The Ghosts Of Digital Brainstorms Past
Steve Smith

As 2009 winds down, the magazine companies appear to be gearing up to fight intense and continued headwinds over the next few years. A new Magna forecast out this month says that between 2000 and 2015 the worldwide ad spending in magazines will have fallen from $40 billion to $35 billion. One initiative (more of a press release really) was the announced consortium of five publishers ( Hearst, Time Inc., Condé Nast, Meredith, and News Corp.) that will develop a storefront and a format for digital magazines across a host of new devices.

I won't belabor the paltry details of a project that probably wont bear fruit until later next year. Promising to vault beyond the staid digital magazines of the past decades, the consortiums acting ceo John Squires is saying publicly this next-gen version will be completely different either from a Web experience or just more repurposed print. One good sign is the demo of a hopped-up Sports Illustrated for a large, color, touch screen device. This garnered some deserved oohs and aahs over its ability to rearrange and customize content, weave multimedia into the text experience, and retain the feel of a magazine without merely mimicking one.

Bravo, and all that. As much as I hate to be a Scrooge at this wonderful time of year, this latest attempt to make magazines more relevant in a post-analog age does invoke for the Dickens in me spirits of digital schemes past, both kind and mean:

1. The Spirit of Hardware Fragmentation. If the rise of mobile technology and Internet devices has taught us one thing, it is that the post-desktop Internet appliance market will become hopelessly fragmented and costly for publishers. Porting content across mobile phone platforms often costs more than core development. The kind of very attractive demo we saw at SI works nicely on the Windows 7- powered touch screen and surely has the rumored Apple Tablet in mind. But by the time these more expensive hunks of hardware get any scale (if they ever do), the lower priced netbooks, graphically-challenged e-books, and at least four-major smart phone platforms will be a much larger target. Getting a similarly involving experience out of all these gadgets (even half of them) is going to be a challenge.

2. The Spirit of Stingy Distribution. Apple and Amazon can rely on content distribution via a single hub, but it would be a mistake to expect a “ Hulu for magazines to work. Hulu had serious tv mojo behind it. There is no such thing as magazine mojo. As I think the overseers of the first generations of digitized magazines and newspapers discovered, people will not frequent media distribution hubs unless there is a lot of value across media types. Precedent: Sony and Microsoft both tried to re-create that iTunes magic to no avail.

3. The Spirit of Ad Schemes Past. Nothing lands with quite the thud of another great ad-format innovation falling over on the launch pad. Before we implement yet another costly set of digital units that look sexy but cant scale, and introduce non-standard metrics that confuse everyone, are pricey time-sinks that have no ROI, and are technological terrors to install, lets consider the lessons of history. No, wait, I just said them.

4. The Spirit of Togetherness. For as long as I have been covering digital media (15 in human years, 50 in Web years), the newspaper industry has been launching and re-launching schemes that have tried to share unified ad teams, ad networks, content, etc. Notice where those efforts got them. But at this point, executives really need to recognize they have no choice. Users aggregate content and exhibit new lows in brand loyalty. The Internet didnt break old-media business models--the readers did.

My basement of gadgets is littered with the ghosts of digital Christmases past. From Tablet PCs and ultra-mobile PCs, to PDAs and several generations of eReaders (including the current ones) that I find too ugly to use. Each of these platforms had business models, publishing partners 100% behind them, cool distribution hubs, and supposedly seamless distribution models. Even this media Scrooge hopes magazines can finally lead a new digital trend rather than follow one...too late. But the ghosts of digital dreams past reveal both the paths to perdition and to hope.

Steve Smith (POPEYESMITH@COMCAST.NET) is digital media editor for min/min’s b2b/MINONLINE.COM. He posts regularly on The Minsider blog and directs the min Webinars. Smith also co-chairs the annual min Day Summit and as ceo of Roving Eyeball Inc., consults for a number of publishers in the digital space.