May 14, 2015--"Mobile Is Now a Magic Word"

Thus proclaimed the New York Times yesterday in two articles above the fold about Verizon's $4 billion dollar deal to acquire AOL.

Remember AOL's dial-up days? Well, that remnant of AOL's business wouldn't be worth $4 bill, but its lesser-known mobile and advertising technology is. At least to Verizon.

We'll see. Remember the Time Warner-AOL merger? From that disastrous situation Verizon should beware.

It appears that this time the deal is all about mobile. Since people are turning more to their mobile devices (smart phones and such) than their clunky PCs and laptops, everyone in the IT business is trying to figure out how to make money off those tiny screens. Traditional ads don't work so well in five-inch formats so what to do?

In Verizon's case scoop up AOL. In the case of traditional news companies and magazines, both of which are turning quickly into dinosaurs, it appears that they are scrambling to move as fast as they can beyond their digital offerings (like the NY Times on line) because these, though making some money, are not making enough to sustain high-cost operations such as the Times beyond the next few years.

So with newspapers such as the Times and the Wall Street Journal and networks such as NBC News realizing that young people especially--the Holy Grail for some reason for advertisers--are getting most of their news from places like Facebook, they are trying to figure out what to do--even at their potential peril. And so they are moving to make deals with Facebook which would allow them to publish some of their products--articles in the case if the Times and WSJ, and video content in the case of NBC. With or without ads since the reason NBC and the Times are agreeing to do this is the hope that mobile users will see what they are missing by not reading the whole NY Times or tuning in to the Nightly News to watch whomever will wind up replacing Brian Williams.

Traditional media have no choice because, as the Times reports, "That's where the audience is." The fear, of course, is that Facebookers will read one feed on Facebook from the Times and rather than race to subscribe to the paper's on-line edition, will feel that they got enough. They now know more about what is going on in Saudi Arabia but have no interest in anything else. So why pay the Times a monthly subscriber free when they can get what they want for free via Facebook.

The Times already represents from 14 to 16 percent of all Facebook traffic--amazing and counter-intuitive--and so they are gambling that this new arrangement will net them more direct readers.

Again, we'll see.

Facebook already plays a gatekeeper role in regard to the news available to members. Including what they choose to put on line from the Times. So who knows what the result of all this reconfiguration will be. It could work for the paper of record or accelerate putting them out of business.

So where does that leave me? I've been running Behind the (New York) Times for nearly 10 years. Thus far I've published 2,582 posts. Will this mean that if I want to try to keep my blogging going for another decade, with the Times relegated to spot appearances on Facebook, that I'll be needing to call what I do something else?

Say Faceless.com or Saving Face.com or, my current favorite, Face It.com.

All suggestions are welcome.