Here's another example of Convergence: A company called Zetabid, which is owned by the same parent company that owns The Los Angeles Times, is revealed in a story appearing in... The Times!
But as discussed here many times at TCG, Convergence is real. And the story itself, by Annette Haddad, was perfectly fair and balanced:
Searching for new sources of revenue, Los Angeles Times Media Group is getting into the real estate business.
On Monday, Times Media Group and other partners will launch ZetaBid, a business that will auction foreclosed homes and other properties. The company would also run a website where the properties could be viewed.
The other partners are London-based GoIndustry-DoveBid, an auction specialist, and CataList Homes of Hermosa Beach, a real estate brokerage. The partners will share fees paid by the buyer on each home sold.
The venture is the latest effort by the struggling media company to tap additional revenue streams beyond newspaper advertising. The media group also operates revenue-sharing ventures through its Cars.com and Apartments.com classified-advertising enterprises.
The point here is that newspapers let their classified ads slips away, first to Monster.com, and then to Google. That's the big reason why their stock prices have plunged. So now, belatedly, they are trying to get back in the game, with a new kind of business model.
The reality of Convergence is what I call the Natty Bumppo Media Principle: "one shot, one kill." Or, updated for the web, "one shot, one screen." Right now, there is much media confusion: People have their TV sets, their computers, and their hand-helds. That's three screens to keep track of, which is two too many.
What folks really want, of course, is just one screen. One screen to do everything for them: It will entertain, it will inform, but it will also be useful for chores, from communications to paying bills to, yes, buying real estate.
That's Convergence, and it's coming. The Home Shopping Network was an early version of this, but HSN stalled because it didn't fully embrace the web, and so it let eBay get ahead of it.
Now, looking ahead, the big question will be from which direction Convergence comes. Will it be TV moving more into e-commerce? Or will it be newspapers, such as the LA Times? Or will it be e-commerce, putting on shows as a cover for, well, e-commerce? (That's how TV got its start, of course--advertisers built a show as an excuse to show commercials, hence, "soap operas." There's nothing inherently wrong with any of these models, of course; it will be fun to see which model wins the Convergence Game.
