Interview with Anton Nosik

1. The complexity of online media business.
2. The problem of the offset point of consumption by users of information.
3. What content should I bet on?
4. How to differentiate when creating online media?

Michael:   Hello. In the air "Startup Wednesday". Today we are talking with Anton Borisovich Nosik. Anton, hello!
Anton:   Good day!
Michael:   Anton, you ran Runet's leading media and therefore, today I would like to talk specifically about the online media business. Although, of course, you can talk about a lot of things, and I think it is possible to conduct this program for a day or two. Since there have been many media projects, maybe the next one will be in this area? Generally what are you working on now?
Anton:   If you are talking about my projects ...
Michael:   It is about those.
Anton:   I do not exclude the possibility of creating new mass media in this life, but the niches that should be taken up in this area, unfortunately, the further, the more narrowed. While niches for creating projects in the field of e-commerce, payments, e-government, interaction, geolocation, photo hosting - these niches are expanding, the niche for creating professional high-quality content collapses. It is becoming less and less attractive for investment, more and more costly, and all the less obvious reasons why someone would like to do this on the Internet. This is a passing nature, it is a dying market in which, over time, players will become less, not more.
Michael:   Now it is very difficult to create a good media, bring it to the TOP, make it profitable?
Anton:   About a thousand times more complicated than it was when I created Lenta.ru in the 99th year or Gazeta.ru in the 98th.
Michael:   If we talk about the ideal media, how do you see the media of the future? Will it somehow adapt to the person?
Anton:   It is already being adjusted today, simply not the fact that the media in the future is a delivery channel. After all, our traditional idea of ​​the media, first offline, and then on the Internet, was that the media - this is the place where you go, and there they tell you. This is such a newspaper that you buy, you leaf it, and this newspaper tells you, because you leaf it. This is the site you came to and read the news that was on this site.
Unfortunately for online media publishers, this format is dying, this paradigm is dying. She died already because today there are two of the world's most visited and read media in the English language: this is Yahoo! News and Google News. Neither there nor a single text is produced. These are just the delivery channels for news produced anywhere, to the consumer. If we talk about the Russian market, then the three leading Russian online media outlets are not Lenta.Ru, RIA Novosti and Gazeta.Ru, but this, excuse me, - Yandex News, Mail.ru News, "Rambler News". This is the delivery of information not produced by them. If we talk about the volume of consumption, about the activity of news consumers, then we will have to add such sites as, on a global scale, Facebook, on a Russian scale, in Contact. People gradually learn to read news from any source there by subscribing to that source there. You can read Forbes, you can read the newspaper "Life". Both of these can be read in the Facebookbook without ever going to the Forbes website or to the website of the Life newspaper. By and large, online media as a site where you come to read is already yesterday.
Michael:   If I understand correctly, is it still possible to create media, somehow differentiating?
Anton:   Yes, definitely.
Michael:   By what criteria would you advise to differentiate if, after all, someone decides to work in this area?
Anton:   Come up with. Think of how the dying model of the arrival of people on your site can be revived. What kind of arguments can make people come to your site when they have already retrained to read everything either in Yandex or in VKontakte. How to explain to them that I have to go to? “RIA Novosti” you already read in Yandex, “Interfax” you already read in VKontakte, and to me you still go to the site. What needs to be done for this? Question.
In addition, when I say the word "site", I still do not mean the site as a page that you open in a browser. I still, first of all, mean as a mobile application, because it is up to half of the news content consumed on the mobile application, and will continue to strive for 100% of the consumption of the same content through mobile devices. Agree that it is much more convenient to read in the Kommersant phone if you are traveling in a bus or subway, than opening a newspaper or opening a tablet and opening a website there.
Michael:   If you take a model for which many bets were previously made, User generated content, is it possible in this model (content produced by users, likes, dislikes, karma system) to create businesslike media?
Anton:   For God's sake! There are a huge number of them, they succeed in America as a business character. Just put in a single room a thousand exchange speculators and quarrel among themselves, and through the mechanisms of karma, reveal among them those insiders who possess information, possess the gift of foresight, and therefore it is interesting to read them. It works, it boils, it is also reproduced here. I will not talk about Bloomberg, but we also have an investor forum, a forum of speculators, communities. It all works. A niche story, where representatives of the same niche want to communicate with each other, is, of course, yes, but it is still a niche story. If we talk about content generated by the user as a way to produce high-quality content that would compete with RIA Novosti, Reuters, and Bloomberg. For God's sake, if we take the whole range of user generated content, primarily offline blogs. If we take any one site that wants to use User generated content to challenge RIA Novosti or Bloomberg, it will never work. In order to get a ton of useful reading material from a ton of ore, she will have to switch to working on filtering this content from a huge stream of garbage instead of producing high-quality content. And this is the same manual, the same expensive work. Therefore, Bloomberg, Reuters and RIA Novosti have money for it.
