Sunday, September 29, 2013

Thanks to digital media, we’re consuming more stuff

Ken Doctor reporting:
This week, we saw the fairly astounding news that mobile minutes are doubling the amount of time Americans are spending online, with smartphone and tablet usage the great multipliers. Amazon reports that its Kindle owners buy four times more books than those who buy only print. Online video watching has increased at least 600 percent over the past five years — averaging more than 200 videos, totaling over 22 hours, per month.
... Those in the newsrooms and editorial staffs and those on the sales side have a future. Growth is possible. As important as the promise of revenue growth is the sense of being essential. The deep decline in revenue over the last half decade has led to a deep decline in confidence: Do readers and merchants still need what we do? That loss in confidence has only added to the problem.
...
This new strategy will be significantly fueled by developments at two of the U.S’s top papers, The New York Times and The Washington Post. From the Times, we’ll soon see a spate of new products, individually priced and targeted at niche audiences, as CEO Mark Thompson acts on his belief that Times readers can be sold new products along “an engagement curve.” From the Post, we’ll likely see the application of the kind of media marketing savvy that now produce more than half of new Post owner Jeff Bezos’ Amazon revenues.
For publishers, the business model has long had two dominant parts: sell advertising to businesses; sell newspapers or magazines to readers, either by subscription or as a single copy. Those two kinds of products remain dominant for now — but it’s remarkable what else is starting to be sold.
2014 looks like it will mark a turning point here, as a number of new news products hit the market — joining the ranks of growing ebook production, e-commerce services, events marketing, content marketing, and niched print and digital paid products already in the marketplace.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/09/the-newsonomics-of-selling-more-things/

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