The Bottom Line: Finding a Model for Media
by Hylton Jolliffe
There’s one thing that’s clear from yesterday’s Fast Forward webinar with NYTimes.com general manager Denise Warren and Fast Company co-founder Alan Webber: business model innovation is tough stuff.
The publishing industry, as we all know, is wrestling with a world full of change. And they’re trying like mad to incrementally innovate and re-configure their existing capabilities to generate as much sustaining revenue as possible. It was an interesting conversation between Webber and Warren who each tried to tackle the very important question of what’s next? What’s tomorrow’s business model?
There is, of course, no perfect answer. But plenty of potential solution paths and opportunities for monetization were discussed including:
- Re-inventing the reader’s digital experience through a design-driven (as opposed to engineering-driven) approach
- High-value curation that moves beyond raw aggregation
- The rise of social media
- Redefining what business publishers are really in. (Great line from Alan: what biz are we in? if you’re a newspaper and you think you are in the news business then you are dead. It’s a commodity.”)
Thankfully, there’s still a good bit of life left in the subscription and advertising model and as the Times and others evaluate and experiment with new ways to deliver value, new models will emerge. Whether they come from an emerging newcomer or existing player is anyone’s guess.
Thanks to Denise and Alan and our moderator Ed Moran for an informed and insightful webinar.
