What's with all the new media experimentation by old media companies these days, asks Kevin Maney of USA Today? Actually, he asks Dallas Mavericks owner and self-made dot-com-era billionaire Mark
Cuban, who answers--strangely--that media firms feel there's room to experiment after "having reached the safety zone." Safety zone? Who in the entire media universe feels safe and certain about
experimentation these days, I wonder. Cuban might want to rephrase that, but what I think he means is that media firms, both traditional and online, do feel some ground beneath their feet in the form
of Internet advertising. The Web's emergence as a serious contender for video ads has advertisers circling like sharks. Case in point: Disney selling out the online inventory of the final four
episodes of hit shows "Alias" " Commander in Chief," "Desperate Housewives," and "Lost" in just three days. But will these shifts to fragmentation result in media firms cannibalizing their own
revenue? Many newspaper publishers know all about this--online ads are far cheaper than print ads, and readership continues to grow apace on the Web as it steadily ebbs in the real world.
Nevertheless, forging new territory is what media companies have to do, although many would argue there is nothing "safe" about it. As movies, TV and music all migrate to downloadable and streamable
formats on the Web, one thing is for sure: production and distribution costs will go down--as will revenues!--and people will have to lose jobs that are no longer needed. I suppose what all this
translates to is that it's a particularly "good" time--don't know that I would ever say "safe"--to be in the Internet ad business right now.
Read the whole story at USA Today »
