Know Who Has Steered the Mass Media Industries Into Catastrophe
Craven are those who shun responsibility for formulating and sustaining the disastrous strategy that during the past 20 years has led the Mass Media industries to financial catastrophe and caused literally billions of people worldwide to abandon routine usage of newspapers, magazines, and radio and television stations as the predominant means by which consumers obtain news, entertainment, and other information.
I accuse the ‘digital’ executives of the Mass Media industries (including notably those who decades ago were celebrated by their industries as ‘New Media Pioneers’) of being directly culpable for the titanic financial shipwreck and very doom of their industries.
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Although you might nowadays hear many people who work below the corporate suites in Mass Media industries—workers who virtually all have no experience or formal training in the strategic management of their industries, glibly blame their industries’ financial woes and lost audiences on convenient bogeymen such as corporate media chain ownership, equity market quarterly earnings pressures, avaricious hedge funds, social media, search engines, or even consumers themselves (who they say ’have become habituated not to pay for online contents’, the real culprits who caused the industries’ catastrophe are the industries’ own digital executives whose very responsibility was to cause the opposite results. I herein indict them.
During the mid-1990s, these new media pioneers and digital executives volunteered or were assigned to formulate their industries’ adaptation strategy to the introduction of personal computer-mediated technologies into the world’s media environment. The gist of what they formulated was that their companies would launch websites that act as the equivalents of their companies’ printed editions or broadcast services. Publishers’ webpages would become the online analogue of their printed story pages; broadcasters’ webpages would become the online transmitters of live broadcasts and the on-demand repositories of the previously broadcast.
The strategy assumed that consumers and advertisers would use the websites the same ways (e.g., as frequently, thoroughly) as consumers and advertisers had used the printed products or broadcast services, and thus that the tradition business models of printed editions and broadcast services would work successfully online.
Although not a goal or benchmark within it, the strategy speculated that if ever enough consumers abandoned usage of print or broadcast for online, then perhaps the Mass Media industries could begin operating only online. Publishers thereby could eliminate the expenses of purchasing, printing, and distributing paper products and broadcasters could eliminate the regulatory hassles and expenses of operating transmitters in public airwaves, having to pay for cable or satellite signal carriage, and having to split advertising revenue with local affiliates. The Mass Media industries might thus in the 21st Century generate even greater net revenues operating only online than the industries had ever generated in the 20th Century from print or broadcast.
From the perspective of the mid-1990s, the simplistic assumptions upon which this strategy was based appeared to make sense. This was when going online meant plugging your home telephone landline into a 600- or 1200-baud modem that operated slower than 0.0012-megabytes per second. Because th0se lethargic speeds permitted little more than alphanumeric texts and still photographs to be shoveled online, newspapers and magazines became the firsts to implement the strategy. And as home bandwidths increased later that decade, radio broadcasters shoveled their audio signals into online. And when by 2006 nearly half of homes in developed nations had gained basic broadband access (i.e., speeds up to 1.5-megabytes per second), television networks and stations implemented this ‘Shovelware Strategy’.
Twenty years ago, 2006 was a halcyon year for Mass Media industries. Their printed products and broadcast services set record revenues and net profits, as well as achieved their largest readerships, listenerships, and viewerships. There was now sufficient home bandwidth that all sectors of the industries could converge online; each competing directly with the others by offering full multimedia and not just their own traditional form. Every sector had implemented the Shovelware Strategy and the number of consumers using the Internet had surpassed one billion worldwide. All those factors should have meant that the Shovelware Strategy, its implementation phase over, now entered its mature phase during which its expected profits would be reaped.
By 2007, however, empirical evidence began appearing that clearly indicated consumers and advertisers were NOT using the websites the same ways they had used the printed editions or broadcast services; that the traditional business models of print and broadcast, which had been transplanted online, were NOT generating anywhere near the revenues expected; and that increasingly billions of consumers were abandoning routine usage of the Mass Media industries’ in printed, broadcast, and online and have instead begun routinely the online services of previously unknown companies as their predominant means of obtaining news, entertainment, and other information.
Although I can cite mountains of empirical evidence from all sectors of the Mass Media industries that the Shovelware Strategy was failing each, consider just the U.S. newspaper industry, the largest newspaper market in the world. During the past 20 years, U.S. newspapers, the sector of Mass Media to have used the Shovelware Strategy longest has lost approximately 70 percent of its readerships, advertising clientele, and annual revenues. (The U.S. magazine industry has suffered similarly grave losses.) The empirical evidence against the Shovelware Strategy has never stopped mounting. The strategies’ anticipated level of revenues been achieved. Most of the 6.2 billion consumers worldwide (74 percent of the world’s population) who now use the Internet have abandoned routine usage of the Mass Media industries’ websites and instead they routinely use the online services of the new companies I’ll describe below.
