Why should this be terrifying and not an example of us outgrowing something quaint and ridiculous? Printing yesterday's news every night on a ton of paper, physically delivering it to people, and then having them throw it away is supposed to be an immortal business model?
"It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves - the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public - has stopped being a problem." -Clay Shirky
> the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
What a brilliant article! It's an especially fascinating commentary on how people can be willing to go to such great lengths to deny a stark but simple and obvious explanation of what is happening.
I agree that the physical printing of news on paper is becoming quaint, but having less print isn't what worries me, it's having less news.
I want to read stories about events all over the world and their meanings, context and history. I want those stories to be written by experts whose full-time job is tracking those stories down and explaining them to me. People like that have to get paid, and it's not clear yet how that's going to happen in the post-newspaper future.
There's always a demand for this sort of news, so I'm sure new businesses will spring up in the future to supply it to me. But it's going to be an annoying few years while it gets sorted out.
"yawn Are we going to keep bemoaning the death of VHS too? What about 8-track? Newspapers are dead. People don’t want them. News is not dead, people want it. Figure it out."
Sadly, times have changed. We need to "bail out" any failing business, no matter how ridiculous:
Imagine our current crop of politicians at the turn of the (20th) century: "Save the poor horse and buggy! Just think of the crumbling equine economy!"
I'd like to see how other advertising as a whole has changed over the same time period. Without that, I don't think the stat is too useful. Has all advertising dropped off a cliff, or has online advertising taken share away from newspapers?
I think it'd be cool to hear some HN anecdotes as well. What's been your experience with Mibbit?
Although we don't have any advertisements on the main TicketStumbler site, we've seen the price of tickets, on average, plummet. Some Major League Baseball tickets are selling 80% below face value.
In terms of Mibbit, advertising has been extremely stable for the last 6 months (adsense). (In absolute terms it's been growing, along side mibbit).
I used to do a lot more affiliate marketing on another site, but still see a fair amount of commissions from it, even though it's "dead". I think online advertising is pretty healthy.
A lot of what I do revolves around online advertising. Some things, such as redesigning sites & the like (which is also really a form of online advertising) have softened a little.
Things like Adwords have gone sideways: Some reducing spending to cope with reduced income, some increasing for the same reason. I think slight net positive.
Client growth is to irregular to know what's going on without looking at years instead of months.
Put the two together & I read it as deferring bulky expenses, but overall strengthening slowly. Anyway, the areas we deal in there's a lot of cash still stuck in legacy budgets: yellow pages, local newspapers& crappy online advertising. New companies aren't going there at all, but all of them are going online one way or another.
From Terrible to terrifying: 35mm film sales have plummeted.
Newspapers aren't going to disappear. Specialty newspapers like the financial times will always have their place on my breakfast table, but the boring, almost-pointless local news?
I am having a devil of a time figuring out what that graph actually is. I think the percentage is "how much less revenues are than the same quarter last year", but I'm still not 100% on that. It's a very strange number to graph quarterly, especially without more clearly labeling it.
Raw #s at http://www.naa.org/TrendsandNumbers/Advertising-Expenditures... - the meat is that total newspaper ad sales in 2005 were ~50b and now it's ~30b - while some of that is obviously recessionary, many of those advertisers are never going to come back now that they've discovered the joys of digital.
As well as it being easier than ever to publish your original content, it's also become easier than ever to book advertising. The company I work for is based in old media (TV) and working on strategy in bundling TV ad sales with radio and print for niche markets but it's not a viable long-term approach - I do learn interesting things about how the ad biz works, but some days I can't help hearing the subtext as 'this slide rule will still work when your calculator batteries have died'.
Given how superior the internet is in every possible way (search, ease of updating, ease of distribution, price) for content and for ads, I am amazed that the decline has taken so long.
My perspective is probably skewed by being an early adopter, though, and the fact that society always moves far slower than I hope.
Actually, the one area that I think print has an advantage over digital is tangibility. I love the web and all things digital, but there's still something special about sitting in a coffee shop and reading a newspaper or paperback novel, or leisurely paging through an art book. The Kindle is awesome and I'll give up all my physical books when I get one, but something real and meaningful will be lost in the transition, I'm afraid. Something worth losing, but something just the same.
I think the reason newspapers have declined so much, is merely the fact that they rely almost entirely on advertising to pay for the production and it's fairly inaccurate advertising. I mean your demographic targeting is exclusively to those who read, which in countries with 99% literacy rates, you're basically fucked for targeting. Where as you can pay less money to advertise online, reach less people but potentially have everyone who sees it interested.
Advertising on a bus is more demographically targeted than newspaper advertising, I mean generally lower income and likely don't own a vehicle. I don't own a drivers license, so why do I care about the new Ford Taurus, they just wasted money by advertising to me.
However, there's no advertising in book sales. Perhaps this is why for the past ten years they've had record sales. The internet has only helped book sales, and interestingly free eBook releases also boost sales.
The assumption that publishing is dead because of the internet is just stupid. We have ubiquitous clean water supplies, but people still "waste" money on bottled water. Plumbing isn't as useful to people as water in a bottle. Similarly, eBooks aren't as useful to people as books (at least so far).
Kindle and similar eBook readers offer promise to removing the paperback from its throne, but tangibility and freedom are key here. I can hand my book to anyone, I can sell it on and whatever I want, this creates the incredible ability for free advertising. Most of my books are from authors recommended to me, which usually involved the person handing me the book to me for me to read.
Also you can't advertise that you're intelligent and well read better than a bookshelf full of books. Then there's all the textile sensations that come with books.
