Altus Partner, Dave Chase, wrote a Guest Post for the leading Tech/Business site in Seattle — TechFlash. Dave has been actively involved in helping local Internet media businesses become profitable (a rarity). In this his piece Local media need dual business models, not dueling models, he draws parallels with the traditional dual business model of newspaper businesses that is rapidly becoming a solo business model with the dramatic decline in classified advertising. In today’s environment, distribution is defined less by physical distribution than it is things like quasi distribution as defined by Google PageRank.
He opens the piece as follows:
What made newspapers viable for so long was the fact that they had two products/businesses that were largely unrelated but bundled together. There was the news business — monetized by display ads — and the classifieds business — monetized by classified ads. The classified business was enabled by the distribution and audience of the news franchise.
He also highlights that most local salesforces aren’t the asset they were once thought of…
Having gotten closer to “the last mile” of the Internet, I’ve come to observe that in most situations the local sales organizations of the incumbent media are more encumbrance than asset.
He wraps up his piece as follows:
The sooner local media recognize dual business models — rather than dueling business models — the sooner we’ll see hiring rather than firing being the storyline of local media.
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