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Tech, Strategy, and other interesting things by Roberto Zoia

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Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die

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A difficult aspect of facing technological innovation is the decision to change your business model in ways that disrupts your current business. It’s not easy to leave the safe shores of what works and is known.

NiemanLab published this interesting article about the L.A. Times and its difficulties competing in the digital business once the advantage of physical distribution of newspaper that gave them market power disappeared. Among other things, the L.A. Times is late in the game. The New York Times launched its first try at digital subscriptions in 2011, eight years ago. The table below, extracted from the article, shows the results.

“In every era, traditional media channels will diminish, dismiss and ignore the new ones. They do this at the very same time that they are supplanted by the new ones. While they will occasionally spend some time or money testing a new medium, they rarely leap.1”

An important exercise is to write down a list of the current technology trends, and consider how they could affect your business. The difficult part is not falling in a blind spot, dismissing things as ‘hyped’ or ‘not serious’.

Take, for example, Artificial Intelligence (AI). If you follow some kind of business trends, you’ll read news every day of companies applying AI to some part of their operation. The insight here is that there are a small fraction that are actually applying advanced AI. But there is a significant number of companies that are going through ruthless automation of everything task-related, applying automation to every process possible. Call it ‘basic AI’ if you want. In a couple of years, thanks to their lower costs and operational efficiencies (and the insight they can get from their data), these companies will be in a significantly better poisition to compete than companies that are dismissing AI as just ‘hype’.

Hint: If you can’t identify a technology trend that could disrupt your current business model, you’re doing your analysis wrong.

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash.

  1. cfr Seth Goding, The old media/new media chasm. ↩

Where Should You Publish Your Content?

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There are several good options for publishing content online. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Medium, and others offer a convenient and cost-free way to publish content and, potentially, reach a huge audience.

It’s important to understand why social networks are free. Like Michael Ende’s Momo Men in Grey, social networks are dependent on their ability to get humans to invest time on their platforms. Social networks revenue comes from selling carefully segmented “user attention” to advertisers1. In this business, eliminating any barrier to users spending time on their platforms —maximizing engagement— is critical for increasing revenue.

What’s critical for the network to succeed is to have enough “user attention” to sell to advertisers, properly segmented. Users spend time on social networks interacting with other users, and interacting with what other users post. To keep users engaged, social networks need a stable supply of content relevant to their user’s interests2. There is one more twist, however: the beauty of the model is that the content is created by the users themselves, which is another reason why publishing on said platforms is free.

As several people have pointed out, if you are not paying for the product, then you are the product.

The Rules of the Game

The problem on relying solely on a social network as your digital home is that their business model may not align with yours.

Consider Medium. Developed by co-founder of Twitter and founder of Blogger Evan Williams, Medium was launched in August 2012 as a long-form publishing and social site where content is privileged. The platform has a clean design, an excellent editor for writing articles, and offers exposure to like-minded people who are in the search of quality content over click-bait articles. Publishing on Medium can give you a lot of exposure.

However, social platforms have their own goals. In 2016, in search of a profitable business model, Medium introduced a paywall around its content. If you had been publishing on Medium, your content became blocked behind the paywall. From that date on, your readers need to subscribe to the platform in order to read more than the 3 monthly articles limit offered by Medium’s free account.

Another factor is what content is shown and when. Most social networks use a newsfeed to show content to their users. An algorithm custom-tailors the series of posts you see. The algorithm’s selection criteria is proprietary to each network. From the user’s point of view, this means that you have limited control over who sees what you publish. Even if you publish something for “Your Friends on Facebook”, not all your friends are shown what you post. (But you can pay Facebook to ‘boost’ your post.) Also, because the newsfeed is time-based, content that is not reshared, quickly fades into oblivion.

Using Social Networks to Promote Your Content

A better strategy is to publish your content on a site under your control, and then use social networks to promote and distribute your content. Having your own site gives you a series of benefits that social networks don’t. It gives you control over your brand. (If it’s your personal brand, I think this is becoming more important every day.) You can tailor the site to reflect your strategy. Over the paltry analytics most social networks give you, you can measure in detail how users interact with your content.

Long term, you are building an asset. Social networks come and go… come and go with your content, if that’s the only place you publish.

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash.

  1. The exception is Medium. Medium income comes from subscription plans. In the case of LinkedIn, their clients are advdertisers and headhunters.↩
  2. In some cases like LinkedIn or Medium, income also comes from offering premium, non-free plans to users. These plans give you more control or access to published content and users. LinkedIn, for example, artificially limits the number of advanced searches you can do using a free account. ↩

Macworld shuts down print edition

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Macworld's first Cover

Shortly after Apple’s iPhone 6/6+ launch on September 9, IDG announced that the print edition of Macworld is shutting down. Jason Snell, Macworld’s lead editor for more than ten years and who has worked in Macworld for more than seventeen, writes in Goodby, Macworld:

Over the last decade we all made an enormous effort to transform Macworld editorial from a magazine mentality to a web site mentality. And honestly, it worked: By the end, the magazine was essentially a curated collection of the best stories from the website, cut down and copy edited and with nice photographs. The economics of the business just didn’t make it possible to continue.

I wonder if magazines from other industries will follow the same path. Most magazines now offer access to their digital counterpart when subscribing to the print edition. I find that even when subscribed to the print edition of some business magazines, most of the time I read the articles online.

Selected Articles for 2012-12-14

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