“ I think the magazine publishing companies that will be most successful will be the ones that become multimedia companies and become more of a marketing service partner with their advertisers. Magazines are already doing creative that was previously only done by agencies, and I think you’ll see more of that.
What this year holds for magazines
Cynodon't
CBS kills sort of OK show, puts creators on totally awful show
Turns out the producers of MobLogic are now doing a show called Novel ADVNTURS.
Besides the positively mongoloid name, this show has the distinction of laboring under one of the most prima-facie awful premises ever: a book club that “lives the books they’re reading.”
<blockquote>And so, the four women start a new kind of book club, picking a “novel adventure” for each book.</blockquote>
I’d say the only thing it has going for it is that CBS apparently suckered Saturn into funding the entire thing in advance.
Note to advertisers: this is a great way to waste money.
CBS pulls plug on Wallstrip, pulled plug on Mob Logic (and I missed it)
The lesson, as usual: overhead is what kills shows, not lack of popularity. Popularity takes time — enough time that any show that is a significant drain on the bottom line will be killed long before it becomes an “overnight” success. Plan for 1-2 years before something serialized in the news format becomes a hit — always. (And even then, that “hit” may only be breaking even. That’s the current market reality and there’s no getting around it.)
Internet-Ready TVs Usher Web Into Living Room
“A key factor in the push are new TV sets that have networking connections built directly into them, requiring no additional set-top boxes for getting online.”
“ The operating policy now, particularly at Condé Nast, basically reads: Revenue first! Future later. And the printed page, the luxury object, is still where you find the money these days.
NYObserver catalogues the cuts at magazine websites. Which, depending on how you look at it, are either short-sighted: ceding whatever presence they currently have on the web dooms them to irrelevance later, or tragically spot-on: because they have yet to master the web, they might as well give up now and preserve their bottom line for a few more years. Is the magazine industry starting to resemble the newspaper industry?
“ Making videos for YouTube — for three years a pastime for millions of Web surfers — is now a way to make a living.
says The Times… yeah sure, in the same sense that playing the Lotto — also a pastime for millions — is, theoretically, “a way to make a living”. Sorry to be the cynical half of this duo, but this kind of facile horseshit really chaps my ass. Let’s not hand out congratulations RE web-video economics until it actually resembles something more functional than playing craps at a casino.
“ I feel YouTube is my home,” he said. “I think the biggest mistake that any of us Internet personalities can make is establish ourselves on the Internet and then abandon it.
YouTube Videos Pull In Real Money (NYTimes)
