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Posted 6:27 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
A Theory of Value-less Content
Vin Crosbie on why consumers aren't paying for content
A century ago this decade, expert physicists were confounded why Distance doesn't equal Velocity x Time when traveling at the Speed of Light. Then the heretical physicist Albert Einstein solved this by realizing that if Distance and Velocity are unchanging in that equation, then the concept of Time itself — formerly thought to be always constant — must be variable. Eureka! Einstein's General Relativity Theory. Today, many media experts are confounded why consumers won't pay online to read the content they routinely pay to read in print. Those experts erroneously assume that content always has a fixed value, whether online or in print, and many claim that the consumers must be changed for online payment to work. ("We must educate the consumers to pay!") But it doesn't take an Einstein to realize that the solution to this problem isn't the consumers but the content.Some heretics, such as Randal Scasny in Online Journalism Review, realize that the solution is that content — not the consumers — must change. Traditional print and broadcast media content has far less value online, which is why consumers won't pay to read it that way. New forms of content must be developed online.
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Posted 6:21 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Musicians Want Net Freedom, Too
Norbert Specker on online music
Stuck in London on Sept. 11, music groups Gorillaz and D12 featuring Terry Hall went to the studio and recorded "911." The song is available only as MP3 and only on the Internet. So you see, the users are not the only ones pushing for alternative distribution channels as we still await word on the acceptance of the various pay-for-music initiatives.
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Posted 3:16 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Newspaper Sites Are Most Visited in Chile
Juan Camus on usage patterns
Two newspapers are among the most visited websites by Chilean people who live outside the country. That is the conclusion reached on a survey conducted by CasaChile. The data showed that 64.6% of participants use the Internet as their main source of information about Chile, while another finding of the survey shows that four out of the top five most visited websites are news sites.
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Posted 12:59 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
EPN Adds Editor E-mail Alerts
Steve Outing on alternative press service
Paris-based European Press Network says that next week it will turn on a new feature: e-mail alerts to editors. EPN and its Correspondent.com website serve as an independent global news agency, taking the work of independent journalists worldwide and selling it via the Web to participating editors. The new e-mail feature is a content-matching system that automatically sends editors notes about newly filed articles corresponding to their interests and needs. This should be useful. (Disclaimer: In the past, I've done a small bit of consulting for EPN.)
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Posted 12:20 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Maybe I Should Become a Website Designer!
Steve Outing on dubious reporting
Don't believe everything you read — like this sentence from Paul Colford's BizNews column in the New York Daily News today: "WSJ.com, which has 609,000 paying subscribers, will introduce a redesign on Jan. 28, said to cost $28 million." No wonder Mario Garcia dresses better than I do.(Prior to Sept. 11, WSJ.com's revenues had been running in the $10 million per quarter range.)
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Posted 11:44 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Web Rises In the East
Vin Crosbie on the rise of the Chinese Internet
If you're considering content in a second language for your website, consider Chinese. Although Internet users comprise a small percentage (2%) of China's huge population, their sheer numbers now dwarf those of Internet users in most countries. According to Beijing's China Internet Network Information Center, the official registrar for Internet access in the People's Republic of China, more than 26.5 million mainland Chinese have Internet access. That's nearly the same number as German Internet users (28.6 million); twice the number of Scandinavian Internet users (13.3 million); more than the number of Internet users in Italy (19.4 million) or Canada (14.4 million); more than the combined number of Internet users in Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Switzerland, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the Netherlands (26 million); and more than the numbers of Internet users in Latin America (25.3 million), in Middle East countries (4.5 million), or in Africa (4.5 million). Though Beijing's government blocks access to many foreign websites — particularly those carrying news — Chinese has grown to be the world's third most populous native language among Internet users and may soon eclipse German for second place. (See NUA's "How Many Online" for compilations listing national Internet populations.)
