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Back to Articles page at TNG Research Thinking Outside of the Polybagby Dave Zornow While relaxing with a good book and my iPod this weekend, I drifted off to sleep. And I had an amazing dream. It was one of those dreams that spring from your last conscious thought. I had been thinking about the new video iPod and what a holiday great gift it would make. I'd also just read about the Washington Post posting their video podcasts on the iTunes Web site. I mused about how you could now get almost any conceivable content from almost any media online…. In my dream it was all true. Even magazines, the mother lode of great content, were now available in iTunes. I dreamed that I could get editorial content packaged like cable – buying a tier of 100 titles for a reasonable $30 a month which included "gotta have" books bundled with "might be nice to read ones," too. It was all there to read online, on a PDA, a notebook or a video iPod. In my dream, magazines publishers decided to work together because they found a rising tide of incremental revenue really did lift all boats. And by looking beyond the covers, newsstands sales, circulation and glossy pages by which they have traditionally defined themselves, they had created a new revenue stream that didn't cannibalize their current subscriber base. Furthermore, these media visionaries had kindled a new reading boom in America by stealing an idea from amazon.com. By including "people like you have also read" recommendations in their online iTunes storefront, magazine publishers had increased customer satisfaction, reduced churn and extended their brands into a new space. The first mass media was reborn, iTuning into new audiences while simultaneously lowering production and distribution costs. Ad sales profited too, as targeted banner ads, based on the interests I demonstrated in previous editorial selections, were included alongside the online copy. I suddenly awoke and realized it was all just a dream. I rubbed my eyes and smiled recalling my short-lived editorial adventure. Then I turned my attention back to the book I had been reading before falling asleep, "The Gilded Dinosaur."## --Dave Zornow is president of TNG Research, a media research and applications development company that works with media sellers and research providers. |