Clarity Vs Confusion Puzzle Pieces Words 3d Illustration
I’ve Revamped and Rebranded the Digital Deliverance newsletter to Focus on What has Already Superseded the Mass Media as Consumers’ Predominant Way of Obtaining News, Entertainment, and Other information.
As old dogs such as me get older, we sometimes forget the new tricks we had learned.
“You’re publishing a newsletter to teach media executives the lessons that you taught in graduate school? Won’t this confuse people who instead expect a newsletter that comments about news and current events in the media industries? Moreover, you’ve devoted the past 20 years your life to recognizing the rise of Individuated Media. So, why not call it that rather than brand it with the name of your 30-year-old consulting company.”
So, welcome to the Individuated Media newsletter (formerly Digital Deliverance newsletter). I’ve revamped and rebranded it. The many lessons I wrote and taught in my required course for New Media Management master’s degree students (an elective for doctoral candidates) at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, I’m instead converting to podcasts and videos for this newsletter’s paying subscribers—a better way to differentiate what they get from what free subscribers receive.
I’ve increased this newsletter’s frequency to more than weekly. And I’ve also changed its tone. I had been these past years publishing academic publications such the International Journal of New Media Studies, the Nordic Journal of Media Management, theJournal of Strategic Innovation and Sustainability, etc., rather than media industry trade journals. Academic writing is virtually required to be bulletproof and concrete, particularly because any dissident or non-conformist articles get attacked by the hidebound or philistine. Yet that can tend to make academic writing sometimes as heavy and ineffective as the Maginot Line. My career started 50 years ago in journalism, in which writing should be short and snappy, particularly in a newsletter. Here we go!
I’ve a reputation of not taking prisoners at conferences, symposia, and seminars about ‘New Media’. I’d rather immediately kill a faulty idea or unsound strategy than let those go viral. However, I regret that wasn’t faithful to that hygienic practice during an online journalism conference hosted by the University of Massachusetts 20 years ago. The result is that I’m today writing about a misguided strategy that has cancerously metastasized since.
In my opening remarks as that day’s co-moderator of the conference, I warned against the Mass Media industries pursuing a strategy that I’ll now outline below. Unfortunately for conference attendees, my co-moderator subsequent opening remarks started with “Forget all of what Vin has said. That doesn’t matter. Do what [journalism] you do best and [hyper]link to the rest.” I thought that was crudely impolite and unprofessional. I should have immediately disputed him publicly, but I saw that most attendees preferred his simplistic fantasy for online success.
What follows are the results.
For more than 30 years, they have myopically misperceived how the introduction of personal computer-mediated technologies has transformed the world’s media environment. The empirical evidence and verifiable data proving my statement is gargantuan and blatantly inescapable.
The Mass Media industries first encountered those technologies during the 1990s (let’s forget the proprietary online services, videotext, and teletext years, although we can certainly include those, too). It was a time when consumers’ access to online required them to plug their wired telephone line into a modem.
For what purpose would these industries use the technologies?
They fundamentally mistook the technologies as ways to create online versions of their printed products or broadcast services. A website became equivalent to a periodical’s edition. Its webpages to printed pages. Printed ‘right-on-page’ (‘ROP’) advertisements became banner ads. For the broadcaster, the website became the online source of recorded video clips or the live ‘stream’ of that station or network. Etcetera.
Virtually all sectors of the Mass Media industries were so confident that online could be the ‘digital’ equivalent of their printed products or broadcast services that they also believed that their traditional business models of those products and services could simply be transplanted and succeed there.
The publishers hoped that online would eliminate their costs of purchasing, printing, and distributing paper products. The broadcasters hoped that online would eliminate their costs and regulatory hassles of operating transmitter or dealing with cable or satellite system intermediaries to reach consumers. The Mass Media industries believed that online might eventually generate annual net revenues equal or greater than what their printed products or broadcast services had previously generated.
Those were the goals and practices for online that the Mass Media industries set in the mid-1990s.
In my graduate school teachings, I referred to this as the ‘Shovelware Strategy’.
The Mass Media industries thought what was needed for this to succeed was that consumers acquire sufficiently fast online access so that the industries could deliver to them texts, still photos, graphical page layouts, animations, audio, and video simultaneously, and without monopolizing consumers’ home telephone lines. The industries termed this ‘convergence’ because all the industries’ sectors would become capable of multimedia and compete in ways they previously couldn’t.
They achieved that situation starting in circa 2005 when approximately half of the households and businesses in developed nations had acquired ‘always-on’ broadband Internet access. Consumers had become ‘hooked-up’, ‘wired’, and everything seemed to become ‘digital’.
The Mass Media industries’ executives who implemented the Shovelware Strategy were lauded as ‘New Media Pioneers’; promoted into their corporate suites; or retired on their pensions and laurels.
The Mass Media industries, particularly those run by executives inculcated in the concept of three-to-five-year business plans, settled back in what they then believed would be the Shovelware Strategy’s start of a ‘Mature’ phase during which net profits would start growing.
The Reality.
Yet as billions of consumers worldwide shifted media consumption habits away from print and broadcast and to online, the Shovelware Strategy incontrovertible failed.
Rather than continue to use the Mass Media industries’ websites, those billions of consumers, as well as the advertisers attracted to them, chose to use the online services of ‘search engines’, ‘social media’, and other innovative startup companies that provided each of those consumers with an individualized mix of news, entertainment, and other information that better match each of those individual’s own unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes, than can any Mass Media company’s products, services, or feed can. Billions of consumers chose to use the websites of companies that produced Individuated Media rather than the websites of the Mass Media industries.
In the March 19th edition of this newsletter this year, I showed how empirical data in 2007 demonstrated that the Shovelware Strategy wasn’t working. And I explained in the March 10th edition how Individuated Media came to supersede Mass Media as the predominant means by which most of the world’s consumers now obtain news, entertainment, and other information. No need to explain those further now.
The overall results of the Shoveware Strategy are that the Mass Media industries worldwide have lost literally hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenues during the past 20 years of applying the Shovelware Strategy. For example, the U.S. daily newspaper industry’s annual revenues have declined from US$44 billion to less than $18 billion during that period, an aggregate loss of more than $600 billion. During these disastrous 20 years, the Shovelware Strategy has generated merely $3 billion in annual revenues, with stagnant growth during the past decade.
As for the remaining 24 largest daily newspapers, during 2025 they lost an average of 13.3-percent of their remaining print edition circulation, ranging from 21.2-percent at The Washington Post to 5.3-percent at the Bridgeport Connecticut Post. (I note that while the Bridgeport newspaper now has the 24th largest circulation among the remaining approximately 1,100 daily newspapers in the U.S., its print circulation is merely 34,000.)
Such declines are only a U.S. phenomenon. Click here to see a chart of the circulation declines of the national newspapers published by Reach Plc (former Trinity Mirror), one of the largest publishers of newspapers in the U.K.
My Dare
I publicly challenge any Mass Media industry executive to dispute that what I’ve written above means that they are zombies. (I don’t care how senior the executive nor how cushy his corporate accounterments are.)
Why specifically are executives of the Mass Media industries the walking dead?
Because intelligent businesspeople abandon failed strategies; discern what caused the failure; then devise and implement a new strategy that corrects that failure. Permit me to state a frank truth: braindead businesspeople don’t.
The first empirical evidence of the Shovelware Strategy’s failure surfaced nearly 20 years ago. Since then, it has failed to produce what the Mass Media industries hoped it would. What nowadays are Mass Media executives waiting for? Another nearly 20 years to pass? The concrete results of the strategy’s failure clearly indicate that their businesses will cease to exist by then. What the executives of the Mass Media industries are nowadays doing is staggering in a zombie-like coma towards their industries’ doom.
In the next newsletter, which I plan to send later this week, I’ll begin detailing the solution for these industries. It’s the sum of what I know after working in the media industries for 47 years, of which 32 years were consulting on five continents and teaching at the postgraduate level about how the Mass Media industries should adapt to the introduction of personal computer-mediated technologies worldwide. It is an integrated, multimedia, multinational, and Open Source solution how to transact, track, and invoice the usage of every type and form of contents, so that each individual consumer received a unique feed of news, entertainment, and other information, that better matches his or her individual mix of needs, interests, and tastes, than can any Mass Media industries’ products or service. You might be surprised to learn that most media’s major usage of Artificial Intelligence won’t be in newsrooms or to create contents.
What it will require is a change in paradigm from the Industrial Era’s Mass Media theories, doctrines, practices, and contents packaging. I’ll end this newsletter edition with a similar example of such a paradigm shift:
When Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the moveable-type press created the Mass Media, the monks in scriptoria, who laboriously hand-copied books, view that new technology as an existential threat and considered Gutenberg’s machine profane. Yet during the subsequent few decades they couldn’t compete with it. So, their employment and industry ended.
