When you buy a magazine or watch a TV show, you may think of yourself as not merely the consumer of "content," but the customer of the content purveyor.
Usually, you're not. Usually, you (or your buying habits) are the actual product; the real business of the media company is selling ads, and the content they deliver is, in varying ways, based very heavily on what their advertisers find advantageous and likely to generate sales.
As a customer of both the magazine and of its advertiser, you're part of a huge aggregate, and have little individual power in the business relationship.
A world in which an advertiser's disgruntled customer can use a free Internet account to air grievances to a wider audience than will ever see the advertiser's expensive newspaper ad is quite disruptive of this model. Further slowing ad sales is the fact that prospective advertisers are finding it more cost-effective to tell their stories in depth on their own Web sites, which often include portals, chat rooms, and various other attempts to build customer loyalty as well as short-term business.
Like many mass-scale industries before it, Big Media struggles to redefine itself to survive technological change. At least one startup exists to sell off surplus online ad space, suggesting that what works in broadcast media doesn't work as well online, yet. In the resulting discontinuity, there's an emerging opportunity to publish information driven by criteria quite different from "what we can sell ads around," in a climate optimized for the reader's ability to talk back.
About the speaker:
With a graduate degree in comparative literature (12th century) and a career ambition of interviewing Jerry Garcia (done in 1987), Mary Eisenhart still wonders how she ended up as editor of MicroTimes for 14 years.
She is currently freelancing (her most recent article is an interview with Palm Computer co-founder Donna Dubinsky in Salon) and constructing YOYOW.com, an experiment in self-publishing with no clear business model in mind.
Contact information:
Mary Eisenhart
3239 Kempton Avenue #11
Oakland CA 94611
(510)465-6726
marye@yoyow.com