By Pius Onobhayedo
Media
entrepreneurs and professionals are no longer indifferent to the disruptive
nature of the so-called new media. The primary pain point may be captured by
the question, “where is the money?” I personally arrived at this conclusion
having participated in a summit where various stakeholders in the Nigerian
media industry shared their concerns about the feasibility of deriving
meaningful economic value from audience engagement on social networking sites
and other new media platforms.
Thanks
to Taiwo Obe, the summit convener and United Bank for Africa (UBA), the summit
host and sponsor, several journalists and media house executives were gathered
on the 20th of February, 2014 to answer some pertinent questions with the goal
of paving the way for a new sense of direction.
Faced with the proliferation of
various forms of new media like social network services, blogs as well as the
growing consumption of news online, media practitioners may be quick to ask the
questions, what do these platforms profit us? Which forms of social media
should we adopt? Do we have the requisite skills to compete in this space? Does
professional ethics still matter? These questions formed the core of the debate
by panelists and other participants at the summit. Besides sharing some
experiences related by the summit panelists, this article is inspired by the
perceived need to provide some clarifications and further insight into the way
forward.
As
consumer habits change, commensurate change in the media industry is
inevitable. Back in 2009, I came across some data which drew my attention to
the fact that target audience is no longer made up of only readers (traditional
to newspapers), listeners (traditional to radio) or viewers (traditional to
television), they have also become users (traditional to new media).
The said
data further presented a rate of adoption of new media forms which dwarfs what
the world experienced with newspapers, radio or even the television - it took
38 years to reach 50 million listeners, terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach
50 million viewers, in less than nine months, a platform like Facebook added
100 million users.
As
communication professionals and media business owners, the strong presence of
our target audience on social networks and other digital media platforms can
hardly be ignored - Facebook alone is known to be home to about 1.2 billion
monthly active users; more than 500 million tweets are sent on Twitter platform
daily; Linkedin represents the world’s largest professional network on the
Internet with more than 277 million members; over nine million pages are viewed
per hour on Wikipedia (English version alone); over 100 million blogs
exist on the Web; more than 4 billion searches occur per day on the Web;
discounting the word Nigeria, news is now the most search for word from Nigeria
on Google search engine service. The foregoing data point to a phenomenal end
user adoption of new media forms and for a media practitioner, Marshall
McLuhan’s advice comes handy: “The only way out of the media pervasiveness is
to understand it … ”.
As
the media businesses (especially the news media businesses) face disruption
induced by technological innovations, we must engrave in our minds the fact
that the media industry as a whole is richer than ever today. We can however
only understand this position if we recognize the fact that part of the
disruption is the admittance of new players into the media industry.
Contrary
to what typically obtains in the traditional media world like the newspaper,
radio, television, audience aggregation is no longer a prerogative of media
organizations. Technology firms that produce the new media systems proceed to
aggregate the audience on their respective platforms. Logically, their
valuation largely emerges from their capacity to aggregate large audiences.
Herein lies the driver of current global inflow of investment into the media
world.
The
recent Initial Public Offering (IPO) of Twitter and the 19 billion dollar
acquisition of Whatsapp by Facebook speak to the subject. In the new media
world, the power of aggregation matters. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp,
to name a few, have all entered into the media value chain.
Connectivity
providers like mobile services providers are also recognizing their power of
aggregation and are beginning to offer Value Added Services (VAS) erstwhile
associated only with news media houses. My prediction is that such VAS will
eventually become Core Services. Welcome to the world of convergence! Bloggers
and online forum providers have also entered into the audience aggregation
game. Based on data from Alexa.com, the top 15 most visited online sites from
Nigeria include a discussion forum – nairaland.com – and a blog,
lindaikeji.blogspot.com, both directly targeting the Nigerian audience.
The
need for strategic rethink by news media organizations especially the
newspapers cannot be overemphasized. The presence of new competitors in the
media industry landscape coupled with the growing number of consumers that seem
unwilling to pay for news online are valid sources of concern. News media
organizations are traditionally known to obtain money from three sources –
consumers, advertisers/sponsors as well as investors (beware! Capital is a
liability but there is also immediate cash reward for owners that choose to
give up shares in the process).
To
paint a gloomy picture for the traditional media, in the online space,
investors and advertisers are chasing audience aggregators while consumers that
are looking for news online seem unwilling to pay for novelty as a basic news
value. Alternative sources of fresh news abound in the online space. It is
common knowledge that the death of Whitney Houston was first broken on Twitter
several minutes before Press.
The novelty value of privileged access to
institutional Press Releases prior to publication has also been watered down by
direct institutional Tweet Releases to the public. A case in hand is Reuben Abati’s
tweets (@abati1990) as the President’s spokesman. What’s the way forward for
newspapers houses and journalists?
Traditional
media practitioners ought to approach the new media landscape with an attitude
or disposition that is not only optimistic but also realistic. If the so-called
citizen journalists can be empowered, professional journalists ought to be more
empowered. Such optimism must however be accompanied by reality check - the new
competitors must be recognized vis-a-vis their competencies, the consumers must
be better profiled so as to understand what they will be willing to pay for,
the basis for new media empowerment must be sufficiently understood so as
to be able to leverage on it, media practitioners must be sufficiently savvy in
order to maintain a good level of distinctive competence required to succeed in
the new media world.
I
have deliberately used the word new media rather than focus on social media
because the emerging media landscape goes beyond the so-called social media and
I believe that a good grasp of the conceptual distinctions between the
buzzwords would go a long way to identifying the empowerment inherent in such
media forms as well as their disruptive nature. People sometimes use the
phrases social media, digital media and new media interchangeably however,
there are some distinctions. In the first place, digital media simply
highlights digital technology as foundation.
