Friday, July 27, 2001

Posted 5:05 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

AOL vs. Microsoft

Rich Gordon on a battle publishers need to care about
The AOL vs. Microsoft wars are getting serious, and the outcome will have enormous consequences for online publishers. AOL is offering substantial sums to computer manufacturers to feature AOL prominently on the opening desktop screens. (Articles today in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.) Meanwhile, critics are arguing — correctly, in my view — that Microsoft is trying with Windows XP to turn its Passport registration system into everyone's e-commerce gateway. In the past six or seven years, open Internet technologies have created the most popular publishing platform in history. But its openness is, in itself, a big part of the explanation for why it's hard to make money delivering content online. AOL and Microsoft would prefer a closed system more like today's cable TV model. (Create a distribution channel ... and then charge customers, content providers or both for the right to use it.) Watch these giants battle for control over the on-ramps to the Internet. And to the degree that either company is successful, expect to share your revenue with them.

Posted 12:33 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Whew! Newspapers Favor Interaction

Steve Klein on interacting with readers
It should come as no surprise that editors of U.S. newspapers believe that more interactivity with readers is necessary. What may be surprising, however, is the relative lack of sophistication in their preferred means of interaction, according to a new survey. The report, "Journalism Interactive: A Survey on the Future of Newspapers," reveals that "9 out of 10 editors believe that the future health of the newspaper industry depends on more interactions with readers" and that "changes in the technology and the geography of journalism and in what editors perceive as topics of interest to their readers are fueling these trends."

Does this mean greater use of the Internet by newspapers? Not specifically, it seems, according to Jan Schaffer, executive director of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism (one of the survey's sponsors): "So much of current newsroom focus in journalism is on the 'C' word — convergence. But this survey suggests the focus should be on a different 'C' word — citizens. The kinds of interactions with readers will then dictate the appropriate news platform."

 

Posted 10:25 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Click Here to Subscribe

Jade Walker on feasible business models on the Web
The Newspaper Association of America's Circulation Federation is about to offer hope to the floundering online newspaper industry. According to Editor & Publisher magazine, the organization is about to release a report that presents a simple and easy way for newspapers to make money from their online ventures. How? Sell subscriptions to the paper version using online ads.

Technology and a lack of foresight seem to be the biggest obstacles to executing this plan. However, once these are overcome, the results are amazing. In fact, my own employer, the New York Times, has received more than 50,000 print subscriptions from its Web site in the past seven months alone.

Posted 10:16 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

A Sports URL Worth Saving

Steve Klein on online sports sites
One of the Web's best sports references, The Sports Hot Sheet, is changing URLs. A directory of official sports sites compiled by Jack Styczynski, it's got links to everything from U.S. newspapers to TV networks; professional baseball, football, basketball, hockey, and soccer; college sports (including Division I schools by conference); auto racing; golf; and tennis. It's definitely a keeper.

Posted 10:07 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

More From the Broadband Battlefield

Katja Riefler on the access price war in Germany
Just a short comment on Steve Klein's issue of AOL and broadband (yesterday's item). It is really a hot issue. Here in Germany you can get cheaper Internet access with DSL than with any other connection. Deutsche Telekom offers access for about US $40. AOL just started a flat rate that costs only DM 39,90 / month (less than US $20), but only if you already have the Telekom DSL connection in your home. The provider 1&1 even beats that price. It's much different with analog or digital (ISDN) phone lines. AOL had stopped its flat rate of US $40 per month in May because of unprofitability. Deutsche Telekom doesn't offer such a flat rate at all. Now AOL has started a new approach and announced that it will raffle 1,000 narrowband flat rate accounts a week that will cost US $20 per month among applicants, starting in August. This is seen as an effort to force Deutsche Telekom to lower its interconnection prices for other carriers. Internet by call without registration, on the other hand, is getting more expensive. Tiscali and Comundo, for example, just raised the costs per minute.

Thursday, July 26, 2001

Posted 1:28 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Offline Advertising Isn't Working Either

Rich Gordon on "Peace, Love, Linux"
This article from MotherJones.com (an online-only piece, by the way, from a company that's recently been recruiting an online editor to ramp up its Web operation) discusses IBM's sidewalk-graffiti "Peace, Love, Linux" campaign. It points out that this campaign is an example of "the seepage of advertising into spaces that used to be relatively free from marketing messages." (This hit me when I first saw an ad on the handle of a gas pump.) The lesson: Online or offline, traditional forms of advertising aren't working — at least not as well as they once did. We need 1) better targeting and 2) more compelling ad formats. Both of these are more possible in new media than traditional media — one key reason why, despite current pessimism, the business outlook for new media is bright.

