• Snot Flickerman
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    1 day ago

    EDIT:https://whattheythink.com/news/22401-2004-marks-strongest-close-magazine-advertising-since/

    In the mid-2000’s traditional advertising was still doing gangbusters. They absolutely had options to invest in other revenue streams, and they chose not to for over a decade. They could have been invested in this stuff by the mid-90’s but they didn’t want to. We can stop making excuses for why they lost all that revenue when it’s their own shitty decisions and unwillingness to change with the times.

    Facebook launched their first ad offerings in 2004. This was a choice by traditional media to let new media eat their lunch. We can stop making excuses for their bad business decisions. The iPhone wouldn’t exist for three more years.


    Being unwilling to change your business model for twenty years is a huge part of it yeah.

    Yep, you’ll keep losing fucking money if you’re too dumb to think of a new way to make money.

    What you described is the same as I described, with a lot of handwaving away of the endless shitty decisions of management at these industry groups and an almost outright refusal to pursue new revenue streams until it was too late.

    They could have been the first to market with things like that, but they never invested in them, opting to “nail a TV to the wall” than hire engineers to compete on the internet.

    What was stopping these groups from developing better ad targeting? They didn’t want to have to, they thought they could just use the money and muscle of their position to keep it.

    They literally at one point had the money to poach engineers from Facebook, Google, Apple, et. al. but it was never something they cared to invest in until they no longer had money to be able to invest in it.

    When my companies CEO flew in to our town on his private jet in 2004 to tell us nobody was getting raises until the industry was doing better, I knew traditional media was cooked. The people who run the show were too fucking stupid, slow, and self-interested to look ahead.

    They literally had 25 years to figure this out.