What those monks should have done is purchase one of Gutenberg’s presses. Although they wouldn’t have been able to print the magnificently illustrated Bibles they formerly produced, each of which took months or years to produce, a press would have enabled them to produce hundreds of basic Bibles in that same time. The error the monks in the scriptoria made was they thought their purpose was to produce magnificently illustrated Bibles for the few when in reality their purpose was to spread the ‘word of God’ to all.
Nowadays, I deal with mobs of media executives and old-fashioned content creators who zombie-like believe their purpose is to produce and package news, entertainment, and other information, in virtually the ways that their predecessors in previous centuries did. They fail to realize that their real purpose is to use the best possible technologies to deliver whatever mix of contents will best satisfy each individual consumers needs, interests, and tastes.
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Clear Evidence Existed 20 Years Ago Websites Won’t Compensate for Print Edition Losses
Digital Deliverance Newsletter #4:
When is a strategy recognized as disastrous? How long must its obvious devastation be experienced until it is called what it so clearly is? How much sheer volume of perennially negative data does it take to alert reasonably intelligent executives to the factual reality that they’ve executed a strategy which has become catastrophic?
Indeed, if a strategy has already failed for over a quarter century, how much longer until the executives who maintain it escape what otherwise appears to be a zombie-like condition in which they thoughtlessly stagger towards their doom?
In the cases of Mass Media executives, perhaps never. They executed a disastrous strategy for adapting to the changes wrought by the introduction of personal computer-mediated technologies into the media environment. They’ve hoped this strategy would at least reap revenues from online that are even greater than those which their printed products or broadcast services generated at the start of the 21st Century or at least compensated for any losses they incurred as consumers shifted media consumption habits to online rather than those traditional products and services. What they hoped clearly hasn’t occurred despite more than a quarter century elapsing. Yet rather than change, or even significantly alter this failed strategy, they mindlessly continue it despite its disastrous effect upon their industries. After all, why change course, even at the last minute, when you instead can go down with the ship?
I refer to what I term the ‘shovelware strategy’. The Mass Media industries simply shoveled onto websites the contents of their printed products and broadcast services. These industries hoped that consumers would use these websites the same ways (i.e., as frequently and deeply) as consumers had used their printed products and broadcast services during the 20th Century. Compounding that hope, the industries likewise shoveled onto these websites their theories, doctrines, business models, and traditional practices of Mass Media
Newspapers were the first sector of these industries to implement the shovelware strategy. They encountered personal computer-mediated technologies during the late 1970s and early 1980s in the form of news ticker scrolls in videotext; then as textual news stories in teletext experiments during the late 1970s through the 1980s; then in the form of third-party proprietary online services from then until 2000. When the Internet opened for public usage and the first multimedia Web browser software was developed, Mass Media companies were freed from having to split revenues with the videotext, teletex, or proprietary online services companies whose telecom systems they used. Newspapers instead launched their own websites and implemented the shovelware strategy. Other sectors of the Mass Media industries would follow their lead.
Within a decade, the newspaper sector was touting their shovelware strategy’s ‘success’ and believed they had data to prove it.
In 2007, the Nielsen//Netrating (‘Nielsen’) company released the data table about traffic at major United States daily newspapers’ websites during the middle of that year. Nielsen audited six months of the traffic data then divided that by six to approximate the average monthly traffic during that period. Look at the first three newspapers listed as examples:
The New York https://www.nytimes.comTimes led the list. Its website received an average of nearly 14 million ‘Unique Visitors’ to whom it displayed an average of more than 370 million ‘Web Page View.’ I’ll use the Audit Bureau of Circulations listings from 2007 to compare the ‘Unique Visitor’ totals: 1,120,420 copies on weekdays and 1,621,062 on Sundays.
The Washington Post, whose printed circulation was 699,130 weekdays and 894,428 on Sundays, was ranked second on the list. Its website had an average of nearly 12 million ‘Unique Visitors’ who saw nearly 191 million ‘Web Page Views’.
USA Today, whose 2,278,022 printed circulation was produced only on weekdays, ranked third with more than 9 million ‘Unique Visitors’ and more than 110 million ‘Web Page Views’.
The newspaper industry’s publicists, corporate suites, and executives who had launched the websites loved this data because it appeared to be proof that the shovelware strategy was working. However, they and other sectors of the Mass Media industries myopically couldn’t see the forest for the trees. It wasn’t the big numbers but each newspaper’s own array of numbers that told more important stories—a wider data panorama to see.
First, why does Nielsen conflate daily and monthly? It is good that Nielsen can identify individual users and not mistake them for another user if they return to a website more than once during that average month. Yet newspaper circulation, the number upon which their advertising sales rates are based, has always been calculated as a diurnal number: the total number of people who either subscribe to daily delivery of a copy or otherwise purchase a copy at newsstands, kiosks, or markets on that day. If a visitor to a newspaper’s website (particularly a website not charging for access, in the case of The New York Times in 2007) visits it only once per month, should such a free visitor count as equivalent to a paying consumer of a printed daily newspaper?
Second, Nielsen reports that the average user of The New York Times website visits 4.05 times per average month. That’s the equivalent of only once per week. Let that sink in. The website of the premiere daily newspaper in the U.S., and perhaps the world, is visited by its average monthly user only about once per week! Moreover, The New York Times didn’t start charging for access to its website until three years later. So, 4.05 times per average month is how infrequently the average user visits to this renowned newspaper’s website—even when accessing it is free.
Third, Nielsen reported that this average user saw 27 webpages during the average per month, which at an average of 4.05 visits per month means he probably sees an average of fewer than 7 webpages per visit. If that user happens to visit the website’s Home page during one or more of those 4.05 visits, he will see even fewer news story webpages per visit. The New York Times generally publishes only one story per webpage. Newspaper industry surveys prior to the opening of the Internet for public usage showed that an average user of a printed edition would read fewer than 7 stories per usage. However, that usage was considerably more frequent. The data back then indicated that the average user of a printed edition would use it 3 to 5 days per week. Yet using a printed edition only 3 to 5 times week is equal to 13 to 22 times per month. And even if that average consumer of the printed edition read fewer than 7 stories during each of his usages of the printed edition, then that means the approximate number of stories he read per month might have been 91 and 154. Compared that to the website’s average user reading no more than 27 news story webpages. No wonder many newspaper companies that have implemented the shovelware strategy are laboriously trying to improve ‘reader engagement’ with their publication’s websites!
Fourth, Nielsen reported that the average user spent an average aggregate total of 20 minutes and 20 seconds per month on The New York Times’s websites. That’s within only a few minutes of the total time a reader of the printed edition spends reading it on each of the average of between 3 to 5 days per week. In other words, the total amount of time the average user of this newspaper’s website spent there per month is merely 1/13th to 1/22nd the time the average reader of the printed edition spends reading it each month. Disengagement, indeed!
With very rare exceptions, the Nielsen data from other major U.S. newspapers are as bad or much worse. For instance, the average user of USAToday’s website visits it the equivalent of once every ten days and spends less than half the time than the average user of The New York Times’ website. The average user of The San Francisco Chronicle’s or the Miami Herald’s websites saw merely 8 webpage all month long and spent half again less times than the average user of USAToday’s website did. Even the average user of The Wall Street Journal’s website, the only one in this Nielsen table that in 2007 was charging consumers for access, had as infrequent and shallow use from its average user as the USAToday’s website did. Consider that consumers paying for access to a newspaper’s website made remarkably the same usage as consumers of newspapers websites with free access did.
These problems are even more grave because approximate three-quarters of this major U.S. newspapers’ websites charged advertisers only for the actual number of online ads that were exposed. Compare that to printed newspapers, in which advertisers are charged for the total number of editions sold (i.e., circulation), regardless of how many newspaper subscribers or purchasers picked up and read that edition. If your website’s average user visits on average of only 4.05 times per month, that’s how infrequently the website exposes ads to him. A website doesn’t deliver anything; its contents await retrieval.
The Nielsen data should have alarmed, rather than pleased, the U.S. newspaper industry and the other sectors of the Mass Media industries that implemented the shovelware strategy. More than a cursory look at the data demonstrated that consumers were NOT using these websites as frequently and deeply as consumers had used these newspapers’ print editions. The data likewise inferred that the traditional Mass Media business models didn’t work online.
When shortly after 2007 some media analysts and consultants began presenting the negative information in this and subsequent Nielsen reports, that company, under pressure from the U.S. newspaper industry, ceased publicly releasing such data.