Despite more than 20 years of its usage (30 years in the case of the newspaper and magazine sectors), the digital executives’ persistence in the Shovelware Strategy resulted in the opposite of what it was formulated to do: Consumers and advertisers didn’t use it as contemplated. Its business model failed to generate the revenues anticipated. Indeed, it abjectly failed to compensate the Mass Media industries for the revenues lost when consumers abandoned their printed products and broadcast services, resulting enormous losses of audiences, advertisers, and operating funds. Yet the industries’ digital executives obtusely persist in pursuing this demonstrably calamitous strategy.
You don’t need to have taught postgraduate New Media Management courses for 15 years, as I have, to realize that continuing to pursue so obviously disastrous a strategy for more than 20 years begs pointed questions about the business acumen and leadership of these digital executives and their overlords. Reasonably intelligent businesspeople would have objectively examined the empirical evidence, declared the Shovelware Strategy to be a failure, and at least ten years ago have formulated an alternative in a new direction and that also can repair the damage done.
Before I outline why the Shovelware Strategy was doomed to fail, permit me one justifiably pointed question about these digital executives’ perceptions. They were all aware of the technological observation coined in 1964 and known as ‘Moore’s Law’. It notes that the power, capabilities, and inexpensiveness of computation technologies has been doubling every two years since circa 1900. Between 1994 when the Shovelware Strategy was first implemented and 2006, that means the capabilities of computer-mediated technologies advanced by a factor of 64 (i.e., 26), which is a significant number. But the difference between 1994 and 2026 is advancement by a factor of 65,536 (216), which is gargantuan number. So, I don’t think I’m in error mathematically or logically, or being hyperbolic, when I state that the Mass Media industries’ mid-1990s Shovelware Strategy is now than a thousand times (i.e., 100,000 percent!) outdated and obsolete, and has been wholly upended by technological advancements that occurred since its formulation. Why were the Mass Media industries’ digital executives of the mid-1990s, 2006, or 2026, who knew Moore’s Law, so obtuse or torpid to assume this strategy could perennially persist without end or huge revisions?
What ultimately doomed the Mass Media industries were remarkable technological advancements that arose after the Shovelware Strategy was implemented and, despite forewarnings, that the industries’ digital executives ignored or failed to perceive and grasp. They from 1994 through 2006 had been focused on bandwidth speeds because they needed to be fast enough for converged multimedia. However, most of Moore’s Law’s exponential advancements weren’t about delivery speeds but processor capabilities, particularly server processors. If you’re looking for a visually tangible example of the results of Moore’s Law, my May 12th newsletter will show you one, a $5,000, book-sized, desktop supercomputer with the power of IBM’s $33 million Roadrunner supercomputer which in 2008 was the most powerful computer in the world.
The more than thousand-fold (216), advances in Moore’s Law since the mid-1990s have wrought monumental advances in informational identification, aggregation, sorting, and user targeting processing capabilities. Those serverside advancements have been brilliantly exploited by startup enterprises such as the search engines (Google, Baidu, Bing, Yandex, etc.), social media websites (Facebook, X, Sina Weibo, Vkontakte, TikTok, etc.), and other algorithmic recommendation engines (Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, Pandora, Douyin, etc.). Many of those startup companies weren’t initially founded as media companies but became such when they analyzed how consumers were using their services online.
They became phenomenally popular and successful because during the past 20 years consumers discovered that by using these search engines, social media, or other algorithmic recommendation engines, each of those consumers could obtain a feed of news, entertainment, and other information that much better matches that individual’s own unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes, than can any Mass Media product or service or practical combinations thereof. Likewise, hundreds of millions of marketers discovered that these services can better target advertisements to those individuals than can the Mass Media industries. As results, these startup enterprises became among the fastest growing companies in world history and are nowadays used weekly, if not daily, by virtually all 6.2 billion people who use the Internet.
In my March 10th newsletter, I detailed how these companies did that and why the Mass Media industries can’t (don’t). The basics are that although the defining characteristics of the eponymous Mass Media are mass production and mass reach, the search engines, social media services, and other algorithmic recommendation engines, add the new dimension of simultaneous mass customization. None of the forms of media that arose from the analogue production technologies of the waning Industrial Era can do that. It is a capability entirely arising from the computer-mediated production technologies of the dawning Informational Era. By not utilizing this remarkable new capability and instead simply shoveling their legacy products and services online, the Mass Media industries are, in effect, inadvertently transplanting their legacy two-dimensional products and services into newly three-dimensional media. Therefore, is it any wonder that instead most of the world’s 6.12 billion Internet consumers are using these new enterprises’ services rather than the websites of the Mass Media industries?