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Posted 5:51 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Using the Net to Report on Factory Shooting
Steve Outing on today's big story
The factory shooting in Indiana is one of today's top breaking stories. Students in a Poynter seminar today, Getting Wired: Reporting With the Internet, used the story for an interesting exercise: They compiled a list of resources on the Web that will be useful to reporters covering the story. Al Tompkins, one of the instructors for this class, posted what the seminar students found on his Morning Meeting column page. They identified some great stuff, including: most recent OSHA inspection of the factory; ownership records for the factory; a satellite image of the factory; and resources to find violence in the workplace statistics. No doubt about it, the Web is an incredible reporting tool.
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Posted 3:50 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Restructuring at TA-Media
Norbert Specker on online business models
After closing down its TV station, Swiss media house TA-Media reorganized its Internet activities, as well. The announcement of folding the winner market ventures (car, job, real estate) back into the publishing house is no surprise. The separate classified platforms branded under a new name and run outside the publishing house never made a big dent on the market. TA-Media started this company a couple of years ago after leaving the Swissclick classified consortium which managed for a short time to get all of the important Swiss publishers under one umbrella and still operates, if quietly.
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Posted 1:29 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Dutch Company Invents Video-Capable Electronic Paper
Vin Crosbie on digital delivery technologies
Researchers at Royal Philips Electronics in the the Netherlands have invented electronic paper that can display video images, according to today's issue of the journal Nature. The flexible plastic polymer can display video with 256 shades of black and white imagery at 64 pixels per inch resolution and at a 50-Hertz refresh rate, fast enough for streaming video. In the U.S., E-Ink and Xerox have each invented similar electronic paper technologies capable of displaying only still photos. (E-Ink is partially owned by Philips.) Although all these companies are a few years away from commercial production of electronic paper devices that could be used for portable reading of newspapers and magazines, I expect to see such devices in consumers' hands this decade. (Nature's story about the Dutch breakthrough is available at this time only in its paper edition, not yet on Nature's website.)
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Posted 12:22 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Books Publishers Blew an Opportunity
Steve Outing on failure of e-books
The e-book industry has pretty much failed, and AOL Time Warner's decision to kill iPublish.com (noted here on E-Media Tidbits yesterday) exemplifies the sorry state of affairs. I can't resist the temptation to point out that it's not just the economy that's at fault; book industry executives are to blame for profoundly bone-headed decision-making. Book publishers made two critical mistakes: 1) They priced e-books to be close to that of print books, so there was little incentive for readers to switch to e-reading. 2) They insisted on using copy protection schemes that made it difficult for consumers to use the books they purchased on multiple devices — or to pass a copy of a book along to a friend as they would a print book they'd bought. Add to that the fact that the first e-book readers (like RCA's poor-selling eBook readers) are good for only one thing: reading books.E-books will get another chance — when economic conditions improve and portable devices are introduced that are multi-capable, where reading books is just one thing they can do. When that happens, let's hope that book publishing executives have learned a lesson from their first e-failure.
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Posted 12:18 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Weird Economics of Online Publishing
Rich Gordon on how new media is different from old
A Washington Post article on this week's layoffs at MSNBC.com points out some crucial differences in the economics of traditional and online publishing. The layoffs were driven, to some extent, by the increased traffic MSNBC.com has seen since Sept. 11 — which yielded substantial additional costs. For instance, an un-budgeted $1 million to serve streaming video. In traditional media, more readership/viewership would be a good thing. But that's because it would translate, sooner or later, into additional ad revenue. With banner ads going unsold, that doesn't happen online right now. Furthermore, compare MSNBC.com to its TV counterpart. In the broadcast/cable world, a growth in viewership doesn't generate any additional costs — the video goes out at the same cost no matter how many people watch it. Online, though, the more people want your audio and video, the more it costs you to deliver it.
