|
Posted 6:57 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Music Executives: Greedy, Greedy, Greedy
Steve Outing on online music
I'm pretty disgusted about how the music industry handled the Napster case. It's not that I think that copyright should be ignored in the digital age; rather, I'm dumbfounded at how the industry's only response to the huge public demand for Napster-like services is to use lawyers to shut them down instead of working with the online music companies to develop an acceptable service that consumers want. Wired News has a story today that points out the music industry's greed and hypocrisy: "Record Industry Plays Both Sides." Here's a quote from the article by Bill Goldsmith, Web director of KPIG radio: "I think the RIAA is a bunch of greedy, shortsighted idiots." (RIAA = Recording Industry Association of America.) I fear that many music fans share that sentiment. The music industry continues to shoot itself in the foot.
Posted 1:58 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Why We Give Ourselves Away
Amy Gahran on free online content
Lots of people (myself included) spend a fair amount of time and energy creating content and giving it away for free online. Why? Chris Pirillo, the publisher of the popular online newsletter Lockergnome, lists plenty of reasons in his new Libera Manifesto.This document is definitely worth reading. I'm personally not a fan of the "manifesto" format, but I think Pirillo does a pretty good job of laying out the perspective of the free content provider. If you enjoy free online content (and I know you do, because you're reading E-Media Tidbits), then — frankly — you owe it to us to read this document! It'll only take a minute, and all the people you get free content from will appreciate it.
Posted 1:35 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
One Content Economy
Norbert Specker on Internet Content Europe
Yes, the weather was nice, thank you. Monaco on the French Riviera is not a bad place to be at the beginning of March. No doubt, the first Internet Content conference on European ground had a first-class setting. 150 attendees and a range of topics in the content field, from Games to Syndication, from Capitalizing on the Consumer to Broadband.In the face of the "Integration vs. Separation" question that the online news industry hotly debated over the last months, the sobering "There is no old economy, there is no new economy: there is only one economy" of Pearsons broadband division president John Holler was echoed throughout the conference. Many sessions were moderated by Chris Graves, managing director business development of Dow Jones (Wall Street Journal). No wonder the notion of "subscription" vs. "free" popped up quite frequently. Notably in the discussion with FT's Peter Martin: "Newspapers make 75% by advertising and only 25% by copies sold. My head says that a similar relation should be achievable online. And since the 25% covers print and distribution costs, the 75% advertising should make for a profitable venture. However, we cannot be sure." No. we can't. It is certain, however, that even a small "guaranteed" subscription income would help immensely in a market downturn. (As Graves says: "It is helpful to be able to calculate with 540,000 times $49 [average subscription] in the next 12 months.")
Averaging $170 Per Thousand
Norbert Specker on Internet Content Europe
Success stories are always nice. But in these days they bring the tears of nostalgia to many eyes as it gets ever more crowded in the 90% club — those companies that lost 90% and more of their value in the last 12 months. And the winners are:GoTo.com issued a revenue warning. Instead of having somewhere in the range of $90 million it now expects $108 million. Why? GoTo.com is a paid-for search engine. The placement on keywords is auctioned off. The buyers get extremely helpful tools to track the performance of their links. The consumer knows exactly how much a site pays for a click-through. A most transparent system and as such obviously catering to advertisers who wish to get more for their buck. The surprising part for many might be that there is an increasing number of users who actually like "paid for" searches.
Our second example is Silicon.com. With a 20% UK market penetration in the IT sector, this is a B2B publication. 180,000 e-mail subscribers, content constantly monitored as to its acceptance by the readership, focus on performance, real ROI, accountability in branding, and guaranteed response generation led to an average value of $170 per 1,000 contacts. (Direct mail in combination with on-site advertising.) Please contact me if you top this.
Posted 10:42 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Tehelca.com Reporters Uncover Scandal in India
Katja Riefler on on investigative Net journalism
India has had its latest scandal uncovered by Internet media. According to Reuters, the president of India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party quit after a videotape showed him apparently receiving a large wad of money. Reporters from the 1-year-old Internet maverick news service Tehelka.com, which means "sensation" in Hindi, posed as arms dealers seeking to sell night vision devices to the army. This is just one case in a list. Media analysts see a trend toward a "watchdog role" for Internet news services in India that could indeed challenge established media. Read the full story at Wired.
