*I never believe this Michael Wolfe guy, but at least he doesn't hesitate to say the unspeakable.
*When digital media collapses it's gonna go lots, lots faster than analog magazines and newspapers. Because there's so little there there.
(…)
We are, all this might argue, looking at a last-man-standing period in digital media. Unlike in most roiled industries facing oversupply and rising costs, where the last man will be the largest company with the least amount of debt, in digital media — still, after 20 years, without any precise way to judge a winner — it is more about who has the best argument for why they should be a winner. It is more politics than business.
Let’s be more precise. There are two clear winners in digital media, Google and Facebook, and their imperial success has largely reduced everybody else to a vassal state, living off their patronage and goodwill. This duopoly has forced the cost of advertising down and the price of traffic up, meaning, for everybody else in the advertising and traffic business, prospects shrink.
True, there are other gambits. You can build a competing platform like Snapchat offering a different sort of social media approach and functionality (on the other hand, that turns out not to have worked so well for Twitter). Or there’s Verizon, consolidating AOL and Yahoo, the few big traffic pools outside Google and Facebook, hoping to profitably manage them with extreme cost efficiencies. Or recently, there is the rising example of CNN, able to leverage the content it profitably produces on a television platform into a digital brand extension, making it the largest online news provider and probably the most profitable.
For everybody else in digital media needing traffic and ads to support content production and supply profits, it’s a colder and colder world….
