From Media to Money. From News to Great Big Story.
Do You Believe In NEWS? How?
On average, U.S. adults spend 10 hours and 39 minutes a day consuming media. So before you spend another 10 hours doing so, why not spend the next five minutes to get to know of your storytellers?
Stories matter. They shape each and every one of us. Thus, knowing the motives and rationale behind those stories matter.
Digital to Money
Staking its future on digital, numerous major news companies headed toward social media platforms. Hence, the distribution of free news content and its accessibility have concomitantly spiked over the past few years. However, an essential question remains: How then do they make money?
In a nutshell, they don’t. Unless..
Ubiquity of free news contents and the rise of digital market propelled industry thinkers to redesign its business model. From its traditional subscription based revenue model to something completely different.
Reminiscent of the period at which ‘video killed the radio star,’ paper news and TV news are slowly being outpaced by digital news. Evidently, overall digital ad revenue in U.S. increased by 20% ($60 billion) last year alone while others have consistently decreased over the past few years.
The rise of digital ad revenue can largely be attributed to the advancement of advertising strategies. For instance, branded contents — otherwise known as native advertising — is a form of advertisement that disguisedly promote products or services to potential consumers. So while you may be thinking that you are reading a well-researched and objective outlook on world, you could actually be reading biased contents that were paid by an interest group. And such form of marketing and advertising is lionized in this age and time at which consumers are keen to ‘ad-block’ and adverse to ‘pop-ups.’
Does this raise your eyebrows?
In simple terms, the less you pay, the more you will get exposed to stories besmeared in private interest. The storytellers — who you may think are unflinching and impregnable warriors fighting to tell stories and achieve justice — are actually humans who have bills to pay back home.
Companies like CNN, Al Jazeera, Fox, New York Times, and even Buzzfeed are essentially large conglomerates of those storytellers who research, design, write, shoot, and cater news to your dinner table. They are thus checked and bounded by realities of their employees: Al Jazeera has little voice in criticizing Qatar’s royal family because it is partly funded by it. CNN has little voice in going against appetite of popular mass because its major revenue stream is consumer based native advertising. Stories are not always compositions of mere facts and wills. Preamplifiers to filter impurities are getting thinner and thinner day by day.
What can ‘I’ do?
Now, as an individual who is nothing more than an architecture of dangling tissues and cells, what can I do to get ‘better’ stories out of information — if any? In my humble opinion, key is to diversify news streams. CNN does best in ground reporting and fact-checking because it prioritizes it. CNN deploys reporters and stringers to over 100 countries, investing massive amount resources. Al Jazeera does its best to stay out of ‘popular trends.’ With relatively less financial pressure, it often chooses to deal with unpopular, yet significant and deserving, subjects. Buzzfeed does its best in bringing large spectrum of consumers together by targeting subjects that are relatively less controversial and easy to understand. List can easily go on for next few pages. The point is — we swim in privilege of having multifunctional and symbiotic media ecosystem. My goal, as an individual, is in finding the right fish to nibble.
What will ‘William Lee’ do?
For all aforementioned notes, business model shares large portion of any media related objectives. Stable revenues will make any noble idea sustainable.
My noble idea is to invent virtual reality news platform at which consumers not only read and watch the news, but also feel the news. Prime example of this is the Project Syria presented at World Economic Forum in 2013 — which exhibited virtual space of Syrian civil war to raise awareness and empathy among users.
Such audacious goal, in my book, can only be accomplished with resolute dedication and meticulous commitment. In particular, I will have to make myself apt at understanding different business ideas and ideals.
With this in mind, I will regularly post media market updates from now on.