Posted 12:22 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Young Matt Drudge
Steve Outing on online talent
In a suburban New Jersey high school is a talented young journalist who's not afraid to bend the rules, a la Matt Drudge, with his underground Web site. As Matt Welch reports in his profile of the student for Online Journalism Review, 16-year-old Sergio Bichao is making a name for himself with his Web site which reports on controversial goings-on and rumors at his school. As Welch reports reports in his article just about everyone at this Hillside High reads Bichao.
Posted 11:26 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
An Early April Fools Joke From BBB?
Steve Outing on legality of hyperlinks
The Council of Better Business Bureaus has begun demanding that Web sites across the Internet stop linking to BBB content — on the premise that since material on its sites is copyrighted, other sites need BBB permission to present links pointing to its sites. Wow! That's just about the dumbest Internet development I've heard about in years. Talk about being completely clueless about the Web. BBB, you win the prize!It's dumb (hey, no point in mincing words) because the Web is by nature an open medium. If you have a Web site that is open to all, then links from others are an expected part of the game. If BBB doesn't want others linking to it, then it should take technical steps to prevent other sites from linking to it (such as blocking access to BBB content when referred from other sites; it's not difficult). One of the Council's concerns is that other sites that link to BBB content will be perceived as being "endorsed" by the BBB. That might be a legitimate concern, but there's no legal precedent for preventing other sites from linking to its freely accessible content.
Posted 4:59 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Britannica.com Starts Charging
Steve Outing on paying for content
Poor Britannica. Through the Internet years the old-line encyclopedia company has suffered a variety of troubles, as its executive faltered in trying to figure out how to survive in a digitally networked economy. The latest news is that Britannica.com has reduced its head count in the U.S. by 31% (68 employees), and it has shifted strategy to charging for its content. With the bottom falling out of the Web advertising market, Britannica.com is following the trend and plans to offer a mix of free and paid content. (Here's a News.com story.)
Posted 4:52 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
i-mode Coming to U.S. Next Year
Steve Outing on mobile content
Japan's popular i-mode wireless Internet service for phones is coming to the U.S. by early next year, reports The Standard. This is made possible by NTT DoCoMo having bought a 16% stake in AT&T Wireless last year. i-mode is wildly popular in Japan, with tens of millions of users paying a flat monthly fee plus additional subscription fees for wireless content and services. The service will debut in Seattle, then spread nationwide in the next year or two.
Posted 3:38 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Big Money Competitors
Katja Riefler on ISP and portal content
What's the most successful online site in Germany? The portal site of T-Online, Germany's biggest ISP and an offspring of Deutsche Telekom. Most of the traffic and money still comes from the ISP business and the 6.5 million customers who rarely change the predefined start page of their browser. Yesterday, CEO Thomas Holtrop announced a shift in strategy. The company should become an Internet media house and focus even more on content than it already has done during the last year. Holtrop expects the portal activities to contribute 30% of revenue by 2004.I'm not sure how to interpret those announcements. Is this another big announcement with little action by a money-losing company trying to please its annoyed stockholders? Its page impressions have almost tripled from 139 million in January 2000 to 380 million in January 2001. Is it always true that the more advanced users will turn to "real media" when they want the hard facts? T-Online was the most successful news and sports site in Germany last year. You think that TV-like formats like "Follow your star" or "OnlineCaroline" are ridiculous? The average time per visit at the T-Online site increased from 15 to 33 minutes per user over the last year. So perhaps the old media houses in Germany should think again whether their sites really satisfy all the needs that their users have.
