The time has come

It was the summer of 2005 when I decided to quit my last job. I was working as a web journalist at Sydsvenskan at the time. I’d been to Lawrence, Kansas, and written a report together with Andreas Ekström about how a successful local student site could be run. Now I was doing some temp work while waiting for the project to get started.

One day that summer I came in from my holiday to join a meeting about the project. We sat down, talked, and when we left the room it hit me: this project is never going to happen. I decided there and then that it was time to leave. It was a fairly easy decision once I understood that I was waiting for something that wasn’t coming.

Six months later I left and started Jeffery & Edling which later became Good Old.

This time the decision was anything but easy.

I’m leaving the CEO position at Good Old to become Director, Future Media & Technology at The Bonnier Group. At the same time I’ll switch to become the chairman of the board at Good Old. I wasn’t looking for a new job, but this opportunity was to good not to try out.

The official press releases are here and here, but let me tell you about why I want to do this.

The previous year, 2004, I was reading blogs about the web and thought it was the most interesting thing in the world. I had a bit of experience running different websites, but mostly I had a head spinning with ideas about what could be done in this new media climate. I remember thinking “surely someone, somewhere, would be willing to pay something for what I know”?. That’s where the idea of an agency started. I wanted to see if it was possible to make a living out of what I knew. Especially since I couldn’t really channel those ideas into anything constructive at my employer at the time.

In a way I created the job that I never got offered or could apply for. I called myself an internet strategist and tried to understand the web ecosystem as best as I could. Many bad ideas, stupid decisions and down right incompetence sometimes – they were all part of this immense learning experience. But I managed to get some consultant work at several media companies due to my background. I worked with them over several years and loved it. Media is my field, it’s where I’ve always been, and where I’ve always pictured myself to be.

For the last year I’ve been consulting at Bonnier R&D, working with the convergence of media and technology. It is a question that I feel passionately about and it was a privilege to get the possibility to get to work with it on such a high level. Indirectly and inadvertently, I created this new position through my time and work there. So when it was offered to me it felt as if it had been tailor made for me. I had to give it a shot.

I’m very proud of my accomplishments at Good Old, but I’m in no way claiming that it was my effort alone that has made it so. It’s been a real honour to work with people that are genuinely talented, and also are really good human beings too. People, that through their hard work and ideas, have shaped the company to what it is today. Thank you. It’s truly great to see. I look forward to being a part of our reinvention the coming years.

Finally, I’d like to thank readers of this blog that have put up with sparse updates and the odd pointless rant. I’ve been in touch with a lot of you during the years and look forward to keeping the discussion going over at my new digital home. Thanks.

Disruption through low margins

For a long time, I’ve been writing about technology as the main source of disruption in the media industry. Yesterday I started thinking that perhaps I’ve been wrong. Technology plays a part, but perhaps it’s a factor rather than the main cause.

The most disruptive thing must be people that don’t play with the same rules as the rest of their peers.

Simply put, companies are judged on their revenues minus their costs and their desired profit margins. If there is money left over, they are doing better than expected. If they don’t make enough, the company is failing to meet its expectations.

Technology plays a large part in lowering the costs. This in itself has proved to be disruptive. But even more disruptive, is to lower the expectations and possibilities of the margins.

Take Craigslist as an example. According to TechNewsWorld in 2004, they took $65 million from the newspapers in the area (and that was five years ago). The same year, Craigslist was expected to make $10 million of their own. As they were taking most of the classified ads, it’s easy to see that they could have made more than the expected $10 million. But they decided not to.

Due to technology, they had lower costs. But due to not maximizing profit, they didn’t have to charge as much for their ads as they could have done. They even let most of them be completely free, and still do.

As the product was comparable – better than the competition even – there simply was no reason to use the classifieds page in the newspaper ever again. But even worse – the newspaper couldn’t accept such a low margin, and through that made it impossible for them to compete. Game over.

Open source works in a similar way. There’s no expectation or requirement to present a profit. Therefore the price can be zero. And that is difficult to beat, if you’re in a company that doesn’t accept zero as a margin.

