Recently in Future of media Category

As the world of media moves beyond its traditional boundaries, media operators need to broaden their thinking about potential revenue sources. In a connected world, the possibilities transcend the classic advertising, sales and subscription models.

In my recent article Creating the Future of Media: 4 Driving Forces, 4 Strategic Issues, 4 Essential Capabilities in Media Titles magazine I wanted to point to some of the possibilities. I brought together some of what we had been working on with clients to create a Media Revenue Models framework to show some of what is possible.

Of course a key aspect of potential revenue streams is the value creation that merits payment. While the general categories of value added by media have not changed, their relative importance definitely has. To understand potential revenue models, you must also be clear on the distinctive value add of your media offering.

A few things to note. First, this is a draft, and while I haven't had time to update it yet I've already been given some additional ideas to complement this. I'd love to hear any other perspectives or ideas that would add to this. Second, this only looks at revenue, not at business models, which look at how resources are brought together to create value. We're in the process of developing a media business models framework. And third, the primary purpose of this is to help executives to think in new ways about their own business. I have already found it very valuable in strategy sessions with clients in generating new strategic options and ideas.

Here is the content in text form:

I recently finished reading the techno-thriller Daemon by Daniel Suarez. It is certainly not literature, but it is a fast-paced thriller that I found hard to put down. It posits a world in which a genius who creates online games builds a systems that makes the entire world into what is effectively a game, with an augmented reality interface, and in which individuals earn points for tasks that give them higher ranking.

I have long thought it is inevitable that much of our work and play will take place in what are effectively game environments.

In Jesse Schell's presentation at DICE (hattip: Kevin Kelly/The Technium) he gives an array of fantastic ideas about the intersection of reality and gaming. After covering how many games such as Wii, Guitar Hero and Webkinz are bring the real world into games, he goes off (from around 18:00) on a rapid-fire string of suggestions about how every aspect of the world can be made into a game.

It is intriguing that mobile social networking, which I have written about since its early days in 2002, has only taken off when Foursquare made it into a game. As people become more familiar with gaming environments and concepts, it seems natural to bring in gaming aspects to more parts of our life. Dangerous things that way lie, but it is inevitable that games and what we think of as reality will be merged to an extraordinary degree.

[UPDATE:] Tom Foremski says why he thinks this is a scary future.

Continuing my notes from the Media 2010 conference on the presentations by Jack Matthews, Richard Titus and Marc Frons, here are the notes I took from the presentations by Frederic Filloux and Russ Fradin.

I will be digesting what I've heard today and pulling into some upcoming content on the future of media.

FRÉDÉRIC FILLOUX, EDITOR - INTERNATIONAL, SCHIBSTED

1. Failure of ad model
- CPM lower than ever
- Clickthrough rate never took off
- endless inventories pushing prices down – ad networks are bottom feeders

When I walked out from seeing Avatar 3D in December, I tweeted: "$300 million very well spent!"

Movie theaters can create extraordinary experiences, but the cost of production is ever greater.

On the other hand, movies can be made for extremely low cost, using HD cameras, digital editing, and volunteer labor.

At Media 2010 Suzanne Stefanac pointed to Escape to City 17, a machinima movie that had been made with a budget of less than $500, mainly for the costumes. It looks pretty good considering how little was spent.

Expect both increasing film budgets at the top end, and lowering film budgets at the bottom end.

I am at the Media 2010 conference in Sydney, where there is an extraordinary line-up of speakers through the day. I am here to get my head back into gear on future of media strategy, which will be a major theme for me through this year.

Below are my notes taken on-the-fly from the first few speakers. Hopefully I will get hold of some laptop power to be able to continue after this.

JACK MATTHEWS, CEO, FAIRFAX DIGITAL
We are at the point of singularity – beyond which we cannot see.

Highly recommend Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks.

George Washington University and media relations software firm Cision have released a very interesting study of how journalists use social media and online tools.

The headline news is that 56% of journalists consider social media to be important to some degree. This figure pushed up to 69% of journalists writing for online outlets, while just 48% of magazine writers found social media to be important.

Journalists on the importance of social media for reporting and producing their stories
Source: Cision

Social media is used extensively by journalists to publish and promote what they have written, with just 14% saying they don’t use social media at all for spreading word on their work. Almost two-thirds say they use blogs (presumably usually not their own), and 57% use Twitter or other microblogging sites to point to their articles.

Journalists on the social media tools they use to publish, promote and distribute what they write
Source: Cision

When I wrote my recent article Creating the Future of Media: 4 Driving Forces, 4 Strategic Issues, 4 Essential Capabilities for Media Titles magazine, they kindly offered Future Exploration Network a full page ad in the magazine.

The ad provides a nice overview of our current work with media organizations that are having to develop and implement strategies on the fly as the industry landscape shifts.

Click on the ad image for a larger version, or the key offerings are described below. If you're interested in finding out more, some of the strategy tools we think are particularly useful in the current environment are described in our Future of Media: Strategy Tools framework.

Here is a video of a very interesting interview of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg by Mike Arrington of Techcrunch.

There are a number of very interesting comments by Zuckerberg in the interview, including on how Facebook Connect is so fundamental to the company. He said that "obviously much more is going to be developed outside of Facebook than inside," meaning that the development of Facebook into a platform is critical.

More controversial was Zuckerberg's comments on privacy. At around 3:15 in the video he says:

"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time. We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are."

This prompted Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb to write a long diatribe, saying:

I don't buy Zuckerberg's argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending.