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Posted 6:05 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Scandinavia Online Sold
Norbert Specker on Internet deals
Scandinavia Online is the leading portal in the Nordic European countries with 8 million unique visitors per month in September. One of the owners was the media company Schibsted; other large stakeholders were telecom companies Telia and Telenor. Together they held 74%. Now Scandinavia Online has been sold to the directory company Eniro for 55 million Euros. "A sweet deal," as Scandinavia CEO Birger Steen concedes. The cash position Eniro bought into was plus 44 million Euro, resulting in a net price of 11 million. Anybody like to try to build 8 million visitors and a leading market position in the Nordic countries with 11 million Euro? Sweet, indeed. (Read my next item below for more on Steen.)
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Posted 6:03 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Paying the Wrong Guys
Norbert Specker on online content
In his recent Content Summit presentation on payment models for content providers, Scandinavia Online CEO Birger Steen debunked the popular myth that "people don't pay for content" when he sketched the following picture. The Internet market in Sweden in 2000 was worth US$270 million without advertising. That is the money people paid the ISPs and the local phone companies for Internet connectivity and the connection charges. If one deducts a generous $100 million as direct costs for the telcos and $110 million as the production costs that the content providers incurred in that year, the Internet as a whole still made a healthy profit of $60 million. Says Birger, "It's not that people won't pay for content, it's just that they're used to paying the wrong guy." The voices that want ISPs in Europe to cough up some money grow louder.
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Posted 5:47 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
NBA.com Scores for November
Steve Klein on online sports sites
It didn't take the playoffs for NBA.com to score some big numbers. The National Basketball Association's website set a record for monthly traffic with more than 26 million visitors during November, the first month of the 2001-02 season. Of particular note: Fans streamed nearly 3 million video packages, an increase of more than 410% from last season's opening month. Is wide(r)spread broadband coverage finally becoming a reality?The new monthly traffic benchmark marks an increase of more than 35% compared to November 2000. And the previous best month of traffic was May 2001 when almost 25 million visitors logged on to the site during the playoffs. The 29 team sites received the most traffic in history with more than 14 million visitors. The most popular team sites were the Los Angeles Lakers, Washington Wizards, and Philadelphia 76ers.
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Posted 12:58 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Peru's 10th Year on the Internet
Juan Camus on Internet development
The 10th anniversary of the first e-mail sent from Peru was celebrated at the beginning of December, through the Peruvian Scientific Network or RCP, a non-profit association that promotes access to the Internet in the whole country. As part of the celebration, it is running a survey (more than 90% say that the Internet helps promote Peruvian development) and a forum, where users are writing about their first experiences using the Internet. RCP uses the model of cyber-cafes (called "cabinas" in Peru) to expand Internet use, including not just the PCs plus connection, but content software and applications. They have been very successful, with more than a thousand of the cafes around the country. In Peru last year, there were only 5.2 phone lines per 100 inhabitants, and 400,000 computers in this country of 24 million people.
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Posted 12:39 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Salon-Bashing
Steve Outing on webzine's road to hell
Dotcom Scoop's Robert Loch has harsh words for Salon.com's latest strategic moves; he says in his article today that the celebrated webzine deserves to die, and there's no way out of the latest mess. (Salon has burned through millions of investor dollars, and prospects for profitability look slim, still.) The death knell, says Loch: Salon's decision to tie the best Politics and News stories to its Salon Premium subscription service. Salon is a dot-com with nine lives, but has it used them all up now? Click "Discuss This" link below to offer your opinion.
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Posted 1:27 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
From iPublish to iQuit
Jade Walker on the volatile e-publishing world
AOL Time Warner's quest to popularize the electronic book has come to an end. The company announced on Tuesday its plan to shutter e-book publishing unit iPublish.com, and cut 29 jobs before the end of the year."The market for e-books has simply not developed the way we hoped, and given the overall economic climate, we can't jeopardize our thriving print business by carrying a money-losing operation indefinitely into the future," said Larry Kirshbaum, chairman of Time Warner Trade Publishing.
