media business models | Individuated Media

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 21^st Century. Those industries’ wake-up call is overdue.

Read and hear it now!

Planet Explosion. Apocalypse. End of The Time. Science fiction art. Beauty of deep space. Elements of this image furnished by NASA

[This essay first appeared in a slightly different form at DigitalDeliverance.com]

Welcome to the Newspaper Cataclysm. The financial disaster unfolding for the daily newspaper industries due to the coronavirus pandemic is a late-stage event in an even greater struggle that has been underway in the media environment for more than 25 years. Though the recession caused by the pandemic will kill many (possibly very many) daily newspapers, their real cause of death won’t be the pandemic or recession but those newspapers’ weakened state caused by an epochal change underway in the media environment.

Most publishing or broadcasting pundits circulate any of several shopworn excuses for the financial and popular usage decline of newspapers, news magazines, and news broadcasts during the past decades. The most frequently uttered are that avaricious corporate chain ownerships of media companies have slashed newsrooms to levels that can no longer produce services that consumers want to use; or that consumers simply no longer care at all about news; or if consumers care, then they still won’t pay for news because they’ve become used to obtaining information for free online; or that no one has yet found the ‘missing’ business model that will allow newspaper to earn revenues as great online as they had earned in print.

However, none of those myopic excuses is the real reason why the newspaper industry has begun to evaporate. Although it is true that corporate chain owners of newspapers, which comprise some 95 percent of the U.S. industry, have bled newsrooms dry, independently owned newspapers and those owned by not-for-profit foundations have suffered the same financial and popular usage declines as chain-bled ones. Multiple surveys (the most recent example) show that consumers do care about news and are willing to pay something for it, but not anywhere as much as they had been paying decades ago when newspapers had been their only locally-accessible sources of daily changing information in print. And there never was any ‘missing’ business model that will allow newspapers to regain the revenues and the audiences that they had had in print. The fundamental reason why the newspaper industry is failing is more than these banal excuses.

In each era of history, the theories, doctrines, practices, and business models of its media have always been defined by the technologies of that era. The reach of the voices of actors or priests and the sightlines of the props in royal courts, theaters, and churches wasn’t far, nor the range of town criers, during the Agricultural Era. Although some people date the start of the Industrial Era to the rise of powered machinery during the late 1700s, I date it to Gutenberg’s invention of the moveable type printing press in 1454. His machinery began mass production: books, newspapers, and magazines. It was the invention of Mass Media. Four and one-half centuries later in the Industrial Era, Marconi’s practical invention of the broadcast transmitter began to extend the reach of Mass Media worldwide. Unfortunately, there was a hallmark limitation to all mechanical (i.e., analog) printing presses and all analog waveform transmitters: they had mass reach but each recipient of that printed edition or that broadcast program schedule simultaneously received the exact same edition or broadcast. They had reach but analog uniformity. That might have been fine if every recipient had an identical mix of individual needs, interests, beliefs, and tastes; yet individual humans don’t. Nonetheless, this was the best Industrial Era technologies could do. The theories, doctrines, practices, and business models of Mass Media arose from within that hallmark limitation.

That limitation does not exist with computer-mediated technologies. The legacy media companies of the waning Industrial Era that have tried to transplant newspaper contents, practices, business models, doctrines, and theories into computer-mediated media (i.e., online, colloquially known as ‘digital’) either because it saves them purchasing, printing, and distributing paper or simply because billions of consumer have switched media consumption habits online, are too shortsighted to see that the media environment has been fundamentally transformed by computerization and liberated from Mass Media limitations.

As the Informational Era dawns, an entirely new genus of media, functionally different and distinct from Mass Media, rises with it. This genus has as much or more the mass reach as Mass Media, yet also can simultaneously deliver a unique mix of contents according to each recipient’s individual mix of needs, interests, beliefs, and tastes. Each of those unique mixes isn’t merely personalized (i.e, ‘a uniform golf ball but with your name printed on it’) or even customized (i.e., a uniform product to which parts have been added or subtracted), but a bespoke mix from its onset, and ideally with component parts selected not just from one source (i.e., a publisher, broadcaster, or other entity) but from all sources practicable. It delivers a fully individuated product or service for its consumer. These products and service truly are ‘New Media’, fitting with Steuer’s classic definition of interactivity, in striking functional contrast to Industrial Era legacy periodicals and broadcasts consigned to online delivery and erroneously called ‘new media’.

