Challenges facing old media thinking

Omar Essack talks about the challenges faced by ‘old’ media.
Wits University Media Conference
20 October 2009

In December and June, every year after my company releases its interims and then its results, institutional shareholders and potential investors marvel at the quality of earnings in the radio business.
They gawk at the operating margin. Then they ask the same question every-time, when will it end?

We run free to air commercial radio stations in South Africa. It’s a classic double sided marketplace. We provide music and entertainment free, we aggregate audiences and we get paid by advertisers who want access to these audiences.

Much of the value and profitability in these businesses is driven by scarcity.
Scarce spectrum in the analogue world has resulted in relatively fewer channels and fewer options for audiences, which meant that more of them gathered around these few options, and were far easier to reach for advertisers. Even as platforms proliferated, large media owners consolidated platforms and then made big investments in marketing to beat off smaller competitors and then they were able to price for ‘monopolizing’ audience attention.

ATTENTION! That is what the media economy is built on.

So, the world of mass media, the world we know and come from is characterised by:
a) Limited supply of radio, TV channels, newspapers, cinema etc.
b) Relatively high barriers to entry because of limited spectrum.
c) Creating content can be expensive in some media because of scarce skills
d) Relatively high attention because of limited options.
e) Some operators were able to create cash cows with high revenue and large operating profit margins.

That world is changing fast in the developed economies north of us. Is Africa immune?
Not if you agree that all media competes for attention or share of mind. Although PC internet penetration in Africa is relatively low, how will that change when the three further undersea cables connect the continent to the rest of the world.
What about Google’s support for low orbit satellite bandwidth for Africa?
In Africa the primary access device to the www will in all likelihood be a mobile phone.
We’ll speak about how the mobile phone is monopolising ATTENTION to the possible detriment of radio and TV, later.
Right now, though, if you’re under the impression that ubiquitous low cost broadband is too far away to be an issue, think about the migration to digital. The scale is different but the effect is similar. There is a growth in media choice, up by a factor of 10X for digital radio and 4X in television. So if you have 40 radio stations in Gauteng, you have the potential for 400 when you digitise.
And unlike in the broadband world, there is a significant increase in the costs of distribution with dual illumination (broadcasting in analogue and digital for a pre-determined period) and an escalation in production costs for media owners with very little prospect of profitability. In the UK experience with DAB is anything to go by. Radio owners who ended up owning multiplexes were able to provide content for the extra channels relatively inexpensively, but the distribution costs and low interest from advertisers resulted in a failed experiment with all of the private owners handing back their multiplexes.

This is also why eTV is resisting the digital migration process in SA. The cost of producing one channel is in the region of R300 million. DTT will allocate around 3 channels each to eTV, the SABC and MNet. It will fragment advertising while leading to ballooning costs. So why does this matter to radio owners? Because all this extra capacity resulting in many more free to air TV channels will suck up more of the advertising pie, leaving less to go around. Are you ready to compete to keep your share?

Anyway, back to the developed media markets.
The changes in the north have resulted in much consternation about the future media model.
Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired magazine, has made a new contribution to that conversation. In his latest book, ‘FREE – the future of a radical price’, which is not available for free, he says that advances in technology will allow most media to be produced for almost no cost and therefore allow content to be available to the consumer for FREE.

Chris is talking about a world that’s still to come (at least in terms of costs coming down to zero) but young people are already growing up with an expectation of free media, mainly driven by piracy and ‘sharing’ with their peers. There is so much content, entertainment, news, music and movies available online at no charge. The availability of free stuff has forced major brands like Disney to accept piracy as a business model to compete against. And big studios like Universal and 20th Century Fox have joined forces to create their own video sharing site, Hulu, where they let you have their content at no charge with a free/ad supported model. This was partly a reaction to the success of Google’s ‘You Tube’ video site. Some of their success in attracting large audiences was driven on the back of IP that belonged to big media companies like Universal and 20th Century Fox.
The latter two now charge license fees for featuring their content on ‘You Tube’ and have their own site, Hulu.
Whether it’s Hulu or You Tube, the ads are just not able to support the costs of the model. We’ll take a look at some of those costs borne by You Tube, later.
So with so much available free, and the future generation of media consumers used to getting it all, will you ever be able to convince them to pay for media/content?

I asked Beth Minehart from Universal NBC where they stand on the issue:

“The bottom line is content cannot truly be free – at least not in early distribution windows – or there will be no content. If film and TV producers can’t monetize then of course they can’t green light and produce either.

