More death of print? Or just death of consistent revenue for print?

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 linked to an interesting story about the decline of print. Colin Crawford at IDG noted in his blog that the absolute dollar growth of online revenues at IDG now exceeds the decline in print revenues. He goes on to say:

In the US, our online revenue now accounts for over 35% of our total US publishing revenues. Next year, for many brands online revenues will be greater than print revenues, if fact they already are at some of our key brands and by 2009 – approximately 50% of IDG’s US revenues will come from online.

To drive this change and to focus on online revenue we’ve changed the business mission of our organization away from print. Going forward IDG Communications will define itself as a web centric information company complemented by expos, events and print publications.

Said another way, Colin believes that online will be the future cash cow, with in-person and print media playing supporting roles.

Ummm. OK. I'm not convinced that the growth in online revenues that IDG is counting on are going to get them to where they want to be. After all, there is a LOT of online content out there, and while IDG's is good, so are a lot of other people's. And my skepticism is raised even more by a post that Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, wrote just the other day:

Back in The Day, Nicholas Negroponte proposed the "Negroponte Switch", which was a prediction that everything wired would become wireless and vice versa. Terrestrial broadcast becomes coax and fiber optic cable. Meanwhile twisted pair becomes GSM and cordless. And so on. It was good enough to become a meme, especially if one didn't think too hard about it.

With approximately the same rigor (i.e. none) I will now set out to do the same. I propose that in the analog-to-digital conversion things that are paid will become free and vice versa. So music and books and other media are turning from paid products to free marketing, while free-to-air video and radio become a subscription or on-demand product for a fee. And so on.

So what IDG is seeing is the formerly free stuff (e.g., online) becoming a larger revenue source, and the formerly pay stuff (print, conferences) becoming more free. Yes, you hope they will compensate for one another, but there's no guarantee. And one of the comments to that article made even a better point:

As price is a balance between offer and demand, those industries whose services are evolving to commodities due to competition pressure are going to be almost free in the long term, while those industries whose services are going through a differentiation process are going to increase their margins.

We are willing to pay for scarcity and not for abundance; we'd pay for those things that make ourselves different from others.

That last sentence is the essence of marketing in any economy.

Coming back to IDG, their real challenge is differentiating themselves in an increasingly commoditized media world tyrannized by too much choice, not deciding what channel to publish their content to. If most of the print world is going online, is good content and a strong brand going to be sufficient differentiation to make up for the loss in value from the abundance of online content? Frankly, it's too early to tell. But Mr. Crawford is right, when he says at the end of the article that there will be even more new skills for his organization to master. One of those new skills may be coping with a much less predictable -- and possibly smaller -- revenue stream.

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