Internet going mainstream - the WTO-column

"In China the internet is already mainstream," says Sam Flemming of CIC data, a company that follows the online buzz for companies, at almost every meeting he speaks. He has been analyzing the online buzz on cars, health care and from his research you can see how the public debate is raging on the internet. Similar sounds come from Kaiser Kuo, who points at a new research by Piper Jaffray about the ongoing media revolution. Kaiser Kuo from Beijing just left what could be considered to be the dream job for a journalistic geek, a job with Red Herring, to join Ogilvy China as their group director digital strategy. How much more mainstream can you go?

While as a one-liner 'the internet is now mainstream' goes very well, it is harder to see how this will work out in real life. The scenario's seem to vary much depending on what country you are living in. In the US the last wake-up call came last year when the newspapers belonging to Knight Ridder, the second largest owner of newspapers in the US. Those papers were sold at a heavy discount, showing that after years of losing their audiences, the investors followed them. While the papers were still making a lot of profit, they were lacking a long term perspective, so the investors backed off. That panic in the old industry at least makes sure that they are looking for ways to incorporate the new media.

Europe is a mixed bag, where the Germans are moving extremely slow, the French relying surprisingly much on the online media, while in Britain especially established media like the BBC and The Guardian make headway in their online departments.

China diverts greatly from those images. Yes, China has almost 140 million internet users and is the second largest internet nation after the United States. Yes, China's online cultural elite has good reason to make mince meat out of the annual CCTV New Year Gala, since it is a boring cliche from the past. But then, more than 80 percent of the Chinese do not have much else to watch. The cultural online elite might be dominating the almost inevitable elitist public debate, but there is still over a billion people out there who have to rely on what the traditional media have to offer them.

That means that the traditional media outside Guangdong, Shanghai and Beijing still have an audience to cater for. Those audiences mean more in terms of eyeballs than in possible revenue they can generate for the companies who still pay CCTV record figures for slots at New Years Eve show. but traditional media in mainland China might still have some time, unless they depend fully on urbanites in the large conglomerates.

In every country conservative media moguls have their own excuses for trying not to change, even though the world itself is turning upside down. In China it is of course the murky bureaucracy that is a major barrier for change. Each medium in China has traditionally its own regulatory regime, with its own rules and traditions, always keeping a keen eye on neighboring bureaucracies that might be trying to move into their territory.

That balance has already been shocked by the emergence of the internet, where in the end only a regulatory solution was found by putting all 14 government departments into one committee. As consolidation of the media and the breaking down of the traditional barriers are part of the industrial transition, we are going to see a prolonged turf battle that will be defining the winners and losers in the media of the future.

User generated content is key for the emergence of online media and that goes against the nature of the traditional media where toeing the correct political line was paramount. That is only one of the dilemma's our dinosaurs have to face.

Yes, the internet has gone mainstream, but the real changes ared still ahead of us.

Fons Tuinstra