Rubens Morse

The Top 12 Brands Likely to Survive

I think you are very wrong about Playboy, Zale and Steinway.

Steinway's brand will survive for sure but I'm not sure the company will in its current form. The most valuable unencumbered real estate is the store and office building on 57th Street. The Queens factory site could only be sold in a total liquidation scenario, if the factory continues to run they won't sell it. There is a worrying trend of Steinway financing more and more of it's dealers inventory, since several banks and GE are cutting lines in this segment. They will probably have bad debt problems from the dealer financing in the near future.

Zale is just an overleveraged retailer, it could go under and no one would miss it, like Circuit City and Linens N Things. I also think Playboy is becoming less and less relevant in today's digital world. The latest proof of that is the magazine will probably go from monthly to bi-monthly. Raising the price of the magazine to $5.99 is a pretty desperate move and should backfire. The reason they are going down (I think the stock will eventually go to $0) is that today you can find better and cheaper adult entertainment online, and their brand is just not relevant for the new generation. Their old time readers are getting older and dying, the young guys don't care about Playboy.

How Google Killed Web Subscriptions

I disagree with your thesis, Google is not responsible. The newspaper industry is somewhat to blame, as they sell contect directly and indirectly through Associated Press (which is owned by newspaper publishers) to aggregators like Yahoo and Google. A subscription model cannot work for a minority of the newspapers with people having free access to most of the newspapers. I also believe that people will also be willing to pay for premium specialized online content (I have no problem paying for the online access to WSJ, Barron's, Economist). The WSJ has been the most successful paid subscription web site ever; with almost 1 million subscribers paying ~$100 per year, it will be difficult to replace those revenues with online ads.