Posted 12:25 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Interactive TV – Thinking About Advertising
Rich Gordon on the next big thing
I have this sense that somewhere beneath the surface of the mass market, interactive television is starting to catch fire. The cable companies have spent billions wiring our communities for broadband. Tivo and other personal video recorders are bringing computing power (and disk storage) to the entertainment center. Microsoft has WebTV; AOL is launching AOLTV. So it's not too early to start thinking about the business models that will support this new medium. In "Interactive TV: Don’t Repeat Web Advertising’s Mistakes," Eric Picard of bluestreak, an interactive agency, has some provocative thoughts on the topic. Among them: He argues for intrusive advertising, and not establishing ad formatting standards too quickly.
Posted 5:52 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Almost Subliminal
Andrew Nachison on Budweiser wallpaper at CBS Marketwatch
Give CBS Marketwatch credit for trying something different, and give Rich Jaroslovsky, managing editor of WSJ.com, credit for spotting the Budweiser wallpaper behind a Marketwatch page. Rich alerted members of the Online News Association discussion list. Three cheers for anything different these days, but let's hope the digital future isn't littered with corporate wallpaper.
Posted 4:47 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Book Industry: Heed Music Industry's Blunder
Steve Outing on book industry strategies
How the music industry has mishandled Napster is shocking. Music executives are so stuck in the old mindset of making money by putting music in containers and selling these containers that they can't see that the Internet changes everything about their business. Their "brilliant" strategy is to legally muscle Napster out of business. Not to put too fine a line on it, but the music industry is being stupid.TextOneZero, a site for book publishers, has an interesting article in "The Music Industry’s Digital Nightmare (Part 1) — A Lesson for Book Publishers," by Christian Braun. He encourages the book industry to learn the lesson of Napster and not repeat the music industry's mistakes. Braun writes: "But no amount of DRM and security will protect books in electronic format from piracy, and if the major houses get it wrong first time round, there will be no going back. The way money is made in totally efficient delivery environments — over the airwaves, for example — is very different from the way the types of entertainment company that are currently moving online have made their money up to now. In fact, book publishers wondering how money may be made in their industry in the future could probably do worse than to look at the way television or radio makes money now. Much is about to change."
Posted 2:41 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
No Easy Answer for Online Used-Book Sales
Steve Outing on online book sales
As M.J. Rose reports in her Wired News column today, the Author's Guild is increasing the volume on its complaints about Amazon.com advertising the sale of used books alongside new ones. Since its protests have not resulted in a change of policy by the online book giant, the Guild is poised to file a formal protest. The problem is that authors are losing out, because there's no way for them to get royalties on sales of used books — and Amazon.com's blue boxes promoting lesser-priced used books discourage some sales of new books, where authors would get royalties.The problem with this is that used-book exchanges are inevitable. Even if Amazon.com and other online booksellers swore off used-book sales, other online book exchanges would take their place.
Posted 2:23 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Useful Conversion Tool
Jade Walker on online editing
I never accept .doc files. They often carry viruses and worms my computer system simply doesn't need. Because of this, all of my submission guidelines and article requests specifically say to paste text directly into an e-mail or attach files in text-only format.Unfortunately, some people simply don't listen or pay attention. For a while I was tossing their queries in the trash, or responding with second and third requests for them to follow directions. No more! Now I use GoHTM.com. Once the initial registration is completed, this free service provides document conversion into HTML. All you have to do is upload your file to GoHTM.com, and it will e-mail an HTML representation back to you, complete with the images and hyperlinks. I highly recommend this service to any online editor.
Posted 1:02 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Slash and Burn Rate
Andrew Nachison on cuts at FT.com
The Guardian reports that Pearson plans to cut spending in half on its well regarded Financial Times Web site, FT.com. Check out the burn rate at FT.com: "The company last week revealed total investment on Internet services had reached £196m last year, almost five times the investment levels of previous years." That's US $284 million at today's exchange rate. Wow!
Posted 12:45 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Central European Experience
Kerry Northrup on online publishing strategy
This from Editor and Publisher (as summarized in this week's Ifra Trend Report): Publishers whose for-profit Internet news site business models have them stymied might take a look at the Central Europe Review (CER), whose nonprofit model has met with surprisingly successful results. The English-language site is powered by 85 volunteer editors and writers who pull together features, commentary and analysis of regional news. Former editor-in-chief and chairman Andrew Stroehlein (now editor of InternetContent.net and a fellow E-Media Tidbits contributor) said the original group of CER academics and journalists set out to be a recognized authority on the region, publishing online content that was also readily accessible to the general public.
