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All business is media: Institutional media usage surges

Ross Dawson, August 7, 2007 4:10 PM US PT

There is much excitement at the release of private equity firm’s Veronis Suhler Stevenson’s new measures and prognostications on the media landscape, with most commentators focusing on their prediction that Internet advertising revenues will exceed those for any other media form by 2011.

The single thing I find the most interesting in the report is the different paces of growth across different media users. “Consumer” usage of media is actually DOWN 0.5%, driven by shifting from long-format media such as TV to short-format media such as online news and video. In contrast, “Institutional” usage of media (comprising business, education and government) is UP 6.9%, outpacing the increases for “marketing” and “advertising”.

I have long said that we are moving to a world in which ALL BUSINESS IS MEDIA, and that is supported by these trends. Almost all of what businesses do today is gather, process and disseminate information or knowledge-based products, making what they do essentially a media business. This is reflected by a massive 7.4% difference in the growth trend in consumer versus institutional use of media.

The second key aspect to pick out of the report is the 6.8% total growth in spending in media over the last year. While global GDP growth for 2007 is forecast to be 4.9%, suggesting just a 2% outpacing of the rest of the economy, this masks the fact that media is heavily overrrepresented in the US, which accounts for 42% of media globally, where the GDP growth is expected to be just 3.3%. In other words, a very rough view suggests that media will double it’s share of the global economy in around 25 years or less. This just happens to be the figure I’ve been quoting for some time, so we seem to continue to be on trend for this.

The third feature of note is that revenues for blogging, podcasting and RSS are forecast to rise from $196 million this year to $1.1. billion in 2011. In other words, growing fast, but in the big picture very small compared to other media. The issue is that the boundaries of blogging and podcasting are likely to blur so much over the next four years, as existing media use these formats for their content, that it will be very hard to define what constitutes old and new media.

Other interesting analysis:
Businessweek Blog
HipMojo
E-media tidbits
Recovering Journalist

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Ross Dawson is globally recognized as a leading futurist, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, strategy advisor, and bestselling author. He is Founding Chairman of four companies: professional services and venture firm Advanced Human Technologies, future and strategy consulting group Future Exploration Network, leading events firm The Insight Exchange, and influence ratings start-up Repyoot.

Ross is author most recently of Implementing Enterprise 2.0, the prescient Living Networks, which anticipated the social network revolution, and the Amazon.com bestseller Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships (click on the links for free chapter downloads). He is based in Sydney and San Francisco with his wife jewellery designer Victoria Buckley and two beautiful young daughters.