While I don't doubt books will likely go the way of the newspaper. I highly doubt the end is nigh for bookpublishers when they have record sales. It just stinks of the BS spouted in the 50's that the end of the automobile would be soon because of how cheap air travel was becoming. I'm still not flying to work, so I'll laugh and ridicule the people who tell me book publishers are going to go out of business when they have record sales, just as everyone should have doubted we'd be flying to work when automobile manufacturers were posting record profits and more highways were being built than ever.
It just strikes me as ignorant, that so many tech news websites and the fanboys on them don't seem to grasp that newspapers and novels are far more different than Microsoft and Apple. You'd think people who can proclaim two computers so different would be capable of understanding a newspaper is not a book, alas apparently not.
Unfortunately, the internet won't always be completely superior. The advantage of newspapers is that you can always just not look at the ads, or at least not pay attention to them. Eventually everything online will be monetized, and more likely than not, the ads will be more intrusive simply because they can be more intrusive, and hence more effective.
But ads online have a limit to how intrusive they can be - if it detracts so much that it removes the value of the content, people won't consume the content at all. It's the same reason there aren't newspapers with one story per page and just ads around it.
AdBlock basically works by blocking inline ads loaded from offsite - eventually someone is going to figure out how to get around it.
And as far as "too intrusive", that will only last as long as people let it. It'll be the "slowly boiling water" technique, adding more and more intrusive ads slowly enough that there won't be an immediate backlash.
Any company wishing to create content will have to figure out how to monetize it somehow, or else they'll have no reason or ability to create/provide the content in the first place, and right now, the current ad model just isn't enough for the level of profitability that traditional media are accustomed to. If YouTube, one of the most popular sites on the planet, can't come up with enough ad revenue to be profitable, the current status quo just isn't enough. Either they will need to scale back their site, or add a massively increased volume of ads.
eventually someone is going to figure out how to get around it
It's not that hard to do, there's not much figuring out involved. It just doesn't make sense to serve ads to people who have actively taken steps to ensure that they don't see them.
As for YouTube - do you realize how much data they deal with? Their costs are ridiculous; they're hardly the example you should be trotting out to inspire incredulity about the viability of the online advertising model.
Of course their costs are ridiculous - I was trying to make the point that we are living in a "golden age" of relatively ad-free bliss on the internet. We won't have YouTube in its current, awesome-for-the-consumer implementation forever. Either they are going to have to start serving many many more ads, or they are going to have to scale back the amount of content they provide - both options are not really ideal from a user standpoint.
I don't think the online advertising model is a failure - I just think there is a lot more room for increased ad volume with it. As traditional media outlets decline, we are going to see more and more of that room exploited on our screens.
As far as AdBlock, no company wants to pay for eyes that they are never going to get on their ads. There was (and is) plenty of resistance to TiVo from the networks because they know that companies do not want to pay for commercials that consumers using TiVo can and will skip.
> Either they are going to have to start serving many many
> more ads, or they are going to have to scale back the
> amount of content they provide
I suppose another option would be that we get more effective ads. Right now I get bombarded with flashy ads about things I have no interest in, so I no longer even see them. But if, say, HN would have a "Buy now" link off to the side every time one of us mentions a book, or "Learn <programming langugage>" with a link to the O'Reilly's book for that language every time we mention a programming language, I'll bet those ads might lead to a lot of sales. Arguably, you could even call them a service to the reader.
Not that I hold out much hope for this happening at very many sites...
There's a third option: ride it out on the revenues from the other business lines until the advances in software, processing speed, power consumption, storage, and network bandwidth drop your costs to a profitable level.
That might work for YouTube, but how many companies have the deep pockets of Google to ride it out long enough for technology advances to make their product profitable?
There is no way the vast amount of free, professionally made, high-quality content we have available online now continues without some sort of tradeoff in either cost, increased ad exposure, or reduction in quality. The transition period the internet is in right now has to end sometime, and I'm pretty sure it will come down squarely on the side of the content providers/producers.
Not too many, but we were talking specifically about YouTube, not some theoretical every-company. If you'll recall, my initial point in this thread was that it was kind of dumb to point to YouTube as if it were anything like a typical internet company.
And if you look at my original point, you'll see that I was trying to point out that not everything can stay free and ad-minimal forever.
I was simply using YouTube as an example of something that, absent of Google deciding to run it at a significant loss for 5 years (far from certain), will have to change its operating methods to something less pleasant to the consumer.
Where in our thread did I dispute that 'not everything can stay free and ad-minimal forever'?
The only thing I ever said was that YouTube wasn't a good example supporting your point, because it was in a completely different situation from most of the rest of the web, and that because of its unique situation, it actually could continue on at a loss for quite a while longer than most.
In other words, you were kind of right, but for the entirely wrong reason.
To throw different opinion here: I personally like the format of print newspaper.
- yes, they are "yesterday" news, but that isn't a problem for me. For most news, I just don't need to know instantly that they happened.
- by fliping the pages I can get better overview of what is going on in the world (comparing to clicking on links).
- It doesn't have the interaction element. I could better relax with print newspaper, since my mind don't need to think about adding comments to articles I read.
All in all, I'd say that I am as geeky as any of you, but for general news, I have found that print newspaper still provides better user experience for me, comparing the online news.
I wonder how many of the dollars no longer being spent on these ads are being captured (as pennies) by Google (and perhaps startups?). I worked at a metro paper from 07-09, and the 2nd largest local ad seller was Google, with their local sales force of 0 (1st was the paper, with their sales force in the scores).
I'd rather see the 24 hour cable news networks taking the beating but hey, gotta start somewhere. We'll all be much better off when journalism and news are not controlled by a handful of powerful companies with their own agendas and political biases to consider. A thousand different perspectives averaged out is pretty close to the truth IMO.
Newspapers don't have the outreach of modern media. Modern media don't have the journalistic quality of newspapers. Solution: Bankrupt newspapers and move journalists to modern media.