While
not discounting the digital foundation, new media is a generational term, which
places emphasis on the innovative nature of the emerging media forms that
continue to shape the way we now consume and share information. In this regard,
social media can be said to be part of new media. Social media usage evolved
from the innovations that facilitate User Generated Content (UGC) on the Web by
supporting multiple and easy ways of interacting and collaborating. Today,
audiences can be easily engaged on the basis of one-to-one (e.g. Facebook
Inbox), one-to-many (e.g. Facebook Wall, Tweets) and many-to-many (e.g.
Comments threads, Forums), even on the same platform.
Although
the emergence of various social media forms could been an empowerment for
communicators and has fueled the growth of citizens journalism, it does not
exhaust the spectrum of new media innovations that has disrupted the
traditional media businesses. The manipulable nature of digital information has
given rise to a broader set of innovations that permeate the media value chain.
Thanks
to such a nature, media innovations have become almost synonymous with
innovations in software development. Arguably, the most significant competition
for traditional media industries comes from the entry of logistical or
organizational media innovators like Google into the media value chain. As John
D. Peters, a Communications theorist would say, the job of logistical or
organizational media is to organize and orient. They are rarely content-driven.
Indexes, maps, catalogs, inventories are examples of such media. To draw an
analogy from physical libraries, perhaps the most visited medium is the
catalog. If only the librarians were pounds wise, they would have recognized
the catalog section as a valuable position for advert placement in the library
premises.
In
the online space, something similar happens, people go to the “catalog section”
to get orientation for where to source their news and other resources. Google
is presently best positioned globally for this role on the Web and Google is
certainly pounds wise – the Company feeds fat on advertisements. I would not
argue that traditional media organizations challenge Google in that space,
however, if they so wish, they must build the highly technical distinctive
competence. At the very least, recognize the fact that Google’s main economic
power comes from the media value chain. Such recognition is important for
strategic decisions.
Another
competing form of audience aggregation is the provision of platform for
communicators to place their content and engage their respective audiences.
WordPress.com, Blogspot.com for example, are well positioned to earn
advertisement revenue on their platforms. Such opportunity becomes more
lucrative for platform owners as competent content providers leverage “freely”
on such platforms.
Twitter, Facebook, Youtube also leverage on such aggregation
possibilities. I wonder why traditional media practitioners have not explored
the power of aggregation from this angle perhaps in a competitive manner. More
could be said about audience aggregation but I would like at this stage to
redirect the attention of the reader to the consumers’ willingness or
unwillingness to pay for media resources in the new media world.
Just
as it would be a misconception for anyone to assume that technology disruption
implies less money in the media industry, it’s also a misconception to think
that the so-called free readers may not be willing to pay for any service along
the emerging media value chain. Consumers of free news online do not hesitate
for example to pay for connectivity in order to be able to access news items.
The ball is in the court of media practitioners to discover and provide
information that consumers will be willing to pay for. As earlier suggested,
willingness to pay for newness as a value may be dwindling as free alternatives
abound in the online space. The situation calls for media practitioners to
revisit those other elements of professionalism that are usually brought to
bear in good journalism namely accuracy, fairness, attribution as well as
relevance. On the one hand, consistency in accuracy and fairness has always
been and will continue to be foundation for positioning as trusted source of
news.
More
than ever, due respect for intellectual property as implied in attribution
ought to be more diligently guarded not only by the individuals but also by
other stakeholder that feel the responsibility to protect the industry. Ethical
behaviour still matters; it is often a matter of justice. I salute any
institutional attempts to enforce copyrights. However, in order to truly
benefit from such protection, relevance must be addressed as a critical success
factor.
In
the face of elevated competition, the importance of relevance may be
accentuated as an element in professional journalism. The value of content to
the consumer has become a significant determinant of their willingness to pay.
In the context of decision making, information value has been defined as the
amount a decision maker would be willing to pay for information before going
ahead to make a decision.
Demand
for information of high value suggests that Journalists must redefine their
competence, perhaps transform themselves into journanalysts with demonstrable
domain expertise. Not only will this imply proper schooling in data analysis,
skills in multimedia presentations across various channels have also become
indispensable. Multimedia may well be a salvation for future newspapers. There
is a whole body of research that suggest the advantages of multimedia in
communication effectiveness (I’ll write more about this in another article).
Today,
consumers do pay for content online even in Nigeria - Technology Times enjoys
over 200,000 subscribers online; the Economist offers subscription channel for
both print and digital versions online. No doubt that willingness to pay
depends on the value placed on the content.
A good test of true value creation
is the ability to successfully run a Freemium model which implies the provision
of a Free basic offering and Premium offerings. Premium services are not
available for free and consumers will only opt for such services if they
perceive their values. Knowing the audience demands good analytics combined
with sound criteria. If a media organization does not know what their audience
will be willing to pay for, they don’t know them well enough!
A
lot more can be said about the vision of new media forms as empowerment for
traditional media practitioners who choose to reinvent themselves and sharpen
their distinctive competencies. In my next article, I intend to do some level
of justice to multimedia, a significant part of the new media heritage, as well
as other success factors like convergence journalism, newsroom efficiency, news
brands, journalists as content curators and valuable attention conservers in
this age of information overload. On a final note, I believe that the media
industry is sustainable economically but only for those that are relevant to
the emerging value chain. Step up!
Dr. Onobhayedo is with the School of Media and
Communication, Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos, Nigeria.
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