mediamachina

“Why don’t mass media make any money on the Web?” #

The time was 1998 and this question was hanging in my mind with the answer seemingly just out of reach. #

#

I had been looking at the Internet since the early 90s. I was at the time editor-in-chief of a business magazine about mass media, advertising and marketing (in French, in Montreal). Understanding how commercial communication works was my daily job. I was routinely interviewing top people in my market and beyond, from every type of mass media and every flavor of marketing. This was the time of a splendid, blooming ecosystem, with very successful entrepreneurs in dailies, magazines, radio, television, posters, ad agencies, creative advertising, PR agencies, direct marketing agencies, research firms, etc. I had been covering this industry – and this community – since 1987, and previously I had been a tv critic for a daily and a media reporter for a news magazine. #

This was my garden. I knew how everything grew in it and if I didn’t, I knew whom to ask. I was an insiders’ insider. Through clients, advertisers and other media, we were in contact with people and events in the United Sates and Europe. We thought we were on top of the communications world and that nothing could stop the rise of media and marketing. #

During the late 80s I had been in the front row when the big cable companies invested millions of dollars in installing two-way “interactive television” in experimental areas, like Time Cable in the United States and Videotron in Quebec. Nothing much came out of it but the logic of connectivity made clear that the future laid in this direction. I still remember when I had my first look at a BBS on my Mac at work. I wasn’t a programmer but with the help of our home geek, Claude Précourt, I delved into groups and lists with fascination: it was slow, it went through the phone line with beeping squeaks but it was the emergent Internet, another route on the McLuhan map. And very quickly most mass media around us, including our magazine, began investing in this new El Dorado. #

But by 1998 I had become frustrated with the whole territory of media on the Web. Something didn’t add up. Here you had all these brilliant people in very successful media throwing millions of dollars at the Internet … and nothing worked. We were at last in the promised land of interactivity, the next step in media development, and everybody was just throwing money into the pit – no revenues in sight. I was in the middle of the whole media and marketing machine and none of its cogs seemed to gain traction in the new mechanism. #

Meanwhile I had become a media consultant and while I worked at first for clients in the magazine industry, I took it as a personal goal to explore the Web and to find answers. Since Web operations of all types of media were bleeding money, it had to be a medium problem. In fact, the question I asked myself was not “How to generate revenue on the Web?” but “What is so different about the Web from all other media that makes every recipe ineffective?” The general overview provided by McLuhan about the effect of electricity on the media environment was mostly clear but at the same time there was something different in the very nature of the Web that was confounding everybody. #

There was no reason why it couldn’t be observed, though. #

At the end of 1998 I had gained a first glimpse, a first shred of evidence of the new environment: the simple fact of being all connected opens a new opportunity for media and marketing. I called this opportunity “ComCom”, as I will explain shortly in a following post. And now here we are, 10 years in this quest and I have mainly 4 observations to add to ComCom. All this time I have not applied the wise rule of open source programmers: “Release early, release often”. I have presented my findings to clients and colleagues and in conferences, but I have never been a great blogger and I was always taken by the chase: how does it work? #

So, better late than never, I am starting to release everything I have. I proceed with a short story of my work as of August 2009, keeping only the most relevant presentations, graphs, and projects. I am trying to write as briefly as possible without sacrificing clarity or logic. If anything is unclear, please ask, we’ll go through it step by step. #

#

painting Diane Obomsawin 2004, acrylic on canvas, 2′ x 9′

used with permission of the artist

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Editorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.