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habits, preferences, fan relationships and others issues much more than on neces- sary needs, a broad offering is required. It is dif cult to know what will be successful and how fast tastes will change. To put it simply, it could be said that one in ten con- tents launched will attract attention; one in a hundred will also be successful nancial- ly. Therefore the successful one must cover the product development, production and distribution costs of all the others.
The traditional way to cover these risks is to sell the products as portfolios i.e. packages: not just one piece of music at a time but a whole LP. Not just one news report but the whole yearly pre- scription including the sports sec-
ADVERTISING AND CONSUMER CHARGES
Free content nanced by advertising has always been available. Either the commu- nication has been hidden i.e. publishers have wanted to spread their own emphasis or even propaganda along with the content as far as possible and have therefore partly or completely subsidised distribution, or advertising has been sold along with com- munications.
The ef ciency and impact of advertising has long been measured but it is only the internet age that has brought the indica-
tent in social media and search engines is produced by media companies which al- low these giants to use it fairly freely and without compensation while still jealous of primary producers for getting the widest possible rights to utilise content.
ANSWERS TO CHALLENGES POSED BY THE TRANSFORMA- TION OF THE MEDIA
Music, television and lm are already de- veloping on the terms of the changing online business environment. Television and lm are undergoing the biggest trans- formation in their history; the fragmenta-
tion, comics, nancial news, and
all. As regards traditional operators
in the eld, only book publishers
and theatres have sold one book or performance at a time; even lms
have been sold to TV channels as packages in which to get one Hol- lywood hit, a dozen other less suc- cessful experimentations must be bought ‘into the bargain’.
Digitalisation is changing all this: techni- cally it is much easier to sell one product at the time and at the same time more dif cult to get consumers to buy what they do not think they need because they are also more aware of what they consume. A person who skips the sports section in a printed news- paper will be well aware about not reading sports online. The entity provided by a printed newspaper competes increasingly clearly against the websites specialised in sports. However, from the point of view of the producer, the need to cover the risks involved in portfolios will not disappear. At most, the producer may try to make use of arti cial intelligence to collect data online about what else consumers of certain con- tents use and then produce content that matches these habits to exactly the same groups, preferably with recommendations and tips. Questions such as ‘portfolio or not’ are at the centre of the transformation of earnings logic and will also remain there for a long time to come.
tors to a new level. Today it is possible to see how long and by whom all advertising – not just small samples – is followed. When advertisements lead to online shops with a click of the mouse, it is also possible to see how much direct revenue they generate. The faster trends change, the more inclined advertisers are to favour this kind of meas- urement methods. The increasing amount of time people use online encourages ad- vertisers to follow them there.
The growth of online advertising has left a huge gap in the advertising revenue of the traditional media in products with both content that is free and content subject to a charge. There are also extensive struc- tural changes constantly taking place in online advertising: Giants like Facebook and Google do not need separate visitor surveys but can analyse all online behav- iour with one permission received from the customer, not only on their own websites but almost anywhere on the internet. The quality of the data they collect is superior in producing precise tools for advertisers. Paradoxically, the central part of the con-
which case nancing can be gathered in advance from the real market on the ba- sis of customers' expectations – a bit like in a yearly subscription for a newspaper somewhere in the distant part at the be- ginning of the 2000s.
Books and theatre, whose consumption in Finland is among the highest in the world, have so far been least affected by digital distribution. Consumption of digi- tal books in Finland is lagging behind the leading western countries due to many reasons, from practices in value added taxation to problems in operating sys- tems. However, it is certain that the trans- formation will continue; old operators will die and new ones will arrive. The national culture will continue to also need support measures from society in the form of both money and regulation. However, in ten years the most effective forms of support are also likely to be something different than they were ten years ago.
However, it is certain that the transformation will continue; old operators will die
and new ones will arrive.
tion of distribution channels and the collapse of the established revenue models have made a large part of pro table business unprof- itable in the short term. There are exceptions, of course, as well as successful newcomers in the eld. The most keen fan communities may, for example, form the target audience for crowd-funding, in
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