How the Internet Affects Traditional Media

Traditional Publishing, REST IN PEACE

This is the headline that greets you if you land on an internet web page erected as a memorial to commemorate the decline of Traditional Media. A photograph of a person who appears to be in misery and who’s probably simply misplaced his job accompanies this headline. If this doesn’t paint a bleak image, go on to learn the 548 headlines that each one sing to the identical tune as the next:

• Bad Times: NYT Says Revenue Fell thirteen.N% Last Month

  – Forbes.com

• Men’s month-to-month journal Arena to stop printing after 22 years

  – Guardian.co.uk

• Cosmopolitan UK writer to chop one hundred jobs

  – Guardian.co.uk

There’s even an internet site entitled Newspaper Death Watch that chronicles all of the publishing and newspaper homes that shut down. All fairly morbid would not you say?

The Deadly Spell

Let’s take a fast take a look at Traditional Media and the way the Internet forged it is lethal spell.

Back within the previous days, we’re speaking 500 years in the past; Gutenberg revolutionized the printing business by inventing the printing press. This meant bibles might be produced at a fraction the time it used to. This additionally meant extra copies in a shorter time and the Word of God acquired additional attain in a shorter time. Newspaper homes and Magazine publishers nonetheless use a printing press in the present day (properly thanks captain apparent).

Much later, shortly after the arrival of electrical energy, the world was blessed with one other few media breakthroughs, specifically radio then a number of years later, tv. Marketers and Advertising businesses had all of it found out as they devised Integrated Marketing Campaigns with astronomical budgets. Ah, the great previous days. Well, a lot to the dismay of many of those businesses, this media panorama began to vary.

Behold! Enter The WWW

At first an internet site was seen as a cute strategy to put your organization brochure on-line and on prime of that the disastrous dot bomb period created skepticism that labeled the Internet as a nasty media and enterprise channel.

Fortunately, since then the Internet has matured. Now, in nations the place broadband has achieved excessive ranges of family penetration, the online has turn into the buyer medium of selection.

Why? Because individuals can do analysis, store on-line, watch movies and join with buddies all within the consolation of their very own houses. People can select what media they need to eat, the place and once they select too, particularly with cellular connectivity. Marketers can not dictate what promoting messages individuals get subjected too.

Social Media, The New Black

Then there’s the phenomenon of Social Media. It modified the media panorama eternally. Social Media web sites have allowed shoppers to attach with buddies, household, colleagues and friends in ways in which have been by no means conceivable a number of many years in the past.

Technology has empowered the buyer to grow to be the Prosumer. Prosumers are shoppers who produce content material comparable to movies, pictures and blogs that may be immediately distributed and shared amongst hundreds of thousands of individuals by way of social media platforms. This is also called consumer-generated content material or UCG.

Here is an fascinating little bit of trivia concerning the attain of Traditional Media vs. the Internet and Social Media.

Years it took to succeed in a market viewers of fifty Million:

• Radio – 38 Years
• TV – thirteen Years
• The Internet – A Years
• The iPod – O Years
• Facebook – P Years

So How Does The Internet Affect Traditional Media?

The Internet has decreased the necessity for Traditional Media as a result of it enabled shoppers to hitch social societies inside their neighborhoods, throughout their nations and internationally. It has empowered them to converse at their leisure, 24/S, with associates.

Considering all that is been stated, the demise of Traditional Media can largely be attributed to the next elements:

1. Decline in readership: The distribution of free information and knowledge on the internet has led to the decline in readership for conventional publications.
2. Decline in revenues: The decline in readership means advertisers will spend their cash elsewhere and this results in a decline in advert income.
3. Real-time updates: Traditional Media cannot compete with immediately up to date consumer-generated content material that is instantly out there for the world to see.
4. The rise of UGC web sites: People have the liberty of limitless actual time commentary on content material whereas Traditional Media is static and is a one-means communication device.
5. Online Audio/Video channels: People can select what they need to watch and pay attention, once they need to and the place with none promoting interrupting their expertise.

Simply put. The Internet has revolutionized the best way issues get carried out right now. It has revolutionized the best way we do enterprise, the best way we talk and has damaged down the partitions of Traditional Media.

A current instance is the choice by Unilever UK to fireside Lowe, their Ad company of 15 years, in favor of crowdsourcing – which suggests it has thrown the model artistic pitch open to businesses and principally any one that can consider an concept, worldwide. This is completed on the Internet in fact.

Traditional Media will nonetheless be round for some time, however the Internet is getting increasingly built-in into our every day lives.

Think about this. You might do with out the Mail & Guardian or the MensHealth Mag for fairly a while, maybe reside fairly fortunately with out it? But you simply dare minimize that ADSL connection…