During the 2010s, I began using this Nielsen data table as an analysis exercise for my postgraduate students. All were initially impressed by the large numbers of ‘Unique Users’ and ‘Web Page Views’. However, the more perceptive students soon noted all the potentially disastrous data interactions. So, why didn’t the U.S. newspaper industry’s executives. I think that they didn’t want factual reality to interfere with their mistaken belief that they’d made the correct decision to shovel their way towards the future rather than scientifically navigate there. ‘Management by seat of the pants’ my friend the late Murray Light, for his final 20 years the editor of the Buffalo News, called it in contrast to Management by Objective.
The U.S. newspaper industry continues its shovelware strategy in misadapting to computer-mediated technologies. Since 2007, the industry has lost some two-thirds of its readers and advertising clients and seen its annual revenues plunge from $44 billion to around $18 billion. During that period of titanic losses, the shovelware strategy generated $3 billion in annual revenues for this industry, hardly enough to compensate for the considerably larger losses. It is a number that hasn’t grown much this decade.
What the shovelware strategy has accomplished is to excavate the grave of the U.S. newspaper industry. Continuing will make the U.S. newspaper industry, with few outlying exceptions, posthumous. This distressed industry complains that it nowadays has few resources remaining to effect a change in course, which is ironic considering how few resources it initially gave the shovelware strategy in the late 1990s. During the next seven weeks of this newsletter, I’ll be writing about other mistakes the Mass Media industries made attempting to adapt to personal computer-mediated technologies. Then, I’ll begin to present solutions to the problems I’ve detailed.
Ask historians to say when the Industrial Era began and they will cite dates in the 18th or 19th centuries when a factory powered by hydraulics or steam engine was first constructed in their nation. I think they’re wrong. The start of the Industrial Era shouldn’t be defined by what powered mechanisms of mass production, but by the invention of such a mechanism itself. In approximately 1454, the entrepreneurial metallurgist Johannes Gutenberg invented the moveable type printing press: the world’s first mass production device.
Prior to Gutenberg, books were rarities, affordable only by the church or the rich. A typical scribe or monk in a scriptorium could copy by hand two to four pages daily, laboriously producing a simple book in three to six months. If the book was also ‘illuminated’ with illustrations or decorations, it could take up to three years. Gutenberg’s press used metal type characters that were set in a mirror-image analog of the page to be printed. This was then inked and pressed onto paper. A two-man team operating the press lever or crank could imprint hundreds of pages daily, enough to produce hundreds of books per month, more than a lifetime’s production by a scribe or monk.
The societal effects of Gutenberg’s press are often cited as ending the Middle Ages and beginning the Modern Era. This first mass production device fundamentally improved how human beings distribute, store, and trust information.
Nearly half a millennium later, Guglielmo Marconi’s invention of wireless broadcasting markedly extended the immediacy and reach of information. He converted electrical teletype signals into analog electromagnetic waves of radiation that could be instantly received across huge distances. The later additions of microphones and photovoltaic sensors and cathode receiver tubes resulted in radio and television.
From these analog production and distribution technologies of the Industrial Era arose the theories, doctrines, business models, products, services, and practices that are now colloquially known as the Mass Media. Their industries globally generate US$3 trillion in gross revenues annually.
The Present
Since the mid-1990s, the Mass Media industries have created online versions of their Industrial Era products and services ‘converged’ into multimedia websites or ‘streaming’ services. The industries hoped that consumers and advertisers would utilize the websites the same way (i.e., as often and thoroughly) as consumers had printed products or broadcast services during the 20th Century. The industries hoped that the same Industrial Era business models would work, too. Moreover, these industries hoped that eliminating the costs of purchasing, printing, and delivering paper products and eliminating the regulatory licensing hassles and transmission antenna or cable and satellite delivery systems carriage costs incurred with traditional broadcasts would result in far greater net revenues than the industries had ever generated.
Their hopes failed. Instead, virtually every sector of the Mass Media industries has seen its daily consumer audiences and advertising clientele, and thus gross revenues, decline when adjusted for economic inflation or population growth. In some Mass Media sectors, the failures are titanic. For instance, the U.S. newspaper daily industry, with remarkably rare exceptions during the past 30 years, has lost some 70 percent of its gross revenues, readership, and advertising clientele.
The disastrous results occurred because the Mass Media industries, in their attempts to adapt to the Informational Era’s personal computer-mediated technologies, overlooked or forgot the hallmark flaw of the Industrial Era’s analog technologies from which those industries arose. In the postgraduate media management courses that I taught for 14 years and my papers published in scholarly journals, I termed this hallmark flaw ‘analog uniformity’. Each pressrun prints identical copies. Every simultaneous listener or viewer of a broadcast hears or sees an identical program on that frequency or channel. With the analog technologies of the Industrial Era, there is no practical way to mass produce printed editions or broadcast programs which contain bespoke (i.e., fully customized) contents to each recipient consumer’s own unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes.
This flaw wasn’t grave during the first 500 years of the Mass Media, when the overall supply of news, entertainment, and other information was scarce and printed periodical page space limited. Publishers initially chose the most universal of topics. Gutenberg famously printed Bibles in Christian Europe. As newspapers and later magazines emerged from presses, royal edicts and national news, and reports about wars and disasters, soon became the most popular secular topics printed. Writers started journals which became journalism. As the supplies of news, entertainment, and other information available for publications grew, editors began selecting stories according to two concomitant criteria: (1) stories about which there is the greatest common interest, and (2) important stories about which the editors think their community must be informed. Broadcasters adopted these same criteria when conceiving and producing their programs. Even as recently as 20 years ago, before most offices and homes in developed nations gained broadband Internet access or ‘smartphones’ were invented, this hallmark flaw of the Mass Media wasn’t calamitous.
Indeed, once circa 2006 the majority of offices and homes in developed nations had gained broadband access, and particularly three years later consumers began purchasing mobile phones that could retrieve and display multimedia contents, the Mass Media industries presumed the new media environment finally had become ripe for reaping their own online successes. Tragically, the industries either forgot or overlooked two fundamental facts:
First, they had inadvertently transplanted the hallmark flaw of Industrial Era analog media technologies into their Informational Era products and services, a huge flaw that these new media technologies inherently didn’t have. Second, the exponentially accelerating advancements of Moore’s Law and its corollaries were quickly turning the global media environment upside-down. Traditional scarcity of information flipped to surplus, ensuing inversions in not only the economics of information but also the power dynamics of transactions among content creators, intermediaries, and consumers.
The Mass Media industries had been forewarned about the epochal transformation that would forever alter how people obtain news, entertainment, and other information, and obsolesce many of the industries, theories, doctrines, business models, products, services, and practices known as the Mass Media. In his seminal 1995 book, Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, wrote:
There is another way to look at a newspaper, and that is as an interface to news.
Imagine a future in which your interface agent can read every newswire and newspaper and catch every TV and radio broadcast on the planet and then construct a personalized summary. This kind of newspaper is printed in an edition of one.
What if a newspaper company were willing to put its entire staff at your beck and call for one edition? It would mix headlines news with ‘less important’ stories relating to acquaintances, people you will see tomorrow, and places you are about to go to or have just comes from. It would report on companies you know. In fact, under these conditions, you might be willing to pay the Boston Globe a lot more for ten pages than for a hundred pages, if you could be confident that it was delivering you the right subset of information. You would consume every bit (so to speak). Call it The Daily Me.
Two years later, Roger Fidler, former Director of New Media Development for the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, wrote in his book, Mediamorphosis: Understanding New Media:
The vision that CMC [Computer-Mediated Communications] technologies employing advanced personal ‘agents’ will ultimately empower individuals to bypass, and perhaps replace, traditional information and entertainment gatekeepers has strong appeal within some groups.…A more all-encompassing Daily Me presents a much more difficult problem on CMC systems. But with more powerful microprocessors and a significant increase in telecommunications bandwidth, some version of the Daily Me is bound to emerge before the year 2010.
For its survival, the newspaper industry must produce and automatically deliver, wired and wirelessly, entirely intact and individually customized editions that are smaller, vertically formatted, and that combine the graphical layout capabilities of print and the interactive multimedia capabilities of the Web, and flow to fit any display screen or printed paper size.
Appearing in 2006 on The New York Times’ Best Seller List, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, a book by Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired Magazine, focused entirely on computer-mediated technologies’ capabilities to provide to each individual a selection of items that better matches that individual’s unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes, rather than the mainly items of greatest common interest. In that year, Amazon, Inc., a company already using that new business model, had grown to a market capitalization of $16 billion and today is a $2.2 trillion company.
