Bronte Media

Magazine publishers don’t need much help in mishandling the Internet as a strategic growth opportunity, having done so brilliantly themselves thus far. But the Boston Consulting Group, a managment consulting firm, are there to help them if they feel that they have not minimized the benefit of the Internet and opened a wide enough a door to new forms of competition.

Now I haven’t read the full report. BCG’s site makes no mention of it and the Magazine Publisher’s of America, who comissioned ‘the study’ releases it only to its members. So I am holding back (no really, I am).

But in a Mediapost write-up of the study, the basic crux of the report is that magazine publishers should get together, collude and not allow search engines to index their content. That’s because search engines make money from advertising and that they link to blogs.

How is this for classic consulting? They say that search reduces audience value (huh?) but that “search is also a valuable means of drawing readers to proprietary Web sites”. Ahh which is it guys? No overlapping circles here. It either provides value or it doesn’t.

And shame on them for not catching up on their buzzwords, recommending that “one solution might be for magazines to work on developing a “hybrid” model that leaves their content “searchable but not scrapable.” (does the author even know what that means?)

Search engines have always and only made a site searchable, then pointing people toward the full article. Maybe it’s time to go back to Stanford guys? Or maybe it is a sign that we are in an another bubble; that if the major consulting firms have lost so many Internet-savvy employees to Google and Yahoo that they are left with none that even understand the basic lexicon of the search industry.

p.s. Since when did BCG start doing ‘whitepapers’? Times must be tough.