Because these new enterprises’ services add an entirely new dimension to media; are entirely based upon digital, rather than analog, production technologies; have become phenomenally successful popularly and financially; have just as rapidly eviscerated the Mass Media industries that preceded them; and have done so during the changeover from the Industrial to Informational eras, that I consider them to be a new genus of media, which in media management academic conferences and my classrooms are being categorically called Individuated Media. All of these new enterprises that collectively form Individuated Media are still rather nascent and will greatly change (i.e., advance) as the century progresses, but their effects on the media landscape have already become epochal.
During the late-1990s, media theorists, such as MIT Media Lab Founder Nicholas Negroponte in his 1995 book Being Digital and Roger Fidler, the former director of New Media Development for Knight-Ridder newspaper chain in the U.S. and one of the initial formulators of the Shovelware Strategy, in his 1997 book Mediamorphosis, predicted the capabilities for media mass customization would probably become possible sometime around the first decade of the 21st Century. Most Mass Media industries’ digital executives apparently couldn’t have cared less. They initially dismissed these new companies’ Individuated Media services as, at most, somehow auxiliary or adjunct to Mass Media websites: just sites helpful for finding or discussing Mass Media contents. They failed to perceive that offering consumers a third dimension (mass customization) in media, rather than just the Industrial Era’s previous two (mass production and mass reach) was an epochal advance or competition that threated their industries. That was unfortunate because surveys in recent years indicated that 6.12 billion consumers now routinely use these Individuated Media companies’ services, rather than the Mass Media industries’ websites, as those consumers primary means to obtain news, entertainment, and other information.
I believe that 2026 can be a momentous year for the Mass Media industries if only the digital executive zombies in it awake. If they are rational businesspeople, they will objectively admit the overwhelming empirical evidence that their Shovelware Strategy and work together to formulate anew based upon the new dimension in media before a growing number of Mass Media companies go out-of-business. My May 12th newsletter detailed how even a small Mass Media company can begin individuating its services.
And doing so this year is even more direly needed due to the latest advancements in Moore’s Law: Artificial Intelligence (AI). This is likely the year in which the ever-accelerating advances in computational technologies will make Moore’s Law itself obsolete. The Government of the United Kingdom’s AI Security Institute reported this month that doubling of Artificial Intelligence’s capabilities are now occurring every 4.7 months, rather than every 24 months as observed by Moore’s Law. As accelerating advances ever shorten the time between doubling of capabilities, the acceleration starts to become tetrationial rather than merely exponential. A doubling of computational power every 4.7 months means a more than thousand-fold increase in Artificial Intelligence’s already astounding capabilities by 2030.
Widespread adoption of AI in search engine services has already markedly reduced the numbers of online users who visit the Mass Media industries websites from those search engines. Moreover, widespread usage of Agentic Artificial Intelligence by consumers themselves has begun. Several recent surveys agree that more than 2.4 billion people (i.e., 30 percent of the world’s population) have already used some form of AI, and that 900 million use it weekly. A survey this year by Capgemini shows that 63 percent of American consumers actively seek ‘hyper-personalized’ contents through Agentic AI and similar AI tools.
Although hundreds of AI experiments are underway within the Mass Media industries and media schools, virtually all focus on using AI either to write stories or fabricate videos rather than on the more obvious and lucrative purpose of using Ai to further satisfy the massive demand by consumers to receive individuated feeds of news, entertainment, and other information. The Individuated Media companies themselves aren’t making that shortsighted mistake. The worldwide rise of AI usage will inevitably make the Shovelware Strategy deader than the tombstones marking all the Mass Media industries that will have needlessly died continuing to pursue that strategy.
Am I rash, hyperbolic, or unhinged to state that the Mass Media industries are being destroyed by their digital executives’ continuing adherence to an obsolete strategy? No, I’m confident that the overwhelming empirical evidence and disastrous financial results objectively validate what I state. I’m merely point out the nakedness of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’.
I had hoped that some among those digital executives would by now have demonstrated the perspicuity and leadership to have stated all this. I had likewise expected that some of the surviving New Media Pioneers (perhaps in their retirements?) might have stated all this by now. I’ve heard only silences.
If the Mass Media industries’ want to survive well into the next three quarters of this century, they direly need to find new leadership, change their online strategy, and adapt to demonstrably manifest the 21st Century media megatrends of individuation and AI.