Pure ad supported offerings are potentially a viable business model but so far sites like You Tube and Hulu, while successful with unique visitors, aren’t generating any meaningful revenue. Traditionally film and TV content have followed varied windowing patterns and I think it would be disastrous if that went away. What’s more likely (and likely to happen soon) is to see windows accelerate and collapse into each other. For the near term and for the longer term too, all these different types of business models will have to find a way to co-exist

It’s interesting for example that many broadcasters internationally are seeking things like 7-day catch up rights following initial transmissions. I think their view is it will get more people to sample a show and come back for more. However, I suspect that if they find a correlation to a huge drop off to repeat broadcasts and the ad revenue in catch up doesn’t at least match second, third and library broadcasts, exhibitors might start to think very differently.

Ultimately the economics have to make sense for all involved. Even if someone can build a free on demand service that has all the content and is hugely popular – who would pay for the broadband fees of all that delivery and would one ad model be sufficient to support those delivery costs, and production costs etc. So I suppose I take some comfort knowing that most of us, other than true pirates, are all motivated to make economic models work.”

Big media companies cannot accept a possible future where all content will be freely available, and paid for by advertisers alone.
It doesn’t work when you consider that these are high overhead, high revenue and profit margin businesses. That regime is under threat from the democratisation of media through the www.

Chris Anderson says that in the future (and maybe that’s already happening), 2 things will be valuable –popular reputation of what is on offer (currently gained by a combination of marketing on mass media and far more efficiently managed through search and recommendation online)
And the TIME we have available for it. This takes us back to ATTENTION. In the mass media world, with fewer options – ATTENTION was relatively abundant – in the new media world of exploding micro media and choice, ATTENTION is scarce.

Let’s talk about this in the African context. Yes there are some parts of the continent where attention is abundant – where people have such limited access to any media that the picture painted here is completely irrelevant.
However, in many cities across the continent, people are increasingly exposed to lots of choice. Apart from dozens of radio, TV, newspaper and OOH messages, they are now spending time that they would otherwise have had for ‘old’ media on their mobile phones, texting, calling, soon for browsing the web; and advertisers are starting to take notice. So while we may not yet have the serious challenges faced by our colleagues in the north, we’re no less immune when it comes to the economic model being under pressure imminently. Advertisers are taking notice of the fact that younger audiences, the consumers of the future, are spending less and less time than my generation did, with TV and radio.
One such example of a disruptor in South Africa is MXit. MXit is a free instant messaging software application developed in South Africa that runs on GPRS/3G mobile phones that allows the user to send and receive one-on-one text and multimedia messages to and from other users, as well as in general chat rooms. MXit also supports connection to other instant messaging programmes such as MSN Messenger, ICQ and Google Talk. MXit does not charge for one-on-one messages, but has a number of pay-services, including chat rooms.
MXit has a registered user base of over 11 million, about 17 million log-ons per day and over 250 million messages sent and received per day. The application is distributed internationally and used by users in over 120 countries daily, but the bulk of its user base is in South Africa and Indonesia with fast growth in 123 other countries.

Not only is MXit a great example of the ATTENTION deficit threat faced in Africa, but it’s also a useful example of how the economics of FREE has worked to build critical mass and scale.
MXit has sucked up almost all the discretionary time that young people used to use to interact with radio and TV. With no habit of listening to the radio and the ability to get all their music free on increasingly cheaper devices, will today’s youth turn to radio as it is currently programmed, on whatever device, when they grow older?
It’s obvious that radio has to insert itself into young people’s lives and be relevant, compelling and useful to be on their choice radar. This will not happen if radio continues to try and compete with the devices that are increasingly substituting it. The oldest lesson in competitive dynamics is KNOW YOUR ENEMY, AVOID THEIR STRENGHTS, and EXPLOIT THEIR WEAKNESSES.
I have some ideas about how we can compete, but advertisers may already be thinking it’s too late.
I met with the marketing head of one of South Africa’s largest FMCG companies recently. Along with government and a maybe 5 other companies, they keep media afloat in SA. This was all that she could talk about. She even went as far as to say that the moment someone figured out mobile marketing beyond SMS, she was ready to cut her TV budget in half to spend on mobile. Marketers, the people who control Africa’s media budgets, are captivated by the uptake of a device that is personal, mobile and in your ear and face 24 hours a day. That should sound familiar. It used to be radio’s proposition.


Good time for me to remind you that while some of the technology and the device challenges around the proliferation of micro-media on the web may be 10 years away in many parts of Africa, the revenue challenge is upon us as more and more people spend their discretionary ATTENTION and MONEY on mobile phones.

