Give the dinosaurs a treat!

 
Column The recession is the best thing that could happen to us. To us readers. Us consumers. Us new media makers.
Although printed newspapers collect significantly more advertising money than digital news despite dwindling readership figures, they will necessarily fail economically. Print is not competitive as a distribution model. And for a very simple reason: "Economic competition always pushes the market value of a product down to the marginal costs" (Mike Masnick, Techdirt). The marginal costs of digital publishing are as unbeatably low as the marginal costs of digital music distribution.music and news are now subject to radically changed production, sales and distribution conditions; consumers have long since understood this, but producers are riding their age-old business models into despair. And then they complain!
Anyone who prints free newspapers and howls when they then have to give out the same information online for free, anyone who blocks the archives out of conservative avarice and grandiloquently threatens to take their main traffic supplier Google to court, should be forced to retire. We readers have never paid for information, but only for paper (and we no longer need that). The majority of news production costs have always been covered by advertising.
Everyone knows that. And yet our whiny media moguls are now happy to sweep this under the carpet. Instead of actively looking for ways to make money online, they prefer to blame a digital Che Guevara. It is hardly surprising that innovative online advertising concepts are sabotaged by gray-haired salespeople in the print advertising department. People are lazy, moguls are comfortable, change always means stress.
But it is astonishing that companies continue to spend so much money on paper advertising and nothing on online advertising. Yes, companies are still wasting huge sums of money on newspaper and glossy booklet advertising - in other words, on funny rustling and page-turning stuff, stuffing and cover material, in other words, on an information carrier that was mainly used as such by old pipe smokers.
But for how much longer? While online advertising has been recording astronomical growth rates for years and grew again by 18% in the USA in 2007, the advertising market for print products suffered its biggest setback in 50 years in the same year: Compared to the previous year, advertising revenues for American print publications fell by almost ten percent.
In view of a collapsing advertising market, declining readership and an ever-widening age gap between paper and screen readers, the following figures are really worrying: 13 million people read the New York Times online, while just 1.6 million subscribe to the newspaper. As a company, the prestigious newspaper generates advertising revenue of 484 million dollars per year. Only 51 million of this is attributable to online advertising. So while the website has ten times more readers, it generates a hundred times less money per reader. What's going wrong?
The guideline that you should only really pay for online advertising when it is clicked does not help, of course. This is a phenomenal folly, especially for newspapers. But the misery that publishers are heading for has much more mundane reasons:
1. advertisers are spoiled snobs and leave a market worth billions to Google.
2. communication managers are calcified slogans with a customer image straight out of a 1950s commercial.
3. online advertising budgets suffer from gout.
4 CFOs do not care about the return on marketing.
5. online marketing departments of publishing houses are powerless.
6. management consultants cannot spell the word interaction.
7. there are no competent new media marketers.
Nevertheless, there is hope: when the recession that has been looming for months arrives, large, medium-sized and small companies will hopefully think three times about whether they want to continue pumping their precious PR money into lukewarm old one-way communication or make measurable investments in contemporary marketing. Then, yes, then a new generation of communications agencies would have a chance to steal a march on the advertising dandies. Ô avalanche! Emporte-moi dans ta chute!
Oliver Reichenstein is a communications architect and lives in Tokyo.