maandag, 16 mei 2011
Changing technology is changing journalism in more ways than we can probably even understand. One of those changes concerns the definitions of “journalist” and “journalism” themselves, the question of who’s permitted to make or contest those definitions, and the other question of whether those lines are fair to draw in the first place....more
donderdag, 28 april 2011
Random forests, naïve Bayesian estimators, RESTful services, gossip protocols, eventual consistency, data sharding, anti-entropy, Byzantine quorum, erasure coding, vector clocks … walk into certain Amazon meetings, and you may momentarily think you’ve stumbled into a computer science lecture...more
zaterdag, 23 april 2011
Some of the most exciting work taking place in The New York Times building is being done on the 28th floor, in the paper’s Research and Development Lab. The group serves essentially as a skunkworks project for a news institution that stands to benefit, financially and otherwise, from creative thinking; as Michael Zimbalist, the Times’ vice president of R&D, puts it, the team is “investigating the ideas at the edges of today and thinking about how they’re going to impact business decisions tomorrow.” (For more on the group’s doings, check out the series of videos that we shot there a couple of years ago.)...more
donderdag, 21 april 2011
I’m a very big proponent of the “lean startup movement” as espoused by Steve Blank &Eric Ries.
The part of the movement that resonates the most with me (in my words) is that entrepreneurs should keep their capital expenditures really low while they’re experimenting with their product and determining whether there is a large market for what they do.
In the initial phases of any new market you’re developing a product (hopefully with a minimal set of features), getting feedback from customers, refining your product based on user feedback and then re-launching your product. Rinse & repeat. Nobody really knows whether or not the idea is yet going to be big, so I believe in not over capitalizing too early. This benefits you, the entrepreneur. It’s the whole basis of my investment philosophy, which I call “The Entrepreneur Thesis.”...more
dinsdag, 19 april 2011
Can a single app please both casual news readers and news junkies?
That’s the question I found myself asking upon rereading that report from a couple weeks ago on iPad users’ reactions to The Daily.
The report was put together by knowDigital, a division of market-research firm Coleman Insights, which asked more than 40 iPad owners to download The Daily and use it for two weeks. Sam Milkman, the head of knowDigital, interviewed participants afterward, and he found that even in a group that small, the needs of users were split...more
maandag, 18 april 2011
So, it looks like an intriguing deal.
Ford Motors’ Lincoln is subsidizing 100,000 new NYT digital subscriptions. Well, it is an intriguing deal, but it’s more nuanced than it seems, and in that nuance, we see some of the next models for how the digital circulation business and the digital ad business will newly intertwine, and open up new revenue streams and new marketing opportunities.
It’s just one deal, but it points to the fact that the new business model in creation will be based more on digital advertising than digital circulation. Making that new interplay work is as important as setting prices and deciding how to restrict content accces for anyone putting up a pay wall, pay fence or pay obstacle of any kind...more
donderdag, 14 april 2011
Here’s how newspapers sell what they do to would-be readers.
You can get the whole paper, now sometimes including digital access. We’ll sell you Sunday only, or the weekend, or 7-day, but you have to take our whole paper. That’s what we sell; that’s our one-size-fits-all product. It fit your grandparents and your parents, so why shouldn’t it fit you?
If newspapers were in the restaurant business, they’d be out of business quite quickly. That’s not much of a menu. There’s practically no à la carte, other than single copy, which is again the whole thing, but just once. It’s prix fixe, with early-bird specials for introductory signups...more
woensdag, 13 april 2011
Microsoft’s new Bing iPad app, released Thursday, does more than search — it begins to remake the newspaper experience in digital form.
The app is not being marketed as a news platform, but journalists should consider it one because it offers a great local information utility for the iPad age...more
zondag, 10 april 2011
@joemullin Apr 8, 2011The Limewire file-sharing service was shut down last year, and the only thing left now is to figure out how much money the now-illegal service owes the record labels that first sued it back in 2006. The judge overseeing the case made two key rulings this week that strongly favor the record labels. The orders are responding to a flurry of motions filed by both sides, as Limewire and the RIAA each try to get the early edge in a trial over damages scheduled to begin May 2. The most recent order will allow the RIAA to “double-dip” and get paid twice for more than one hundred songs....more
vrijdag, 8 april 2011
Don’t call them pageviews— call them pages read.
Don’t call them unique visitors — call them readers.
Welcome to The Washington Post’s new foray into understanding — and acting on — how readers actually consume digital news.
