Perfect Storm

Posted by Steve Yelvington (via Poynter.org)

"News sites are having a great year, with soaring revenues and profits. But media companies more broadly face "the perfect storm of the Internet," said Chris Schroeder, VP of strategy for the Washington Post Company and former publisher of Washingtonpost.com, in his keynote address this morning at the E&P/Mediaweek Interactive Media conference in Atlanta.

Traditional media are aggregators at heart, and now face an array of new aggregator-competitors on the Internet. Disaggregators are building new businesses that chip away at content as well as advertising; even sports teams are running their own web destinations. And new forces are aggregating services that previously were scattered -- LendingTree, TicketMaster, and others.

To survive this storm, Schroeder said, it's essential for sites to focus on delivering quality audiences through registration and behavioral targeting, and to focus on content that delivers nuance and not just commodity data."

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