Posted 11:27 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

The $64 Billion Question

Steve Klein on broadband services
While pervasive broadband delivery of Internet services always seem to be just over the horizon, AOL Time Warner chief executive Gerald Levin called it the "final battlefield" at The Standard's Internet Summit in Carlsbad, California. Levin had praise for the utility of high-speed cable access and said the key to the future of broadband was "who will deliver it, and what will they provide." Levin forsees "on demand" services for music, movies, news, sports, and shopping. Just who controls the home network, he said, remains the "$64 billion question."

Leslie Walker, who writes the ".com" column every Thursday in the Washington Post, provides an excellent overview of the conference. Among her comments: "Gone was the giddiness. Gone, too, was the cockiness of Internet revolutionaries convinced that they were building a global computer network that could overthrow the old guard of business. Gloom and caution took their place ..."

Wednesday, July 25, 2001

Posted 6:30 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Wait Till Next Year

Steve Klein on online sports sites
Wait until next year! We've heard that one before. It's a popular rallying cry for sports teams that don't win the championship, and it's just what SportsLine.com is saying about profitability projections. According to a story by Christine Winter in the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, the No. 2 online sports site has pushed back its goal of breaking even by a full year to the fourth quarter of 2002. Said SportsLine.com CEO Michael Levy: "It is not the best of times." Levy called the company's results "disappointing" and blamed losses on the "softness of the advertising market in the company's slowest period." Nothing new in that assessment. For the second quarter, SportsLine.com reported total revenues of $13.1million compared to $24.3 million for the same quarter last year.

Posted 4:52 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Pay to Chat?

Steve Outing on Salon's latest revenue scheme
Salon.com, which probably will get delisted from NASDAQ tomorrow, is obviously desperate to bring in more revenue. The webzine already charges ($30 a year) for a Salon Premium service, which offers an ad-free experience and extra content. Now Salon.com is going to start charging users for participating in the popular Table Talk discussions area. The paid subscriptions will be $6.50 and $9.50 a month (intro rate, then the rates go up after three months), which gives access to Table Talk as well as the discussion communities of The Well. Owned by Salon, The Well already charges monthly fees to participate in its online communities. As you might expect, many members of Table Talk are incensed, and the discussions would seem to indicate that many of them will bail out rather than pay. My guess: 5% of registered Table Talk participants will pay to stick around. While that might bringing in a decent amount of money for Salon, it will kill the community, which needs high numbers of participants to remain vibrant. This is probably Table Talk's death knell.

Posted 11:00 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Distribution Partnerships: Yea or Nay?

Rich Gordon on "sleeping with the enemy"
Editor & Publisher Online has an interesting article about MSNBC and its agreements with local newspapers and TV stations that provide local content to what has become the nation's No. 1 news Web site. In particular it highlights the debate over whether it's in a local site's best interest to provide news to a national portal. Jack Lail of Knoxnews.com says his site's deal with MSNBC is worthwhile for traffic and branding purposes. Mike Coleman of AZcentral.com says the site has canceled its MSNBC deal in favor of a new philosophy: "We're not willing to allow our content to be put in any other site's templates unless we're getting cold, hard cash."

My opinion: The devil's in the details. For a local or niche site, a distribution partnership with a high-traffic national site is worthwhile if: (1) branding for your site is prominent on the local "front" and on the articles themselves, and (2) the articles contain prominent links back to your site (preferably for very specific services — for example, jobs and homes — and/or headlines that aren't being published to the portal site). I'd also try to send only abbreviated versions to the portal site and ask for a "for more on this story" link back to my site. Yahoo! seems to be willing to do this these days (example: this Chicago Tribune story on Yahoo's site).

Tuesday, July 24, 2001

Posted 5:55 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Charge the ISP! ...

Katja Riefler on a new revenue idea
Want to see another idea in the never-ending story of how to make money on your content on the Internet? The small Swedish company TRIC, whose name they want you to read as "True revenue for Internet content," wants to play the David against Goliath game with the telcos and ISPs first in Sweden and then in the rest of the world. It has created a filter, which enables sites to exclude surfers from access providers that have not paid a subscription to the material. The filter, which is based on a technology similar to the mod_access Module of the the Apache Web server, will be on the market in September.

