Traditional media vs. online media gatekeepers

The race between traditional media and online media

2000/05/07 - By Digital Wall Wong Fong Yu - Keywords/tags: e-commerce, search engine, broadband, community, portal, ISP, online media, B2B, B2C, branding, Yahoo!

The Internet has developed commercially for over four years now, and at this stage the industry is now reaching maturity. If the whole industry from the beginning of commercialization to the development of mature is a long road, this road is now about to reach the end. At least, we have seen where the end is.

The main reason why I say this is to observe the development trend of the U.S. network industry, has returned to focus on the fundamentals of the network company, emphasizing the ability to make a profit. And the general environment has been a hundred industries online, traditional companies began to buy the phenomenon of network companies. The end of this road is in fact every company to become a network of companies, B2C e-commerce is integrated into the traditional brand, because the entity combined with the virtual can provide the best service. And because of this, B2B e-commerce is highly developed.

Although the development trend of the whole industry has been quite clear, because of the different media environments and political and economic structures in different countries, the development of the Internet is often unexpected. Take the traditional media and online media competing with each other on the Internet, and the situation in the US and Taiwan is very different.

Basically, the US Internet was not born out of nowhere. The culture of the land, coupled with a high degree of technological development, took quite some time to accumulate before the Internet was born. That is to say, the American society stood its horse on top of the new field of the Internet. For that society, whether the Internet develops into a platform for media or business, it is only the result of a high degree of social and cultural development.

On the other hand, the development of other countries, almost all of them are directly transplanted from the U.S. experience in the past, and it is conceivable that the situation is not suitable for the local community. I have said before, the United States took four years to evolve from search engines to online media, and then to e-commerce finally entered the B2B era, these things in other countries may be compressed in two years to happen. These things may be compressed into two years in other countries. Other countries start late and directly copy the success of the United States without asking whether it is appropriate, so the time is often compressed. Whereas it takes time for a society to mature.

Yahoo! is a very clear example of this, and can be said to be in the field of the network above and come early and coincidentally, running far ahead of the traditional industry. He is constantly innovating the content of services on the network, or buying potential emerging services for themselves with a precise vision. Traditional media in the United States initially underestimated the power of this force from the Internet, and when they realized that something was wrong, they found it difficult to catch up. Yahoo! has raised a lot of money by going public and getting a very high market value, so on the one hand, it has enough ammunition to fight the war or buy arms, and on the other hand, its market value is so high that traditional media can't really buy it.

In addition, the distributed nature of the web makes the threshold of success for online media higher than for traditional media. That is to say, to create a monopoly or oligopoly in the field of online media, the effort required is greater than that of traditional media. There are many factors to create this kind of oligopoly, including the project of network service, the amount of network content, the mastery of access (such as dialing user name, or logistics and gold flow, etc.), cross-media exchange of mutual resources, and so on. In order for a media group that started from the Internet to have such a wide range of orientations, the resources behind it and the timing are very important. AOL is an example of a company that started out as an ISP, moved into online communities and content and services, and then was given the ability by the capital markets to take the last piece of the puzzle - traditional media content - and buy Time Warner.

From the example of AOL, the combination of traditional media and online media is inevitable, and the result will be an unprecedented media behemoth, from the moment you turn on the TV, to the username you dial to connect to the Internet, to the content you watch after you go online, the media conglomerate has it all. You may ask, then from the traditional media, cut into the network media business, is not it more advantageous than these media from the Internet home? That's right, this is the U.S. environment and Taiwan's most different places, in addition to the timing, the network company's ability to raise capital to create a decisive difference.

The painful experience of traditional media in the US has alerted other media groups around the world to cut into this space early. Originally, Taiwan could have stabilized after four years like the US. The problem is that Taiwan's online businesses simply don't have four years before traditional media groups have a foot in the door. Coupled with the fact that stocks can't be listed to raise funds and other factors, it will be especially hard to fight with these traditional media in the future. Of course, at present, with the traditional media advantage of the portal, in the long run will indeed be more competitive.

In the next six months to a year, Taiwan will enter the era of fixed-line telephony. This is a very different place from the United States. Taiwan's narrow and densely populated, the island's cable TV lines, the public has long been accustomed to using the two media groups monopoly cable TV lines and watch their programs. Taiwan's media conglomerates even hold the advantage of gold flow behind the future, regardless of Access (cable broadband), media content, network services, e-commerce, and strong capital, etc., are extremely considerable advantages. The existing portal ranking may be reshuffled at any time due to such competition. Don't forget that Taiwan's current Internet population is only 5 million, while the population without Internet access is 15 million, and these people could start accessing the Internet at any time because of fixed-line telephony.

The portals, the online media, that are currently on the table are basically not without a chance. It is a matter of who runs fast. There is still some time from now until the fixed-line environment matures, and now online media such as Chima Station, PC Home Online, Sina.com, Dreamer, etc., should be aware that their rivals are no longer each other, but from the traditional forces.

Do you think there is a chance that any of the major Taiwanese online media outlets that I mentioned above will buy ETTV or Hutchison? Isn't it more likely the other way around? Taiwan's political and economic structure allows these traditional media groups to hold huge resources on the island. In the US, the second- and third-ranked online media have either been bought out or left to find new horizons in Asia, with only the No. 1 Yahoo! still standing. Coming early and coincidentally, coupled with the right direction and strong firepower, are all indispensable factors for success. These factors are lacking in Taiwan's current online media, and the future will be tough. (Text: Huang Fangyu)

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The article quoted above is for the comparison and correlation between media and the Internet. If you are referring only to the gatekeeping of literary works, then it is a different matter, and the Internet gatekeeping requirements are elegant and popular***, in line with the trend of fashion, to keep up with the fast-paced pace of the Internet. Keeping up with the fast-paced pace of the network; while the media is to strive for knowledge and fun compatible, the requirements of the deeper aspects of knowledge, not more than the network of randomness and flexibility, often in this fast-paced era subject to certain limitations.