Internet To Save/Destroy Traditional Media; Britney Spears, You To Help
Magazines are dying and the web is surging, but maybe there is a web ad bust on the way, and also maybe the web is what is killing magazines, or maybe no one reads anymore, and (former Gawker managing editor) Choire Sicha is trying to figure it all out in today's Observer. He's also trying to figure out Rolling Stone's Britney Spears cover and New York's Lindsay Lohan cover, the two most important magazine covers of this century. But, about that Rolling Stone piece—we all saw the good bits, because they were leaked, by RS, to Perez, but maybe we mostly missed the more "important" thinky bits of Vanessa Grigoriadis' story, because RS only put the first 606 words on their website? Regardless, Rolling Stone had their "best week ever in the history of the Web site," even without the story. So maybe all they needed were the photo galleries? "Until the people on the business side are sure they're going to replace that revenue, that's how it's going to be," says an editor. Maybe we don't actually need content anymore, just the idea of content? That will save everyone a bit of time and money!
According to Esquire's web editor, "80 to 90 percent of people that visit the Web sites for magazines neither buy nor subscribe nor have anything to do with the print publications," which he calls "counterintutive," though it really makes perfect sense to us. Esquire has a bit of a relationship with Yahoo, which has led to occasional traffic spikes, like the ones this site receives when AOL places one of our items on its home page. Popular Mechanics now puts things on the web and ties them to movies and things, and their traffic benefits when they go hard on Diggable stories. New York's Lindsay Lohan pictures presumably did very well for their website, considering it crashed under the traffic on Monday.
These peaks and valleys, dependent on things that are popular in spite of their debatable aesthetic or intellectual quality, doesn't really seem like a sustainable model for media, at least in terms of paying people to create intelligent, professional content, paying other people to place this content either on paper or in magic electrons, and then charging still different people to consume it. But what do we know! We're bloggers, like Anderson Cooper and Rosie O'Donnel. Maybe this post should've been a photo gallery?
