Via CNN.com on the latest Neilsen ratings:

There’s this little sobering fact to consider: The number of viewers, overall and with the ad-friendly 18-49 crowd, have declined sharply for each of these three networks. Oops.

Read the full article.

I’ve railed against the television networks, music distributors, radio networks, film distributors, and newspapers now for some time. The handwriting is on the wall: your audiences are shrinking and the trend is accelerating. The one traditional medium that might escape, is radio. That’s because it still has a captive audience in the car…other than that, these companies are screwed unless and until they learn how to function in a computer network-centric environment.

Here are some examples of the death of traditional media from my own life:

• Newspaper – 20 years ago, I had a daily subscription to the San Francisco Chronicle and a Sunday subscription to the NY Times and I would frequently buy other newspapers on a spot basis. Today, I maintain a weekly subscription to my local newspaper, the Half Moon Bay Review. Why that paper? It covers local events not available elsewhere (though Coastsider.com is coming on strong and may displace this last local news source.) What has taken the place of the papers for me? Live syndication of RSS feeds through a news reader. The reality is, by the time a paper can physically be produced and disseminated, it’s no longer news. My current newspaper is always available and always up-to-date, I can see any back issues I could ever want, and it’s free (I know, there are ads, but there are ads everywhere including the physical newspaper you pay to receive.) Outlook: Aside from an odd impulse purchase, I don’t see that I’ll ever consume/subscribe to another newspaper. Magazines may be an exception…more on that below.
• Radio – This is something of an odd one in that I do still listen to the radio in the car. And unfortunately, I spend a fair amount of time in the car. But what I listen to has changed dramatically. 20 years ago, I listened to FM radio almost exclusively with music and stupid drive-time shows dominating the content. Now, I listen to XM radio about 10% of the time for either sports or comedy, AM radio about 5% of the time for traffic, and the rest of the time is spent with music from my digital collection. I never listen to FM radio any more. If I’d purchased the realtime traffic adapter for my GPS system, I wouldn’t listen to AM radio period. If I collected comedy clips into my digital music collection, I wouldn’t listen to XM other than enroute to a destination hearing a game broadcast live. Outlook: It’s hard to beat radio for mobile updates on traffic, weather, and sports enroute while driving. But, look out for the 3G devices, they could displace radio from this niche.
• Movie Theaters – What an interesting market, NetFlix killed, and I mean killed, any desire I have to go to the movie theatre. Crowds, noise, cost, hassle, all of that to see the movie on a big screen and pay through the nose for bad snacks? No thank you. 20 years ago, I used to see a movie in a theater at least once per week. Now, it’s pretty much when an interesting children’s movie comes out as an event with my daughter, maybe once every three months. Between digital cable, our DVD collection, YouTube, Google Video, and NetFlix, we have no shortage of interesting content to choose from, all of which is cheaper, more convenient, and available on my schedule, not the theater’s. Outlook: Even the quarterly trip to the movie is at risk, my daughter doesn’t seem to enjoy them as much as when they’re at home. It’s hard to see that aside from an impluse trip to the cinema that I’ll see many more movies there. At home, however, we still consume movies on a regular basis, just on our terms.
• Music media – 20 years ago I was replacing my tapes and albums with compact discs. The music industry was happy as I was paying top dollar to get a physical artifact that contained media, 90% of which I didn’t like. Now, unless I’m sure I like a particular collection of music, I exclusively buy single tracks (without copy protection) from online music vendors. The thing that is interesting about this is, I probably buy as much music now as I did 20 years ago, the money is just transiting a different supply chain. The other difference is, my musical taste has expanded dramatically meaning I search for more obscure artists in genres I like vs. sticking to “known brand name artists” making my spending more diffuse. Outlook: Online distribution, purchase, and management of non-copy protected media has won and there’s no going back. Where possible, I buy directly from the artist online. If not possible, I fall back to an aggregator. It’s hard to see buying another CD ever.
• Television – The CNN article that prompted this entry is right, only is not extreme enough in its analysis. 20 years ago, I watched pretty much the network programming live. I did watch the odd cable channel, but mostly for special event type programming. Now, I haven’t watched network programming (aside from sports events) in at least 5 years. That’s not live network programming, that network programming period. My daughter, to my knowledge, has never seen one minute of network programmed TV. She’s an interesting case in that she expects that programming that she’s interested in is available when she wants it and that boring advertisements can be skipped. When that’s not the experience available, she opts out. Outlook: Grim. Not only have the networks “lost” some of their measurable audience, the digital natives won’t ever become their audience. Think about that for a minute if you’re considering investing in one of these stocks. There is no future. The only exception to this is sports events, I will watch network programming to get those events, I tend to DVR them to skip through the ads. Other than that, it’s movies and specialty programming. In our household, the Cartoon Channel, The Disney Channel, the History Channel, HBO, and Showtime – all timeshifted viewing has completely displaced network programming.

If you’re in traditional media, you should take away two things from this example: Content matters and delivery matters. Consumers (people like me) want quality content, aren’t afraid to pay a little something for it, want it in a portable format, want it on our own schedule, and want it to be convenient. The content providers pushing out quality stuff will migrate to the distribution mechanisms that meet these consumer desires – it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. Doing silly, counter-productive things like suing your customers and your new media distributors may temporarily stem the tide, but ultimately are doomed to failure. People will simply omit you from the supply chain. That’s what’s happening with the mediums described in the examples above. The trends are not a large mystery.

Two exceptions in the traditional media world I’d like to touch on are magazines and books. For whatever reason, I haven’t entirely displaced either of these content delivery vehicles. I think it comes down to content and depth in both cases. I have little desire to attempt to read a 1,000 page book on my computer screen. It just doesn’t work, you can’t really curl up with a computer screen as yet on the book side. On magazines, I think they’ve now migrated toward a depth of coverage that isn’t common in the news. So rather than competing with online media from a freshness perspective, they’re working quality and depth that aren’t seen as regularly in the online outlets, yet. It will be worthwhile to see in 20 years if magazines and books are displaced the way other traditional media and mediums have been displaced to date.

What’s your experience? Do you still watch network programming? Go to the movies? Listen to the radio? Buy newspapers? Buy physical CDs? How has your media consumption changed over time? Leave a comment if you’d like to share.