The Avalanche is coming, The Avalanche is coming.

I fondly remember a conversation that I had with a Sr. VP of Sales at a leading newspaper roughly five years ago (where I was employed as an online specialist). It went something like this:

What do you think will happen moving forward with the newspaper, the magazine and the sites?

You see the publisher of the paper was trying to figure out how to rescue print and magazine advertising dollars while online advertising was taking off. For decades clients were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in those mediums and now they just weren’t getting the ROI that they wanted.

My response was “watch out because the Avalanche is coming”. What I was referring to was that with online audiences growing steadily and newspaper and magazine ad revenue (and readership) dropping like a stone, it was pretty clear that any stagnant media source would be wiped out. It wouldn’t happen overnight but it would definitely happen, magazine by magazine, paper by paper, city by city.

“Readers” weren’t readers anymore, they’re now people. They didn’t like yesterday’s news or to be told what was happening. They no longer bought the media, they controlled it, they made it. They had voices and they reached out to places where they could be heard. Traditional media used to think we were nuts when we talked about places like YouTube or we blogged. Now, it’s called User Generated Content and these dark dungeons are now billion dollar companies.

With the mainstream’s immersion in the internet, we’ve taken media to an absolutely new level. That new shift has been incredibly fun for my peeps, my fellow webheads. On the other side of the fence, it’s been pretty scary for traditional media advertisers. They can’t find you anymore, they’re having difficulty learning how to speak WITH you instead of speaking AT you. Can’t you just congregate at the local newspaper like you used to? It was so much easier when one phone call would buy media for millions of people in a specific demographic.

To make things worse, the economy has gone to “the challenge area” and now Marketing Managers and agency folk are pressed to sell more products with each marketing dollar spent. That’s right, selling products is important again. Pass the Rogaine, people are losing their hair out there. The avalanche is here and the snowboarders are winning! It’s ok, we’ll help them out, right?

You never know, maybe they’re reading your blog right now, clicking on an ad and helping you make a few affiliate bucks.