old media | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

When AirBnB comes for real estate agents

Disruption for the real estate industry has only just begun, but it could be the local newspaper that is the first victim of AirBnB into property sales and management

One of the web’s promises was to eliminate the middleman – the retailer, the broker and the agent. During the heady days of the original dot com boom in the late 1990s many of us, including this writer, thought relationships between producers and consumers would become stronger without intermediaries.

As it turned out, things things didn’t quite work out that way with new middlemen like Uber and Amazon rising while some sectors, like real estate, just saw the industry evolve around new tools, distribution channels and advertising models.

Now it appears AirBnB is coming for the real estate industry with a plan to move into rental management, something that publicly bemuses the incumbents but no doubt privately worries them.

Like Uber, AirBnB is having to look at alternative revenue streams to justify its sky-high stock valuation. Particularly so given the company is looking at an IPO in the next few years.

Rental management is a pretty low margin, high maintenance business so it’s an odd choice for AirBnB and it’s not hard to think the real target is the real estate sales business which far more profitable and in many cases quite doable with algorithms.

No doubt real estate agents will retort with how they add value and how computers couldn’t do their sales job but in truth it’s like many other industries where automation can deliver cheaper and quicker results.

If AirBnB does successfully enter the real estate market the first victim won’t be the agents but the newspaper industry.

With local newspapers still dependent upon real estate display advertisements, particularly in Australia where the print media’s only real revenues come from property advertising, losing out to an app would be the industry’s killer blow.

As with many other things in the digital economy, it may be we underestimated how long it would take some industries to fall. We could be about to see two sectors fall to disruption now.

How the movies beat disruption

With the movie industry’s Academy Awards taking place last night, albeit not without mishaps, it’s worth reflecting on how Hollywood has defended itself against a range of disruptions.

With the movie industry’s Academy Awards taking place last night, albeit not without mishaps, it’s worth reflecting on how Hollywood has defended itself against a range of disruptions over the last century.

From when the first movie was shown by the Lumiere brothers in Paris just after Christmas 1895, cinema has been both a disruptive force and one that’s been subject to its own challenges.

The immediate effect of the new technology was an explosion of new businesses, trades and techniques not dissimilar to the first dot com boom of the early days of the web as the traditional theatre industry was displaced by movie theatres.

As the technology evolved, the movie industry itself was subject to disruption as sound was developed – ending the careers of many silent film stars – followed by colour both of which allowed new techniques and markets to developed.

Then came television and, it would have seemed, the end of the movie industry. Although that didn’t happen and it’s instructive how the industry reacted to the challenge.

In a 2007 paper, academics Barak Orbach and Liran Einav showed the movie industry’s evolution starting just after the introduction of talkies in 1927.

The shift to sound drove the movie industry to its all time heights prior to the Great Depression, however the economic downturn hit the film business hard – something to consider when people talk about the ‘lipstick effect’ -however steady growth returned through the 1930s and until the end of World War II.

Following the war, economic change and the arrival of television were tough for the movie business as attendances fell dramatically until stabilising in the late 1960s. Interestingly, the price of movie tickets went up dramatically shortly before the decline tapered off.

The graph finishes at 2002, at the end of the first internet boom and it’s notable the early days of the web, or the rise of Pay-TV in the 1970s and the Video Cassette Recorder in the 1980s had little effect on the industry’s attendance figures.

Despite those new technologies, the movie industry managed to attract audiences despite the plethora of entertainment options on offer at home.

Much of this was due to technological change with advances in computer generated graphics and recording techniques giving film makers far more creative scope while the roll out of multiplex cinema complexes allowed patrons far greater choice in movies.

Fifteen years later the effects of technology are still telling. In 2002, the average American was buying five movie tickets a year, according to the 2016 Motion Picture Association of America’s annual report this had fallen to 3.8, no doubt partly due to the success of Netflix.

However the film industry has still remained lucrative, partly through developing alternative streams of income like product licensing and international sales – China is by far the US industry’s biggest market and non-North American sales are growing by 21%. At the consumer level, movie houses increasingly make their money from concession sales and add-ons like premium seating.

