What's a Media Mogul To Do

Andy Kessler's been writing on his blog about the state of affairs for being a media mogul. The the final piece about the new state of affairs has been published, as has a consolidation piece of all of the parts. The comparison to media control to control of The Pipes is an apt comparison.

Comments

Kind of Obvious But Valuable Advice

[eldavojohn]

Well, I haven't read the other three pieces of this line of blogs but after skimming over them and reading the fourth, it looks like this guy is concerned with a media mogul not realizing everything about his industry all the way down to Web 2.0 technologies like AJAX. I would counter this with just always being sure you're utilizing the edge of technology to the fullest.

What's A Media Mogul To Do

The fact is that the real big media moguls out there (like this guy) don't worry about these things--if you're a mogul, you have money so pay some geeks to advise you and listen to them.

Secondly, the whole point of this fourth piece is to "go wide" and then the spin on horizontal integration and "layerfication" comes back into the discussion. Well, I'm going to offer a simpler and more general rule of thumb for media moguls: Bring your services and information to your consumers with the latest/cheapest/fastest technology. Just because newspapers have been around for hundreds of years doesn't mean you shouldn't change it. I wake up, go to work and click on the Washington Post link ... nearly zero waste and it's searchable.

Most importantly, don't skimp on a website. Consumers take seconds to decide if they're going to do business with you based on your site. The more tech savvy society becomes, the faster we'll decide. Don't forget that. Hire someone who's good, shop around for people who can make your site interactive and fresh. That's it.

The recipe for success these days isn't hard but requires a lot of money and sometimes you already have to be the leader in that market. Take something that everyone loves (music, TV, movies have been done) and streamline the process of delivering to consumers by going digital.

I buy my loose leaf tea online.

Why? Because it's easy. E-commerce is obviously good for a business. Media moguls are no different. Offering goods & services through an online store is good. Automating your good or service and its delivery through "The Pipes" is great. Control the pipes, control the world. The same was said of news some time ago (and in a James Bond film).

The P2P part of this article makes a lot of sense though. If you could simplify/automate something like BitTorrent for your consumer, you'd on to something big. The big problem then becomes securing/controlling the spread of it by protecting your consumers and raking in their cash in some way.