Many Mass Media traditionalists abhor the concept of using computer-mediate technologies to aggregate and provide a bespoke feeds of news, entertainment, and other information to each consumer. For instance, in a 2009 column entitled the Daily Me, Nicholas Kristoff of The New York Times warned that social science studies indicate human beings don’t naturally seek “good information” but rather information that corroborates their existing prejudices. He predicted that the ‘Daily Me’ concept would cause people to insulate in “hermetically sealed political chambers” or the “reassuring wombs of an echo chamber.”
I think that such mass hermeticization had already occurred by 2009 in the U.S. after the Mass Media industries’ 1996 launches of Fox News and MSNBC television networks. Moreover, as much as Kristoff mentions a human tendency to seek corroboration, I point to an even more predominant human behavior: the tendency to seek and obtain the best possible mix of items that match your own individual needs, interests, and tastes. It is the tendency that makes each of us individual (‘individuated’) and has been rather thoroughly confirmed by Freud, Jung, Habermas, et. al.
Many hidebound Mass Media executives also misperceive consumers’ growing demand for more individuated media as the ‘fragmenting’ or ‘atomizing’ of audiences, which from an Industrial Era perspective might seem true. However, Anderson in The Long Tail quotes me:
The individuals haven’t changed; they’ve always been fragmented. What’s changing is their media habits. They’re now simply satisfying the fragmented interests that they’ve always had.
I’ll write in subsequent editions of this newsletter about how the Mass Media industries myopic misperception that they could transplant their traditional products and services, business models, doctrines, and theories into computer-mediated technologies was an industrial-scale example of the Einstellung Effect, the tendency to use traditional thinking to solve a novel problem even though better or more appropriate and analytical methods of solving the problem exist. For now, however, let’s advance to the third act of this tragedy.
The Future
As the capabilities of computer-mediated technologies ever more articulately aggregate, select, and deliver individuated feeds of news, entertainment, and other information to each of the world’s consumers ineluctably continued to advance exponentially, sooner or later a company or companies would commercialize it. What was remarkable in the new media environment, however, was that the companies that did weren’t initially founded to do so, but then phenomenally succeeded.
For example, Google was founded as a company selling webpage ranking software, not as a media company providing news, entertainment, and other types of information, nor selling advertising space or time. Facebook, which was originally founded as a ‘hot or not’-type friend or date finding application first at Harvard University. Twitter (now known as X) was founded as a group messaging application rather than any source of news, entertainment, or other information. The stories are similar for many search engines and social media applications that started in other nations. These startup companies, however, understood computer-mediated technologies’ capabilities to create individuated services and contents feeds. And they also understood the novel business doctrine nowadays called ‘User-Driven Innovation’ in which if most of their customers begin using their product or service for other than the purposes for which those were initially intended, pivot and focus that product or service on that new purpose rather than fight it.
During the past 25 years ago, literally billions of consumers started discovering that by ‘search engine’ and ‘social media’ services to connect to their friends, denote their ‘Likes’, and let these services’ algorithms record what they watch or search, they then could start receiving increasingly articulate feeds of news, entertainment, other information, discussions, and friendships. These individuated feeds are a better match to their individual needs, interests, and tastes than the products or services from any Mass Media company or alliance of such companies can provide. Additionally, even newer startup companies have launched services that use computer-mediated technologies solely to provide individuated streams of music to consumers (Pandora, Spotify, etc.).
Because search engines, social media, and other individuated streaming services all have mass production and mass reach capabilities equal or greater to the Mass Media yet with the unprecedented simultaneous capability of mass individuation, are entirely based and reliant upon computer-mediated technologies, have no possible analog media equivalents, and overcome or obsolescence numbers of the Mass Media’s theories, doctrines, business models, products, services, and practices, I radically posit these to be an entirely new genus of media, rather than ancillary some spinoffs or ancillaries of the Mass Media. In my classroom and scholarly publications, I’ve termed them the Individuated Media.
Once the Mass Media industries noticed the growing popularity of Individuated Media, those traditional industries create their own accounts on these new services so that their websites might receive online traffic from these. That soon became the Mass Media industries’ main sources of online traffic, yet primarily because billions of consumers were abandoning their habitual usage of the Mass Media industries and switching to the Individuated Media industries’ services. Google and Facebook have become two of the fastest growing companies in world history and between them now control slightly more than half of the world’s ‘digital’ advertising sales, including local advertising. Earlier this year, the Reuters Institute at Oxford University reported that the social media sector of the Individuated Media industries has now become the predominant means by which people of the world first obtain news, entertainment, and other information, eclipsing television for those purposes.
The phenomenal popular and financial successes of Individuated Media industries at the expense of the Mass Media industries has motivated some the latter to lobby their national governments to force Individuated Media companies to pay some financial compensation for their losses. That is now law in Australia and Canada, yet the compensations aren’t nearly the magnitude of the losses.
Worse for the Mass Media industries, the exponentially advancing capabilities of computer-mediated technologies have now reached the capabilities of Artificial Narrow Intelligence, otherwise known as Generative or Agentic ‘AI’. The search engine sectors of the Individuated Media industries are no longer mainly providing to consumers links to Mass Media industries’ websites and instead themselves using AI to answer consumers’ search questions. This means that the Mass Media industries have immediately seen their websites’ traffic drop by 40 or more percent, with commensurate declines in those websites’ advertising sales revenues.
Such usage of AI by the Individuated Media industries will only increase as the exponentially advancing capabilities of computer-mediated technologies do. Atop the past 20 years’ huge declines in the Mass Media industries’ audiences, advertisers, and revenues, these developments portent those increasingly antiquated industries probable doom.
Although the Mass Media industries have begun studying how to use AI, because those industries are still largely clueless that the huge consumer demand for individuated services is why competition from Individuated Media services are the root causes of their audience, advertisers, and revenues losses, they are myopically focusing their experiments with AI on newsroom usage, rather than in using AI’s peerless ever-increasing capabilities to individuate news, entertainment, and other informational services, which is exactly how Individuated Media uses AI.
The exponential progress of Moore’s Law, the concurrent rise in Artificial Intelligence’s capabilities, and even the possible introduction of practical Quantum computing, will likely ensure ever increasing individuation of media services during the 21st Century.
The Time for the Mass Media Industries to Awake to Reality
More than 20 years ago, the Mass Media industries myopically and thus catastrophically bet their future on the wrong path adapting to personal computer-mediated technologies. Subscribe to the Digital Deliverance newsletter and learn how and why.
The Mass Media industries mistook prerequisites and superficialities, such as ‘convergence’, ‘digital first,’ and ‘do what you do best and link to the rest,’ as the major and ultimate metamorphoses that these technologies wrought in the media environment. They expected the websites that they built would yield net profits equal or larger than their printed or broadcast services and products had earned, thereby sustaining themselves into the future. Despite forewarnings, they shortsightedly failed to perceive and comprehend ever much greater (indeed, epochal) changes that were then already underway. Some of the Mass Media industries have blithely trod this rapidly quickly obsolete path for more than a quarter century, despite it having so obviously led them into disaster and accelerating towards their eventual doom.
With exceedingly rare exceptions, these industries in developed nations have now lost more than half their consumer audiences (readerships, listenerships, or viewerships), more than two-thirds their advertising clientele, and more than half their gross revenues when the numbers are adjusted for population growth or inflation in the economy. Less prideful or less hidebound industries would long ago have realized, nonetheless admitted, that their adaptation strategy to personal computer-mediated technologies is a deluded debacle and instantly alter strategy.
The disaster is an industrial-scale example of the Einstellung Effect — a cognitive bias in which executives who aren’t used to rapid or a radical change employ outmoded but familiar methods to solve unprecedented problems, doing so even when they’ve been forewarned that more appropriate or efficient new solutions exists. In the cases of the Mass Media industries, they formulated, implemented, and have continued an adaptation strategy that might have seemed to them relevant during the 1990s but which subsequently failed to keep abreast even greater changes that the ever accelerating developments in computer-mediated technologies have wrought since then.
The Digital Deliverance newsletter (itself ironically a continuation of the 1990s one) will explain:
What wrong path the Mass Media industries took;
Why that path was wrong;
What those industries should instead have done;
How those industries own journalists and academicians inadvertently hampered their industries’ successful adaptation
What opportunities the Mass Media industries might be able to salvage.
Consequently, it will also explain what are now called Individuated Media, which in effect are a new and unprecedented genus of media, that have already replaced the Mass Media as the predominant means by which most people in the world obtain news, entertainment, and other information, and why that is demonstrably so.
