Horizontal to vertical redux
Posted: February 21st, 2008, by Mike ShatzkinMichael Cader was kind enough to alert me to a Forbes story about Nike http://www.forbes.com/sportsbusiness/forbes/2008/0211/082.html
This demonstrates another aspect of a theme I think is the dominant reality of how media is changing, from the 20th century’s “horizontal and format specific” to the 21st century’s “vertical and format agnostic.”
The post explains that Nike used to be organized by type of product (shoes, apparel…) and now is reorganizing by the consumer activity (tennis, running, skateboarding.)
Aside from the inherent logic here for Nike — when you’ve sold somebody tennis sneakers, you are more likely to next sell them tennis shorts, not running or basketball shoes — there’s another important message for publishers as all the world moves from horizontal (what Nike used to be) to vertical.
As they were positioned before, any publisher would find it hard to provide Nike with good content for their web efforts. (How much — and what — do people want to read about “shoes”, or “shorts”?) As they become logically vertical in respect to their audience, they also inherently organize their audience so that they can easily present content to people who will want to see it. And that enables a more logical interaction between Nike and any content creator. As retailers and manufacturers reposition themselves into logical verticals, they become a much better fit for content, and that is good for publishers.
Publishers will shift from horizontal to vertical organization because their own horizontal channels are atrophying, but they will also find growing markets as their content is organized the way the world really is. And that’s vertical.
February 22nd, 2008 at 3:27 am
How does this look in a fiction house?
February 22nd, 2008 at 4:25 am
This has already happened to a large extent in business and professional publishing. Reed Elsevier’s decision yesterday to sell its magazines business and concentrate on workflow modelling in chosen verticals - in other words , rediscover how customers work and sell them services and solutions, not unrelated content - is symptomatic of this . But the question remains - can we understand consumer requirement in the network with sufficient accuracy to prepare vertical content for them , or will we provide them with dashboards and options, see where they drive , and then fuuly customize around them. We are still closer to the beginning of network publishing than to any mature model.
February 23rd, 2008 at 10:01 am
To ML: Fiction niches too. There are fiction omnivores, but there are far more who loyally read genres. Or selected authors. But fiction and memoir and belles lettres are much more handicapped by the shift from horizontal to vertical than travel or computer books or knitting books.
If you are a fiction publisher, you’re going to have to think more about building on specific successes than you ever did before, because making things happen “from scratch” will be come increasingly difficult.
Mike
February 23rd, 2008 at 10:04 am
To David Worlock:
Your observation that we are nearer to the beginning of network publishing than to any mature model is the important point. May I say: FAR nearer! I think as we get closer to mature models, the path for the fiction publisher like ML will become clearer.
Incidentally, Timo Hannay of Nature did a great presentation at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change on applying what he’s learned from his online science experience to fiction publishing. Slides for that are probably up on TOC’s website.
Mike
February 24th, 2008 at 3:37 am
Mike-
Excellent observation. As the world moves from hierarchies to networks, the communities create themselves around like interests, pulsating nodes on the networks if you will. Why wouldn’t businesses organize around their customers?
As a futurist submitting a book proposal, I was stunned to hear my agent tell me that one publishing house, though they liked the proposal, rejected my book proposal because they already had a futurist that they published. That works with wifes and husbands, but is idiotic in business.
David
February 25th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Mike, you’re so completely right about this. Years ago when I started at Muze, we created this great taxonomy of book subjects - using the BISAC subjects, of course, but going on from there.
To answer the concerns about non-genre fiction - we created a list of themes. Mothers and daughters, for example. Interfaith families. Man against nature. Obsession. And you could enter the title of a book you enjoyed, and then click on the themes and get results back of other fiction titles that centered on those themes.
Syndetics does this too, as does NoveList, to a degree.
As vertical reorientation happens, particularly with the shift from relational databases to XML repositories for content, rigorous attention has to be paid to the strictures of taxonomies and tagging. Be good to your categories and your categories will be good to you.