TRIC claims to have been able to get most of the Swedish media world (70%) on its side of the negotiation table — Schibsted, Bonniers, and Swedish MSN. It wants to negotiate a deal that commits the ISPs to pay US $1 per customer per month (with 4 million Swedish Internet users that would be US $4 million per month). The money shall be shared among the Web sites according to the traffic each has achieved. TRIC will keep a commission of 10%. In the future, TRIC expects the ISPs to adopt the billing for premium content — which no European telco is eager to do yet. The initiative is very closely watched especially in the Nordic countries where you have high Internet penetration and a small number of content providers. It probably would be much harder to install in a country like Germany or the U.S., where customers that are excluded from sites could easily find an alternative.

Posted 5:55 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

... Or Charge the Customer

Steve Outing on pay-for-content alternative
In the item directly above this, Katja Reifler talks about the splash that TRIC is making with its charge-the-ISPs-for-content model. In this week's Content Spotlight newsletter, I've written an editorial explaining why this is a notable development that content sites should support.

There's one additional piece to the TRIC story that I haven't seen suggested yet. When TRIC is implemented, when customers of a non-subscribing ISP hit a TRIC-managed content site, they'll see a message denying them access. An alternative is for content sites to include on these access-denied pages an option for the Web user to gain immediate access to the site by paying a modest fee. Thanks to Mark Smith at Internet Billing Co. (iBill) for tossing this interesting idea my way.

Posted 10:04 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

All the News That's Fit to Find

Steve Klein on online newspaper redesigns
Customer improvements come in many shapes and presentations, but the New York Times has taken its Web site to a new level with an excellent guided tour. The animated slide show provides an overview and also runs through the Business, Books, New York Today, and Classifieds sections. Full access to the site has long required registration, but for Times lovers, it's one registration process that's worth it.

Some of the improvements pointed out in an e-mail by site editor Bernard Gwertzman include a choice of headlines from just the print edition or the full menu (print, the Web site, and Times partners); a navigation bar that expands on certain sections and features such as the International section sub-sections for Africa, Americas, Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East; and improved access to multimedia and discussions. Gwertzman even points out that when always vocal soccer (a.k.a., football) fans pointed out that there was no link to a soccer sub-section, one was added. Now that's being on the ball!

Posted 9:57 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

So Many Numbers, So Little Time

Andrew Nachison on e-publishing buzz
Here are some tidbits I gleaned from the Newspaper Association of America's Connections new media conference last week:

• Lingo: "Forced" buy is out; "Packages" are in. Newspapers are selling combinations of print, audiotext, and online banners and directory listings. I didn't hear anyone talk about it, but some are also selling TV and radio spots. They're emphasizing the comprehensive quality of these multimedia advertising packages. If you want in, you buy the package. No a la carte sales. Still, the industry is avoiding a term that's SOOO 1999: "Forced buy."
• Buzz: Measurability is out; branding is in. Web publishers dug themselves into a hole when they emphasized to advertisers that they could measure the "success" of banners by tracking click-throughs. Now publishers want to downplay horrible clickthrough rates and instead convince advertisers that the Web is all about branding. Here's an example from Boston.com's media kit, touting the big Flash ads introduced by CNET earlier this year: "According to recent research by EyeTracking.com, users spend more time with these new ads and brand recall is as much as three times higher* than for conventional banners." (The asterisk cites, but doesn't link, a March 2001 story in Salon.)
• Numbers: There's still a lot of dissatisfaction with today's Web audience measurements. Chris Schroeder, president and CEO of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, urged newspapers to "lock arms" and push for more uniform measurements.
• Quote: Schroeder also said this: "A lot of very big fundamental mistakes were made in the go-go days of the Internet, and I submit to you that a lot of mistakes will be made in the slow days."

Monday, July 23, 2001

Posted 4:24 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Re-registration Blues

Steve Klein on another newspaper Web site re-design
I'm not crazy about registering for sites, so you can imagine how I feel about re-registering. But that's what chicagotribune.com wants me to do as it relaunches its "refined and slightly redesigned Web site." The extra work (on my part) is necessary, I discovered from an e-mail I received today, because my old password was encrypted to protect my privacy and chicagotribune.com can't do it for me. By registering, I am able to search the last seven days of Chicago Tribune stories for free. Stories older than seven days (and going back to 1985) require a fee.