Posted 12:03 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Pay to Play? Please?
Andrew Nachison on revenue for online content
Yesterday I trashed about 500 unread e-mail newsletters, discussion list messages, and items I'd filtered and saved for later reading. This happens to me every few months, when I get caught up in work and way behind on the reading I generally consider important. One daily e-mail newsletter I almost always try to read is Catch of the Day, by Red Herring editor Rafe Needleman. It's always short, insightful, and short. Today's edition, tying together Yahoo's current woes with the widespread failure of advertising as a revenue model for content sites, included this comment: "Online consumers will soon be paying fairly for content and services. And they'll like it, because the alternative is no service at all."I don't know about the "like it" part, and I'm unconvinced that free, trustworthy, valuable information will disappear. I think there's enough incentive for some organizations to continue distributing information for free — like non-profits, advocacy groups, alternative media, and startups willing to consider content distribution a cost of doing business.
Posted 10:37 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Medium With No End
Kerry Northrup on future thoughts
"One of the great advantages of the printed newspaper is that it has an end to it," says Neil Budde, editor and publisher of the Wall Street Journal Online. "A reader can page through the newspaper and when done feel she is up-to-date on the news that matters. Online, users remain uncomfortable that they have seen all the relevant news."Budde's comments in the Winter 2001 edition of Future Print are thought-provoking, especially in his views on the newspaper's expansion into the mobile world: "In a world of mobile devices, we will need a combination of skillful editing and intelligent filtering that ensures all relevant news is presented to a reader. ... Just as we have needed to evolve the product we publish on the Web to keep pace with how our users behavior has changed, we must figure out how behavior will change as mobile devices become faster, lighter, and easier to read. ... If we are to achieve the mobile electronic newspaper, we must deliver a user experience that matches today's printed newspaper."
Posted 9:57 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Competing On The Internet
Paul Grabowicz on dot-com business strategies
Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, author of a seminal book on competitive business strategy, has written a very interesting piece for the latest Harvard Business Review that lays waste to a lot of "new economy" thinking and details the economic forces that make e-commerce profits so elusive. It can be downloaded for $5.50 at the HBR Web site.
Posted 4:15 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Funny? Serious? Dumb?
Andrew Nachison on Iconocast's dumb-ass campaign
The Take Back The Net campaign launched last week by Michael Tchong's Iconocast comes complete with a manifesto, anthem, and a viral "tell your friends about it" marketing campaign (with no mention of privacy or what Iconocast will do with the e-mail addresses it collects). The satirical (right, Michael?) manifesto includes this witticism: "As Netizens, we hold certain truths to be self-evident: that the Internet was created and endowed by its Creator with certain unalienable Rights, chief among these: free Access to uncensored Content, the ability to Shop wherever and whenever one chooses and the general pursuit of e-Happiness." Hmm, I wonder what Tim Berners-Lee thinks of this Orwellian perversion of hypertext transport protocol.Tchong wants April 3 to be a big day for e-commerce, an "offline strike." There, I've given him a plug, and a link, so let me also add that this may be a clever ploy to attract attention to Iconocast, or it may be an artful jab at OTHER dot-com bellyachers who take themselves and the Internet way too seriously — is Adbusters involved with this? — but, for the record, it is NOT the dumbest idea I've come across in a long time. Let's face it, dumb ideas are a dime a dozen on the Internet. This is just another waste of bandwidth, and there's plenty to go around. Save Yahoo? Save Amazon? That's funny.
Posted 2:44 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Destinations or Companions?