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Posted 7:43 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Election Time on the Net in Chile
Juan Camus on online political coverage
Media sites in Chile are preparing for the election of one-half of the Chilean legislative body on Dec. 16. Major news sites have featured the issue, such as El Mercurio and La Tercera, the latter displaying an animation about how to vote, using Macromedia Flash technology. However, most of the links from those sites send the visitors to government sites (like this one) where there is the richest information, such as statistics from elections going back to 1989. The promise of all those sites is to have live coverage of Election Day, including the results for every candidate while the votes are being counted. In the past, final results weren't shown till the end of election day.
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Posted 6:20 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Closing the Gap on Monster; Still
Norbert Specker on online classifieds
Not so long ago there was no gap on Monster.com, and the newspaper industry was very much aware of the threat that online newcomers offered its classified franchise. Peter Winter and the (defunct) New Century Network come to mind. We are seven years later and get to hear a consultant knowingly tell us that "the Internet lends itself to classifieds very well, and over time this will be a growing format because it offers distinct advantages over its print brethren." Aha. The classified part of the online advertising market grew 176% in the first half of 2001 compared to the same period in 2000 (from US$205 million to $564 million). That $564 million still only represents 3% of the $20 billion classified sales of newspapers, but at the going growth rate we can expect it to represent 7% in the next year. Probably that will get some things going. (There's a good round-up by Stefanie Olsen on CNET.)
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Posted 5:59 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Its Awards Contest Continues, but NetMedia 2002 Is Canceled
Vin Crosbie on another online media setback
NetMedia, the annual European online journalism conference in London, previously scheduled for July, has been canceled. Founder and organizer Milverton Wallace will hold NetMedia's European Online Journalism Awards contest during 2002, but has canceled what would have been the eighth annual NetMedia conference itself, now that five of its six sponsors have pulled out. Wallace intends to restart the conference in 2003, when he also will begin holding the online journalism awards ceremony in a different European capital each year. Meanwhile, as a resource for European online journalists, Wallace will launch a NetMedia newsletter in late January, with its first issue dedicated to the U.S. online journalists' response to the events of Sept. 11. He also plans a GIS roadshow to help UK online journalists make better use of the 2001 UK census data which will be released in August.
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Posted 12:29 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Big Freaking Flash Ads: Bad!
Steve Outing on online advertising
Web user experience consultant Madhu Menon calls them "Big Freaking Flash" (BFF) ads — the large in-your-face multimedia ads that are now common on major Web content sites. And he doesn't much like them, arguing that our brains have already adapted to ignoring them just as much as the old, ineffective 468x60 banners that started the online ad industry. Menon has written a thoughtful essay about the right way to present online ads — which involves placing ads at the point in an Internet user's Web consumption that he/she is in the right state of mind for a buying decision. That's when you serve up the ad — not in the middle of a content experience. I don't agree with every point in Menon's thesis, but he makes some arguments worth pondering. He does say that "BFF blindness" will soon become a buzzword, and I think he's right on that. But that's not unique to online advertising; people have been ignoring TV ads for decades.
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Posted 11:33 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Making a Career Online
Rich Gordon on one journalist's story
ContentBiz.com this week published a fascinating case study of how a journalist can build a career using the Web. It's the story of Danny Sullivan, once a reporter for the Orange County Register (California) and now editor of SearchEngineWatch.com. The site is a wonderful resource for anyone who wants to use search engines more effectively. It's also a successful business — bringing in several hundred thousand dollars a year in revenue. Keys to his success: (1) building traffic through link exchanges; (2) "giving away" a lot of content free, but offering expanded coverage to paid subscribers; (3) steadily raising prices. "We found the higher price put more value into it. Something at $34 was more valued and sold better than something at $19," Sullivan says. Sullivan chose a great topic to become an expert on, because so many people want and need to know how search engines work. But I think his tactics in building traffic and revenue apply to any topic expert who wants to translate his/her expertise into a Web business.
