INNOBLOG

Few industries have felt the disruptive impact of the last decades biggest innovation, the Internet, more than the media. Newspaper circulation has dropped; billions of advertising dollars have swung from broadcast and print outlets to the web; and music and movie companies have seen their intellectual property high-jacked via peer-to-peer technology.

From 2000 to 2002 alone, sales for the worldwide recording industry shrank close to 20 percent, from $39 billion to $32 billion, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

Whats more, lately online competitors have even begun to muscle their way into the print world. Last fall, for example, Google announced it had begun reselling ad space in ink-and-paper journals. In January, it purchased dMarc Broadcasting, a radio advertising firm; company executives also publicly discussed a possible move into TV ads.

The news is not as odd as it may seem. Google realizes that the more ways it can reuse and resell content"whether in cyberspace, in print magazines, or over the airwaves"the more money it can make. And thats a lesson that could benefit all traditional media companies.

To succeed in this new environment, traditional media players need to imitate the strategies of their biggest new threat: free-content providers employing a variety of reuse and re-run tactics. Today, free blogs give content more reincarnations than Houdini. They compress initial release and re-run cycles"sometimes to an instant"and they link their content to others, creating powerful, self-reinforcing networks.

Cornerstone blogging technology Really Simple Syndication (RSS) allows bloggers to transmit content around the Internet to be repackaged into email or personalized Internet homepages. Rather than being tied to a conventional re-release schedule, RSS allows near instantaneous repurposing. By offering as-good-as-new content, bloggers grab wider audiences without making additional investments. In this Strategy & Innovation article, which you can read by subscribing here, three partners of the consulting firm Bain & Company, offer valuable lessons for incumbents and describe how some big media companies have started to co-opt the logic of bloggers.