In English-language idiom, that’s known as ‘a tall order’. Why should I be writing it and you be reading it? Compare my credential against those of others who would purport to explain these things:
• My name is Vin Crosbie. I’ve worked for the past 32 years full-time advising the Mass Media industries how to adapt to personal computer-mediated technologies. (For the prior 15 years, I was an executive with News Corp., Reuters, the original United Press International, the owner of a daily newspaper, and the fifth generation of my family in the media management business.) My consulting company Digital Deliverance, LLC, is 30 years old. I’ve consulted to media clients on five continents.
• The decade-year-old International Journal of New Media Studies requested my permission to use my seminal 2002 essay What is New Media? as the very first thing it published.
• I’ve co-chaired and co-moderated the World Association of News Publishers’ Beyond the Printed Word conference in Vienna, as well as been a speaker at most of the developed world’s major media conferences.
• I’ve given the Republic of Singapore’s Annual Media Lecture in its National Library auditorium, with an introduction by Singapore’s President.
• I was the first person, only industry consultant, and only academician, quoted in the Congressional Research Service’s report The U.S. Newspaper Industry in Transition, to brief the U.S. Congress about that industry’s disastrous problems adapting to the future.
• My speech to the National Association of Broadcasters conference was one of 23 orations — including speeches by Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Hillary Clinton — selected by a team of speech professors for publication in the anthology Representative American Speeches.
• Despite lacking any university or college degrees, I was enlisted in 2007 by Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, America’s premiere school of broadcasting, to write and teach New Media Business, a resaired course for master’s degree students in New Media and in Media Management. I continued as that course’s exclusive teacher until 2021 when I retired from the grind of scheduled teaching of graduate students and returned to consulting. I’ve also taught similar courses at Rhodes University in South Africa; and lectured at Peking and Tsinghua universities in China and at the University of Southern California, University of California at Berkeley, University of Missouri, and Virginia Commonwealth University in the U.S.A.
• At their invitation, I’ve presented academic papers at the biennial World Media Economics and Management Conferences and at the International Media Academics Association. Much of what I will explain in this newsletter has been published in the Journal of Strategic Innovation and Sustainability, among other scholarly journals.
As you can tell by my tone at the start of this very newsletter, I am direct and radically dissident from my consulting competitors or other media professors. I realistically expect that what I write will cause controversy and result in outrage or rejection by the very people who caused the Mass Media industries to trod for more than two decades along the wrong path into the 21st Century. Those industries’ wake-up call is overdue.
In May, I presented my conceptual paper Individuated Media in the Informational Era at the biennial World Media Economics and Management Conferencein Rome. The paper has since been published the in the peer-reviewed, quarterly Journal of Strategic Innovation and Sustainability. I am particularly happy about this because I hadn’t solicited this journal. Instead, it had heard about the paper and asked to review it. Moreover, JSIS is a general-interest business journal, not a media industry journal, and it publishing the paper thereby demonstrates wider acceptance of the concept of Individuated Media.
Author’s Note: This paper was presented at the Rethinking Theories and Concepts of Mediated Communications conference, September 13-14, 2018, Barcelona, Spain.
Abstract
This paper is a conceptual framework for comprehending how the shift in people’s access and choices in news, entertainment, and other information, changes people’s media consumption habits; thwarts many Mass Media business models and practices; and proposes that a shift is underway from the Mass Media of the Industrial Era and to the computer-mediated Individuated Media of the Informational Era. This epochal shift, resulting in most people having nearly instantaneous access in hand to more information than has before been printed or broadcast, is the greatest change in the history of media. It is already causing profound political, industrial, and societal effects and changes worldwide.
Keywords: Individuated Media, Mass Media, limitations of media, individuation of contents, mix of needs interests tastes, indivimedia
The Rise of Individuated Media
We live amid the greatest change in the history of media. People’s access and choices of news, entertainment, and other information has shifted from relative scarcity to surplus, or even overload. More than half of the world’s 7.6 billion people now own computer-mediated devices that can give them nearly instantaneous access to more information than has ever before been printed or broadcast. The speed of this shift has been unprecedented, affecting far more people worldwide far more quickly than did the inventions of the printing press, the broadcast transmitter, or any other past development in media. This shift is also among the most significant events in human history, already causing profound political, industrial, and societal effects and changes worldwide.
The epochal shift occurred over three or four decades, no more than a wink in human history, yet spanned more than a generation in the lives of people today. The shift occurred so quickly that most young adults have known nothing but surplus, yet occurred so slowly that most older adults are only beginning to perceive the magnitude and spectrum of effects it has already wrought, nonetheless those latent to be seen. The shift’s speed and sweep has caused a cognitive gap within the media industries between younger and older adults that is crippling those industries’ abilities to adapt to the new media environment the change has wrought.
Most young adults who staff media companies, and students who soon will, are natives to this new environment, but most of them still lack sufficient experience and perspective to formulate whatever doctrines, theories, and practices necessary to navigate this transformed environment. They look for those from the older adults who run media companies or who instruct media students.
Yet most of the older adults won their positions thanks to their hard-won expertise navigating a media environment which existed before this transformation; many, if not most, during the latter decades of the 20th Century. These old adult’s expertise is rooted in the waning years of the Industrial Era, when consumers had relatively scarce choices and access to news, entertainment, and other information: only a few or several terrestrial broadcast channels; only a few daily newspapers and perhaps one to two dozen weekly or monthly magazines in their language available on newsstands and kiosks; cinematic entertainment available mainly only at cinemas, books available only from bookstores or libraries, etc. A different era than now.
Moreover, the doctrines, theories, and practices at which they are expert were essentially defined by the media technologies of the Industrial Era: such as analog printing presses, analog waveform broadcast transmitters, and others media technologies that essentially predate computer-mediation. It was the capabilities and the limitations of those analog technologies that essentially defined the doctrines, theories, and practices that are collectively known as Mass Media, the hallmark mode of media during the Industrial Era. Decades of formative personal experiences during the era of relative scarcity, plus professional or advanced academic training in the doctrines that arose from then, have shaped most older adults who run media companies or who teach media students. These older adults had known no other mode of media except the Mass Media. Most might tend to assume that Mass Media are historically the ultimate possible forms of mediated communications. Many might overlook the inherent limitations of Mass Media communications as perhaps the inviolate or immutable boundaries of the media universe. Mass Media doctrines, theories, and practices are thus the filters through which they perceive and interpret everything in the media environment: whether a flutter of change in tabloid formats, the quaver of regulations in broadcast markets, or the seismic collapse of traditional Mass Media industries in developed countries amidst the greatest change in the history of media.
If proof of that exists, it is apparent in developed countries, where during the past half a generation most older adults who run media companies have inadvertently and demonstrably led their media industries towards obsolescence and possibly collapse. The proofs manifests there in steadily declining viewerships, listenerships, or readerships of Mass Media products (particularly when figures are adjusted for population growth). The proof is observable in how Mass Media companies’ equity prices have plunged and how their market capitalization has shrunk during the past dozen years. Proof is likewise also noticeable in the evaporating ranks of their traditional media companies’ employees, as staffing is constantly cut to match declining revenues. In most developed countries, the daily newspaper industries, which as few as 15 years ago had been among the most robust and valuable of many media corporations’ assets, touted by those corporations as ‘pioneering’ adaption to the new media environment, instead have been devastated. In the United States (U.S.), the newspaper sector of media has lost more than half of its annual revenues and daily circulations. Many of the approximately 1,250 daily newspapers in that country are now worth less as enterprises than the value of the real estate upon which they sit. Nearly as great drops of daily newspaper revenues and circulations have occurred in many Western European countries and Australia. The magazine and the commercial radio sector in developed countries have suffered similar drops. The recent divestiture by News Corp. of its cinema and U.S. commercial television network assets might be a harbinger of troubles in those media sectors, too. If there is a traditional media ‘convergence’, it is not in value.