Michael:   As for monetization, then, as I understand it, the main model is media advertising, contextual advertising and in general.
Anton:   The main model is the media model.
Michael:   Is the user in Russia ready for a paid subscription?
Anton:   Not.
Michael:   Will it be ready?
Anton:   It will not be ready until you figure out what to pay him. As soon as you figure out what the person should pay for, he immediately, with joy and gratitude, starts paying you and starts to be grateful to you for giving him that.
Michael:   Model distribution of magazines through the iPad?
Anton:   Yes, the magazine distribution model via iPad. If this is not only cool, but also not stupid, then this is generally a very good income. The arithmetic of applications for both iOS and Android is that a month after the initial download, the download application is opened for the second time - 36% of cases. 64% of the applications that people have downloaded and installed in themselves, they open once.
Michael:   This is a pretty good indicator, I think.
Anton:   64% they open once and never again! In 64% of the installation is equivalent to "looked and threw out." This means that 36% remains for the first month, 4% remains for the 12th month. 4% of applications installed a year ago are still in use today. 96% of what was established a year ago today no one remembers how it was called, that he put it, that he needed it for some reason. Compare it, excuse me, with Microsoft Office, compare it with Photoshop, compare it with Windows, compare it with Mac OS. From sites: compare this with “Lenta.Ru”, with “Gazeta.Ru”, which people used 12 years ago, as they use it today. With regard to applications for iOS and Android - 96% of what you thought a year ago that you needed it, downloaded, bought, installed, 96% of this turned out to be unnecessary for you during the year. So you just scored on it. So here's the name of the game - do it so that you are not hammered, do so that it is interesting. So, the vertical PDF, the vertical Esquire bar, as it is in the Esquire format, turned PDF into a smaller bar on the 9.7-inch iPad screen - this is, sorry, dung and sucks, because this layout means that when you start to increase it, then part of the text just fits over the screen.
Michael:   But now interactive magazines are doing well.
Anton:   Here! It is necessary to do interactive magazines. We must do so that people enjoy the pleasure of paging. We must do so that it is not the same pleasure every day. It is necessary to do so that the pleasure that you received today was different from the pleasure that you received yesterday, that you were interested, that it was meaningful, that it still reminded you that a new way to poke around in this story came out. We all look after Rupert Murdoch and his edition The Daily, which continues not only journalistic work, but also continues technical development, offering more and more new toys within the downloadable module. Do you know how The Daily works? 99 cents is a weekly subscription, $ 34 is a subscription per year. This is a daily full-fledged textual multimedia American newspaper, in which there are articles, in which there are photos, in which there is a video, in which there are games, crosswords, sudoku, interactive, in which there are three-dimensional photos, panoramic, which you can twist, in which there is animated advertising. This is an attempt to publish an iPad-only newspaper, taken by Rupert Murdoch for his money in partnership with Apple. It was noisily running, but we are waiting for it to burn.
Michael:   In general, on what kind of plan is the content worth betting now?
Anton:   On the content about which you know exactly what kind of market it has, who these people are, who make up this market, where they live, and how to get them to fork out. That this content makes sense. If you are an oil industry worker, and you know about the reading circle of people in the oil industry, what they read, how often they read it, how their lives determine it, you can create media about oil that will be readable and in demand. And they themselves will go there to give advertising, knowing who the other is reading it. If you are not an oilman, if you just fell from the bullshit onto this market and say: “Oh! We have few publications about oil. Let's make a publication about oil, and everything will be fine. " So, maybe they are few because oilmen are not interested in reading? If you do not know this, then it is better for you not to draw conclusions based on unfamiliarity with the subject area.
Michael:   If we talk about television, then it is now quite actively degrading, in my opinion. Gradually.
Anton:   It is already degrading years 70.
Michael:   Do you see the future of television in the form in which it is now?
Anton:   Of course of course. Television ... Our life expectancy is increasing. We have more and more old people who have nowhere to put themselves. And television is increasingly becoming pensioner television, television for people who have nowhere to go. It becomes such an irrelevant media with dominant formats, such as Malakhov, such as Dom-2. From there the news must go, because to whom the news is interesting, that the television format is not interesting. Analytics should go from there, high-quality cinema should go from there. If you download in America in iTunes, then in Russia there are also a lot of stores today, all Russian film classics are available for free from the Mosfilm cinema concern. There are premieres on now.ru for money, on ivi.ru for free with advertising.
Michael:   YouTube   recently launched too with us.