I wouldn’t quite call it a revolution. But it’s a firing shot in an effort to bring a modicum of science to the art form we editors like to believe we exercise so gracefully. It’s The Washington Post’s reader dashboard 1.0.
“Journalists like to believe that readers read every story they write,” says Raju Narisetti, one of two managing editors at the Post and head of washingtonpost.com news operations. “We’re disturbing that illusion. We’re also saying that focusing on the numbers doesn’t equal pandering.”...more
woensdag, 6 april 2011
Hulu LLC’s subscription video service will surpass one million subscribers in 2011, chief executive Jason Kilar said in a blog post Monday.
Mr. Kilar also reiterated that the company is on track to approach $500 million in revenue in 2011, up from $263 million in 2010. Its first-quarter revenue grew 90% from 2010...more
dinsdag, 5 april 2011
Reports of the demise of newspapers may be greatly exaggerated.
According to a new Harvard study, the denizens of the digital age — 18-to-29-year-olds — would prefer to get most of their political news about the next presidential campaign from — believe it or not — major national newspapers....more
maandag, 4 april 2011
Last October, suspense writer Jonathon King launched “Midnight Guardians,” the sixth novel in his Max Freeman crime series. Unlike the previous five titles, this one didn’t have a major publisher or a cash advance.
Instead, “Midnight Guardians,” available at Amazon.com for $14.99 as a digital text and $23.08 as a print-on-demand paperback, was issued by Open Road Integrated Media LLC, a digital upstart that has also reissued Mr. King’s entire backlist...more
vrijdag, 1 april 2011
The details of Paul Allen’s testy personal relationship with Bill Gates have been the most eye-catching part of his forthcoming memoir. But it is the Microsoft co-founder’s damning critique of the company’s current problems that could well prove more telling.
In a draft of the forthcoming book, seen by the FT, Mr Allen writes: “How did a company once at the forefront of technology and change fall so far behind? It’s a thorny question, with roots that go back decades, but I believe it boils down to three broad factors: scale, culture and leadership.”...more
donderdag, 31 maart 2011
What Apple took away, Amazon has restored.
I’m talking, of course, about Lala, the pioneering digital music service that Apple purchased in December 2009 and shut down more than a year ago. The first thing Apple did, almost immediately after purchasing the company, was to disable its Music Mover feature, which allowed Lala members to upload their personal music collections to a cloud-based locker where they could play it from any web browser.
Yesterday, with the double-barreled launch of its Cloud Drive storage service and the tightly linked Cloud Player, Amazon brought that capability back to a mass audience. They’ve executed their strategy brilliantly, and they’ve painted the recording industry and their archrival Apple into a corner...more
donderdag, 31 maart 2011
Popular Science magazine sold the 10,000th subscription to its iPad edition sometime on Sunday, nearly six weeks after accepting Apple’s terms for selling subs on its tablet. That’s a speck compared to the title’s nearly 1.2 million print subscriptions, but a significant early foothold for digital magazine subscriptions on the iPad.…more
woensdag, 30 maart 2011
The Times and The Sunday Times had a combined total of 79,000 monthly digital subscribers at the end of February, up almost 60 per cent over the past four months, according to unaudited figures released by News International.
The total was up from 50,000 last November and included subscribers to the two newspapers’ digital sites as well as to The Times’ iPad and Kindle editions.…more
maandag, 28 maart 2011
A regional publisher which has scrapped the printing of most of its weekly freesheets and transformed them into e-editions says it has seen a 50pc increase in web traffic in three months.…more
maandag, 28 maart 2011
By now, we were supposed to have clarity about how The New York Times will use a meter to create a digital subscription revenue stream. After all, the plan went into effect in Canada March 17 and is supposed to start rolling out in the United States and globally Monday afternoon. We do have details—all-you-can-click social, 20 clicks at NYTimes.com (NYSE: NYT) before direct access is lost, pay plans of $15-$35 every four weeks—but the clearest aspect so far is how hard it is to cut through preconceptions, particularly when flexibility and complexity are involved...more
zondag, 27 maart 2011
“If you look at the history of the world, up until 1700 nothing much happened.” That’s what Karl Marx said to Friedrich Engels when the two first met, at a cafe in Paris, in 1844. No, I’m kidding. The guy who actually spoke those words is Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, and he spoke them just a few days ago.…more
vrijdag, 25 maart 2011
Digital news business models are playing out on pool tables these days. Break the balls and you have no idea where they’re going or how they’ll impact each other. We’ve got paid content models of varying kinds. We’ve got the new combining “free world” of AOL/Huffington Post+ taking aim at the emerging paid world. We’ve got continuing revolutions in advertising models and technologies. We’ve got the knitting together of professional publishing and higher-end “amateur” publishing. And we have the biggest introduction of a digital device, the iPad, that we’ve ever seen, while smartphone adoption continues to create a news-anywhere world. Draw back the pool cue, punch a ball, and new patterns emerge — some planned, many quite unintentional, and maybe a few dramatic in their impact...more
donderdag, 24 maart 2011
Digital media companies will soon find it easier to clear content rights for new online services, under recommendations from the Hargreaves review into intellectual property.