The Myopia of a Waning Era
The penultimate cause of those declines is a pervasive misperception by most old adults who run media companies. They mistakenly believe that the greatest change underway in media during the past few decades is that consumers are simply switching media consumption from ‘analog’ to ‘digital’. In other words, these older adults mistakenly believe that people want to consume via computerized devices the same packages of news, entertainment, and other information that they had been consuming via printed publications or via terrestrial or cable broadcasting. They myopically misperceive that consumers have merely become ‘wired’ or ‘hooked up’; that the competing roles and products of traditional Mass Media sectors such as newspapers, magazines, radio, television, etc., have become ‘converged’ through via computer-media delivery, thereby ‘disrupting’ those industries; and what all those traditional media industries need to do to survive and prosper is to deliver their traditional business models, their traditional content packaging, and their traditional contents (albeit with the addition of hyperlinks and embedded multimedia) into consumers’ personal computers, ‘smartphones’, and future computerized devices. Those old adults mistake superficial characteristics of the greatest change as the change itself, woefully underestimating the change’s nature and scope. This myopic misperception is seductive to those media executives who are blindered to the possibility that Mass Media aren’t the ultimate conceivable modes of media. This misperception has led them to formulate and implement what critics call ‘shovelware’ but proponents term ‘digital first’ strategies for adaptation to the new media environment. In developed countries, the implementation of these strategies during the past 20 years has inadvertently caused marked and demonstrable drops in consumers’ use of Mass Media products and declines in Mass Media companies’ revenues and market capitalization. For example, the U.S. newspaper industry has seen its annual revenues from printed editions drop from U.S. $60 billion to $29 billion during the past 16 years[1], yet revenues from its newspapers’ websites, which it has been publishing since 1996, have grown to only $3 billion during the past 20 years (and increased of merely $1 billion during the past 16 years) of mainly ‘digital first’ strategies. The results of these myopic strategies of underestimating the change underway, of mistaking its nature as simply a shift in media consumption from printed or broadcasting products and to simply online delivery of those same products, are media industry sectors facing collapse.
Although the core premise of those strategies is true, that billions of consumers are switching how they consume media content, changing from print or broadcast and to online, those billions of people aren’t doing so because they think that text content is easier to read, or that music is easier to listen, or that cinema or video is easier to watch on the screens of computers or smartphones. Nor is it necessarily the addition of hyperlinks and ‘converged’ multimedia. Much more than that is occurring that motivates a change in consumption by half the world’s population. To describe what, first examine the sheer magnitude of the shift from relative scarcity to surplus that began a little more than a generation ago.
Three Principles and Five Waves Interact
The exact timing of this great shift has varied per nation, depending upon each country’s economics, politics, and technological infrastructures. In general, however, the shift has occurred in approximately five ‘waves’ of change that altered the media environment, each of which is a direct result of the progress and practical usages of the computer integrated circuit ‘chip’ and the interactions of three observable and related dynamic principles or ‘laws’ arising from that technology:
(1) Moore’s Law observes that the number of transistors that can be miniaturized into an integrated circuit doubles about every two years, which means that the practical processing power of new computer chips doubles in each such period;
(2) Cooper’s Law (also known as the Law of Spectral Efficiency) observes that the practical communications-carrying capacity within the wireless electromagnetic spectrum doubles every 30 months; and
(3) Butters’ Law (also known as the ‘Law of Photonics’) observes that the practical carrying-capacity of fiber optics doubles every nine months.
The interactions of these three technological principles or ‘laws’ have been causing accelerating technological advances worldwide since some 60 years when computer chips began replacing manual or mechanical switching armatures and vacuum tubes in the technologies of wired and wireless telecommunications. The three ‘laws’ are interdependent because the capabilities of any computer are limited by those of its telecommunicative inputs and outputs; the capabilities of telecommunication are limited by those of the computers driving it. The progress of each of these three principles or ‘laws’ is thus dependent upon one another.
In the U.S., the five waves of change altered the media environment and shifted most people’s access and choices of news, entertainment, and other information from relative scarcity to surplus. Each wave coincidentally occurred during different yet consecutive decades of the Gregorian calendar:
The 1970s brought implementation of cable television, first in cities and then suburbs (followed decades later by satellite television nationwide). Consumers who used to have access to no more than between one and a dozen television channels gained access to dozens and then hundreds. (A recent Nielsen study reported[2] that the average U.S. home now receives more than 180 television channels.) A notable characteristic of this, as well as the subsequent waves of change, was not only that it gave consumers more choices of general-interest channels but gave rise to topical channels: news, sports, cartoons, history, biography, science, comedy, nature & animals, fashion, science fiction, shopping, and so on. As the number of accessible channels increased, topical channels quickly outnumbered general-interest channels and sub-topical channels arose (rather all sports, a golf channel, a tennis channel, a motor racing channel, for examples.). If your hobby is to cook, you no longer had to wait for the weekend when an hour-long cooking show might be broadcast; you could instead watch cooking shows at any time of day.
The 1980s brought advances in offset lithography which made publication of topical (‘niche’ contents) magazines economical. Newsstands and kiosks that 40 years ago offered 20 to 30 magazine titles now sell hundreds of titles, almost all of which are about specific topics rather than general-interest. A reader specifically interested in a specific topic (4WD Toyotas or Nordic cuisine or World War II history or Missouri vacations or bonsai gardening, etc.) now no longer had to wait for the occasional story about that topic in a newspaper or general-interest magazine.
The 1990s brought Internet access to the public. More than 4 billion people worldwide[3] have since gained access to nearly 1.9 billion websites, daily make 5.9 billion Google searches, and watch 6.5 billion YouTube videos[4]. (These number don’t include searches on Yahoo!, Bing, Baidu, etc., or videos seen on other websites.) That 1.9 billion websites includes virtually all the worlds’ newspapers, magazines, trade journals, and other publications, plus than 15,000 radio and television channels that have been put online, plus nearly one billion blogs (433 million via Tumblr.com alone[5]), plus social networks. Mass Media companies’ websites comprise a tiny fraction of 1.9 billion websites, almost all of which are about specific topics or individuals.
The 2000’s wave brought broadband access to billions of consumers. Most homes and offices in developed countries gained nearly-instant, ‘always-on’ access to the news, entertainment, and other information that the previous three waves brought. This wave eliminated the need to monopolize a telephone line to access all news, entertainment, and other information. It also markedly changed how, and how frequently, consumers accessed their newfound cornucopia of contents. It also catalyzed the rise of video content online (even allowing consumers to distribute their own online). By 2017, more people in the U.S. had subscriptions to ‘online streaming’ services such as Netflix and Hulu than had cable television subscriptions.[6] Online streaming had already become the predominant way in which consumers in China watch videos.
The 2010s brought all that wirelessly into the palms of our hands, our vehicles, and even our appliances. Within two years of the 2008 introduction of the ‘smartphone’, nearly 300 million had been sold worldwide. That number had risen to a total of 1.4 billion by 2015, at which time the world’s mobile telephone handset manufacturers had begun producing nothing but smartphones.[7] By 2017, smartphone access became the predominant way in which consumers access the Internet (and already accounted for nearly two-thirds of such access from Asia).[8] Some 1.5 billion smartphones will be sold during 2018.[9] The least expensive smartphones, such as the Samsung Galaxy J1, Techno L9, or Huawei Y3, available in developing countries nowadays cost[10] the equivalent of U.S. $100 to $110 with ‘pay as you go’ carrier charges for telephony and data carrier costs, putting smartphone ownership in reach of many more consumers worldwide. Furthermore, several of the world’s major cinema studios have begun developing video entertainment specifically for smartphones, raising billions of dollars to do so.[11] Meanwhile, most of the world’s major manufacturers of automobiles have begun building Internet access into vehicles (as already do most of the world’s major manufacturers of television sets). Major manufacturers of home appliances, such as Samsung, LG, and Siemens, now sell refrigerators capable of displaying streamed video from the Internet.
These waves of accelerating technological change transformed the media environment from what it had been during most of the 20th Century or even ten years ago. The changes have not been incremental, and have shattered many aspects of the media environment and media industries worldwide. To think that such radical changes would not alter the doctrines, theories, and practices of media, plus how media products are consumed, is illogical.
Ultimate Cause of Mass Media Decline
Evidence of how radically the shift from relative scarcity to surplus has changed consumer’s consumption of media can be seen in the following mid-2007 table of data from the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) about usage of major daily newspaper websites in the U.S. (See Figure 1.) The NAA asked Nielsen/Netratings to compile usage data from that year during March through August, specifically about the monthly numbers of web pages exposed and ‘Unique Visitors’ received, and how often the average such visitor of each of those websites visits, how many webpages he sees, and how much time he spends on that website. Nielsen averaged the aggregate data from those six months to compensate for any seasonal or holiday variations. Most media executives and media scholars who have Mass Media backgrounds tend to focus on the monthly numbers of ‘Unique Visitors’ and of ‘Web Page Views’. Note that during the average of those six months, the website of The New York Times received nearly 19 million users to which it showed more than 370 million webpages, numbers that appear impressive.
Figure 1.