So the answers to the movie industry’s success in staying profitable in the face of disruptive technologies seems to be in adopting new tech, diversifying income streams and globalising their product – although a bit of legislative protection in extending copyright probably helps.

The lessons though from a century of disruption though are clear, how well the movie industry responds to continuing disruption from the likes of streaming services like Amazon Prime, Netflix and their Chinese equivalents remains to be seen.

Subverting the house rules

An Arab Spring seems to have come to the US Congress as members occupy the chamber and stream their own video footage.

It seems the Arab Spring has come to the US Congress where Democrat representatives protesting the house’s refusal to vote on gun control legislation have occupied the house.

House speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican, ordered the chamber’s TV cameras to be shut off but the occupying members responded by streaming their own media feeds through Facebook and Periscope.

Once again we’re seeing how new media channels are opening up with the internet. While they aren’t perfect, they do challenge the existing power structures and allow the old rules to be subverted.

Redefining sports media

The Australian Open tennis tournament illustrates how the world of sports broadcasting is changing

Over the last 50 years the relationship between professional sport and television broadcasters has been defined by broadcasting rights. Like most other media business models that relationship is now under threat.

Touring the Australian Open tennis tournament this week, it was striking how the relationship between sports organisations and broadcasters has changed as the internet changes distribution models and data starts to become a valuable asset in itself.

A tour of the data infrastructure behind the tournament as a guest of sponsor and service provider IBM showed how sporting organisations are hoping to use data to improve their fans’ experience and add value for sponsors and competitors.

Last year the Australian Open collected 23 Terabytes of data, a 136 percent increase on 2014, which the organisers distribute on their MatchCenter web platform along with analysis through their Slamtracker system.

Using IBMs Bluemix development platform and the company’s Watson artificial intelligence service, the Australian Open website analyses factors ranging from the audience’s social media sentiment through to predicting competitors’ performance based on historical data.

This wealth of data gives the event organisers a great platform to engage with statistics hungry fans and it was notable when talking to the Australian Open staffers how they now see the television broadcasters as much as their competitors as their partners.

When coupled with the changes to broadcasting rights – like most sports organisations the Australian Open has moved to the model pioneered by Major League Baseball of providing their own video feeds rather than engaging a host broadcaster to record the events and distribute the video – this has put the television and pay-TV networks in a far less powerful position.

For the sports organisations those broadcast rights deals are still by far the most lucrative income stream they have but the days of the host broadcasters holding power over the events are slipping away.

One telling statistic was the shift to mobile platforms. Kim Trengrove, the digital manager for Tennis Australia, pointed out how in 2015 online traffic was split equally between desktop and mobile use while in 2016 it was appearing to be 60% mobile. That change in itself has major ramifications for the market.

In the future as the data becomes more valuable and the video feeds can be distributed across web browsers and even artificial reality headsets, the late Twentieth Century broadcast model becomes even more tenuous.

For the television networks it means their power and income is reduced while those collecting, processing and distributing data become more important. However it may be the software companies managing the information aren’t able to pay the immense sums the broadcasters have been able to offer for the last fifty years.

One thing a tour of the Australian Open did show was how business model of professional sports is dramatically changing. A data driven world is going to be very different to that of the last fifty years.

Social media and the changing media landscape

A Reuters report looks at the changing media landscape and how the older news industries’ decline has some way to go yet.

“We seek news on Twitter but bump into it on Facebook” points out the Reuters’ 2015 Digital News Report in its analysis of global media consumption.

The broad trends from surveying over 20,000 online news consumers in the US, UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Finland, Brazil, Japan and Australia are clear – social media is becoming the main way people are finding their news while television is slowly declining.

Probably most concerning for the television networks how younger viewers have turned away from TV with only a quarter of those aged between 18 and 25 tuning in as opposed to two thirds of those aged over 65.

Given the aging of television network audiences it’s not surprising that last week Australia’s Network Ten, part owned by Lachlan Murdoch, found a lifeline from the country’s main cable network as the broadcaster is finding revenues declining.

