Interactive deliverance: Vin Crosbie, Internet pioneer and professional contrarian, strenuously objects to publishers forsaking new media in these post-bubble days. His advice? Abandon the web and prepare for what's next

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Jan, 2002 by Jimmy Guterman

Vin Crosbie likes lighting matches, throwing them at polite industry conversations, and seeing what happens.

As the president and managing partner of Digital Deliverance, a six-year-old consultancy based in Greenwich, Connecticut, Crosbie has worked with publishers ranging from Advance Publications to the late New Century Network consortium of newspapers. His mission: to help them master the nuances of digital circulation.

Crosbie's background is steeped in media, both traditional and newfangled. He's spent time at wire services Reuters and UPI, and was present at the creations of two pioneering interactive ventures: Delphi Internet (the first Internet-enabled online service) and Freemark (the first free e-mail service). While he sees a rich future for magazines in new media, he thinks the Web is the wrong place to be. Folio: recently spoke to Crosbie about why publishers' thinking is misguided thinking, why Newsstand.com is doomed to be the Pointcast of its time, and how e-paper and wireless will revolutionize the business. He apologizes if his comments are truculent--but, he says, "It's early and I haven't had my coffee yet."

What's the current state of magazines on the Net?

Think of an animal that's been afraid to do something for many years and is now quivering in fear. Think of sheep. Magazines are sheepish regarding the Net. They were afraid to get in and now they're bleating with pleasure because they're so glad they didn't go into the Net too deeply.

But some did get in quite deeply.

There were some misguided experiments like [Time Warner's] Pathfinder.

That was a long time ago. Many other magazines have committed to the Net since then.

Among mass media, the ones that went into the Web in a big way were the ones that published most frequently. That's newspapers and broadcasters engineering the Web train, with magazines acting as the caboose. So some magazines have been protected a bit from the huge financial losses that newspapers and broadcasters suffered on the Web.

The thing is that magazine publishers are still defining the problem, not the solution. Over the last eight years the magazine industry has been taking the Web route, thinking the Web is the only way to publish online. We're going to see some radical solutions in the next few years that will be a lot more successful; the same techniques, but going in a different direction.

What is the next direction?

We've just finished the second wave of expiration online. The first wave, from about 1984 to 1992, was the era of the proprietary online services: AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, Delphi and Genie. The Web wiped out all that because it offered significant advantages. A publisher didn't have to make a deal with an online service; a reader did not have to subscribe to a particular online service.

But it turns out that there are a lot of things the Web can't do. HTML [the programming language underlying the Web] is incapable of handling display advertising. You can't do picture-quality advertising that way. Sure, you can do Flash or Shockwave, but the Web is not capable of fine-quality picture stuff, so advertising has been limited to banner advertising. Banners are very poor, the Neanderthals of display advertising.

Print advertising operates on the economics of scarcity. Web advertising operates according to the opposite dynamic: the economics of surplus. A magazine has finite pages. If it doubles its circulation, it doesn't have to double the number of ads it sells to keep up. The magazine just raises the ad rate per page. But if a magazine Web site doubles its traffic, the Web site has to sell twice as many ads to keep up.

Okay, you've buried the second wave. What's the third wave?

For the Net to work for magazines, it has to be able to deliver better graphical quality. Maybe newspapers can put up with crude text and still pictures online, but magazines need better display capabilities online. Magazines will work on the Net when the Net is capable of delivering an intact, complete edition. Period. It has to be a portable medium, too. People are not going to do their reading on a PC screen chained to their desk or carrying a heavy laptop. We need to look toward a portable device or e-paper. And it must be wireless. People won't want to synchronize multiple devices all the time just to read their magazines.

How will this solve the economic issues you've described?

If you're sending subscribers a display edition with a finite number of ads, you're not selling banner ads anymore. You're selling based on scarcity again, and you might finally make money.

Every magazine should publish a Web site for archival use and as away to get and manage subscriptions. But Web sites won't be the future of the magazines that want to distribute themselves electronically in smart, profitable ways. I guarantee it.

What will the format be?

It won't be PDF-based, I think, because [portbale document files] are too huge. In the medium term it might be Microsoft Reader. The files are smaller and Microsoft is intending to incorporate it into its Office suite in the next version. Then it will compete with Acrobat [PDF] in a big way.