So what does Chris Anderson say about the economics of media businesses?
He sees 4 models in the world of FREE.
-Cross Subsidies (give away the razor so you can sell the blade)
- Advertising supported services, like in classic double sided free-to-air media today (although with so much choice and fragmentation won’t we just end up with hyper deflation?) Don’t you love these buzz words?
-Freemium – where a small number of users pay for a premium version or for earlier access and this revenue stream then supports the free version that the majority of people end up taking.
-a completely voluntary, non monetary model driven by collaboration, like open source software development or Wikipedia.

Except for the last one, there’s a mix of free and money in each of those. It appears that he’s saying that models will shift and evolve and mix and we’ll have hybridisation.

My concern is that in the current environment where such models are in operation, they’re not getting close to the pay models that big media companies were used to. People will argue that perhaps the Big media companies were asking too much anyway.
Big issue for me – with tomorrow’s consumers used to FREE, will they ever attach a meaningful value to paid content?

Does this work for anyone?
Yes, it does for those of us working from our laptops on the go creating micro-media in our spare time while working at a dull desk job to pay the bills. Just the monthly payback from Google adsense is often enough for these newly formed single person media businesses. But what about media companies like the one I work at today? We need to figure out how to compete and we can, as long as we’re willing to let go of some of the old models of compensation, reward, work process and gatekeeping.

So, to recap, everyone appears to be moving to an ad funded model. This puts such a model under enormous pressure. Everyone can be a publisher, a radio station and a TV producer. The costs of production and distribution are way down and the value of attention and brand is way up. So everything is now abundant except ATTENTION, which will become scarce and too expensive to pay to get because it is so low.

Is giving stuff away working profitably? Here’s the You Tube story that I promised:

You Tube provides a platform where anyone can upload any video and others can watch these videos at no charge to anyone. As a result, You Tube will serve 75 billion videos in 2009.
Unbelievable numbers of people are uploading and viewing every day. It comes at a cost, though. Just bandwidth should cost US$360 million in 2009. Who pays?
Advertisers – but they’re not biting because the stuff uploaded by everyman is a bit of a risk for brands. So, You Tube knows that it has to provide professionally produced content to keep eyeballs and attention but all this does is escalate costs by another US$260 million for licenses. This year’s loss should be about US$500 million.
The jury is still out when it comes to content.
A model with old media content and its attendant costs and new media distribution and its ubiquity just doesn’t seem to deliver the profitability that the big media companies were used to, despite undreamed of scalability.

Here’s another story:
The publisher of the Dallas Morning news recently told the US congress about his negotiations with AMAZON. Amazon is the world’s largest online and possibly offline bookstore. Recently Amazon developed an electronic device that links its backend (supply of books and newspapers) to the device so that people can buy and read anything conveniently and seamlessly wherever they are.
Think of the device, called the KINDLE, as an iPod and Amazon’s online store as iTunes.
The Kindle, like the iPod, needs content. That would make content valuable right?
Well, Amazon’s negotiation with the Dallas morning news, a content provider with teams of journalists, and significant overheads was instructive.
James Moroney, the publisher says that Amazon offered the newspaper 30% of each subscription received and Amazon took 70%. Amazon also insisted on the rights to republish the newspapers IP on any portable device.

To some it may appear from this example that some types of content have lost their value. Control over distribution and devices seem to be more important.
The iTunes store and the iPod and iPhone are more important than the content/commodity on it which is sometimes given away in an effort to make the device more valuable.
I think that the Kindle and the iPhone/iPod are actually not strictly new media anyway. They are new devices playing in the old media world of limiting access through a single device and controlled IP and digital rights. They operate the way that retail has always operated. These devices are trying to play in the world of scarcity for as long as they can. Content owner’s panicked when piracy started turning their business models upside down and driven by fear they signed away their souls to Apple.
Shoprite/Wal-Mart and other supermarkets have always been able to dictate terms because they control the customer interface. Limited shelf space meant that they could push back on pricing with brands despite the fact that if everyone turned them down, they’d be an empty shell. So it is with the iTunes store, the iPod and iPhone. Content owners appear to have been sucker punched while they were running scared from piracy and a total collapse of their businesses.

They were forced to negotiate from a point of extreme vulnerability and were sucked into a single distribution deal that left them with no options.
Using old model thinking, they now need to support and sign up with as many devices as possible and hope that other devices also gain market acceptance and share to return some power to them again.
I don’t think it will ever go back to the days that they yearn for, though.