The review is part of a wider package of proposals around IP in Wednesday’s Budget, including the creation of new diplomatic posts in Asia to lobby for greater protection from piracy, which is rampant in markets such as China and India.…more
woensdag, 23 maart 2011
Huh? The New York Times is clearly struggling with the whole social media angle of its new online pay-wall — or rather, trying to have its online cake and eat it too.
On one hand, the NYT wants heavy users to pay for access to online content, shelling out $15 per month for continued access after reading the maximum allowed 20 articles for free; the pay wall is supposed to take effect on March 28 (it’s already up in Canada)...more
woensdag, 23 maart 2011
The New York Times’s model for online charging will no doubt be widely copied. But according to one analyst, print will still be providing 86% of UK newspapers’ revenues even in 2017.
So, at long, long last, we have the paywall policy all Americannewspapers – and many others around the globe – have been waiting for. Get the New York Times delivered at home and you receive internet access free. But eschew print and visit the website more than 20 times a month and you’ll be charged $15 or $20 or $35 a month according to the number of bells and whistles (tablets, smartphones etc) you opt for.…more
dinsdag, 22 maart 2011
EveryBlock, a hyperlocal news site acquired by msnbc.com in August 2009, unveiled a new version Monday designed to encourage conversation and collaboration among neighbors.
“We’re shifting from a one-way newsfeed to more of a community-empowered website,” says EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty. “Instead of going to the site to passively consume information, we’re going to offer a platform for posting messages to your neighbors, to discover who lives near you.”...more
dinsdag, 22 maart 2011
I’m often asked to name companies with a successful paid digital content strategy. It’s harder than it should be to answer that question, especially in Europe.
In news, the FT still heads a small field, along with some B2B publishers while, in music, despite some innovative companies, the digital revenues beyond iTunes are still small...more
dinsdag, 22 maart 2011
Citizenside, other websites collect and syndicate amateur videos to professional news groups
By MAX COLCHESTER
PARIS—French website Citizenside recently sold a grainy video of British fashion designer John Galliano conducting an anti-Semitic rant to news organizations around the world.
Mr. Galliano lost his job, and Citizenside pocketed a six-figure bounty.
This was just the latest scoop for the Paris-based company which is one of several websites that collect and syndicate amateur videos to professional news organizations. Citizenside says it sold the Galliano clip for more than €100,000, or about $139,000...more
maandag, 21 maart 2011
@davidaKaplanMar 18, 2011 11:15 AM ETMedia buyers don’t expect the New York Times’ online ad revenue, which was up double digits last year, to take a hit from the company’s new digital subscription plans. Some even see a scenario where the NYT will be able to charge higher rates—if the newspaper hits the expected number of “heavy users” which may offer proof of “more engaged” readers.
When it comes to digital ad revenue, the NYTCo’s experience has mirrored most major publishers. In Q4, digital adsremained a particular bright side in general, as that segment rose 11.1 percent to $113.2 million. Citing a “volatile ad market,” the company experienced a 7.2 percent drop in print ad dollars...more
maandag, 21 maart 2011
RTL and ProSiebenSat.1 said on Friday they were considering legal action against the German cartel office after it blocked their plans to establish an online video-on-demand service.
The Bundeskartellamt confirmed on Friday its initial opinion from last month that the venture planned by Germany’s two largest commercial broadcasters would be bad for competition...more
vrijdag, 18 maart 2011
The New York Times has launched its long-awaited model for charging for news online, with a “metered” subscription approach that will charge more than some analysts had expected, but ensure that most readers never encounter the paywall.
NYTimes.com will become the largest non-financial newspaper to charge at least some online readers, starting the industry’s most closely watched experiment in whether general interest publications can wean readers off a 15-year habit of finding news online for free...more
donderdag, 17 maart 2011
(Reuters) – Media giant News Corp aims to build its own social-gaming business as valuations of games companies, such as FarmVille maker Zynga skyrocket, its head of digital media said on Wednesday.