The question is how long advertisers are going to stick with television as audiences increasingly move online creating a revenue gap estimated by analyst Mary Meeker to be worth around thirty billion dollars a year.

For the moment, the great hope for the online world is Facebook with Reuters finding the service is dominating users’ time. In that light it’s not surprising the company has such a huge market valuation.

The competing social media services are still facing challenges, particularly with Twitter showing a far lower level of penetration with the general public, leading Harvard professor Bill George to speculate the company risked becoming the new BlackBerry.

While the online services struggle for supremacy and television slowly declines, the real pain continues to felt by the newspapers who continue to find their relevance erode and few of their readers prepared to pay for their content.

The Reuters report confirms the trends we already know while giving insights into the unique peculiarities of each market.

The tension between creative and business

One of the ongoing tensions in the new media landscape is that between the demands of advertisers and content creators.

This isn’t a new thing as a 1959 interview between Mike Wallace and TV pioneer Rod Stering shows.

Sterling describes how pressures from networks and advertisers created often weird compromises along with a fair degree of self censorship among TV writers and producers.

Little that Sterling describes would surprise today’s online journalists, bloggers and social media influencers who find themselves subject to identical pressures today.

Social media’s fatal attraction

Social media’s desperate struggle to revive the dying business model of print advertising.

The story of Whisper and the betrayal of its users continues to roll on, but the real problem is the way social media services are desperately trying to recreate the dead business model of print advertising.

Whisper’s problems with The Guardian continue as the company tries to salvage its reputation but the irony for the service is that it was trying to shoehorn its business to fit the print publishing model that the internet started to erode twenty years ago.

It’s not just Whisper; almost every social media business from Facebook to Twitter wants to be an advertiser funded publishing company, just like the newspapers of thirty years ago.

A few weeks ago I wrote about LinkedIn’s pretensions of becoming a publishing platform and this week Forbes tells of Pinterest’s adventures at the Cannes advertising festival as it sells its marketing services.

Every social media service has some sort of angle that harks back to the golden age of newspaper publishing where print advertising was a deep river of gold. Most of them want to become publishers themselves.

It would be hard to think of a service less suited to being a media company than Whisper; but then there’s Yelp whose main business of reviewing eating houses and bars seems to be totally at odds with newspapers of yore.

On the Salesforce PayPal Media panel last week, Yelp! Founder Jeremy Stoppelman was asked if he saw the restaurant review site as being a media company, his response was “sure, it’s a blogging platform.”

So we have new media aping the old media business models where these platforms try to lock users into information silos; in the same way that a London Times reader would never buy the Sun.

The problem with that is the internet broke down the geographic barriers and today a Sun reader in London can just easily find celebrity gossip on TMZ and the broadsheet reader might find more thoughtful analysis in the New York Times.

Certainly someone browsing the web for restaurant reviews might find a better site than Yelp while a bride researching wedding dresses could just as easily find ideas on Facebook as much as Pinterest.

In reality, social media sites have nothing of the stickiness of the old fashioned newspapers in the days before the internet.

Of the social media services it might be that Facebook is the best placed to succeed as an old media publishing service with its advertising smarts pushing messages to its diverse and deep user base but that isn’t certain given the widespread user dissatisfaction with its news feed.

For the social media services much of the problem – -particularly for Facebook – lies in their contradictory aims; they are trying to be identity services, buying platforms, publishing services and advertisers.

For publishers that balance between content and advertising was always a delicate one; and one that shifted over time. For online services that balance is far more complex and the future far less certain.

One thing that is clear Is those contradictory aims aren’t going to be easy to reconcile and the quandary may prove to be insurmountable.

What’s clear though are the advertising models of the future are still waiting for a David Sarnoff moment.

The decline of Forbes magazine

The tale of Forbes Magazine’s downfall is a lesson to all publishers, both in the new and old media

A great piece by Michael Wolff in Town and Country describes how the Forbes family struggled with making their magazine work in the digital economy.

For the Forbes family, it was always going to be hard stepping into the shoes of the late Malcolm after he unexpectedly passed away in 1990 and unfortunately for them that happened to coincide with the end of the great era of publishing wealth.

