Endeavour Partners - Blog

One of the most interesting questions arising from convergence is the impact on content businesses (what people sometimes call the ‘media’, but that’s so exactly wrong nowadays, we should focus on the message, the content). A piece in todays NY Times – the proverbial ‘Gray Lady’ perfectly illustrates what we call the…”…you didn’t get the memo…” phenomenon:

For many Americans, cellphones have become irreplaceable tools to manage their lives and stay connected to the outside world, their families and networks of friends online. But increasingly, by several measures, that does not mean talking on them very much.

Liza Colburn and her 12-year-old daughter, Abigail, use their cellphones for many tasks, but make relatively few phone calls.

Instead of talking on their cellphones, people are making use of all the extras that iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones were also designed to do — browse the Web, listen to music, watch television, play games and send e-mail and text messages.

Say it isn’t so….

One of the key themes of the way the web is changing is the decline and demise of mass media. One facet of that is a battle over access to content, and some recent work has led us to the conclusion that the current business models are doomed.

Perhaps the scariest presentation from a great recent event on the West Coast was the guys from First Paper, who came across as dinosaurs from another era. What does that make Rupert Murdoch?

This interview on Sky News, reported through mUmBRELLA, definitely goes in my “didn’t you get the memo?” file (along with Microsoft being late on the UI work for WinMo 6.5 and Palm being late with the SDK for the Pre and WebOS):

Rupert Murdoch has suggested that News Corporation is likely to make its content unfindable to users on Google when it launches its paid content strategy

Murdoch claimed that readers who randomly reach a  page via search have little value to advertisers.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7GkJqRv3BI&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

Wrong! We’re actually going in the opposite direction: the advertising apocalypse involves adspend inexorably migrating to channels that are targeted (such as by a search term – duh!) and which provide feedback to the advertiser.