4 ms·

I find it amusing that they took out a full page ad in a print newspaper.

patio11 17y ago
Doomed industries have to stick together. OK, that's totally snark. Let me try again: the traditional media industries are very incestuous in both intellectual and business senses. For example, the publishers' pretty much sole marketing resource is trying to get books approved by tastemakers like the NYT reviewers or to get them into the best sellers lists maintained by, again, the NYT. In return, they spend most of their advertising budgets doing big media buys at the same tastemakers. Both sides think this is totally above board and would never influence reviewing decisions. Everyone knows that crass lucre only affects massive multinational companies in bad industries like pharma or cigarettes rather than good industries like journalism or media, after all. Relatedly, both publishers and traditional media are mostly missing the boat with their online strategies, because they're wedded to the physical distribution model, the cost structure they've built to support it, and the revenue models dictated by that cost structure. They're largely resistant to disruptive innovation on top of that, despite the fact that it would present absurdly huge advantages to their business. (For example, upwards of 80% of sales of most books happen within a 3 month release window. That's insane for content that does not rot, but the publishing industry puts out so many books that it is impossible to physically stock them all, and the large channels rotate at a dizzying speed. If they were to embrace online distribution, aggressive crosspromotion, etc, they could still be selling appreciable amounts of books written in 1986. That is pretty close to free money -- they've already got the rights to the book and have long since paid their sunk costs on the book. There is just a massive organizational and cultural failure to take bold steps like this.

Doomed industries have to stick together. OK, that's totally snark. Let me try again: the traditional media industries are very incestuous in both intellectual and business senses. For example, the publishers' pretty much sole marketing resource is trying to get books approved by tastemakers like the NYT reviewers or to get them into the best sellers lists maintained by, again, the NYT. In return, they spend most of their advertising budgets doing big media buys at the same tastemakers. Both sides think this is totally above board and would never influence reviewing decisions. Everyone knows that crass lucre only affects massive multinational companies in bad industries like pharma or cigarettes rather than good industries like journalism or media, after all. Relatedly, both publishers and traditional media are mostly missing the boat with their online strategies, because they're wedded to the physical distribution model, the cost structure they've built to support it, and the revenue models dictated by that cost structure. They're largely resistant to disruptive innovation on top of that, despite the fact that it would present absurdly huge advantages to their business. (For example, upwards of 80% of sales of most books happen within a 3 month release window. That's insane for content that does not rot, but the publishing industry puts out so many books that it is impossible to physically stock them all, and the large channels rotate at a dizzying speed. If they were to embrace online distribution, aggressive crosspromotion, etc, they could still be selling appreciable amounts of books written in 1986. That is pretty close to free money -- they've already got the rights to the book and have long since paid their sunk costs on the book. There is just a massive organizational and cultural failure to take bold steps like this.