In my view this device ascendancy with its attendant gate-keeping will only last as long as we can’t get to a truly portable, fast and readable web experience. Exceptional and seamless on phone browsing and interaction will make the web’s free riches easily available on the go and could be an extinction level event for Kindles and iPhones that are proprietary devices with strict digital rights management.

What will mobile web do to radio?
Integrating an FM tuner into phones or any new device – is that enough to save radio? Let’s be clear, radio is not about to die. Its business model however – is under severe pressure. As long as radio owners continue to do business the way that they have always done, with little investment in talent and content and then rely on advertising alone to fund them, they will face some serious challenges.

Here’s the delicious irony though.
As things stand radio owners like me have been too willing to give up my content to as many devices and platforms as I can, in the name of being available to my audience, wherever they are. I have done this in the hope that I can monetise every channel on which my brand appears. Perhaps I have been premature!
All that I have succeeded in doing is moving from a world of few competitors and limited choice to a world of infinite choice and billions of competitors.
Also, I have made this transition with the view that traditional media models for success will serve me in this new space.
That’s a mistake since the choice and variety in content and business models in this world are almost infinite.

I need to learn new skills to be noticed on the www. I do have the advantage of an established radio audience. But, why should they come to me when they have so many options? If they do come, why should they return and what will keep them interested?
If I can answer those questions successfully, will I be able to capture value/monetise the opportunity?
Does the world of exploding micro-media also mean micro-money for most players?

So what is the way forward?
I don’t know any more than you do.
So I can do one of three things.
1. I can hedge my bets by trying many different things and hope for something to succeed.
2. I can persevere with how I have always done things and hope for the best, its working fine now.
3. I become agnostic – waiting for proof of the divine, the lit path that leads me to the RIGHT ANSWER before I commit. The risk is that I die or go insolvent before the revelation comes.

The one thing that appears to be a foregone conclusion is that the revenues and profits of yesteryear may be gone for a while.

However, I also have the nagging suspicion that things will go full circle. That low cost micro-media will dominate for a long time but that those that become really popular will ally with others who are equally so, to come together and create something where the sum of the parts is greater than the separate parts on their own. It sounds like mergers and acquisitions again – the rise of a conglomerate.

On the other hand, Rupert Murdoch and Koos Becker will not go quietly. Already Murdoch is insisting on charging audiences for access to his online properties. What if enough publishers started applying old media economic models to the web? What if the only way to get the really useful information was via a paid subscription? Would the old ways thrive or will it be one last hurrah before the whimper? Some specialised content sites are doing this fairly well. But for each one with a payment gateway, there are dozens more who are happy to give the information away for nothing.

Certainly if there is a shake out of sorts, many will perish. Others will have to be inventive to survive.

Some far brighter people that I have been reading say that survival requires the following tools:
a) Come to terms with the rise of micro-media and an explosion of media supply.
b) Understand that large overheads and limiting production to a relatively small team will not work in an era of exploding media supply. So invest in INCLUSION:
i. Peer production models
ii. Open access models
iii. Sharing models.

Let others add value to the product which creates economies for you.
Give them access to the means of production for complementary goods (sounds like Marx was right after all)
Invest in production, not in attention/marketing since search is an efficient and inexpensive way to build audiences.

I’m stating the obvious here but it bears repetition. Many of today’s media businesses do understand what competencies are needed and must commit to investing in them. We’re doing it today, even though we don’t know when the change will materially affect our businesses.
Just making my product available to everyone isn’t enough. We must open it up to allow it to develop in ways that I wouldn’t have imagined.

Look for the sweet spot because there will be one.
This is usually within certain niches, but only for a time. This will allow you to make some money before imitation erodes margins again.

To end:

Change the way we do things.
Bring talent in to share in the profits of the business.
Understand that the time for media conglomerates may be over.
There shouldn’t be a single revenue source for any media.
The reliance of free to air media on advertising is at risk.
We need to pursue various revenue streams: ads, subscriptions, sponsorships, commissions, merchandising etc

The concern is that even with all of these, we’ll never make the kind of money we once did.

Fortunately, unlike the dinosaurs, who we are now learning died out from a sore throat, we have the ability to be creative and come up with models that work. We should survive the challenges we’re facing with enough focus and sufficient use of business clichés like ‘thinking outside the box’, ‘changing the paradigm’, ‘leap of faith’ and ‘business process re-engineering’.
They may have become tired clichés, but now would be a good time to use them meaningfully.

In the African context, it’s not about the death of radio and TV. It’s about the fragmentation of attention and the fragmentation of advertising.
And it’s not about the audiences we have today, but the audiences and consumers of the future.

Omar Essack
October 2009