Thad McIlroy - The Future of Publishing

  V3 July 8, 2009

By Thad McIlroy
(V1 January 1, 2009)

1.     Digital versions of analog forms of content will not draw the same revenue as their predecessors. Costs, however, can be greatly reduced. The challenge for all content producers is to find a new business model that allows profits to be maintained, or ideally, increased, in the digital world we occupy.

2.     Technology will never block (although it may delay) desired media changes.

3.     Good content will always win even if the medium that previously contained it dies.

4.     Advertising spend is a zero-sum game.

5.     There remain just 24-hours in a day, and not all of that time can be devoted to the consumption of media.

6.     The Web is still in its infancy.

7.     Very rarely does one vendor dominate more than one "technology era."

8.     The methods of education, in all forms and at all levels, have embarked on a path of irrevocable change.

9.     "Megahits" are not the be-all and end-all. They are no longer the foundation on which media businesses must be built.

10.  There is in fact a "long tail," but it is not the all-encompassing economic creature it is sometimes portrayed as; in other words, the metaphor is not universally applicable.

11.  Every DRM code ever created has been broken, and generally in a very short time.

12.  People don't like DRM because they feel that once they have purchased content, they shouldn't be restricted in what they can do with what they own.

13.  Free is overrated. People will pay a reasonable amount for content if it's convenient to access and DRM-free.

14.  At the same time, there will always be "pirates" of content. At their most benign, they are consumers who would never have purchased the product in the first place. But there is a large contingent who abuse copyright on a regular basis to the great detriment of content producers.

15.  Physical media used to record creative or information media will be soon phased out if it lacks an inherent physical aesthetic (i.e. CDs do not; books do).

16.  Despite what anyone may claim, young people still grow and their tastes and habits change, as they always have.

17.  Social media is overrated for individuals as they grow older.

18.  The value of face-to-face experiences increase in value in direct proportion to the spread of disintermediated electronic encounters.

19.  There is a limit to the number of separate digital devices people want to carry. That limit is one.

20.  There will remain situations where mass-advertising is useful, but Unified Media Strategies have greater impact.

21.  One of the most difficult skills in this age of new media is the development and execution of effective Unified Media Strategies.

22.  Egomaniacs will find a decreasing urge to purchase every media property in sight as the economics increasingly favor the specialized over the mass. The synchronicity of disparate media properties has proven to have been overrated, never more so than now.

23.  Do not forget the law of "completely unexpected occurrences" and its sister law of "completely unexpected outcomes." The human tendency is to assume that things will continue as they were, and in a linear fashion.

24.  You can run but you can't hide from surreptitious data collection on the web.