The cost of communicating in digital age

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Broadcasting is expensive, requiring expensive infrastructure, technology and many personnel. Printing is also expensive, though owning a printing plant is not a necessity this is balanced by the high costs of distribution. Writing in February 2003 in the United Kingdom the bare minimum cost of professionally printing and distributing a subscription based black and white 40-page magazine to 1,000 people was £2000 per issue.8 at the cheapest end of the market this is outside the scope of many organizations, certainly on a regular basis and without advertising support.

At the other end of the scale the cost of national newspapers is well known, Of the United Kingdom’s two most recent market entrants one of the world’s richest media moguls, Rupert Murdoch, was unable to bring Today, a middle market tabloid with hundreds of thousands of readers, into profitability and avoid its eventual closure. The Independent struggles from crisis to crisis and from rescue bid to rescue bid, despite both newspapers employing the latest technology and having the resources of large media groups to fall back on.9 Not only do websites and email allow near instant communication with smaller groups, they also bring a huge cost reduction.

For only the price of a computer and an internet connection an individual could send emails and create a basic website using free software and free server space. Professional web design software costs a few hundred pounds and your own web address and server space can be bought for less than a hundred pounds. At the most basic level an individual can disseminate information for a one-off cost of less than a thousand pounds much cheaper than the ongoing costs associated with printing.

 However, it is often mistakenly assumed that the low cost of basic web production means anyone with a home computer can create a site to rival the BBC or Amazon. Simple sites may be cheap but large complex sites are every bit as expensive as the traditional media. Sites which compile lists of users or restrict access by the use of unique passwords require integrated databases which greatly increase the design costs. In the United Kingdom quotes for sites with this sort of functionality currently start at £10,000, and cost far more during the dot.com boom.10 Furthermore, the technical characteristics of websites mean unlike broadcasting there is a significant marginal cost.

 The costs for a radio station are exactly the same whether they broadcast to one person within their coverage area or one million. But with websites adding users increases the costs, most significantly if we are talking about creating a mass audience site with millions of hits. It requires a higher bandwidth connection to the internet back bone and larger numbers of more powerful servers running more expensive software.11 For the managers of big websites the number of users who can access the site without it crashing particularly during national emergencies like 9/11 is a matter of great pride and testament to the site’s expensive technical capabilities.

Neither can it be forgotten that the media is a labour intensive industry and for an enterprise of any size this is equally true of websites. Even the smallest local paper requires at least a couple of journalists, as would a small magazine-style website, but it would also need IT staff, as do printers and news- papers. The United Kingdom’s biggest site, www.bbc.co.uk, reportedly employs 200 people and cost £100 million in 2002, 12 but the true figure would be much higher if it took into account the cost of sourcing the material it recycles and repurposes from BBC radio and television.

Assessing the effect of ICTs

The internet has made little impact on the economic realities which shape the mass communications landscape. As a way of reaching national audiences of hundreds of thousands there is no significant cost saving over the ‘old’ media. It is unsurprising that the most popular sites in most countries are run by either big companies like Microsoft or national telecoms providers; or well established media organizations like the BBC or AOL Time Warner. These are complemented by start-ups like Yahoo! and Google who had sufficient funding and a good enough product to challenge the big boys. Mass communication continues to be dominated by a handful of huge companies and is likely to remain so. The implication for PR professionals is that the internet has changed little in terms of disseminating a message to a mass audience.

Disseminating information via the internet will never have the same impact as traditional mass media relations. Where the internet can have a marked effect on corporate communication is in utilizing its ability to communicate quickly and cheaply with relatively small numbers of people, i.e. in the low tens of thousands and below. To return to the earlier example, a developer who built houses in an area where the rock is known to release large amounts of radon could achieve a great deal by setting up a website which provides the latest information about whether the gas is harmful. A large company is likely to have the resources to produce a more comprehensive and regularly updated site than small groups of campaigners.