When snow falls in the Antarctic, it piles up over thousands of years and forms glaciers, which flow (slowly) across the continent and sometimes end up in the sea as icebergs. As the glacier traverses the landscape it picks up nutrients from the soil, so in some cases icebergs end up moving those nutrients into the ocean.
Those nutrients feed phytoplankton, which are little critters that live in the ocean. That impacts the local ecosystem in many ways, but it also sequesters carbon, because the phytoplankton use up CO2.
So, CO2 might cause a warmer climate which might cause more icebergs to break off into the ocean which might cause phytoplankton to thrive which then use up the CO2 that cause a warmer climate.
See How huge icebergs could be slowing climate change.
That’s the way nature works sometimes. There are complicated feedback loops that tend to balance one another out. If one thing increases, something else often comes along to counter it. For example, a warmer climate might cause more cloud cover, which tends to cool the climate.
These things don’t always balance out perfectly. It’s not as if the phytoplankton will sequester exactly the right amount of CO2. The point is simply that when you increase one thing, something else often comes along to counter it. Nature is full of opportunistic plants and animals that are eager to grab what they can get. And as in the example with cloud cover, you don’t even need living things to have this sort of balancing act.
The same sort of balancing act can happen with markets. A new thing comes along and takes off like the proverbial bat from Hell, but then new products and players appear, costs and benefits adjust, and the initial calculations don’t apply any more.
A company sees an opportunity and enters a new market, but by the very fact of entering the market things have now changed.
Consider drones. The recent holiday shopping stats show that people are buying more and more of their gifts online. (I don’t think I darkened the door of more than one or two actual stores.) What will happen if packages can be delivered in hours instead of days?
Drones could drastically decrease shipping costs, since you don’t have to pay postage, or a truck driver. But remember that there are opportunistic critters out there ready to pounce. You can’t hack a UPS truck, but a clever kid can probably hack and divert a drone, which could increase delivery costs.
What does all this about icebergs and drones have to do with publishing?
The same basic rules seem to apply across markets.
Trends tend to slow down. Ebook adoption started off at a mad pace. Now the ebook share of the market is steady. You can’t base your business on an assumption that a trend will keep going the way it’s going now — or even keep going at all. People change, and new things come along. (Along these lines, analog is staging a small comeback against the digital revolution.)
“Opportunistic critters” show up. Years ago, publishers rushed to put their articles online to get ad sales, but then slimy websites stole the content and sold ads against it, cutting into publisher profits. It’s like the long-lost relative ambling down the lane after you win the lottery. As soon as somebody starts to make a buck, other people try to find a way to get their cut.
That “cut” might undermine your hard work. For example, you might spend a lot of money to convert your content into the latest and greatest digital format, and one month later a new technology comes out that makes it all obsolete.
Even the experts can’t see what’s coming. We’re not very good at predicting the future. Remember when Sen. McCain said “the fundamentals of our economy are strong” just before the Great Recession, or when President Obama said “ISIS is contained” right before the Paris attacks? These are guys who get regular briefings from the best of the best, and they still get it wrong.
I’m painting a fairly negative picture here and you may be asking what it all means. Am I suggesting that we spurn trends and not worry about the future? Que sera sera?
Of course not.
The first step is to avoid being fooled, but the second step is to take appropriate action. In my opinion, publishers should keep these things in mind.
- When you’ve got a wave, surf. Ride trends quickly and make what you can of them, but don’t expect them to last.
- Stick to the fundamentals. No matter what device or format people are using, quality content, clear offers and compelling benefits to a well-targeted market are what matters.
- Do the cheap thing first. You don’t want to call the pumber only to find out that you could have solved the problem in five minutes if you’d just checked YouTube. (Ask me sometime about the morning I disassembled my steering column when all I had to do was wiggle the wheel.)
The overall lesson from the iceberg is that the world is a complicated place, and causes and effects are tricky things. Hidden forces can creep out of the woodwork and take a bite out of your confident projections. Push ahead, but keep your options open, and don’t expect the winds to keep blowing in the same direction.