Get ready for silliness about the Apple watch
The Apple Watch just came out, and that means Apple devotees will be oohing and aahing over them.
Something else will happen, too, because it happens every time there’s a new tech product or popular social media site.
Marketing experts will start telling us how the Apple watch is a great new opportunity for selling our products. Content experts will lecture us on how to deliver content to the thing. Social media mavens will hype the new opportunities.
Yes, of course it’s ridiculous that you would read much of anything on a watch, but … just wait. The silliness is inevitable.
There’s a portion of the publishing world that has a teenage-like compulsion to run headlong into every fad. And since this is an Apple product, doubly so.
I’m anticipating LinkedIn articles on the 5 ways the Apple watch will revolutionize marketing / content / whatever.
Follow the money
Hampton Stephens quite reasonably asks Why is Media Business Innovation Dominated By Advertising?
Every industry needs to innovate, especially when things are changing — and the media landscape has been changing pretty dramatically for decades. With little sign of slowing down.
Still, revenue innovation among publishers is predominantly about new ways to do advertising.
… among the most significant new media ventures, where one would expect the most innovation to be occurring, there is very little experimentation with business models that don’t involve advertising. The lesson that most media startups seem to have taken from the evisceration of advertising-supported journalism over the past two decades is that more innovation is needed . . . in advertising.
How about a very simple explanation. People who sell advertising are usually paid on commission. People who sell subscriptions are not.
From the perspective of the publishing company, revenue is revenue, whether it comes from advertising, subscriptions, ancillary sales, events, or whatever. So if all the innovation is coming from the advertising side, maybe it has everything to do with poorly configured incentives and very little to do with sound publishing judgment.