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brands featured in the adverts and the other 10 percent on anything from hor-
oscopes to features of the contributors and photo spreads of models wearing,
wait a second, pieces from the brands whose adverts you have already seen.
Even the letter from the editor, which is supposed to tell the reader what to
expect from the magazine, is often hidden somewhere in the middle pages,
suppressed by the mammoth presence of the adverts that surround it. The
magazine world has sold its soul to advertisement revenues. The established
luxury brands pay sums that run into hundreds of thousands of dollars for a
one-page advert in a fashion magazine and emerging brands are left to sweat it
to get some editorial coverage “because they are not advertisers”, even if they
have a great concept, fantastic products, excellent service and a strong mes-
sage. This is how it had always been until the Internet came along and is on the
verge of breaking all the rules ferociously guarded by media companies.
Even in the early days of the Internet, there was a flurry to reproduce the
same model when mainstream print media companies introduced websites
that reproduced the same news in their print versions. With online adver-
tisement expenditure at a constant rise ($32 billion in 2007 and projected to
reach $160 billion by 2012), media companies looked to retain a large chunk
of this cake. This was the period when media companies, with ample support
from PR firms and media buyers, sought to produce a web version of the
CPM (cost per thousand) quantitative measurement that is supposed to jus-
tify an expenditure of $100,000 per page of advert. This basically followed
the “counting” system that print media loves to dish out and on the web it
translated to the numbers of daily, weekly and monthly visitors as well as the
number of clicks per page, number of unique visitors per month, the number
of newsletter subscribers and all kinds of numbers that could be waved in the
faces of luxury executives to both tantalize and confuse them. But the social
web (or web 2.0) came along and changed everything.
Online media now has its own mechanism and doesn't function in the way
that print and television operates. The social web has provided a voice to the
people and a platform for any brand (both big and small) to tell their story to
an audience that increasingly listens, provides feedback and spreads the mes-
sage. The Internet provides equal access and space to everyone who wants to
be visible. The time has come for the exclusive media club that promoted the
use of all sorts of jargon and obedience to strict rules, including excluding
outsiders, to re-write its rules. The arrival of citizen journalists in the form of
bloggers, and the opinionated consumer who doesn't hesitate to speak up in
favor of or against luxury brands, has crushed the media barriers. Today, blogs
like Style Bubble, Beauty Addict, Bagsnob.com and Purseblog.com have
more community members and page views than the average mainstream mag-
azine's website. The average fashion enthusiast now has the tools and com-
petence to develop an interactive and highly aesthetic website with content
that could compete with the
Vogue
s,
Elle
s and
Glamour
s of the publishing
world. The web has made everyone a publisher - that is, everyone who has a
