Above, a screen shot of a blog post by Say Media CEO Matt Sanchez.
Say Media, the San Francisco publisher of ReadWrite and many other sites, is pivoting into a media tech developer and looking for buyers for its titles.
Matt Sanchez, CEO said it was hard for the company to focus on two businesses: growing its media brands and developing media technologies for media companies such as its content management system.
Lucia Moses at Digiday reported:
"When we launched Say, it was really about, how do you provide technology and services for independent media," [Matt Sanchez, CEO] said. "It was this vision of building the modern media company by building, partnering with and buying independent media companies, build the tech beneath it and think holistically about the entire media stack. We just came to the conclusion that it's very difficult to do both."
Platishers, beware: Say Media gives up on publishing - Digiday
Foremski's Take: It's hard to be a media company. Say Media is getting out at the right time because the disruption in the industry isn't confined to traditional media companies, it includes new media companies, too.
The move to mobile is killing media. That's the crux of the matter.
Advertising on mobile is a huge problem that is talked about as a huge "opportunity." Positive spins don't change the fact that publishers earn as little as one-tenth the ad money on mobile versus desktop.
Will they show ten times as many ads to make up for it? That would obscure everything on a smart phone screen.
Ads don't work well on desktop and they work even worse on mobile. The shift to mobile media is the media industry's 2nd Apocalypse, following the transition from print. The 1st Media Apocalypse is still in progress -- a decade of transition to digital is not yet done.
A paper cushion...
Traditional publishers, including the New York Times, that still have a substantial legacy print advertising business are lucky, compared to the pure digital media companies such as Say, News.com, etc. That's because print ads are going away more slowly than the lightning fast transition to mobile media content.
Say Media has done all the right things in terms of strategy for growing its media titles, and it has been quick off the mark in new types of promotional products it can offer advertisers. This experience of publishing top sites fed directly into the design of its media publishing system.
But being a media company is tough. Having to run fast in a marathon race just to stand still as ad rates continue to drop and as programmatic ad trading removes the incentives to create high quality content -- it's far easier for Say to focus on being a media tech company. But will there be enough media companies to buy its content management systems?