Commenting is closed on this post.
Death by acquisition
Over the weekend, news broke that Ziff Davis Enterprise (ZDE), the IT side of the legacy Ziff Davis franchise, had been acquired by QuinStreet, a lead-generation firm with $400 million in annual revenues.
Ziff Davis has had its share of ups and downs over the years, so (even with reports of significant layoffs in store), this isn’t a lament for the fortunes of part of what Folio: described as “one of the most storied companies in the history of publishing.”
Rather, it’s an observation about the buyer.
Looking at industry updates from two media investment banks last month, I wrote:
“When you follow the money, you see that publishing is already blending with a variety of content-dependent businesses. The good news is, these other segments understand how content can be used to attract and serve an audience. The bad news is, that’s not how we think in much of traditional publishing.”
The ZDE acquisition is fresh and the new owner has been silent on its intent. Still, it’s not a big leap to imagine a streamlined ZDE whose B2B media offerings are measured by their ability to generate profitable leads for the parent company’s clients.
Death by acquisition is not the only future for published content, but it is a real one. Hoping to remake Readers Digest into a direct-marketing company, Ripplewood Holdings bought and eventually lost control of the firm after weakened cash flow in a down economy bankrupted the business.
Publishers like Bloomberg, which employs 2,300 journalists in 146 bureaus and 72 countries, are committed to the value of content. They are also committed to monetizing content across platforms, uses and formats.
I think we’re living in a short, transitory window during which traditional publishers will either broaden their service mix and train their staffs or risk becoming white-label providers for folks who weren’t on the radar a decade ago. In such matters, I always hope I am wrong.
Posted by Michael
My greatest fear is that, once digital books become the norm and print media becomes a marginal business, digital books will come to be compared against the other forms of digital literary media. The metastasis of instant gratification which has already ruined our news media with infect literature.
I hope I’m wrong.
Posted by Brian O'Leary
In the book business, I don’t see print and digital as “either-or”; both can exist as cost-effective options (where demand persists). People choose to read on digital platforms for a variety of reasons, not all of them well-understood at this point, and there is some recent (Bowker) data that suggests hard-core print demand will be at least half of the near-term market.
I do think that both periodical and immersive reading on digital platforms will be evaluated against the other things a reader could do on a given device. That’s actually something I’m posting about tomorrow.
There are many theories and beliefs on what has negatively affected news media, and I’m not the strongest voice for any of them. One thing that does strike me as interesting, though: per-capita circulation of newspapers has been declining steadily since 1947.
You could link that to the rise of television as a news alternative (and from there get to instant gratification), or you could also wonder if newspapers were either not filling a need or over-serving a population that really didn’t need four sections of national, metro, sports and lifestyle coverage every day.
The segmentation of newspapers was generally driven by a need to satisfy advertisers, and it may have taught subscribers to “read what you like” (in the somewhat ill-advised words of a past New York Times ad campaign). We propped up circulation of many national magazines with give-away gimmicks like sneaker-phones, teaching potential subscribers that a better deal might be just around the corner.
No one of these observations is “the” answer, but I think there’s a complex assortment of factors that led to the news morass we face today. To me, it seems that more than instant gratification is at play.
Posted by Michael
I greatly appreciate the detailed and well-considered response. Can you suggest any good books that treat of the relationship between advertisers and mass media markets?
Also, I would like to link to your posts on my blog. What would be the proper link to use for rss?
Posted by Brian O'Leary
I’ll look around for books or at least resources on the relationship between advertising and mass media. While I do that, you can check out both Nieman and Poynter for some current thinking (not all of which resonates with me, but that’s a good thing).
If you go to the home page for this site, you’ll see an RSS2 icon in the upper right corner. That should get you the feed you want.