Anton:   Well, they have Hulu , which is not available to us at all. There is Netflix, which more or less started from renting a DVD by mail, and now more and more online streaming. There ARPU, in my opinion, today $ 30. That is, it is the revenue per user per month in Netflix. They sell the subscription to you for 4.25, and then you have seen $ 30 a month.
The fact that television showed us a movie, all that is left for this is only broadcasting, and, you understand, go out to watch broadcasts in HD. It will not be a decimeter-frequency television broadcasting meter, and it will be NTV, TV-sport, HD. These will be all paid subscriptions. As a matter of fact, I am talking about this in the future tense, but, nevertheless, if you look in America who is fighting with anyone, there is generally a decimeter and meter - there is no such thing. All cable and people pay in the package. Why is Dr. House filmed at all? “Doctor House” will be removed, so that people subscribe to the entrance, so that people watch it, because this is business.
Michael:   Many are interested in money, questions about the cost of the project. Approximately what number of budget is needed to launch a project, say, BFM?
Anton:   This figure can not be said ...
Michael:   Naturally, it is impossible.
Anton:   Because it is a media market, it is not an economic market, it is a market with a huge number of attendant factors. BFM, let me remind you, was created within the framework of the holding, which at that time was attended by paper newspapers, a paper magazine, the second FM-license. And the main asset was Business FM radio station, which at that time was very successful growing and profitable. So BFM was created as the fifth brother in the family, this determined its value and the ambitions of those who created it. If BFM was created in the open field ...
Michael:   It would not be otherwise.
Anton:   Because it was created this way, that is why the million dollars that was invested in its creation and the year of operation were very cheap. But if it was created in an open field, then everything would be different. In the open field, the same people would sit without an office, write from home, it would be saved on everything that is possible. And it would not be a million dollars, but it would be $ 200,000. But at the same time, he would never have earned, because in the first or second year BFM received its main money as an advertisement package from the radio station “Business FM”. That is, not because of what a good site, but because of what a good radio station, that its advertisers are also ready on the site.
Michael:   We also have an audience, right?
Anton:   Yep Therefore, there is no such figure as “the cost of creating media”, but simply on the basis of what you create this media. Before you, Kommersant launched Kommersant FM first by the same people who made Business FM at one time, then it launched Kommersant TV, in particular, your humble servant participated in the Pilot Production project. On the basis of Kommersant, having a commercial resource, all this was done several million dollars cheaper than it would have been done in an open field from scratch, if it had been done without Kommersant, as a founder. In this case, all this would be absolutely not so interesting in terms of prospects.
Michael:   If you try to talk a little bit about the future of the projects in which you worked, for example, about LJ. How do you see its development?
Anton:   As I see the development of LiveJournal, it is not so important, because I currently do not work in the company "Soup". Much more interesting, as sees the development of LJ his leader, for example, Ilya Dronov, because LJ will be done now a huge amount of everything. Over the next year, there will be a complete technological overhaul of everything. Not in the sense that you look at LJ and you don’t recognize it.
Michael:   Is it technological or the concept will change?
Anton:   No, how can the concept change? The concept of LiveJournal is people keep diaries. And these people, if they themselves do not decide to change their concept, and instead of diaries, start chatting or tweeting ...
Michael:   The scale of the change in Facebook: there Timeline is introduced, - rather large changes.
Anton:   Not. You cannot afford such a LJ because Facebook is collective everything, all pages are collective, and in LJ all pages are individual. If someone climbs onto my page with ideas, some kind of timeline, then he will just go far and forest. In LJ, it is impossible to chemically altogether with the structure of a single diary. In LiveJournal, you can chemise with an assortment of service and content delivery — this is the field of play. LJ can be integrated with other large media by others, as it is, in fact, integrated with two hundred media outlets of the Russian Federation. You can post comments through LJ in Kommersant-e, in Gazeta.ru, a total of two hundred. LJ can give new RSS, LJ can get a new photo hosting, video hosting, audio hosting. LJ can somehow integrate with social networks in a new way. Some, maybe applications for LJ, API, social graphs. This is something that can modernize LJ as a technology platform. But at the same time, as a person with twenty years of editorial experience, I can tell you that the LJ publishing platform today (if you take Semagic functionality as a client for writing texts and layout) has no analogues, publicly available analogues. There is, of course, the Content Management System (CMS), which is used for the layout of the Times newspaper, which is used for the layout of the Kommersant newspaper; it is, of course, more progressive than LiveJournal, but it is not accessible to anyone except the editorial staff. , , , , , , , , , , — . Google Blogger.com,   Blogspot.com . Google+ , Blogger.com . , . WordPress, , WordPress .
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Mikhail:   Anton, thank you for the answers.
Anton:   Thanks you!