Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I ran magazines in the ‘90s and I worked at magazines and we were actually – the magazine
that I ran, the Test Lab at PC Week, we were actually the first magazine that put ads on
the internet. Wired is wrong. They were not the first, we were the first. But we just
took our magazine articles and shoved them up online. That was the path right? But over
time it became blogs and social media and all that and what we found is that websites
– so you have a magazine brand, your website brand for that magazine is not your magazine,
it’s short snacky stuff. It’s quick, it’s blog posts, it’s da-da-da-da-da. It’s
boom, boom, boom, boom, blah, blah all over the place. It was short attention span because
you were sitting in front of your computer. It was not the same experience you get when
you open up your favorite magazine like wait a minute. Like I just happen to have Wine
Enthusiast, not that this is my favorite magazine but you know when I get this magazine – it
is one of my favorites. When I get this magazine I have this nice deep dive experience. Look
its this rich deep experience and I read it and it’s like I spend 45 minutes or an hour
and you know it’s like when I fly back home to San Francisco tonight, I’ll probably
sit there and read this and who knows I might even have a glass of wine. But the experience
online, for Wine Enthusiast or PC Magazine where I was or anywhere else is much more
like boom, boom, give me what I want, let me go over there and but – that short attention
span thing that you get when you’re on a magazine online is very different from that
lean back experience with a magazine when you’re kicking back. Now the interesting
thing that’s happening with the tablet and magazines is that digital editions of magazines
are coming out on tablets but they’re not that short attention span, boom, boom, boom,
boom, move around. They’re actually recreating that deep dive long form experience where
you’re really, you can have a magazine on your tablet and have a great deep experience
with it like you can with that printed product. Very interesting. Now the analogy I have for
video is traditional television up on the big screen I want to do a deep dive into Modern
Family or Dexter or whatever, whereas online when you’re looking at it on your computer
or your iPad or your phone, it’s more like boom, boom, give me this short thing.
Yeah, snippets. Snippets but I don’t know how the tablet’s
going to work out. My suspicion is that the tablet is going to become a primary video
consumption device that will allow us to do both. I think the tablet allows us to do short
consumption but also, you can watch a movie on here. You can watch a half hour show and
have a really good experience. The tablet is going to become a video consumption device
that will allow you to deep dive and do short attention span. It may become a deep dive.
It may become a short attention span, it may be both. So the reason why I bring this up
is when you think about internet video, right now successful internet video is short and
it’s snappy and you move around it’s boom. And there’s that long form on the TV and
a lot of this money that’s sloshing around that’s going into creating new video products
are trying to replicate that long form lean back experience and I don’t think there
are enough of those devices yet to make that a profitable experience yet. I think it will
happen.