Brockhaus gains insight

Johannes Beus
The Brockhaus publishing-house has announced that they want to offer their content through a free but advertisement-financed “encyclopedia-portal” from mid-April on. This is not a wholly voluntary development – through the strong decline of their printed media they have accrued losses in the millions during the last fiscal year. The “Brockhaus case” seems exemplary for a long list of publishing-houses. Be it in Germany or internationally, most of the publishing-houses have simply overslept the timely entrance onto the Internet. Now the editions are falling, advertising customers are noticeably switching to the Internet and the publishing-houses see their hopes dashed. I have an utter lack of understanding for how the Brockhaus publishing-house, who says it watched the Internet for the last 10 years, is only acting now – it is not as if has become easier to successfully get started within the last five years. In this case, they have left the possibility to bind users untapped for years. In the meanwhile projects like Wikipedia had the chance to become extremely strong. To get a transition to the topic of searchengine-optimization, here the comparison of which Google-resultspage Wikipedia and Brockhaus.de can usually be found on:

To be amicable, we can say that Brockhaus is optimized for users who rather click all the way through to the sixth results-page. Even if no mistakes are made in the encyclopedia's conversion, we can only hope that this decision was not too late, so that enough “modern, post-materialistic performers” (how Brockhaus calls its target audience) will find appreciation for the offer ...
Johannes Beus - on Tue (02/12/2008) at 11:41 AM

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