This is a fascinating issue. I and many others - including Zuckerberg - have been surprised through this decade by quite how much people have been prepared to share, given the opportunity by the rapid rise of Web 2.0 tools. Undoubtedly there has been a rapid evolution of social attitudes to privacy, as many people have discovered that they are in fact comfortable sharing some personal information.

Other 2009 summary posts
Top blog posts of 2009: 6 on Twitter and the media
Top blog posts of 2009: Enterprise 2.0 and organizational effectiveness
Top blog posts of 2009: The future
Top keynote speech presentations/ videos of 2009

And one more summary of my blog posts that have attracted the most interest this year, this time on the topic of influence, which has become very central to my interests and research.

1. Launch of the Influence Landscape framework (Beta)
A visual framework to explain the role and mechanisms of influence today

2. “Influence is the future of media”
Why influence is at the center of where the media industry is going

Other 2009 summary posts
Top blog posts of 2009: Enterprise 2.0 and organizational effectiveness
Top blog posts of 2009: The future
Top keynote speech presentations/ videos of 2009

At this time of year it's good to look back at the blog posts I've written and see what is most interesting. Some have got quite a lot of attention, other posts I liked got passed over.

Having looked through my blog posts, the most useful approach seems to be by topics. I'll start with a list of six posts on Twitter and the media, including some embeds.

1. Twitter on ABC TV - the impact on politics, media and socializing

The post includes this ABC TV segment on Twitter, which includes interviews with myself and Mark Scott, Managing Director of ABC. Full analysis on the post.

I very rarely find the time to write magazine articles, but I was delighted to write the opening feature article for MediaTitles 2010, an annual publication which covers the media and magazine industry.

To see the article in the full splendor of the print version, go to the MediaTitles website, which has the full publication viewable using Realview Technologies (with the article reformatted to take out the lists of four, which I think is a pity). My article is on pages 7-10.

The (original) text of the article is below.

CREATING THE FUTURE OF MEDIA

These are the best of times, these are the worst of times. The global economic crisis, coming on top of a dramatic transformation wrought by the rise of the Internet, is creating the swiftest change in media industry structure ever experienced. Newspapers and magazines are being shut down at an extraordinary pace all over the world, journalists are losing their jobs, and broadcast media are under threat as sliding advertising revenue hit an unmoving cost base. Yet as the world shifts towards what will be truly an all-encompassing media economy, there are extraordinary opportunities ahead for media organisations.

This is a critical juncture to examine the future of media. Magazines have and will continue to be central to how we learn, socialise, entertain ourselves, and make buying decisions. Yet the magazine industry will undoubtedly look very different scant years ahead. It is our role and responsibility to create the future of media, rather than to let it happen to us. To do that, we need to examine the most central driving forces, strategic issues and capabilities in the evolving media landscape.

Four Driving Forces

For many years I have believed that our everyday interfaces with computers are deeply limited, and that creating more effective interfaces is central to our future. In my 2002 book Living Networks I selected Interfaces as one of the three key enablers that would bring the networks to life.

Pranav Mistry of MIT Media Lab's SixthSense has made his mission integrating our gestures in the physical world with the digital world. In this video taken at TED India last month, he tells his personal journey of exploration, beginning by taking apart his computer mouse, moving on to monitoring his gestures, headmounting cameras and projectors.

Some of the technologies he shows include framing photographs by holding up his fingers, projecting live updates onto newspapers, making hands into phone dials, and far, far more. This is ultimately about bringing together the physical and digital worlds, helping making us more human.

In the video, Pranav tells of his plans to open source the technologies he has developed to provide broader applications for them. The video is well worth seeing.

The Institute for the Future has shared its Future of Video project using the presentation platform Prezi. This is a great way of giving access to the rich visual frameworks that are the trademark of IFTF - it's well worth a browse just to see part of what Prezi can do.

The presentation wraps up with some nice videos from Microsoft and Sixth Sense showing visions and demonstrations of the role of video in how we interface with the external world and information. Which illustrates how man-machine interfaces - one of the primary mechanisms for the birth of the living networks - are in fact largely driven by video.

The trends that are highlighted in the presentation are:

- From scarcity to abundance of digital video
- From passive to hyperlinked, interactive video
- From keypad to gestural and tangible interaction
- From limited to ubiquitous video interactions
- From camera-captured to synthetic CG video
- From 2D to immersive HD, 4KHD, and 3D video

For a number of years I’ve talked about how we are effectively reaching a world infinite content, and the implications of that. That is becoming more real by the day, as in an economy increasingly driven by search and links, people find new ways to generate content that participates in this new information infrastructure.

I wrote last year about Philip Parker, who created programs that have automatically generated 200,000 books by aggregating and structuring content on the web. I haven’t read any of the books, but I’m told that they are – unsurprisingly – pretty poor, though of possible value to some people. However this is probably at the quality end of the spectrum of auto-generated content. For many years blog spammers have been auto-generating blog posts which have plausible language constructions, so they are picked up by search engines, but in fact are nonsense.

Adding to the morass of content are non-native speakers who lack background and context writing articles that are far more coherent than anything generated by computers, but which are still basically crap i.e. a waste of time to read.

I was interviewed yesterday on Sky Business about plans by Rupert Murdoch and others to charge for online news and content – the video is below. We discussed plans to charge for content, whether the news aggregators can be charged or blocked, and differences in the Australian news media landscape.

In the interview I mentioned in passing the application of game theory to media strategy. Below is an excerpt from our Future of Media: Strategy Tools framework , which gives an overview of a number of strategy tools for the media industry. In essence, game theory is about mapping how players might respond to each others’ moves.