media

The media business is not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel yet. When people asked me about my magazine and the economics of that, they were saying why I am in publishing business. Well, that is not my core business, just a hobby. It has been almost three years since the first publication of MISC and readership is growing nicely. We're now in 28 countries and we have have the digital version. I am getting a lot of positive feedback from readers from all over the world. Perhaps I should make the next issue the thickest one. This is the first cover that was shot in Milan. And the next cover will be shot in Shanghai. 

Now that CNN and BuzzFeed have joined forces to create a new online video destination, the meme-ification of the news is almost complete. The viral celebrities, the LOL cats, and the Listicles have won. The one company at the nexus of the meme aggregation movement - BuzzFeed - and the one media company that practically invented the 24-hour news cycle - CNN - have partnered to give you the 24-Hour Buzz Cycle. All buzz, all the time.

From a media perspective—marketers like to align strategies and tactics along the lines of how things are done at scale. The popular framework goes something like: Paid (advertising), Earned (Word of Mouth), Owned (Corporate) and everything else falls in a somewhat more grey area and from my perspective this is where the action will be for 2013 and beyond.

This chart published over on The Atlantic shows how out of kilter the US is in not requiring companies to give their staff paid annual leave. Almost worse than that is the fact that, according to a JetBlue/Harris Interactive study, no less than 57% of Americans ended up not using all the holiday time they were actually given in 2011.

I've lost count of the number of articles I've read over the years declaring the death of online advertising. The reasons cited usually touch at some point on banner blindness, falling click-through-rates (the average CTR having dropped to less than a tenth of 1%), and the uneven distribution of clicks (Comscore's 'Natural Born Clickers' study for example showing that only 8% of Internet users account for 85% of all clicks).