Bloomberg’s Smith: Media’s future is in niche

The future of profitable media companies will be in serving, informing and engaging as directly as possible with a distinct audience, said Bloomberg Media CEO Justin B. Smith.

“I believe the future of profitable media is going to be in far more targeted, niche, more contained segment-focused media plays,” he told Digiday’s editor in chief Brian Morrissey at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado. “I’d say to all those people who are chasing scale: think hard about it because that game is a really, really tough game.”

This thinking has informed Bloomberg Media’s focus on becoming the leading global multi-platform business media company, providing news and insight to an audience of business and financial customers. This approach has kept the focus on Bloomberg’s multiple-owned platforms while other publishers are increasingly betting their futures on platforms like Facebook.

While social platforms offer the allure of large audiences, Smith questioned the long-term business model reality for publishers of the distributed media approach.

“One of the reasons that media is suffering at the hands of the platforms is that platforms are doing media better than media does media,” he said.

Smith urged publishers to consider the ramifications of going all-in.

“The rush to these platforms needs to be paused for a second,” he said. “People need to consider what’s really happening here. It’s not that it’s pure doomsday scenario, but rather a call for caution and really sensible, data-driven and logic-based analysis about where this is all going to lead.”

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