During the “Understanding Disruption” conference in April 2013, the Future Media Lab. had the opportunity to sit down with Romanus Otte, General Manager, Welt Digital at Axel Springer (Germany) to discuss the emerging business models seen in the media sector today.
FML: Future Media Lab.
RO: Romanus Otte
FML: Any ideas on the media in 2050?
RO: The year 2050 is too far away. If you look 37 years backwards, there was no internet, there were no mobile phones. I remember when I first got in touch with the internet in 1995, 18 years ago and the first time I learnt about Google was in 1999. So these companies that are incredibly important now developmentally are quite young. As such, we can only look into the foreseeable future – which is next year and maybe we have some feelings about two or three years’ time, and we try to figure out the big trends. But I am reluctant to make any assumptions about 2020 and beyond.
FML: Emerging Business Models
RO: As far as content is concerned, we are implementing a payment model. We don’t like to refer to pay walls. If you went into a shop to buy a brand you wouldn’t say there was a pay wall between you and the product. We started [charging] in late December and it is very encouraging. We see that, first of all, systems are running, and people understand the concept, even if people don’t love it, they understand why we are doing it. We are in an environment where all our competitors are free on the web in Germany – we hope that our experiences will encourage others to follow our example, but of course that is their decision.
FML: Who will write the copy and who will pay for it?
RO: I strongly believe in the role model of professional journalists – the specialists who really put all their efforts into reliable journalism. What we hope to achieve is a business model which pays journalism a living and we are convinced that this business model shouldn’t only rely on one pillar, like advertising. We don’t have any doubts about advertising, which is really strong, but we want to start to build up a second [digital] revenue stream through subscriptions.
Going forward – journalism has changed a lot in the past few years. But the core is still the same. There will be a lot of changes, driven by technology and consumer habits, but still the core is about investigating topics; it’s still about a good story and good style. It’s still about deep analysis – and knowledgeable and reliable content.
This interview is part of the recurring blog series of short interviews with representatives of different media or related sectors. Our first interviews were with Kerstin Jorna, Director, DG MARKT at the European Commission; Michiel Buitelaar, the COO of Digital Media at Sanoma Media NL; Jean-Jacques Deleeuw, Head of New Media at RTL Belux (Luxembourg); and William Higham,
Managing Director of Next Big Thing.
Image: Romanus Otte participating as a panelist in the closing panel of the Future Media Lab.’s April 2013 conference, Understanding Disruption. Photo ©Thomas Geuens.
