There’s an interesting article on the Huffington Post UK site by former EMAP Director Colin Morrison, in which he asks Who Killed Britain’s Best Media Company, and goes on to discuss the inner workings of the leadership of the company at the time, before it was split into a consumer business which was sold to Bauer, and a B2B business which continues the EMAP brand joint-owned by Apax and Guardian Media Group.
It makes for interesting reading – the relationship between Robin Miller and David Arculus for example. By way of context, the ‘glory days’ appear to have been 80s and 90s – basically right up until around the time when I joined, which was after U.S investment went badly wrong, and the initial heavy investment in transferring brands to the digital worlds also had a major stumble.
But I do think he overestimates the brilliance of the leadership versus the problems of a traditional media company faced with the age of digital disruption that has seen the internet, mobile and tablets appear alongside a number of major digital properties which now command the attention economy.
Even now traditional media companies are still struggling and battling to make the transition to the web, whether newspapers, magazines, radio or television, and they’re all still behind where they should be. A lot of that is down to the nature of the organisational structure, and the risk averse tendencies of a middle management who are being pressured from above, and block so much potential from below.
It’s no coincidence that at the time myself and other digitally-addicted colleagues were pushing for ideas like low cost digital launches based around teams of 2 or 3 and a blog-based platform, Mashable was being launched by the then 19-year-old Pete Cashmore (2005). The same year saw Yahoo Answers launch – I suspect that was before I suggested the idea of the Ask An Expert section on MCN, but certainly we beat the likes of Quora by some way. I’d try and check, but it appears Bauer’s sites are experiencing an outage at the moment…
And funnily enough, the best time and definitely the most innovative I experienced was when for a few months a small team of us operated with barely any ‘adult’ supervision. Suddenly we were able to produce a variety of RSS feeds for starters. And initially noone paid much attention to my friend, colleague and talented video specialist Angus Farquhar starting to mess around with Youtube, establishing a channel which became a Partner channel early on, and has now racked up over 88 million views. I’d like to think that was partly down to my own appearances on the daily news show we started, that sadly petered out due to a lack of involvement from anyone else, along with the podcast Angus initiated.
I also took the chance to start playing with social media – we quickly had a Myspace page and Flickr group up and running, to be joined by Facebook and Twitter.
This isn’t to blow our own trumpets – there were lots of other talented digital people across the business, and many of them have gone onto great success since moving to other companies or starting their own businesses.
But the scary fact is that EMAP had websites for titles dating back to 1998, such as the original motorcycleworld.co.uk site, as captured by the Wayback Machine Internet Archive. That was around the same time as Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google. Since then, we’ve had Myspace (2003), Facebook (2004), Youtube (2005), Twitter (2006), the iPhone (2007), the iPad (2010), and Blogger (1999) or WordPress (2003). In addition to Mashable, there’s the likes of Techcrunch, PerezHilton, the Huffington Post itself, Boing Boing going web only, and hundreds of other sites commanding a large amount of content and attention.
And many content companies have changed how they do things, giving rise to the likes of the Demand Media content farm which is built to respond to search and advertising demand. And that’s before we get into the likes of Paper.li, or Flipboard etc.
(I actually remember bringing in the wonderful Andrew Davies from Idio to discuss the idea of personalised digital magazines on-demand to a bemused audience).
Oh, and there’s the whole world of Glam Media, Shiny, B5 and all the other content networks that exist in a myriad of sizes, shapes and forms.
And yet, the traditional organisations, structures and practices still remain. Even when they did try, they put all their eggs in one basket, and then set fire to the basket (e.g. Ditto.net).
As any blogger will tell you, bespoke quality content is incredibly labour-intensive with low margins, and the rise in content marketing is due to the fact it works extremely well for business which have products to sell.
What’s going to hurt even more…
And that’s where the increased pain is going to come. More and more businesses are realising how useful content marketing can be, which is great for me as a consultant in that field, but not good for magazines, which are going to increasingly be cut out of the loop as middlemen unless they can build their own value as arbiters of taste in a cost effective way which includes social signals and added value.