Jonathan Miller also said News Corp’s The Daily, a newspaper designed for Apple’s iPad, had had hundreds of millions of downloads since its launch in the United States last month. It will begin charging readers for subscriptions next week...more
woensdag, 16 maart 2011
During a visit to Poynter on Tuesday, Bob Woodward talked about Watergate’s original code name, why he likes his iPad, and the best time of day to access hard-to-reach sources.
Below, I’ve highlighted his thoughts on these topics and others. The quotes are drawn from two talks Woodward gave at Poynter and a one-on-one interview I had with him...more
woensdag, 16 maart 2011
Rental giant is bidding on a series starring Kevin Spacey
Netflix has already revolutionized the home video business, crushing all rivals while introducing an entirely new and now widely imitated model in content distribution via the postal service and later the internet.
Now Netflix is now looking to revolutionize the content production side of entertainment...more
dinsdag, 15 maart 2011
TOKYO – Dentsu Inc. and Facebook, Inc. announced an agreement under which Dentsu will become the official representative of Facebook’s sales and marketing support to companies in Japan.
Under this agreement, Dentsu, as Facebook’s official ad sales representative in the Japanese market, will provide consultation on effective Facebook Page (see Note 1) development, exclusively market Facebook Premium Ads, and offer new marketing strategies utilizing Facebook that are tied into ad placements in the mass media to advertisers in Japan...more
dinsdag, 15 maart 2011
Facebook said it was entering the fast-growing “deal of the day” market, posing a challenge to online discount marketing pioneers Groupon and LivingSocial.
The social network’s large audience and detailed database of user preferences positions it to be a fierce competitor in this market, which is expected to generate nearly $4bn by 2015, according to consulting firm BIA/Kelsey. Facebook’s move could boost its revenue stream as it considers a public offering – and potentially compromises Groupon’s impending IPO...more
maandag, 14 maart 2011
By several measures, the state of the American news media improved in 2010.
After two dreadful years, most sectors of the industry saw revenue begin to recover. With some notable exceptions, cutbacks in newsrooms eased. And while still more talk than action, some experiments with new revenue models began to show signs of blossoming.
Among the major sectors, only newspapers suffered continued revenue declines last year—an unmistakable sign that the structural economic problems facing newspapers are more severe than those of other media. When the final tallies are in, we estimate 1,000 to 1,500 more newsroom jobs will have been lost—meaning newspaper newsrooms are 30% smaller than in 2000.…more
maandag, 14 maart 2011
Google Inc., trying to become a middleman for selling video ads on the Internet, will soon test a service that matches advertisers with website publishers, including Google’s own YouTube video site.
The Silicon Valley company is creating the video marketplace within its DoubleClick Ad Exchange, Neal Mohan, a Google vice president for product management, said in an interview. It resembles existing exchanges used to sell graphical and interactive ads, a category known as display.
Such exchanges allow companies to bid to place ads across different websites in real time, or right at the moment a user has called up a particular Web page...more
maandag, 14 maart 2011
When I was at school, mobile phones and MP3 players were banned from the classroom. In no way were they considered to be an aid to education.
The same went for downloads. If pupils were to download anything, it would be their favourite piece of music in their free time. Now, however, these formats have united to become a means of furthering a student’s learning.
“We are going through a revolution,” says Ray Irving, head of learning and resource development at Warwick Business School in the UK...more
zaterdag, 12 maart 2011
One of the big promises of the digital age was that journalism would be transformed by an army of amateur videographers – namely, all of us regular citizens – who might just happen to be nearby when something important goes down. And it’s true this kind of user-generate content has provided some pretty amazing scoops and footage from incidents which might otherwise have been missed by “real” TV news outfits: some of the most alarming video I have ever seen is amateur, close-up footage of tornadoes (I mean really close-up – way closer than any professional news outfit would get). But it’s also clear that the close-up perspective of the random passer-by just can’t compete with professionals when it comes to certain types of events...more
vrijdag, 11 maart 2011
Here’s one of those stats that makes you sit up and take notice: Facebook was identified as “the ‘primary source’” of evidence in divorce cases by fully two-thirds of divorce lawyers surveyed by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. This figure is especially incredible when you consider that Facebook didn’t even exist ten years ago — a testament to how quickly technology and social change can advance in our mad, modern world...more
vrijdag, 11 maart 2011
I rediscovered my old AOL e-mail account this week and was taken down e-memory lane as the famous “You’ve Got Mail!” message boomed from the PC speaker as I signed in. After years of neglect and only spam in my inbox, it was like a voice from beyond the grave – and with the same old US accent they never localised for the UK with a British voice proclaiming: “Post Is Here!”
