Poor Glenn Milne. More than 12,000 people have watch him make a goose of himself at the Walkley Awards last night thanks to YouTube. The footage at YouTube is more powerful than any of the stories written. It’s a perfect example of the disruption traditional media faces from new technology and the desire for unfiltered content.
We have published a new viral ad, it’s more of a social comment piece than a viral ad, at YouTube. Stalking Yellow represents the pressure small businesses feel from the Yellow Pages sales people. It also reinforces the small business credentials of Find It, our online classifieds site promoted in the video.
“The beauty of the Australian magazine market has always been that entry to it was reasonably uninhibited.” Publishers Australia executive director Chris Tchakalian
He was quoted by Sally Jackson in The Australian yesterday. By “uninhibited” he means that newsagents wore the costs. We take new titles, pay who all the stock we are sent, put them o the shelves, return what we don’t sell and wait a month or two for a credit for the returns to come back to us. New titles are often cash-flow negative for a year, sometimes more. Tchakalian goes on…
“You can have the best magazine going but the public will never see it,” he said.
“What you will see is a crippling of the opportunities to launch new titles by the medium to small publisher …
The best way for niche publishers to get their product in front of consumers is to respect newsagents and deal with them on commercial terms. The current magazine model does not respect newsagents for these niche titles. These publishers want us to consider them as charity cases. No. Thanks to decades of this charity work newsagents need some charity of their own. Niche publishers need to either run by business principles or close down. The current situation cannot continue.
I wish Sally Jackson had spoken to newsagents about this problem with niche titles. I’d like her to read my magazine cash-flow report and see the evidence of the cost of these titles of small businesses which can ill-afford such an impost.