Ringier CEO Marc Walder on the future of the media
The Media Days (October 24 to 26) began in Munich on Wednesday. Ringier CEO Marc Walder spoke clearly about the future of the media during a panel discussion.
Marc Walder discussed with other publishing greats such as Rainer Esser (ZEIT Verlag), Philipp Welte (Hubert Burda Media), Christian Nienhaus (WAZ Media Group) and Thomas Lindner (G+J Publishing Group). Paid content, diversification strategies of media companies, growth prospects and synergy potential were discussed. Walder emphasized: "The reach of print brands has never been so high - but monetization has never been so bad." The price level in the digital world - both in the user and advertising market - is putting media companies under great pressure.
"Digital is nowhere near compensating for the loss of print. In the USA, advertising in newspapers fell by 2.1 billion dollars from 2010 to 2011; this contrasts with an increase of 207 million dollars in online advertising," says Walder. The forecasts for the mobile Internet are not rosy - Google is also feeling this very strongly at the moment. "The trend of more and more users accessing the Internet via smartphones and tablets is to blame - including for search queries via Google. Or to put it simply: smaller screens also mean smaller advertising revenues," Walder continued. Ringier is therefore on the right track with its diversification strategy.
Marc Walder said that "paywall" is currently the buzzword of the media industry. Last week, Axel Springer announced that it was putting Die Welt behind a paywall. Walder quoted Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner on this: "If we don't have the self-confidence to demand a little money for what we work for from morning to night and keep a few hundred people on the move, then we should actually stop what we're doing."
