Guardian Media Group purchases Paid Content for $30 million.
Interesting piece of news, especially the paragraph that talks about The Guardian’s B2B publishing arm that organizes conferences & publishes business research articles. Granted, most of that is in trade magazines. However, I’m convinced the next 20 years will not be about fighting for dollars, but rather fighting for attention. We have to worry about the people stealing sales dollars out of our wallets & people stealing our audience’s attention. Watch for someone clever to coin a term like “audience ADD” that lays out the conundrum of an audience with too much information to pay attention to, let alone spend money for a premium product. Media Content producers will end up fighting each other for this attention, rather than dollars.
Traditionally, content producers saw their competitors as those that produce in the same niche, i.e. B2B, News, Entertainment, etc. In the future, regardless of content niche, all producers will end up competing with each other, rather than just those in their niche.
It’s going to get ugly fast for all content produces vying for attention. I’m not convinced that traditional media will “die” by any means. The next generation of media companies will most likely be a blend of traditional (broadcast, static) media and new media (conversation, dynamic). These will be ones that can blend the cost structure of new media (offset by user generated content) and the stable revenue generating models (advertising, subscription).
What do you think? How is the content industry going to shake out in the next few years?
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