Each of us alive shares a few common interests (the weather, news of a disaster or pandemic, etc.) Many of us also share some group interests (a sport team, a popular cuisine, a fashion, etc.) Yet each of us has myriad idiosyncratic or specific interests, including some of which we might not know anyone with whom we share. It is the unique mix of common, group, and idiosyncratic interests, beliefs, and tastes that makes each of us individual. Imagine that previously in your life you had always been served the same meal as everyone else, but now you have access to a gargantuan buffet from which you could select whatever mix of items that you think best matches your individual needs, interests, and tastes. Would you continue consuming uniform meals or choose that buffet? I think it self-evident that most people would switch to the buffet, the more articulate means by which they can satisfy their individual needs, interests, and tastes. Billions of consumers have been making that same switch online thanks to the New Media.

So far, three general categories of Individualized Media have appeared during these early decades of the Informational Era. Each category is unprecedented in the history of media:

The first and earliest is Search Engines. Although the world has had printed directories and encyclopedia, none were ever live (i.e., news updated with minutes, other listings within days); capable of parsing users’ questions; and delivering more information worldwide than had ever before been published and broadcast. Most consumers use Search Engines not for contents that the users could readily find in whatever Mass Media are locally based and distributed, but instead for more idiosyncratic contents. And no two individual users likely ever search for the same mix. (Indeed, for example, 15% of all Google searches terms each day have never been searched for before.) Consumers began using Search Engines in the 1990s to hunt and gather a better mix of contents to their individual needs, interests, beliefs, and tastes than Mass Media could give them. Is Google a Mass Media company? Its worldwide reach is absolutely mass, processing 3.5 billion searches each day. it is ranked the #1 website in the world by traffic, and it receives 32.3% of the world’s online advertising expenditures, at Mass Media’s loss.

During the following decade, many New Media companies were launched to give those consumers automated help hunting and gathering individuated mixes of contents. Colloquially known as Social Media, these new services have long been mistaken by Mass Media executives as somehow supplemental services to Mass Media, as if social media were merely electronic bulletin boards instead of so much more. Social Media (such as Facebook, Sina Weibo, Vkontakte, Twitter, Renren, etc.) are now the primary means by which people under the age of 35 obtain news, entertainment, and other information. Social Media consumers receive an individuated feed of contents based upon their ‘Likes’, ‘Follows’, and network of ‘Friends’ (i.e., collaborative filtering). Facebook itself now has 2.5 billion users and 22% of the world’s online ad spending (83% of the world’s Social Media ad spending). Does all that make Facebook a Mass Media company? It certainly has mass reach, yet quite unlike Mass Media products, even those of the Industrial Era’s last decades, none of Facebook’s 2.5 billion users simultaneously sees the same mix of contents; each sees a uniquely individuated mix. Like Search Engines, Social Media products and services are Individuated Media.

The third category of Individuated Media arising hasn’t yet a colloquial name (such as ‘Search Engines’ or ‘Social Media’) but instead are individuated media transformations of what Mass Media executives would call topical (or ‘niche’) products and services. Each focusing on a single genre of media contents, examples of such services include Pandora, Spotify, and Flipboard. Each of these a highly customized or individuated mix of music or of news to each of their users, according to each user’s interests and tastes. Pandora and Spotify nowadays each have more listeners than any commercial radio station or music network (the sole exception: government-owned China Central Television). Flipboard’s 145 million users number far more (4x) than the readers of any news or features magazine in the world, yet each sees an individuated mix of contents changing daily.

Half of humanity, 3.8 billion people, now use at least one Individuated Media service daily, if not multiple ones many times per day. None of those services existed a generation ago. And most of those billions of people use Individuated Media at the expense of Mass Media products and services, even though those products and services provide some components of Individuated Media contents. Online advertising already comprises the 68% of the $563 billion spent annually on all forms of advertising, and Individuated Media services such as Google and Facebook command more than 60% of that majority of the world’s advertising. Individuated Media aren’t supplemental to Mass Media; instead, Individuated Media is rapidly superseding Mass Media, and not coincidentally much as the Informational Era has been superseding the Industrial Era in the world’s developed countries.

All Individuated Media products & services are entirely dependent upon computer-mediated algorithms, much as almost all aviation nowadays is dependent upon locomotive technologies. While Individuated Media delivers the benefits of better mixes of contents that match each individual’s unique needs, interests, beliefs, and tastes, like most other revolutionary technological advancements, it also creates new risks. Although degrees of serendipity can be built into its algorithms, some of its consumers can use it to omit receiving information that is contrary to their beliefs or prejudices. Editors can no longer set a ‘common agenda’ for the consumers in their community who use it rather than Industrial Era’s legacy Mass Media. Nor can advertisers as easily force ‘eyeballs’ to see their ads as they could with Mass Media. Thus, many of the theories, doctrines, practices, and business models of Individuated Media are different than those of Mass Media, despite many commonalities.