The State of Sourcing

U.S. Internet users spent more time on Facebook than Yahoo and Google combined this past year (Nielsen, 2011). Following users, companies are also on track to spend 13.7 percent of their marketing budget on social media advertising (Borrell Inc. , 2012). Traditionally, small businesses advertised in local papers to drum up sales for their businesses. In the current scenario, Facebook and Twitter accounts threaten to usurp the place that newspapers had in selling the business to its readers.

Continue reading ‘Newspapers need to effectively monetize social media if they want to sustain their business’ »

In the recent months, we have been studying the effect of the digital market on the publishing industry. Across segments and geographies, publishers are experiencing challenges centered on costs, resources and technology that have made it necessary for them to re-invent their business models.

Of the 200+ publishing professionals we interviewed, we found that close to 4 in 5 publishers are either outsourcing or considering outsourcing publishing services. So, if the whole industry is pretty much outsourcing technology, back office processes and industry specific publishing services, why is it still taboo? Perhaps some context would help.

Continue reading ‘Why is the outsourcing of publishing services still taboo?’ »

Commented a respondent of our survey on ‘The Current State of Digital Content’. So,  how are things shaping up for digital formats, does everyone in the publishing industry feel the same way? Read on.

Changing the ‘format’ of content

The publishing industry has progressively been going digital. While selling digital content is recent, publishers have used digital production techniques/processes that are reliable, stable and efficient. Such processes, however, ended mostly in the creation of PDFs – that doubled as print ready files and/or a product that was to be sold digitally.

Continue reading ‘Device specific formats are horrible to support, and I hope they die!’ »

On Monday, the 19th of November 2007, Amazon released its first generation Kindle – an event that shaped the digital market. Since then, large corporations such as Sony, Barnes and Noble, Google, and more recently Apple, have been giving the digital content market significant attention – adding credibility and more so, validating the digital market as a strong revenue source. It is this potential that is transforming the publishing industry today.

In the last few years, the publishing industry witnessed tremendous change – a change that centred around revenue and cost challenges. For publishers, the digital market presented a holistic solution – one that opened a channel of revenue with non-linear growth, while ensuring minimal costs of production & sales. Publishers worldwide are either producing digital content or are considering it as a service area.

Continue reading ‘Survey: The Current State of Digital Content’ »

A question that has been playing on my mind for sometime. Authors and writers have depended on publishers for production, printing, distribution, marketing and promotion of their content. However, the rise of the digital market is challenging the traditional author-publisher relationship.

The traditional relationship between authors and publishers centered on the capital outlay required to create, print and sell books. Publishers would provide authors with advances, bear the expenses of producing, printing, distributing, marketing and promoting the books. Proceeds from the sales of the book were largely the publisher’s and a portion of it goes to the author as royalty. The value of the publisher, thus, centered on printing and selling the books.

Continue reading ‘Survey: Is self-publishing increasing?’ »

For an industry that has been questioning the way it has been functioning for the past decade, the publishing industry seems to be rejuvenated with the potential of the digital market. While publishers look to overcome the decline of print by developing digital market as a revenue source, it becomes even more important to have the right vision while addressing it.  Venturing into potentially unchartered waters, require the publishers to adopt a steep learning curve that means not only operating like a Net company but also creating a strong value proposition.

A significant section of publishers addressing the digital market have relied on partners. Right from producing books, adapting them to various devices or distributing them to readers, publishers have seen the merits of depending on partners. Take for example the Apple iPad. Publishers look at this piece of gadgetry with the same glee that the music industry did when the iPod was released. Some have gone to the extent of proclaiming the iPad as the backlit beacon of hope for the publishing industry. I do not think so!

Continue reading ‘Will the iPad help the publishing industry?’ »

One would expect customer satisfaction levels with outsourcing providers to be proportional to the years spent in outsourcing. However, our findings from a recent survey of publishing industry segments – STM/Academic and Educational publishing threw some of these assumptions off the mark. It is surprising to note that publishers from the STM/Academic segment indicate such low levels of satisfaction with outsourcing despite being pioneers in outsourcing and offshoring.

Continue reading ‘Satisfaction with outsourcing: Educational vs. STM publisher’ »

The newspaper and magazine segments are the largest contributors in revenues to the global publishing industry – contributing close to 52% of global publishing revenues. It would therefore be safe to assume that of all the challenges faced by the industry, none would be as altering (in terms of revenues) as the challenges faced by these two segments. The newspaper and magazine segments have already lost considerable revenues on account of dip in ad revenues. This is directly attributable to the global economic slowdown, which has led to decrease in consumer and corporate spending.

Continue reading ‘Magazines: Ad-ing up the losses’ »

With the publishing industry facing cost pressures, change in consumption patterns and struggling to sustain its revenues, it only seemed logical that the industry as a whole would outsource more. To truly understand how the industry value chain perceived outsourcing, we at ValueNotes Sourcing Practice decided to conduct a publishing survey.

To gain clarity on where the industry is heading, we needed to understand: Continue reading ‘Publishing Survey: Disparity in cost savings continues’ »

Margin pressures are a sign of maturity (and commoditization) in any services industry. Publishing outsourcing is no different. Low entry barriers have kept the wannabes pouring in, relentlessly setting up shop, offering ridiculously low prices … to a point where it won’t work any further. However, that hasn’t stopped any more wannabes from joining the game.

While this phenomenon on one side of the industry spectrum has led to rapid commoditization of services, it has also galvanized creativity amongst players on the other side. Innovations in productivity enhancements, process refinement and proprietary product development has become the new mantra for industry leaders, in order to stay in a profitable game. Today, prices have dropped to levels that have pushed struggling players out of business, while the larger players are desperately seeking opportunities to grow.

Continue reading ‘The yin-yang of publishing outsourcing’ »