And the areas which do create bigger margins are those around social, data, analysis – all the areas which allow a small team with a lot of technical knowledge and skill to achieve far greater scale for the cost of servers and number crunching. Meanwhile we’re still in the very early days of social media and mobile, and both are still operating in a manner similar to media companies when it comes to generating revenue, which means as they’ve gained respect and interest of the advertising agencies and clients, the pot of money available for the media brands is being thinned out.
Meanwhile small independant blogs and websites are still appearing every single day, powered by the availability of self-publishing and self-promotion, and the simple fact that some of us, despite the knowledge of the economics of the media, just love to write. Hot Mod Media is the catch-all for my own network of sites, and with a total financial outlay of about £500 per year, it’s already reaching over 200,000 uniques annually (Oct 2010-Oct 2011, and that’s going to rise massively with audiences increasing 500% already this year). Most importantly, the only ongoing investment at the moment is my spare time, and that of a small number of volunteers.
So as much as the leadership changes and struggles may make for good reading, and there’s undoubtedly some elements which affected the company as a whole, I wouldn’t say that it’s ultimately what ended the golden days of the big British media company…
I remember the day Roger Green walked into Cyberia with the first issue of Internet mag, which he’d put together under the radar, covered by whatever other mag he was doing at the time. I’d been part of the launch team for .net at Future earlier that year. I was a columnist for it for a while with my own pic and byline (the only time I ever got a proper photographic session at the big building up in Camden). I flipped the domain name whatsnew.com over for a joint project at a time when Whatsnew was a big daily deal on the web – but nothing ever came of it. Nothing ever came of a lot of things in those days though, and it all drifted away …
Ah, Internet mag – I remember it well.
There were so many ideas around that time which all faded away for various reasons, and the few that did make it tended to be the huge attention grabbing ones, which is the opposite of the little and often approach, and the idea that it’s multiple small changes that really make the difference, especially in the case of Google, for example – always testing, always changing. Rather than waiting 2-3 years, then scrapping all that went before in a big relaunch.
Interesting pair of articles coming from two very different directions. It was such a shame that it was only the people on the very ground level the could see what was truly going on.
It often felt like every level of management was holding a bullshit umbrella up to the next level up so they couldn’t see how bad it was underneath. From the top it must have looked pretty rosey, but from the bottom looking up all you could see was all the shit stuck underneath.
Reading the HufPo article does put a lot of things in context though, I think it wasn’t just the flexibility at the top that was lost when Arculus/Miller left, the problems filtered all the way down. As you said Dan there were so many ideas that could have been taken and run with in an agile way, that were either just neglected or trampled on whole heartedly. The ones they did decide to run with really were obvious bad choices right from the start.
And then there were the strong brands and ideas that people managed to make work despite the amount of wading through treacle that had to be done. A small number managed to perform really well but eventually got dragged in to the mire as the business decided that it was a bad idea to let things flourish outside the fold without following ‘the proper processes’, i.e. the ones that were killing the rest of the business.
It really was a frustrating place to work, with so many incredibly creative people being constantly held back from achieving their full potential both for themselves and for the company. I mean, who could possibly have predicted way back in 2007 that video advertising would be one of the biggest growing areas of ad spend! The company now has no dedicated video producers as far as I know when other companies around them are staffing up whole departments and making money commissioning out their extra production capacity to advertisers. What a revolutionary idea!
Still makes me sad to have had to work through such a wasted opportunity. But hey, I did alright out of the skills I taught myself there so I can’t complain too much. Just wish I could have put them to better use for the company that I developed them for.
Video? It’ll never catch on, you mark my words. In fact, I suspect your idea to have me in front of the camera out of desperation actually put the rise of internet video back about 2-3 years as people recoiled in the horror of what it could become.
Next you’ll be claiming that mobile phones are going to catch on as internet devices…
To be fair, having worked with the Ditto team, for example, I’m not sure it was necessarily an ego project. It was more the case that people had decided they wanted an internet success, and thought it would happen first time and in a short space of time.
Oddly enough that rarely happens.