Table courtesy of Nielsen Media Research
However, what is striking to anyone interested in how media consumption has changed are the monthly ‘Web Pages Per Visitor’, ‘Visits Per Visitor’, and ‘Time Per Visitor’ numbers. The average user of The New York Times’s website visited it only 4.05 times per month; spent 20 minutes and 20 seconds there all month; and read 27 stories during those visits. (See Figure 1.) Visiting this daily newspaper’s website only 4.05 times per month is equivalent to visiting it about once per week. Spending a total of 20:20 there during those 4.05 visits equals approximately five minutes per visit. Reading 27 web pages during those 4.05 visits means the average visitor reads fewer than approximately seven web pages per visit. (27 / 4.05 = 6.66). If each web page contains one story, that means the average visitor saw fewer than seven stories per visit, though likely fewer than that if he also visited the website’s home page or sectional index pages during each of those visits.
[Although the NAA, which has since merged with six other U.S. newspaper associations to form the New Media Alliance, no longer publicly releases such data, private viewings of Nielsen and ComScore data by the author during visits to many of these U.S. newspapers confirm that although the monthly totals of ‘Unique User’ and ‘Web Page Views’ has greatly increased during the past 11 years since this table of data was released, the average monthly numbers of ‘Web Pages per Visitor’, ‘Visits Per Visitor, and ‘Time Per Visitor’, or equivalent data, has not markedly changed.]
This data shows radically different consumption online than in print. The average user of a printed edition of The New York Times probably spends ten to 20 minutes per day reading it, not a total of 20 minutes per month. The data from almost all the other major U.S. daily newspapers’ websites shows even less frequent and less deep usage. For example, Miami Herald: 2.09 visits, eight total minutes, only nine web pages seen per month.
Consider also how advertising exposure and advertising business models differ between online and in print or terrestrial broadcasts. When someone purchases an advertisement in a printed publication, the purchase price is based upon the net circulation of that publication, not upon how many actual readers turned to the page on which the advertisement was placed. When someone purchases an advertisement in a terrestrial broadcast, the purchase price is based upon an approximation of how many people could be listening or watching the broadcast at that time, not upon how many do. Yet because interactive technologies can detect the actual number of people to whom an online advertisement has been shown, the advertiser is charged per that number. If the average visitor to The New York Times’ website visits only 4.05 times per month, during which he sees only 27 web pages, that daily newspaper is only able to expose advertisements to him only 4.05 times per month, not daily, and only on 27 pages during that period. Because the consumption habits of people online are different than with the same contents in printed or terrestrially broadcast form, their less frequent and less deep usage online is one of the major reasons why publications’ or broadcasters’ advertising revenues online are much lower than in print or terrestrial broadcast.
During 2011, The New York Times began trying to convert as many as possible of its website’s users into paying online subscribers, and many other daily newspapers have followed its lead. Now, after seven of marketing, The New York Times has converted a total of 2.8 million of its websites’ claimed 78.1 million registered ‘Unique Users’ into paying online subscribers.[12] That is a conversion rate of only 3.6%, and includes ‘Unique Users’ who subscribe not to full access but access only to the newspaper’s recipes or crossword puzzles. Most other daily newspapers in the U.S. (except for the financial publication The Wall Street Journal) have fared even worse. Most consumers don’t want to pay the U.S. $10 to $35 monthly that publishers are trying to charge for access to websites that those consumers use relatively infrequently (such as only 4.05 times per month) and thinly (fewer than seven web pages per visit). Readers of The New York Times’ printed edition, whose consumption habits are radically different, had no such qualms. Most will, at least, scan every page of the printed daily edition, yet nobody ever views every page of a newspaper’s website each day. People consume news, entertainment, and other information differently online than they do in in print, terrestrial broadcasts, or other forms of Mass Media.
Choosing Items from a Cornucopia of Contents
Imagine that all your life you’ve been fed the same institutional or standardized meal as everyone else was in your community that day. The meal might consist of an entrée, a vegetable, and a beverage, none of which were chosen by you but by a nutritionist who thought those items were those most people in the community would want or should eat. On some days, this meal might interest you; on other days, its mix of items does not. However, you now have an alternative: a gargantuan buffet of appetizers, entrées, vegetables, salads, fruits, breads, deserts, beverages, and myriad other items which you yourself can select. Given the choice between continuing to consume the same standardized meal as everyone else in the community or utilizing this huge buffet to select whichever items best match your own needs, interests, and tastes, what would you do? If you are like most people (the mass in the Industrial Era term Mass Media), you’ll likely stop consuming the standardized meal everyone else in the community gets and instead make your own choices from the buffet to which you now have access. That way, you will likely find a selection of items that would better match your own unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes than the items in a standardized meal could.
What if when you walked into a grocery market, the store clerk stopped you from browsing in the grocery aisles and handed to you, and each other consumer who walked into that market, bags containing the same selection of grocery items, a selection of items which he thought that most people might want to or should eat? Would you continue to patronize that grocery market? Or would you instead patronize a grocery market that allows you to browse and select whatever mix of items best fits your individual mix of needs, interests, and tastes?
Those two hypothetical examples are akin to choices which most people in the world now have between continuing to consume general-interest Mass Media products or browsing and selecting items from their newfound online cornucopia of contents. Rather than continuing to consume general-interest publications and general-interest broadcasts, regardless of whether those contents are in print, terrestrially broadcast, or online, more and more consumers are abandoning consumption of general-interest selections of items and instead are obtaining from their newfound online cornucopia of contents their own selections of items, a mix that better matches their needs, interests, and tastes than the general-interest packages do.
Each consumer is uniquely individual. Most people permanently share few universal or common interests. During workshops that I hold at newspapers, I frequently asks editors to list permanent interests shared by everyone in the community they serve. Many editors reply ‘taxes’ or ‘local politics’, disqualified answers because those topics aren’t of interest to most children and teenagers in the community. ‘Hurricanes’, ‘earthquakes’, ‘tornadoes’, ‘floods’, and other natural disasters, plus ‘national elections’, are answers that partly qualify, although most are weather-related and incidental, not permanently sustaining interests for many people. The sole topic that all editor agreed is of permanent interest to everyone in their communities was the weather. That ultimately means that most stories in newspapers are not of interest to most people. However, many people do share some group interests, for examples fans of the actor George Clooney or of the Barcelona football club or of table tennis or of Harley Davidson motorcycles or of Malaysian cuisine, etc. Most people have several group interests, some of which they might hold permanently and some of which might vary over time. Yet the more specific a topic of group interests becomes, the fewer the number of people who share it. Each person might indeed have a myriad remarkably specific or individual interests about which nobody he has met or known shares: such as be a fan of an obscure author, have a particularly unusual hobby, be a collector of an unusual type of object, love a very specific type of cooked meal, etc. Each person is a unique mix of a few universal interests, some group interests, and very many specific interests. It is this unique mix that makes each person an individual. No two people have the same mix of interests.
Each person yearns to obtain products and services that can best satisfy his own unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes. Chris Anderson’s 2006 book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More describes in detail[13] how the proportions of universal, group, and specific interests can be calculated as a power curve[14] graph. (See Figure 2.)
Figure 2.
The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare. [15]
Anderson noted in his power curve graph that huge numbers of people share very few universal interests; that large numbers of people share some group interests; and that few people share any specific interest but there are huge numbers of specific interests. The astronomical numbers of specific interests would scroll off any reasonably-sized chart. (Hence the name ‘Long Tail’.) To media executives and media academicians trained in Mass Media, the Long Tail chart indicates that the most successful media businesses should be built to cater to the few universal interests or, at most, numbers of group interests. Those interests indeed have been the realm of Mass Media due to the limitations of Industrial Era technologies. However, Anderson and other observers have calculated that the greatest area delineated under this power curve is the specific interests, not the group or the universal interests. The bulk of Anderson’s Long Tail book describes companies that during the past 20 years have used computer-mediated technologies to exploit the voluminous area of specific interests and thereby deliver products that better match their customers’ own individual mixes of needs, interests, and tastes.
Among those companies is Amazon.com, whose founder, Jeff Bezos (now the richest person in the world), understood the power curve of people’s interest and formulated a business plan that ably utilizes it. He started with books. Bezos knew that most retail bookstores built can stock and sell the best-selling books and that some are large enough to stock and sell books about group interests. However, he understood that no retail bookstore built was large enough to stock and sell all the world’s books about specific topics; topics from which in aggregate his company could make the most revenues because that’s where most people’s interests lay. Bezos knew that no shelves in a physical store or kiosk could contain books in print about all topics, but he realized that creating a computer-mediated online interface to do so could. Along with that interface, he also established huge warehouses of books throughout the U.S. and began using postal mail or commercial delivery companies to deliver books about specific topics to individuals who wanted those, thus exploiting the ‘Long Tail’ effect. Now 24 years after its founding, his company, which today sells more than only books, has the second greatest market capitalization in the world and annual gross revenues (turnover) of more than $177 billion. Among startup companies in the U.S. that have exploited similarly plans are Pandora for music (81 million users, more than any U.S. radio station has), Flipboard for magazines (28 million users, more than any U.S. magazine has), etc. All these companies allow each customer to find a more precise mix of contents that match his needs, interests, and tastes, than he could obtain from Mass Media companies packaging contents focused primarily on universal and group, rather than specific, interest. The rapid successes of how these companies used the computer-mediated technologies of the Information Era to better serve masses of individuals, and thereby gain greater revenues, should be a warning to Mass Media competitors.
