Unicusan is a University that has madeInnovation its strong point. The study of new information and media technologies and their constant application has certainly been one of the traits that has made this university, which is precisely "telematic", a top-level university institution capable of competing with larger realities that have been rooted for a very long time on the territory in a country that until recently looked at everything telematic with distrust.
Right on the webUniversity Niccolò Cusano shows us instead, in aInfographic captivating and simple to understand, a study that demonstrates how this distrust of the telematic world is over and Italians are increasingly in digital also with regards to thepublishing.
In collaboration with Edicusanus, the University's publishing house which has several scientific publications to its credit and offers the possibility, very difficult today when it comes to serious publishers and with a position on the market, to emerging authors to submit their manuscripts to be evaluated, the university offers us a cross-section of Online Publishing and the journey made so far.
How do Italians keep themselves informed in 2018?
Talking about the work done by Amazon in the United States which in unsuspecting times started right from the sale of books on the internet when the internet was a thing for the few, which from offering self publishing has also added the editorial service of scouting and promoting authors, even landing on printed paper, it's always good. This is a refresher on how the number one, loved and hated eCommerce has contributed to revolutionize the publishing world and the way we read.
And yet, say Amazon or New York Times and their much celebrated models of business online it serves to give a general picture but today it can be much more interesting to know what is happening in Italy.
Digital publishing in Italy
In fact, our country at the moment is an interesting terrain in which major national and international players collide in the world of content, in an era in which mobile networks have finally made it possible to archive the word digital divide and in which new tested online are born every day just as dozens of blogs of fake news and pseudosciences vie for the attention of the most inexperienced readers by meeting a demand for digital information which is present but which is still not fully satisfied by the more serious publishers. Suffice it to say that today 80% of Italian editorial projects they exist only on the web channel and that 80% of people who claim to get information frequently do so mainly using the web. Interesting data that collides with another data: the fact that only 13% of publishers monetize content directly while the rest of the market is based on advertising revenue.
This figure is not good news: monetizing with advertising requires constant massive traffic, therefore it is detrimental to quality and originality. We must prefer the captivating and ambiguous title for click-baiting (that is, using "bait" to get clicks), we must prefer the gossip on the protagonists of the news rather than the facts themselves, with results that are sometimes scarce and sometimes literally tragicomic of online newspapers, even with a certain name, who are scrambling to publish dozens of often similar articles with different titles and misleading images for previews to be shared on social networks.
Il freemium model or premium, i.e. charging for some content is a path taken by many around the world and which in Italy has led to higher revenues for newspapers such as il Foglio and Corriere della Sera, also offering greater freedom compared to the "Capture-attention" models used by those who must scramble to monetize in advertising.
The problem therefore, as demonstrated by the cases already mentioned, is not that in Italy there is no demand for quality information but rather that supply is scarce.
An important lesson for traditional media who want to survive and perhaps triumph in this period of change and transitions between digital and print.
