://readinghour.in. Albeit in India, where the print industry is not yet in such a bad state. Do however agree with most comments here, which is why we are simultaneously building a community at facebook.com/readinghour. Early days, but do take a look if you can. We love feedback and suggestions
I agree with what you’re saying, but if you look at what J.K. Rowling’s doing with her online store, I think publishing needs to adapt to compete.
great article .! i read your every post ..! i like to spend time on your blog ..! thanks alot for sharing this great articles
Terrific article! Well written. I keep coming back for more! =)
Very nice article.The future is now!
excellent article. the good companies are always the ones setting trends but i know there are a bunch out there that could use this advice and start moving forward.
Definitely worth reading.
As a publisher, I am aware that my content might be stolen..but hey, what can i do?
humm… didn’t finish reading it :/
but maybe it is just because of the time
.. it is 02:18am
The residence entertainment scenery is enduringly changing, and amazon.com is here to assistance you understand those inescapable
i dont know how long it took you to write that post, but it certainly rings out as a crie de couer for the industry.
too many point raised to comment on them all, but this paragraph stands out:
——–
“The trouble is that the internet has brought about a new paradigm to replace scarcity: ubiquity. Publishers that still operate under the rules of scarcity are finding they are not even playing the same game as those that have transformed their thinking. There are now no limits to the number of pages of a newspaper. The more stories published, the better. There is no sense to think of a quantity of books, as they become an instantly replicable, and copyable, product….”
——–
and it particularly stands out for me as ive just been reading
~”GOOGLED: The End Of The World As We Know It”~
by ken auletta who spent quite some time with the main players in and around Google, from founders sergei brinn and larry page, ceo eric schmidt and countless others.
i initially thought that the title of the book ‘Googled’ was a reference to the way that we search for information online. it isnt. its a direct reference to what happens to an industry once Google has set its sights on its prey. choose almost any media and you’ll see disarray wherever you look.
over 25,000 newspapers are aggregated each and every day by Google as they seek to provide the worlds most comprehensive NEWS coverage. Of the 20 million book titles that have ever been printed, more than half have already been digitised by Google as they seek to share them with the world, snapping up out of copyright titles by the yard. Its YouTube subsidiary has revolutionised the FREE sharing of content owned by the worlds largest tv networks, film companies and music publishers. Its Android phone operating system is an alternative platform for GoogleAds of an even more highly personalised and targeted nature than already exists via the pc.
We find ourselves in the extraordinary position of hoping that MicroSoft (the traditional panto villain) are able to perform minor miracles and create something of a comeback against Googles domination, but dont hold your breath.
FaceBook are likely to be smashed against the rocky shores of Googles ‘Google+’ social network.
I might be wrong in attributing this quote to one of the Rothschilds: ‘i dont care who’s in power so long as i control the money supply’, but the modern day equivalent statement would be ‘i dont care who owns the products so long as i own the consumer data’ and Googles method of owning the data appears to be based on giving away as much content as they are legally able to, in exchange for cookies dropped on your pc/mobile/tablet.
yes Andrew, its a grim outlook for the publishing world, but as ive just pointed out, these enormous epoch changing events are affecting whole industries across the globe and as the saying goes “if you’re looking for Sympathy, you’ll find it in the dictionary between Sh*t and Syphillis*.
Depending on your perspectives and position, these are exciting/terrifying times. Thank you for taking the time to write this piece.
The key to this in my view lies in the ability to build a culture of innovation within Publishing. This has been ignored in the past but I feel the tide has now turned due to necessity rather than a planned reaction to the points you correctly identify. The need to accelerate understanding of innovation and how it supports sustainable business success is critical – and as you state if Publishers don’t position themselves correctly in this way, then others will.
Its such as you learn my thoughts! You seem to understand so much about this, such as you wrote the guide in it or something. I feel that you can do with a few % to force the message house a little bit, but instead of that, this is great blog. An excellent read. I’ll definitely be back.