Profiting From Information Overload

As publishers, we have an interesting and increasingly complex relationship with technology. Till the end of the twentieth century, it was our best friend, but now as technology moves forward, it sometimes seems to threaten us as if it was our worst enemy. We have automated the entire manufacturing process, saving our companies billions of dollars in no longer necessary and inefficient production steps. We no longer use mechanical paste-up boards or, for the most part, any expensive hard proofs. We no longer need the antique process of film to create printing plates. In the near future we will no longer need printing plates at all, and, with the coming implementation of wide-array ink jet heads connected to big data engines, each page in a magazine will have the capacity for the edit to be uniquely tailored to the specific person. All these computer generated processes have advanced the creation of the magazine business far beyond the imagination of the men and women for whom I worked as I got into this industry in the latter half of the last century. We have totally exceeded our expectations, imaginations, and former limitations when it comes to making beautiful, well-crafted magazines. Now computers have added an additional dimension that is both wonderful and threatening at the same time. I am speaking of the ability of some programs to create computer generated "editorial serendipity" on the fly. There are several programs that do this now, which are still in their early adolescence. Flipboard, Paper.li and many others have given us all the ability to create a personalized publication that is paginated, designed, and a rich reading experience, populated by "sources" that we, the reader, chose. I have been experimenting and using both Flipboard and Paper.li since they were created in 2010. Most people in publishing are aware of my newsletter with a rather robust circulation, but very few are aware of my daily e-newspaper that has been published at http://paper.li/bosacks since 2010. It has generated over a 1,000 subscribers without any attempt at publicity on my part. In late March of 2013, Flipboard launched version 2.0 of its iOS app, and it allows any reader to become an instant magazine publisher. Instead of reading content intended solely for the single unique reader, users can now create personalized periodicals curated from a variety of content from around the world and develop their own paginated magazine, a community of readers with edit curated by each new "publisher." Here, too, on Flipboard I have over 1,000 unsolicited subscribers to my new "Heard on the Web" magazine in just a few weeks. With this technology our readers have also become publishers and that means there is yet another digital addition to global information overload. But all this access to more reading platforms and new magazines begs the question about revenue streams and who gets a piece of it. Mike McCue, Flipboard's CEO, recently said that a primary focus of Flipboard is to help publishers make money from their original content through advertising. He also noted that Flipboard will take a cut of those advertising dollars collected. Mr. McCue went on to suggest that he wants publications to be able to charge users to access particular articles. If Mr. McCue's idea of giving readers access to specific articles has credence, then this concept brings to the forefront the question of whether or not publishers will try to profit, not from the whole pie of the magazine, but from an attempt to sell portions of that pie as individual slices on an article-by-article basis. That type of distribution is being done already. Kindle Singles is just one example. The only question to me is this—is there long-term monetization in this process of dissecting a magazine into its smallest usable components for redistribution? Where is the most value? Is it in the totality of a magazine or the dissection of that magazine into its smallest unit sized components? Even if Flipboard and publishers don't start selling individual articles, there is an under-reported and positive revenue event happening for the publishing industry. The Flipboard CPMs are favorably high compared to most other digital distribution platforms and worth the investigation of any publisher. In a conversation last week, a publisher friend who is currently involved in this process voiced concern about the longevity of these new high CPMs. He may be right, but for the sake of the industry I optimistically disagree. I think that if the writing is good enough, the reading public has shown that they are willing to pay for it, and I believe that the substrate shouldn't matter in relation to the value of the written word. It has always been my contention that the substrate shouldn't matter in the value equation. As publishers in a world of information overload we must stand our ground and firmly charge for our highly valued intellectual property, because if we don't, the consequences are dramatically destructive not only to the industry we knew, but to the still evolving information distribution industry. PE Bob Sacks (aka BoSacks) is a publishing industry consultant and president of The Precision Media Group (BoSacks.com). He also is co-founder of research company mediaIDEAS (MediaIdeas.net), and publisher and editor of a daily e-newsletter, Heard on the Web.

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Profiting From Information Overload

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