I had logged in because I was taking the pulse of e-mail in general. Its obituary has been written repeatedly by the media over the past 10 years – strangled by spam in 2003, smothered by social networks in 2007 and razed by real-time communication such as Google Wave in 2009, before predictions of being finished off by Facebook Messages this year...more
vrijdag, 11 maart 2011
The Wall Street Journal has added 200,000 paying subscribers who access the newspaper via mobile devices such as Apple Inc.’s iPad and Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle.
Les Hinton, head of the newspaper’s publisher, Dow Jones & Co., which is owned by News Corp., said Thursday that about 150,000 of the new subscribers were added in the last 12 months. Subscribers pay about $4 a week to read the Journal on their iPad...more
donderdag, 10 maart 2011
Editor’s Note: Richard J. Tofel is general manager at ProPublica, a Wall Street Journal veteran, and author of a number of books, most recently Eight Weeks in Washington, 1861: Abraham Lincoln and the Hazards of Transition. Here he looks toward a future when search engine optimization has been rendered obsolete by advancing technology — and the implications for news.
The first time I saw the Google guys in action, one of them — I believe it was Larry Page — stunned the small crowd. It was long before the IPO, when Google was the Next New Thing, the search engine that the cool kids in the class, or the office, were knowingly mentioning to the rest of us. The interviewer was fawning over the young upstarts when Page said, “I’m glad you think Google is great, but I think it sucks.”
His point, he quickly added, is that the objective of a search engine is to enable the reader to find what he or she wants. Google, Page noted, rarely does this perfectly. Even the simplest searches retrieve pages of choices, many of them quite beside the point...more
donderdag, 10 maart 2011
“An utter disappointment and abysmal failure” (Orange County Design Blog). “Consumers seem genuinely baffled by why they might need it” (Businessweek). “Nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks” (Bloomberg). “Insanely great it is not” (MarketWatch). “My god, am I underwhelmed” (Gizmodo).
Good heavens! What a critical drubbing! Whatever it is must be a real turkey. What could it be?..more
donderdag, 10 maart 2011
CP&B Now Using the Research to Develop Tablet Ad Formats
Readers have more trouble focusing on magazines’ iPad editions than publishers initially predicted, according to the latest study in a growing effort to figure out tablet computers.
“We thought that of course there’s a lot of activity going on on an iPad, when there’s so many things you can be doing — between email, Netflix, playing games, reading magazines — but they’re actually bouncing around a lot more than we thought,” said Megan Miller, research and development program director at Bonnier, which publishes titles including Popular Science, Field & Stream, Parenting and Ski...more
donderdag, 10 maart 2011
For media companies, when and how to tap into the new mobile and social platforms on the web is as much a question of timing and technological tactics as of business strategy. But make no mistake: as the platforms quickly evolve, most companies have little choice but to engage with them – and pay whatever toll is required.
There have been two reminders in recent days of the growing power of these platforms, from Apple and Facebook...more
donderdag, 10 maart 2011
Omnicom, one of the world’s largest marketing services groups, has struck what it claims are industry-first partnerships with AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft, to gain direct access to the internet companies’ consumer data.
The deals, which follow a similar agreement with Google last year, will give Omnicom’s agencies the ability to target advertising to particular locations, ages and demographics across the web’s biggest media networks...more
woensdag, 9 maart 2011
FreePressMedia and Yahoo! are teaming up to give local advertisers new access to customers via online advertising campaigns targeted at local consumers on BurlingtonFreePress.com and Yahoo! websites.
FreePressMedia, which includes the Burlington Free Press and BurlingtonFreePress.com, immediately will begin offering Yahoo! digital inventory as part of its local advertising solutions, President and Publisher Jim Fogler announced...more
woensdag, 9 maart 2011
Spotify is this week celebrating signing up its millionth subscriber – but only quietly. Staff at the digital music service’s offices in London have not been treated to a big party, slap-up feast or cracked open the champagne. Spotify says there will be a few pats on backs, then it’s just “onwards and upwards”...more
dinsdag, 8 maart 2011
Warner Bros. will begin offering select movies through Facebook, a move that will enable the social-networking giant to compete in the online movie-rental market.
The new offering—which was made by Warner Brothers without explicit assistance from Facebook—puts Facebook Inc. in greater competition with Netflix Inc. and other tech companies vying for position in the ever-expanding online-video-services market. It also comes as movie studios are increasingly testing new methods of distribution for their movies...more
Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703386704576186913491751144.html#ixzz1G2nJBMZx
