My name is Michael Paustian. I'm from Germany, actually, from Berlin. I work for Axel Springer,
which is the biggest European publisher and also the leading digital publisher in Europe.
Right now I'm concentrated on a new venture of ours, which is Upday, a strategic partnership
with Samsung, where we created a very seamless and unique new service explicitly for Samsung
customers. So the major issues for media in general is that there's lots of uncertainty.
Nobody really hammered out yet how to make money in a proper way, and this is something
which is obviously a little bit disturbing. Nevertheless, this is a great chance for us,
and I strongly believe that media will make it to become profitable. But there are many
challenges in regards to talking to different partners. There are many challenges in terms
of copyright laws, to whom belongs the content. There are many challenges in regards to data
and how to address the people. We're talking about lots of homeless media, so that the
big destination addresses are vanishing, that news comes to you in a contextual way, and
we're thinking a lot and discussing a lot and trying out a lot how to solve these problems.
It's a very playful approach.
So if you look at Axel Springer, we own hundreds of outlets, so it's hard to answer for us
as a company, because we obviously target different peer groups with each and every
brand. Truth is that there's one overwhelming rule which is relevant. I think that's actually
a hygiene factor. We need to produce relevant and high-class journalistic content first,
if not we will vanish. That's the given. That's only one side of the metal, doing great products
and doing great journalism. The other side of the metal is definitely how to distribute
it and how to address our audience in a proper way.
I think the publishers will be in a very, very good position, because if you look at
how the landscape changed and what happened within the media space for the last 18 months,
you clearly can see that all the big companies out there have acknowledged that news is
something which provides a lot of stickiness to the ecosystem. So Snapchat did discovery,
Facebook did instant articles, Twitter does Twitter moments, Google did AMP, so all of
the big gorillas out there are really stepping into this field. This is a good sign and shows
how relevant and how worthy content and news are. I think five years down the road we will
benefit from it very, very clearly and we'll have very good and fruitful business cases
for us as well.
