Shock, horror, but do net novels bring in profits?
Flavor of the month or the future of publishing that's the current fad for online novels. Recently 16,000 internet users entered a web site featuring Olga Tokarczuk's novel, "Dom dzienny, dom nocny (House of day, house of night)." The text has been online since Aug. 18 at www.swiatksiazki.pl, the web site of the Bertelsmann Media-owned publisher and book distributor Klub Swiat Ksiaýki. Tokarczuk's novel is available free of charge for another month.
According to Piotr Mazurkiewicz,
e-commerce manager at Klub Swiat, putting the novel online was never meant to be a profit-focused project. "We didn't intend to make money on this, which is why we planned no advertising campaign," Mazurkiewicz said. "It's a kind of test. We simply wanted to see whether the Polish internet market is similar to its U.S. counterpart."
In the U.S. market, however, the same kind of experiment is meant to bring real profits to America's best-selling author, Stephen King. The first installment of his novel, "The Plant," went up on his official web site (http://www.stephenking.com) July 24th and the second one on August 21st. The third one was expected in September. The installments can be downloaded from his web site but there's a catch. The story continues after the first two promised installments as long as readers pay $1 for each of the first three episodes, and $2 for each of the projected eight. Payments can be made by credit card, money order or cheque either before or after the chapter has been downloaded. As he puts it on his site, King is counting on the curiosity and the honesty of his reader: "Remember: Pay and the story rolls. Steal and the story folds. No stealing from the blind newsboy!" King promised that he would carry the "The Plant" to its conclusion if the response is strong.
In King's words, novels published over the internet have a chance to become "Big Publishing's worst nightmare." In Poland, though, publishers can still sleep easily. According to an OBOP public opinion survey conducted in August, there are currently about 4 million internet users in Poland. Ninety percent of the poll's respondents declared that they use the internet mostly for professional and academic reasons.
And Polish novelists are far from treating the internet as a potential source of profits. Mazurkiewicz said Tokarczuk agreed to make her novel available over the internet for free because she was interested in the exposure it offered. "I am glad that my book has a chance to reach almost every place in Poland," Tokarczuk said in an interview available on the web site offering her novel. "I have lived my life far from the capital, far from cultural centers, and I know that a book still has its real value there."
Warsaw-based Machina Press, the publisher of pop-culture monthly Machina, plans to expand. According to Przemysaw Szydlak, director general of Machina Press, the company was likely to complete the acquisition of four new magazines last week. He wouldn't reveal details of the transaction. "We will expand in terms of content and our reader group," he said. "Machina is more often read by men and the new magazines will add more women to our readers." Machina has a circulation of 80,000 and is aimed at 18-28 year olds. Machina Press also publishes a Machina supplement, Magnes. According to Szydlak, the company's expansion plans won't end with the expected acquisitions. "We want to create new titles. I think we've got good ideas and the means to implement them," he said.
A note placed on a TV set in a bar at one of Tuscany's seaside resorts "Sports programs have priority over other shows" might serve as proof that Italians are very passionate about their sport. Poland is no different. And digital platform Wizja TV was well aware of that when on Sept. 18, 1999 it launched Wizja Sport, the country's first Polish sport channel. One year later, Wizja Sport employs 79 people and broadcasts 12 hours of programming a day.
While the channel began broadcasting with live coverage of two UEFA soccer cup matches, according to Marcin Kubacki, the channel's director, Wizja Sport is now looking beyond soccer. "We have been trying to shape it in such a way that everyone would find something suitable for them," Kubacki said. "We didn't want Wizja Sport to become television exclusively for soccer or speedway racing fans."
As Wizja Sport joined Telewizja Polska, Polsat, Canal+ and others in the race for broadcast rights to top sport events, it discovered a market of skyrocketing prices. At the moment, Kubacki said, Wizja Sport is trying to purchase the right to broadcast the upcoming fight between Mike Tyson and Andrzej Golota. "The price is reaching $1.2 million now, whereas Tyson's fights used to be available for $200,000," he said. "In such a case there's a dilemma, as for the same amount of money you can buy the rights to broadcast one of the leagues for 3-4 years."
Such dilemmas tend to be resolved by audience figures. Last year, when Polsat broadcast the Golota-Liverspoon fight, the transmission grabbed more than 80% of the market share.
According to Jaroslaw Pawlowski, deputy president of market research company TNS OBOP, it may soon be easier to estimate the real value of internet advertising. At the beginning of September, TNS OBOP, advertising monitoring company Expert Monitor, and I-Metria, the research branch of Global eMarketing, signed a letter of intent, under which they are going to launch NetMetria, an internet research project. The project will monitor the impact of internet advertising on a panel of 2,000 internet users, as well as their web site and portal preferences.
"What we are aiming at is giving media planners a tool to measure precisely what groups their ad campaigns reach over the internet and how effective that advertising it," Pawlowski said. "So far, people who decide on the division of ad budgets could only use general information about the number of internauts and the popularity of specific portals since nobody conducts such detailed panel research over the internet."
At the beginning, the research panel will be made up of 1,000 internet users, who will have monitoring software installed on their computers.
"We would like this kind of research to become as popular as TV viewership monitoring," Pawlowski said.
Meanwhile, market research companies AGB Polska and SMG/KRC have been waiting since May for Polish internet portals to evaluate their proposal on internet monitoring. The proposal involves combining AGB's and SMG/KRC's research methods in one software package. "We would also add a demographic questionnaire, offering information on the sex, age, etc. of users, which we have lacked so far," said Elýbieta Gorajewska, director of AGB Polska. #
