December 11, 2009
By the ZippyCart Shopping Carts Content Team
Amazon is expected to soon encounter a content sales war against five major publishers who are looking to create a rival store online. Hearst Corporation, Meredith Corporation, Conde Nast Publications, News Corporation, and Time Inc. are all teaming up to create a joint venture to sell their newspaper and magazine content online. They will be able to merge all of their great print magazines and newspapers into the online medium for consumers to buy. Their storefront could also be used to sell a variety of other digital goods like books or comics. There has not been a media partnership of this size before that could seriously compete head to head with Amazon for electronic content. Traditional print media has been on a gradual decline for years now, with many companies going out of business and moving to an online only model. There is much less overhead with an online only media company and they have an advantage as they can report the news as it happens with little delay before the consumer can read it. Therefore these traditional media companies are trying to evolve and compete in the online marketplace by monetizing their content.
The ereader battle has been dominated by Amazon with their Kindle reader, but some of the 350,000+ titles that are sold for the ereader do not work on other devices. Electronic newspapers, for example, that are purchased for the Kindle cannot be read on other ereaders. This new media partnership of major publishers plans to have a model that allows you to buy the content once and have it be available for you on any ereader, regardless of the manufacture. Amazon has a huge head start on this potential competitor and will have about another year to increase their lead, as the competing online store is not set to open until late next year. Publishers are excited as more players in the space allow them to make more money and not only give their business to Amazon to control. Industry analysts will continue to watch this partnership to see how it will change the face on the online sales of content.
Nick was born and raised in California, but has been working the dot com scene in Seattle for many years. He co-founded ZippyCart back in 2009, and now works here full-time. Nick wears many hats at ZippyCart, including producing content for our Ecommerce News blog. Nick loves photography and the outdoors, so when not working on ZippyCart you can find him out and about in Seattle.
