Why did ‘Time’ never figure out the Internet?

It won’t be the first ‘older’ media company that won’t make the jump, and it won’t be the last. But there are lessons in Joshua Macht’s look at Time magazine:

When the digital era arrived, the inevitable fragmentation of media made it virtually impossible for Time to hold onto its massive audience, but the enterprise never seemed to get that fact. Instead, it tried to bulk up on pageviews, open up its archive (which has since gone behind a wall) and go with the bigger-is-better approach. But in a world where CNN’s 40 million unique visitors is small compared to Google’s 170 million, the get-big-fast approach is a tough road, and advertisers can find cheaper rates and more effective outlets fairly easily.