O’Reilly Media is a leading technology publisher and easily the most influential company in tech, not by dollar value or brand reach, but through thought leadership. Founder Tim O’Reilly is regularly referred to as an oracle and has an amazing ability to predict and build the future (see O’Reilly’s bold moves into eBooks as an example).
Their Makezine blog is wildly popular and they have built an amazing grassroots community around “making” as evidenced by their well attended MakerFaire’s.
Given the predictive abilities of the O’Reilly organization it is worth watching their expanding ecommerce efforts. Instead of just chronicling the projects and hacks of their community they are now supplying them with the raw materials to build even more cool projects. A great example is this well merchandised electronics kit.
The reason for this expansion is logical. Print media is dying and DRM free ebooks and the subscriptions for books are not fully proven business models. However selling atoms, physical products, is still an area where a small company with a lot of knowledge can build large businesses. This presentation by Limor Fried of AdaFruit Industries lists a dozen or so examples of companies with revenue greater than $1MM and the biggest of all is probably Sparkfun whose revenue is reportedly well north of $10MM.
I think this is a sign of something bigger. Moving forward “media” is going to be funded less by ads and become more of a way to sell products directly to customers. I’m seeing more industries that have a media component to inspire/instruct, an ecommerce channel to fulfill demand, and increasingly a tech component to help production become more efficient. O’Reilly certainly has the media/ecommerce parts down and tech is baked into their DNA. However, you can see how the same paradigm could apply to crafts via this Fashioning Technology kit, and the monster hit Cooking For Geeks.
A more mainstream example is Discovery Communications which owns TLC and makes a big chunk of its revenue by selling ads on shows about cake. There are a dozen shows about cake baking, catalogs that sell the supplies, and even cool tech tools to make cake decorating easier. These are some half formed thoughts, but I think vertical integration of media, commerce, and tech is the wave of the future.