Twenty five years later the family are largely removed from the publication which is a shadow of its former self with its best hope for survival lying with Asian investors who still see some value in the brand.

What’s particularly poignant about Wolff’s story is the Forbes family did nothing wrong — they embraced the new platforms, experimented with digital and tried to find a way to make their business work in the online marketplace.

As it turned out, the old advertising and publishing model was horribly and irredeemably broken.

Forbes Magazine’s decline is an important tale for the whole publishing industry, for both the brash new entrants and for the struggling established players.

Demoting the newspaper

Newsagents are adapting to a digital world which is seeing every industry being disrupted

You know a product has problems when retailers start start moving it out of key retail positions. When the product was the retailers’ core business, you know the entire industry is in serious trouble.

Mark Fletcher describes in the Newsagency Blog how he’s moved his city’s number two selling paper off the main level of his newspaper display.

“Sales are not paying for the space,” Mark says bluntly.

Newsagents relegating newspaper fits nicely into Ross Dawson’s Newspaper Extinction Timeline, in the case of Mark Fletcher’s newsagency Dawson sees the Australian newspaper industry vanishing by 2022.

For newsagents the signals have been clear for some time that they have to adapt to a society where paper based products – newspapers, stationery and greeting cards – aren’t in demand.

The process of adapting isn’t easy or smooth – many experiments will fail and even the smartest business people will make expensive mistakes. That’s the nature of evolution.

Newsagents though are just one example of changing marketplaces, there’s few industries that aren’t being disrupted by the technology and economic changes of our times. All of us are going to have to adapt to a rapidly changing world.

The high cost of new media experiments

The BBC’s expensive exit from their Lonely Planet investment shows the costs and risk for old media empires as online business models evolve.

The BBC yesterday sold Lonely Planet to US media company NC2 Media. Their £80 million loss on the venture puts them in good company as established media struggle to find new online channels and revenue streams.

While the losses aren’t trivial, they are not quite in the league of News Corporation $545 million loss on MySpace or Time Warner’s billion dollar adventure with AOL.

All three stories show how tough it is for ‘old media’ adapting to a new landscape.

The problem is there for ‘new media’ as well, most ventures struggle to make money and many of the success stories like Huffington Post rely on a combination of free content and a greater fool buying them.

No-one has really figured out what the new media revenue models are; not the established publishers or the online upstarts.

Lonely Planet’s online success was due to their forums which, like most web discussion boards, can feature discussions politely described as “robust”.

This was always going to a problem for the BBC’s public service management culture and it resulted in the shutdown of the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree forums over Christmas.

So it’s not surprising that the BBC has decided to end its experiment and now the corporation’s management is dealing with the criticism of those losses.

While it’s easy to criticise the BBC for the deal, at least the broadcaster was attempting something different online, doing nothing is probably a poorer strategy than buying MySpace or Lonely Planet.

Over time, we’re going to see a lot more experiments and many will be public embarrassments like those the BBC and News Corporation have suffered, but there will be successes.

Someone will crack the code and they will be the Randolph Hearsts of this century. It could one of the Murdoch heirs, it could be the owners of NC2 Media or it could be some young, hot shot developer working in a Rio favela or the slums of Kolkata.

But it will be someone.

It’s an exciting time to be in business.

It’s too late, baby – when digital reality bites

Sensis decide to move on from a print based model to digital advertising – a decade too late.

Yesterday Sensis announced it would restructure for digital growth by sacking staff, offshoring and “accelerate its transition to a digital media business”.

The directory division of Telstra has been in decline for years, a process that wasn’t helped by then CEO Sol Trujillo embarking on his expensive “Google Schmoogle” diversion.

A decade later, Managing Director John Allen has announced another 650 jobs to go from the remaining 3,500 workforce.

John’s comments are worth noting.

Until now we have been operating with an outdated print-based model – this is no longer sustainable for us. As we have made clear in the past, we will continue to produce Yellow and White Pages books to meet the needs of customers and advertisers who rely on the printed directories, but our future is online and mobile where the vast majority of search and directory business takes place.

Carol King put it best – it’s too late, Baby. These are words that should have been said a decade ago.