As for the redesign, well, the Tribune online looks like a lot of other newspaper Web sites that have redesigned recently, including the Los Angeles Times. Unhappiness over the redesign of the print edition of the Tribune recently resulted in the departure of sports columnist Skip Bayless after three years at the paper. Former sports columnist Bob Verdi, now with Golf Digest, still writes a weekly column for the Tribune (no one knows Chicago better), and a former Wisconsin classmate of mine and fellow sports editor of the Daily Cardinal, Barry Temkin, has been covering prep sports as well as anyone in the country since the mid-'80s. ... So, I guess I'll re-up.

Posted 3:14 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

NYTimes Starts Weblogging ... Sort Of

Josh Fouts on the weblog trend
A recent link on Metafilter calls attention to the New York Times' modest effort at weblogging. Every Wednesday the Times is publishing "a Web-only feature highlighting facts and figures culled from the week's news." Although the log doesn't link offsite, it's a start. The question remains, though, will the New York Times hop on the weblog bandwagon, or is it beneath its scope?

Posted 1:43 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Feeding Israeli Internet Hunger Pains

Steve Klein on a cyber-restaurant
We all know about fast food, but how about a quick Internet connection with your burger and fries? According to a story on Reuters, that's the concept being introduced at a suburban Tel Aviv branch of McDonalds, which allows customers to surf the Web along with their Big Macs on more than 20 PC terminals. They are not without a price: Customers must buy a token (about US $2) for 20 minutes of surfing time. The restaurant features a giant computer for advertising; children can play computer games for free; and Microsoft software is available for sale.

According to statistics from Nielsen/Net Ratings, Israelis spend an average of almost 8-1/2 hours a month on the Web, slightly behind the U.S. average but ahead of Internet users in 14 European countries. McDonalds operates 90 restaurants in Israel, seven of which are kosher (no cheeseburgers since mixing meat and dairy is not allowed) and are closed on the Jewish Sabbath.

Posted 12:45 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Ideas Here! Get Your Free Ideas Here!

Steve Outing on ideas for newspaper sites
Fellow E-Media Tidbits writer Peter Zollman (along with his partner, Mike Blinder) has compiled a list of 60 "Great Ideas" in newspaper interactive media. The publication, which is available for free download (in PDF format), was created in conjunction with the Newspaper Association of America's Connections new media conference. (See Peter's item below.) Don't let the newspaper focus deter you from reading this free publication; many of the ideas can be adapted for other media.

Not every idea is new or even novel, but some are. The quirkiest of the bunch: Boston.com let readers decide what kind of hair style the site's arts and entertainment editor should get. He hadn't had a haircut in two years. The contest was sponsored by a hair-styling business.

Posted 12:31 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

More People Logging On From Work

Paul Grabowicz on online demographics
Media companies may have to toss out their traditional news cycles in the face of data showing that people are increasingly accessing the Internet throughout the day. Nielsen/NetRatings reported that the number of people using the Web at their workplace increased 23% in June compared to a year ago, and 15% of all Americans now access the Internet from work. They are also logging on more frequently and visiting more sites while at work. This is similar to a finding in a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project survey that reported work access was intensifying, with more people logging on several times a day.

Posted 12:28 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Connections: Where'd Everybody Go?

Peter Zollman on NAA's new media conference
It's a classic case of the newspaper industry cutting spending just when it's needed most. Attendance at last week's NAA Connections conference fell through the floor — perhaps 200-250, compared with the anticipated attendance of 700. (About 300 people registered, but there were a lot of no-shows.) Yet the ideas were flowing ... the vendors were (surprisingly) very satisfied with the seriousness and purpose of the attendees ... and the theme of the conference — "Chasing Revenue" — was extremely appropriate for these tough times in the newspaper business. The conference was well worth it, even if it was sparsely attended. Does it really make sense for a newspaper to cut the $2,000 to $3,000 it costs to send one attendee to a conference like that? Of course not. It's typical of the penny-wise, pound-foolish mentality that is so often rampant in the newspaper industry, but now seems almost universal.

Posted 12:00 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below

Public Continues to Embrace The Internet

Paul Grabowicz on online demographics
While Wall Street and many media companies have soured on the Internet, the public continues to embrace it, according to several recent studies. A survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found no decline in the time people spent online over a six-month period (there was actually a small uptick), while audience tracking data from Jupiter Media Metrix showed home Internet usage up 25% in June compared to a year ago. Meanwhile, 63% of the American public has a favorable opinion of the Internet, and 79% of Internet users said it had made their lives easier, according to a survey by the Markle Foundation. There were some warning flags — an apparent leveling off in the number of new Internet users and continued public concern about privacy, data collection, and information credibility issues.