Andrew Nachison on Web strategies for old media
While many newspapers around the world have invested heavily in their Web sites, local television stations in the U.S. have, generally, been more restrained. The Radio and Television News Directors Association will hold a one-day Local Broadcast Web News summit Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., to discuss Web strategies for local TV.TV and newspaper executives might want to think about how the magazine industry has approached the Web or, more often as not, avoided it. Newsweek magazine has a nice look at the take-it-slow approach of the magazine industry. Here's a quote from the story, by Michael Mechanic, and I have to wonder what online newspaper executives think when they read this: "Banner ads and e-commerce have largely failed to support bloated online ventures, and publishers that dumped millions into the electronic void are facing a new reality: a Web site is less a revenue stream than a cost of doing business — a way to sell subscriptions while building credibility and brand awareness."
Posted 12:07 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Great Web Wipeout
Rich Gordon on the declining "dot-com" economy
The past few days of coverage of Yahoo!'s troubles ("Et tu, Yahoo?" from the New York Times; "Yahoo! Struggles to Survive" from the San Jose Mercury News; etc.) really proves that the bloom is off the Internet rose. Yahoo! was, after all, the original Internet "blue chip." Scott Rosenberg of Salon does a nice job of pointing out how ridiculous the so-called experts sound: "Plainly, the market's pundits were way off a year ago, at the pinnacle of Net stock mania; so why should we put any more stock in them now?" Rosenberg also points to a wonderfully prescient 1996 article from Wired magazine ("The Great Web Wipeout") that I had forgotten about. The author, Chip Bayers, foresaw the future: "Giddy investors," plummeting banner ad revenues, shutdowns of online content sites. Bayer's only miss: That Internet traffic congestion would be the cause of all this. Now that Bayers' predictions have come true, it's time for the pendulum to start swinging back. Today's negativity is going to look as absurd five years from now as the dot-com mania of a few years back looks today.
Posted 11:40 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Cyberspace as Space
Andrew Stroehlein on International Internet law
There were quite a number of fascinating comments to come out of last week's Moscow conference, "Internet: Impact on Media and Society," co-organized by the European Institute for the Media, and quite a bit of discussion about the need for expanded international Internet governance. One suggestion came from Professor Mikhail Fedotov, a prominent Russian specialist in intellectual property and media law, who proposed using international space law as an initial model for international Internet regulation. He didn't venture into specifics, but he said that, at least conceptually, space and cyberspace have many similarities — humans entering a new sphere that defies traditional notions of the nation state — and that for issues of Internet security, cybercrime, freedom, and privacy, some of the early international agreements pertaining to humans in outer space would serve as a good conceptual and philosophical model for humans in inner space.
Posted 11:29 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Your Home Wake-up Call
Steve Outing on services as content
Among my junk e-mail this morning was an update from TellMe about additions to its phone information service. An item that caught my eye was introduction of a new "wake-up call" service. Call 1-800-555-TELL (from within the U.S.) and order a wakeup call — just like in a hotel. The difference is that you get personalized news and local weather when you pick up the phone. That's a pretty neat (free) service. Indeed, next time I travel, perhaps I'll have my mobile phone wake me up. Let's hope it's more reliable than the clock radio in my room at a Dallas conference last month; the alarm didn't work and I overslept the first session of the day!
Posted 11:18 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Tomorrow's Newsroom
Kerry Northrup on building an advanced newsroom
Lots of newsrooms around the world are trying out different approaches in technology, in organization, in workflow, even in floor plans, in an effort to retool for the new news marketplace. The Tampa Tribune's new $40 million News Center is perhaps the current cream of the convergent newsroom crop. Utusan in Kuala Lumpur is putting together a "virtual newsroom" to link together its news staff members wherever they are. The publisher of the Bieler Tagblatt in Switzerland dreams of "brainpool" rooms where print, broadcast, and online journalists can collaborate on story coverage. Unfortunately, efforts along these lines tend to stop short of really breaking the newsroom mold to change how news is handled, to get better positioned with how news is used in our expanding Information Society.The University of South Carolina and Ifra (who I work for) last week launched an ambitious project to create a true, working prototype advanced micro-newsroom for demonstration, training, and research in next-generation newshandling technologies and methods. It is called the Newsplex and it should be open in 2002.
|