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Posted 8:33 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Battle of the E-book
Jade Walker on Internet piracy
E-book author Jill Morton has filed a lawsuit against Mesa Community College in Arizona, Maricopa County Community College District, and a professor at the college for copyright infringement. Morton claims the defendants published her e-books, "Color Voodoo #2: A Guide to Color Symbolism for Web Design," "Color Voodoo #3: 50 Symbolic Color Schemes," and "Color Voodoo #5: Color Logic for Web Site Design," on the college's website, without permission, and encouraged others to copy and use the books without paying her for them. Morton is seeking maximum statutory copyright damages and punitive damages.
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Posted 11:27 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Cyber Age Adventures Goes Dark
Steve Outing on an award-winning e-zine
Cyber Age Adventures, which publishers superhero fiction, is the latest e-zine to call it quits. Editor Frank Fradella announced today that he's stopping publication on the Web after three years, though he will continue to publish book anthologies in the superhero genre. CAA was one of the more successful zines on the Web, winning several important awards — including top honors in the Writer's Digest Zine Publishing Awards. CAA publishes superhero entertainment aimed at a more mature audience than that of superhero comic books. It was a nice experiment in Web entertainment content while it lasted.
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Posted 6:24 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Ridiculing 'Newsletters' by News Publishers
Vin Crosbie on why publishers should directly deliver their pages, not newsletters
In the Tidbits item below this one, Steve Outing mentioned how Red Herring magazine had ceased publishing news e-mails. Though its e-mails were in HTML format, Red Herring made a mistake in not simply sending its actual Web pages. Instead, it manually produced its daily HTML e-mails. That's like a magazine printing a different edition for newsstand sales than for home mail delivery. Unless there's a very specific reason for manually producing a separate mail edition, that's a ridiculously expensive way to use staff. Had Red Herring instead simply delivered its Web pages, it wouldn't have had incurred those costs nor probably ceased e-mail publishing.
Imagine if a newspaper company daily delivered to your home not a newsprint edition, but a sheet of paper, a "newsletter" that listed just the day's headlines and invited you to retrieve a newsprint edition from a newsstand or vending machine. Ridiculous? Yes, but that's exactly what many newspaper websites are doing when they deliver e-mail "newsletters."(Disclaimer: In addition to my writing duties for this weblog and consulting to news publishers, I am chairman of PublishMail, an e-mail publishing applications services company.)
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Posted 12:20 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Red Herring Dumps E-mail: Dumb, Dumb, Dumb
Steve Outing on e-mail publishing
According to a report from Internet.com, Red Herring is pulling back on its Internet operations — in response, of course, to the continued sorry state of online advertising. It is likely to move its Web operations back into the parent publishing company; the magazine company had been operating a separate Internet unit. OK, that makes sense in a tough economy. What doesn't make sense is that Red Herring has dumped its e-mail newsletters. That's a dumb move (my opinion, and only mine), because e-mail newsletters are great at driving traffic to websites. Belt tightening is something all media companies must do these days — but if you are forced into budget-cutting mode, don't kill off the elements that are most important to future Internet success when the economy rebounds.
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Posted 10:18 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Mobile Revenue Sharing: A First Step In the Right Direction
Katja Riefler on deal between Swedish telco, content providers
Europe may be far ahead with available content services for mobile devices, but it is definitely not if you look at revenue opportunities. In most European countries the telecom operators are very reluctant to share revenue with content providers. Many aren't at all willing to do the billing, others charge extraordinary high rates. Now Telia, Sweden's largest mobile operator, is adopting a new business model based on revenue sharing. Telia will charge content providers for traffic rates and 20% of the price of the services being offered to customers — as opposed to the current 50% which has brought many complaints from the content providers for stifling the market.This is a first step in the right direction — but nothing more. It still doesn't take into consideration that telecom operators profit directly from the additional phone usage due to the content services. Therefore it shouldn't be the content providers that pay for their services being offered but the telcos: they should let the providers participate in the additional revenue generated from their customers.
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