No matter what people say, print publishing is gasping its last breaths and the recession is rooting around for the life support plug. The new rule is: everything for everyone — no matter who or where they are.

As internet creator Sir Tim Berners Lee flipped on the switch for the world wide web in 1991, he had an inkling that it would lead to a global business revolution — and so along comes the demise of the mass print media and advertising markets. It was the shortest life span of any market in the history of man.

The web’s ability to be the proverbial sniper, to print’s weapon of mass destruction, makes it so much more attractive to advertisers who crave fast, high quality results for their limited budgets.

An example of the ‘long tail’ market that is replacing the mass market is that of my fictional hero, Romano, and his “Alfa Anti-Ruggine” — a device made specifically for the 1974 Alfa Romeo Spyder to keep it rust free (remember, it is fictional).

The old market model would have Romano pay tens of thousands of dollars for the pleasure of waiting for weeks while publications were printed and distributed with his advert in them. He would then have to replicate the process dozens of times around the world to cover his markets properly — all on an off chance that an owner of a such a classic car in need of his product would see the ad. If Romano were really, really lucky, he may have had some positive coverage in one of the magazines.

The new model has Romano’s company sell the product on eBay or an Amazon type site for a few percentage points in commissions. Romano’s company would also buy some Google keywords to make sure that the thousands of people searching for ‘1974 Alfa repairs’ would find it easily. These avenues are instant, highly targeted, cost effective and global.

Importantly for Romano’s “Alfa Anti-Ruggine”, his customers could be members of an Alfa group on social networking, site such as Facebook, or could even be a writers of the Argentinean or Norwegian Alfa blogs — giving them an ideal outlet to write about and discuss the miracle cure that stops their cars falling apart. Romano could then freely use these testimonials, enhancing his products credibility and saleability. How very Web 2.0.

¡Viva la revolucón!

Welcome to Web 3.0. It’s here, right now — and it’s all about semantics and content with context. What if our Argentinean or Norwegian Alfa owner is a racing buff? Facts, such as how many Alfas won races 1974, would probably interest him. That information is out there and this is where data linking — or semantics — opens up limitless possibilities.

Crucially, it would bring advertisers directly to customers surfing for information that holds a deep personal interest for them. Imagine our car buff, while looking for the antirust gadget he had recently read about on a blog, mouses over the phrase “1974 Alfa” and a poster of an Alfa winning the 1974 Canadian-American Challenge Cup slides out? Or, perhaps a framed poster of a car just like his, but in its prime and rust free? It is conceivable that a purchase would be made.

Publishers still hold the aces: they are (mostly) respected authorities in their fields and, essentially, have extensive archives of quality content that can be exploited for its semantic value. This is the new big traffic driver. Content is also being constantly updated and created — adding to the giant jigsaw puzzle. All of this gets married to advertising — be it banner networks or Google AdSense — the more pages, the more views, the more revenue.

The way to get our hero and his car parts business back into magazines is by providing a platform that enables him to effectively and directly target consumers — those readers that the publishers should know so well.

At the same time, intelligent targeting and a tightly wound online brand awareness campaign will increase traffic and at the same time convert print readers to online — reducing overheads and increasing revenues-per-reader.

This will all lead to a much deeper relationship between publishers, advertisers and readers — and everyone gets precisely what they want.

Based on a recent data presented by the Online Publishers Association and Nielsen / NetRatings, the percentage of people engaging in content reading is now more than ever before. Based on a four year long Internet Activity Index (IAI), which measures the use of ecommerce, communications, content and search services over time, it was concluded that activities like ecommerce and communications still remain popular, reading and viewing content has skyrocketed between 2003 and today.

According to the data, about 34 percent of Internet users’ time was spent reading content in back in 2003, while content came in second to ‘communications’, which measured a 46 percent of Internet users’ time. Surprisingly, as of May 2007, OPA reports that those numbers have dramatically reversed! Content now came in at 47 percent of Internet users’ time while ‘communications’ came in only 33 percent.

For many businesses out there, this is very important shift of strategy and emphasis on their online media. Not only is the importance placed on good design website but more than anything else, a good quality content site will bring in consistent readers over time. The figures itself only confirms the shift in the behavior of Internet users from communications to content and some of the activities engaging users are like news reading, browsing listings, checking out information on certain products or services…

Adding onto the trend are social networking sites that pushes the content readership to new heights. Under OPA’s metric, social networking are counted as content site and only email are classified as ‘communication’.

However, it seems that e-mail’s popularity isn’t actually going down, but rather the availability of content to consume is going up. Within Ad.WRIGHT, we consume more and more of our everyday lives online than ever before, by researching client information or reading up on the latest technology to help our clients stay on the leading edge (AJAX, Silverlight…)

Many a times, when we meet with clients on web development needs, client would always place a lot of importance on the Branding / Design of the site, but rarely see the importance of putting in a good quality content to substantiate the overall package. We keep emphasizing to the client that getting a good content management system and well design site is not enough, but the support from top management to see the importance of getting a good writer (both internal or external) to write up the content for the site. Some have heeded the advice and are seeing the results of their site readership gone up over time.

With Singapore launching its island wide Internet coverage this December, we will likely continue to see this pattern in the years ahead as people continue to shift their offline activities online and the importance of quality content on online medium is not to be ignored.