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Launch of the Future of Media Report 2008! We predict the media industry will be worth US$5.7 trillion in 2024

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Our Future of Media Report 2008 is now launched! (See also our extremely popular Future of Media Report 2007 and Future of Media Report 2006).

This will be given to attendees at the Future of Media Summit 2008 next week in beautiful glossy print format to take home. If for some reason you are NOT attending the Summit, you’ll have to settle for a digital version with small print-outs of the spreads (unless you happen to have a large-format printer handy…) :-)

This year we’ve taken a slightly different approach, moving away from providing statistics, and focusing on developing three frameworks to help people think about the future of media and engage in constructive conversations at the Summit. We’ve always found we get a fantastic response to our frameworks, so we focused on this as a way to create value with the report.

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Future of Media Report 2008 (pdf 1MB)

A quick overview of the report contents:

WELCOME

An introduction to the report. The full text is at the bottom of this post.

MEDIA: A GROWTH MARKET

Contains our prediction that the global media and entertainment market will grow from US$1.7 trillion this year to US$5.7 trillion in 2024 (in 2008 dollars) – released in this report – as well as information on current growth trends in advertising.

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Mark Pesce wows the Personal Democracy Forum: see Mark at Future of Media Summit 2008

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Mark Pesce is one of my favorite media visionaries. Back in the late 1990s I was a big fan of Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), which was co-invented by Mark. I proposed using it as a tool for concept representation, among other applications. Mark has since focused largely on the media space, doing some great work. I wrote about a report on IPTV by Mark last year, and his insights at a conference on public affairs we both spoke at a month or two ago.

Mark will be speaking at our forthcoming Future of Media Summit 2008 in a couple of weeks on the Future of TV and Video panel, which will be run between Silicon Valley and Sydney. I’m particularly looking forward to this panel, which will uncover how existing broadcast and cable TV is intersecting TV and video on the Internet to form an entirely new landscape.

Mark spoke earlier this week at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York. A review of the event in The Huffington Post described Mark as “the best speaker at PDF”. A brief excerpt:

In the morning the digital ethnologist Mark Pesce gave a bracing corrective to crowd wisdom. Speaking from a sociological and philosophical perspective, Pesce talked about the hyper connectivity that the internet provides. We are being asked to believe this will help political campaigns, he said. We are asked to believe things and politics will be different. “Bullshit.” Under an iconic image of Barack Obama, Pesce’s PowerPoint presentation showed YES WE CAN HAS. In other words, the fact that Barack Obama now has over a million friends on Facebook (mentioned frequently at PDF) may not be such a happy portent.

Mark Scott, Managing Director of ABC, at the Future of Media Summit: thoughts on the future of media

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The Future of Media Summit 2008 is designed to have a far broader reach and impact than for just those who attend. Part of the way we do this is to get contributions from the speakers beforehand on the Future of Media blog and websites, setting the scene for deeper discussions on the day, and providing context for those who can’t make the Summit.

The CEO Panel on predictions for the future of media will be held at 1:20 – 2:00pm in Sydney, just before the Unconference session, and will be the final session at 8:20 – 9:00pm in Silicon Valley, over drinks. Panelists for this session include Mark Scott, Managing Director of Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Mark’s pre-event contribution is two papers:

* A recent op-ed on the role of the ABC in 2020 that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald.

* The ABC in the digital age – Towards 2020, about the ABC’s shift to digital media.

The ABC shares with a few other organizations such as the BBC and CBC the special issues of public broadcasters in a rapidly shifting world. The papers describe the evolving role of publicly funded media in a world awash with information, and the steps the ABC will take to fulfill that role, including the new digital channels it will implement.

Below are a few excerpts from the papers that are particularly worth highlighting in the lead-up to the Future of Media Summit:

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UK and Australia lead the world in online advertising per capita

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Techcrunch has just published a very interesting analysis of valuations of social networks. Here is its methodology:

Our model takes Comscore data for available countries and regions. We’ve graphed each of 26 well known social networks with the data we have been able to collect. We’ve then calculated the average advertising spend (estimated by PriceWaterhouseCoopers in a recent report ) for each person online in each of those countries. For example, in the U.S., the total 2008 estimated Internet advertising spend is $25.2 billion. We’ve divided that by the number of people online in the U.S. according to Comscore (191 million), to get an average Internet spend per person of $132.

I have charted the figures of interactive advertising spend per Internet user from this data below.

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Source: Techcrunch, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Comscore

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Radio National interview: The state of Australia startups and major online media players

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Last Thursday’s Media Report on ABC Radio National features an extended interview with me on the state of Australian Web 2.0 and major online media (there is both a podcast and transcript available from the link). Some of the points we covered:

Major online media players

* The well-publicized challenges of NineMSN (the Australian 50/50 jiont venture between Microsoft and PBL Media) are partly company-specific, and partly a reflection of the difficulties of the incumbent position.

* Australia’s major media companies have done far better than their international peers in dominating online news (and other aspects of the online space including classifieds). Blogs and micro-publishing are now finally taking off, taking market share from the majors, leading to the major online publishers losing readers in a growing market. The long tail is the natural distribution of readers, and it has always been inevitable that the majors would lose their dominant market share.

* In media conglomerates that are experiencing revenue challenges in traditional channels such as TV, newspapers, and magazines, expectations for growth in the online business are often unrealistic, leading to disappointments when budgets are not met.

* PBL Media, which owns 50% of NineMSN, is 75% owned by private equity company CVC Capital Partners. Private equity companies, for reasons including their debt structure, are often biased to short-term over long-term revenue, relative to their listed company peers. This leads to pressures on management and staff, which can make attracting and retaining staff more difficult when other companies are enjoying participating in a rapidly growing market. The 50/50 ownership structure doesn’t make things easier.

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Registrations open for Future of Media Summit 2008 – Sydney early bird still on

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The Future of Media Summit 2008 is now open for registration in both Sydney and Silicon Valley. After the great success of the Future of Media Summit 2006 and Future of Media Summit 2007, the third annual event is quickly rolling up!

See Future of Media Summit 2008 website for full details.

Note that there is an early bird offer for the Sydney Summit until June 16, then full price applies.

There’s too much to cover in one blog post, so I’ll be providing more detail on everything that’s happening in coming days and weeks. However some of the key features of the event include:

* Simultaneous events in Silicon Valley and Sydney merged seamlessly by video, online discussion, and cross-continental panels and conversations

* Highly participatory Conference AND Unconference formats at both Sydney and Silicon Valley events

* Discussions on global media strategies, future of journalism, future of privacy, and the future of TV and video

* Peer video discussions by participants across continents (world-first)

* Prediction markets on the future of the media before and during the Summit to tap collective wisdom of event participants and global media leaders

* Future of Media Summit blog for insights and discussion by all speakers and participants

* Detailed content and analysis, including the Future of Media Report 2008

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