Print. 8 Futures which won’t save Murdoch, but sure look nice.

April 21st, 2010 • 4 comments Media
Tags: Cool, Creativity, Experimental, Future, Ideas, Media, Prediction, Print, Touch, Trend, visual

Some of them will never see the light, but others already did. Check out my 8 favourite videos about a touchy future for print (which will never come).

Apple iPad. Endorsed by Print Publishers Worldwide.

Januar 28th, 2010 • 1 comment Allgemein
Tags: Apple, Burda, Industry, iPad, Media, Murdoch, Print, publishers, Strategy, Tablets, Tech, Tools, Touch, Trend, World

What a week for Hubert Burda! The Grandsigneur of German Publishers, ‘Chairman of the Board and Publisher of Hubert Burda Media, President of the Association of German Magazine Publishers, and co-founder of the European Publishers Council’  must have had a great night last night.

Why? Because it seems to me that he, as one of the most conservative protagonists of paid content on the web, has finally won.  Earlier this week he had opened Burda’s annual digital conference DLD in Munich. A digital conference which looks like all the industry meetings you know from around the world…except that it was hosted by a brand which publicly asked to disappropriate google because of their online media market share. Sounds ridiculous? Well, it is.

Burda described Google as a “killer application” which delivered almost half of all traffic to local journalism Web sites and yet managed to keep almost one-third of all Internet advertising revenues in Germany for itself. “All of that without making any investment of its own in the expensive business of journalism,” Burda noted.

Burda called for amendments to copyright and even suggested that Google should pay for the use of news it had not produced itself. Of course, the search engine wanted nothing to do with this suggestion. (‘Der Spiegel‘, Sept 09)

Actually your failed business model is not my problem

Earlier, in summer 2009, Burda and other publishers had managed to channel their whining about antiquated business model into the Hamburg Declaration of European Publishers. It demanded a ‘fair share’ by search engines like google. Google reacted with an offer to deny robots the access to the publisher’s pages. The conflict went hot. The web manned the battle stations when Silicon Valley started fighting against Munich. Well, and of course it could get even more bizarre when Rupert Mordoch started to ‘threaten’ google to block them from his newspapers and rumors about a Murdoch pact with Bing versus google made the headlines.

Burdoch’s ‘new business model’ was the old one…translated into digital: Making readers pay for stuff they read online.

In the new business model, we will be charging consumers for the news we provide on our Internet sites. The critics say people won’t pay. I believe they will, but only if we give them something of good and useful value. Our customers are smart enough to know that you don’t get something for nothing.

Similar to the music industry publishers never condescended to think about alternative business models. While print advertising revenues worldwide dropped like they were hot, no alternative business model was even explored. The direction was clear: Save mainstream print media at all cost. No matter wether there simply is no need for so many general interest magazines anymore, we do print…with a digital touch to make it look cooler.

The web’s response was unambiguous: Twitter founder Biz Stone commented the Burdoch’s closed payment model will ‘fail fast’ and it would be impossible to ‘put the genie back into the bottle’. Others compared the old men’s inflexibility to the disaster of the music industry etc. In autumn 2009 both, Burda and Murdoch, demasked themselves as dinosaurs – powerful but inflexible, free from creative power and about to make the same mistakes so many others had done before.

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