In this post ‘Why newspapers fail‘, Frederic Filloux mentions a few reasons. The one which has struck me is that they concentrated on the wrong thing: diffusion rather than aggregation and development of a platform, to reap the value of user data.
“The news industry took the opposite stance. Deprived of customers’ data, it found itself blind to what kind of online services the audience was craving. As a result, publishers left numerous markets wide open, like free classified and auctions taken by Craigslist and eBay (before Schibsted set in), large news aggregators and the entire system that flourished thanks to RSS feeds. It is actually funny to see many news outlets now engaged in costly acquisitions to get back the services they should have developed in the first place.”
Today the value lies in customer data, and those platforms and links in the chain that have access generate the most value. And this explains the value of social network companies and other platforms like Google. All other services are doomed to be dependent from the platform-gods.
If you want to create value today, you need eventually to produce a platform that will concentrate user data; the real source of value in this early Collaborative Age!