Disruption comes in many forms. Technology has made it possible to create a lot with little. The internet as a whole has brought back the notion that for a lot of people and companies, it’s good enough to make a living, rather than getting rich. Combine the two and you have the most difficult hurdle to overcome for any profit-driven company today.

Good Old x TEDx

Before the summer, I had the privilege of being part of the first TEDx event in Sweden. I got a five minute slot to ramble about an idea I had, about the importance of 'connectivity' over 'proximity'.

Make sure you don't miss the other videos from the event either - a lot of inspiring stuff.

Illegal downloads and social media

Don’t worry about the gratuitous use of the word “illegal” before the word “download”, that’s just a generation thing. Like saying “social” before “media”.

- JP Rangaswami

One short quote from an article that has about ten, equally quotable, paragraphs that should be read, and re-read.

On the payment of news

Through Per-Åke I find a really interesting article written by Jeff Sonderman. You should definitely read all of it, but the key paragraph is this one:

“Consumers couldn’t care less how much it costs to produce a product, be it news, clothing or cars. They don’t inspect your production facility and balance sheets to determine whether the price is fair.”

Absolutely correct, and valid in every way. I could rant about journalism as non-profit, public service and all of that. I won’t as Sonderman says it better himself, only more succinct.

However.

I question whether this means that journalism can’t be funded through consumer payment. I’m not talking about projects such as Spot.us, but about well designed and packaged (paid) services that enable and enhances the news experience. I haven’t seen any, although I assume there are a few.

If the perception that people were paying for content in their newspaper subscription was wrong (they paid for distribution), why are so many experimenting with the charging of online content rather than everything else attached to it?

Whether you can charge for online content or not is irrelevant. What is interesting and important to pursue is if journalism can be funded – in any way – from consumer payment.

Worth thinking about

From Gareth Kay:

Given this volume of content generation, is our usual strategy of 'build it and they will come' one that holds water? Isn't it time we thought better about how we might swim with, rather than against this, tide? Think more smartly about how we bring online and offline marketing together as one (how do we promote our online content)? Realize a funny ad might not be funny enough (there might be funnier content in culture outside advertising)? Think that we need to either make something more magnetic and beautiful (craft) or be quicker and have a more disposable attitude to the stuff we make? Any way you loom at it, it's quite sobering to see how truly frenetic culture has become.

Moving Images, a (very) brief summary

Yesterday, I was at the Moving Images conference in Malmö. I won’t review it as it wouldn’t come out as well as I would like it to. But I will say this: it’s was so refreshing to hear new ideas from new people, but themed around the concepts that relate to what I do. So many industries represented in the same hall. The same, few, questions more or less. I think we all left with a reminder that it’s the wide approach that takes us forward.

The future of internet consulting

As a part of Moving Images blog relay, a few selected bloggers will be writing about future scenarios within their line of work. I’m taking over from PM Nilsson at Newsmill who wrote about the future of journalism yesterday. In contrast I thought I wouldn’t write about media for once, but about the line of work I’m actually in: internet consulting.

New blogs at Good Old

My new colleague Jonas Carlsson has started a new blog here at Good Old. It’s in Swedish, but so interesting that all of you that don’t speak it should grab a language course. It’s called Good Old Think and takes up the business and sociological side of the web.

Same thing goes for my other colleague Ulrika who will be writing about how to reach people in the new blog Good Old Attention.

If you need to balance your reading up with something a bit more easy going, I’d like to also plug our new blog Being Tyler Brûlé. If you’re a Monocle, Fast Lane or ex-Wallpaper reader you’ll catch on pretty quick.

Don't read blogs like you read newspapers

I remember a sales call that I got a year or two ago. It was a news monitoring company that had a new sales pitch, since I had said that I wasn’t interested in their services previously.

Sales person: You know, now we even cover blogs!
Me: Really? What blog index are you using for that? [I was, admittedly, smirking]
Sales person: Index? We’re adding several hundred – every day!

She didn’t get a sale.

After the call, it occurred to me that the sales girl regarded blogs as any other media outlet: one that should be regularly monitored and followed on a daily basis.