The Technological Limitations of Mass Media
Most of the doctrines, theories, and practices of Mass Media arose from the capabilities and the limitations of Industrial Era media production technologies. For examples, an analog printing press, whether the moveable-type version invented by Gutenberg or the modern rotary offset version used by The New York Times, can print a massive number of copies simultaneously, but each of those copies is identical. An analog waveform transmitter can reach massive numbers of people within its range (terrestrially or extended through cable systems), yet each of its listeners or viewers simultaneously receives the same program and an identical program schedule as every other. Industrial Era technologies are incapable of producing an individually-customized edition or program or program schedule to match each individual recipient’s own unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes. In Mass Media, a team of editors at, for example, a daily newspaper selects stories to include in that day’s edition based upon two criteria: (a) which stories might have the most common demographic interest, and (b) which stories the editors think all recipients should be informed about. (In entertainment media, only the first criterion is generally used.) The resulting products and services generally are imperfect matches to each person’s own unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes. Industrial Era media technologies have mass reach, but no practical means by which to customize contents for each user—a massive disadvantage in an Information Era when billons of consumers have gained access to a cornucopia of contents. The computer-mediated Individuated Media technologies of the Informational Era do provide mass reach with mass-customization.
When Mass Media executives nowadays complain that their audiences have become ‘fragmented’, they are complaining that their Mass audiences have declined because increasing numbers of those audience members are instead online finding and consuming (‘self-selecting’, as if from an informational buffet) whatever mix of stories, from all possible accessible vendors, best matches each individual’s own unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes. Billions of people now do so. There are as many ‘fragments’ as there are individuals. During the past 20 or more years, the media industries and the media academia should have foreseen: that once people’s access and choices of news, entertainment, and other information, shifted from relative scarcity to surplus, people’s media consumption habits would shift away from accepting standardized Mass Media packages of contents and towards each person seeking a more articulately individuated selections of content items which can better match his own unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes; also that Mass Media’s standardized selections of items would become worth less as billions of people shifted their media consumptions this way; and that the aggregate sum of the items in Mass Media packages of contents might therefore become more valuable to people when unbundled than the sum of those items had been when packaged as printed editions or as broadcast program schedules (an example: Apple sells more songs as individual downloads than as download of the albums of those songs).[16]
The method by which millions of those individuals first began individuating the mix of news, entertainment, and other information, they received each day was by self-selecting it during the late-1990s from massive amounts that they were beginning to gain access to online. They first used search engines to aid in the individuation of contents they received. Back in that decade of primarily dialup access, those millions of individuals might have first ventured online to read the contents of Mass Media publications, perhaps ones to which they didn’t subscribe or weren’t available in print in their location. However, it soon became apparent that they wanted more than the world’s Mass Media could provide. (Part of the reason might be because almost all Mass Media publishers and broadcaster during the years 1996 to approximately 2010 put online only those contents that they also printed or terrestrially broadcast. The number of stories that, for example, the newsroom of The New York Times receives dailies from its own reporters and news and feature agencies and syndicates numbers in the thousands, yet that newspaper’s printed edition can only economically fewer than one hundred per edition. In doing so, publisher and broadcasters failed to utilize the full capacity and capabilities of computer-mediated media technologies and inadvertently transplanted one of the limitations of Industrial Era media into Informational Era media.) By using search engines to find more specific sources of information about the group interests or specific interests for which they cared, consumers discovered even more specialized topical publications, bloggers who knew more about that group or specific than they did, and numerous other sources of that information than could the more generalized or general-interest publications and broadcasts by Mass Media could provide. These millions, and soon hundreds of millions and billions, of individuals’ use of search engines made the companies providing search technology, such as Google and Baidu, immensely rich (annual revenues of U.S. $110 billion[17] and $12.5 billion[18] respectively during 2017).
Billions of people found more efficient ways to individuate the mix of news, entertainment, and other information they obtained when during the early years of the new millennium companies such as MySpace, Facebook, Sina Weibo, Twitter, Reddit, VKontakte, and others providing services now colloquially known as ‘Social Media’, were launched. At the core of most social media companies’ is the concept known as ‘collaborative filtering’.[19] It is based upon the hypothesis that if you have friends, then they are your friends because you and they happen to share together some or perhaps many interests. That means that you and your friends together can, as each of you searches online, find more items that match your unique mix of interests than you alone could have found. (That is your ‘society’ in Social Media.) Social Media companies such as Facebook have further augmented this by allowing publishers, broadcasters, schools, governments, and other organizations, each to create their own ‘page’ on a Social Media service so that each organization’s contents can be automatically added to any individual user’s ‘news feed’ simply by that user ‘Like’ing the organization as if it were yet another friend on that Social Media. The resulting feed of individuated contents that a Social Media user automatically receives each day is thus based upon his individual mix of friends and ‘Like’s. These services delivering individuated contents have become phenomenally popular. For example, as of the second quarter of 2018, only 14 years after its launch, Facebook had 2.23 billion Monthly Active Users (i.e., have logged-in during the past 30 days)[20], 29% of the world’s population. There are 2.6 billion people currently use Social Media and predictions that 3 billion will be by 2021.[21]
Other companies have launched services which provide individuated contents for only particularly forms of media. For examples, the U.S. company Pandora Radio, founded in 2000, has 81 million users. It lets each of them individuate streaming music so that the musical genres styles, and performers each listener hears fits that listener’s own mix of interests and tastes. By the end of 2013, Pandora accounted for 70% of all Internet radio streaming in the U.S.[22] Among Pandora’s competitors is iHeartRadio, owned by the corporation that operates the largest number of terrestrial radio stations in the U.S. Like Pandora, iHeartRadio lets its 100 million users individuate the stream of music they receive.[23] No terrestrial radio station in the U.S. has nearly as many regular listeners as do either of these two individuated streaming music services. The closest competitor to Pandora and iHeartRadio would be the Mass Media satellite radio station Sirius XM which has an aggregate total of 33 million users of its 151 channels.[24]
Individuated Media Supersedes Mass Media
The phenomenally rapid popularity and growth of services that let individuals find the mix of news, entertainment, and other information, that best fits their own unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes, or that automatically provide them with such feeds, has been unprecedented in not only the history of media but also the history of business. More than half of the world’s population now has access to such services and 58% of them (29% of the world’s population) have gravitated to these services. Moreover, most of that 58% are been people under the age 30, who will likely use such services, rather than legacy Mass Media, for the rest of their lives. Multiple surveys by reputable polling organizationshave begun to report that individuated media services, whether search engines, Social Media, or others, are already the predominant means by which people under the age of 45 in developed countries obtain news and other information, rather than by the printed periodicals or terrestrial broadcasts of Mass Media.[25][26]
Is Facebook a media company? With 2.23 billion active users, it certainly has mass reach, and hundreds of millions, if not billions of its users rely upon it as their primary means of obtaining news and many forms of civic and societal information. Yet each of its 2.23 billion users will simultaneously see a different mix of content than any other of those users does, quite unlike with a Mass Media service. That’s why this author terms such services Individuated Media rather than Mass Media. Individuated Media products and services utilize (and are inherently dependent upon) computer-mediation to provide not only the mass reach of Mass Media but to provide the mass customization of information that Mass Media technologies cannot provide. As Moore’s, Cooper’s, and Butters’ laws and their interactions continue to accelerate and advance the pace of technological change worldwide, I believe that the effects will ineluctably accelerate the capabilities of Individuated Media services to provide even newer and more articulate matches to each person’s own unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes. And it will conversely erode the fortunes and futures of Mass Media and its practices. Individuated Media is already superseding Mass Media as people’s predominant means of obtaining news, entertainment, and other information.
The ramifications of this great shift bear further study. As most people who have spent time in a bazaar, souk, or flea market know, whenever the supply of something changes from scarcity to surplus, more than just its pricing changes: things such as the purchasers’ attention spans, the power balances between buyers and sellers, the market dissonance as the shift occurs, etc. The Principle of Supply & Demand might be the ideal prism through which to examine further the entire spectrum of media changes underway.
References
Anderson, C. (2006). The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. New York, NY: Hyperion.
[13] Anderson,, C., The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2005) Hyperion. Retrieved from https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0935726942/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i5
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