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Posted 6:11 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
E-Media Tidbits On Vacation
Steve Outing on this weblog
E-Media Tidbits writers are taking a break the week of Nov. 19-23, so there will be no new items posted until we resume publication on Monday, Nov. 26.
Posted 6:09 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Paid Web Subs Count as ABC Circulation
Steve Outing on changing rules
The U.S. Audit Bureau of Circulation has revised its rules and will begin to accept paid subscriptions to newspaper websites as counting toward a paper's overall circulation totals. The site's subscription rate must be at least 25% of print subscription rates. As fellow Tidbits contributor Vin Crosbie, who follows this issue closely, notes, a newspaper could provide a print subscriber with free access to its paid website, but that would still only count as one overall subscription. Here's today's ABC press release explaining the change.
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Posted 5:49 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Large Job Cuts at Pioneering Online Publishers
Vin Crosbie on news layoffs
As the advertising economy erodes, the percentages of staffs cut by publishers escalates. Two pioneering online publishers being hit by formidable staff cuts are the magazine giant Condé Nast Publications and the Irish Times. CondéNet, the Internet arm of Condé Nast, earlier this month laid off 25 of its 114 employees — 22% of its workforce. CondéNet had earlier laid off nine staffers and closed its Image Center photo archives sales unit. The Irish Times announced that it is cutting 250 jobs — more than a third of the Dublin newspaper's staff. According to a story in London's The Guardian, these layoffs might include more than 100 journalists. Word in European new media circles is that the paper's pioneering Ireland.com won't be spared cuts.
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Posted 5:02 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Consumer vs. Advertiser Arms Race Continues
Vin Crosbie on what the new Opera browser can defeat
So, your site is selling pop-up windows to advertisers? Don't expect users of the newest version of the Opera browser to see those. Introduced this week at Comdex in Las Vegas, Opera version 6 lets users choose to allow pop-ups, allow only pop-unders, or defeat all popping windows. The browser also gives users the choices of defeating GIF animations, embedded video, embedded audio, Java, Javscript, cookies, and referrer logging. Though used by only a small minority share of the world's Web visitors, Opera is the first major browser to let users selectively defeat most major online advertising technologies.
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Posted 2:26 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
What Do Users Want? Concentrate!
Katja Riefler on the unsure future of news at portal sites
The Swiss magazine Netzwoche reported in its last print issue that the content strategies of big portal sites like Swissonline or yellowworld have more or less failed. Swissonline recently announced its switch to a pure access portal until the end of the year; yellowworld will concentrate on information about its postal services. The scaling back of news content offerings seems to be a general trend among portals in Europe. Only market leaders like Bluewin in Switzerland or T-Online in Germany still stick to a broad mixed news concept. Whether they might be better is an ongoing discussion. Joshua Fruhlinger is convinced that understanding the usage modes of the users is critical for the success of a website. Read his recent piece for WebTechniques here.
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Posted 2:05 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
People Are Spending More Time Online
Paul Grabowicz on Internet usage
While there are indications that the percentage of people connected to the Internet may be hitting a plateau in the United States, the amount of time each user spends online continues to rise. Nielsen/NetRatings reports that the average Web surfer spent 19 hours online in October, up 9% from 17.5 hours a year ago.
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Posted 12:47 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Salon Exec: Why We Created Salon Premium
Steve Outing on Web business models
Salon.com senior VP for editorial operations Scott Rosenberg gets a forum to explain (at length) why and how the renowned webzine created its "Salon Premium" paid-subscription service in Web Techniques. His article is worth reading to understand Salon executives' thinking — though it's obviously one-sided, and there are critics of the strategy who aren't heard from. Salon remains primarily a free content site supported by advertising (including some that's fairly intrusive). Premium subscribers don't get the ads, and get additional "special" content.
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Posted 3:10 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
What People Think of New Ad Formats
Rich Gordon on a new survey
Online advertising research firm Dynamic Logic recently conducted a survey (executive summary in PDF format) of people's reactions to various new online advertising formats. Given that respondents were selected through an e-mailed sweepstakes offer, I'm not sure that they are a representative sample of online users. (Dynamic Logic says the company weighted the results to be representative of the U.S. online population.) But I think the findings are interesting:[ Discuss THIS item | See ALL Tidbits discussions ]
- "Traditional" banners are the most popular ad format among users, followed by the so-called skyscrapers and then the large rectangles inset into content sections.
- Pop-up ads are much less popular, though preferable to full-page interstitial ads. Online pop-ups are comparable in popularity to TV and direct-mail ads — and much more popular than telemarketing calls.
- More than half the users said they would find two or more pop-up ads per hour acceptable. (Of course, these days, Web users are subjected to much more than that.)
Posted 12:42 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Conversion Rates on Charging for Content
Norbert Specker on revenue models
17% of American Internet users have been asked to pay for content that they used to access for free, according to a Pew Internet Project survey conducted between Aug. 13 and Sept. 10. Of that 17%, the conversation rate was 12% who indeed did pay when put to the decision. A conversion rate in that range has been reported at Content Summit by Rob Cox of the British Breakingviews, while Michael O'Donnell, who heads Salon, has convinced only 23,000 of his 4.5 million monthly users to open their wallets. However, those 23,000 will be responsible for 35% of Salon's budget this year. Most sites have not yet gone through a renewal time (coming up at Breakingviews), so churn rates are not yet a base of experience.
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Posted 10:16 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Zurich Comes to You
Steve Outing on reports from Interactive Publishing conference
Attendance at the Interactive Publishing event in Zurich last week was well down from the previous year, for predictable economic reasons. (Fellow E-Media Tidbits contributor Norbert Specker organizes the show each year.) For those who didn't make it to Switzerland, Norbert has made presentations and session reports available online — making for a worthwhile resource for folks in the online news industry. Reports are available for Wednesday, Nov. 7 (including an interview with SFGate.com's Bob Cauthorn); Thursday, Nov. 8 (including Salon.com CEO Michael O'Donnell on paid-subscription models, and a panel on "what is different within the online news industry after Sept. 11"); and Friday, Nov. 9 (including a presentation about visual displays and interfaces for Web content).
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Posted 9:25 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Pessimistic Predictions
Rich Gordon on Lawrence Lessig's vision of the future
Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig is one of the deepest thinkers of our time when it comes to Internet culture, politics, technology, and law. His latest book, The Future of Ideas, is a must-read for anyone contemplating the future of the Internet. In an interview with Newsweek columnist Steven Levy, Lessig lays out a brief summary of his thesis: that big companies such as Microsoft and AOL, together with powerful copyright holders such as Disney, are rapidly taking control of the once-open Internet in the interest of maximizing their profits whatever the cost to the public interest. It's a bleak and pessimistic — but compelling — argument.
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Posted 4:50 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
An Interesting Conversation: Paying for Content
Steve Outing on how to fund websites
There's an intriguing conversation taking place on Metafilter this week. Oliver Willis posed an idea about how Web content sites can get paid by users. A network would exist of sites that present their content (or some of it) only to people who subscribe to a content service that features content from many sites (a la AdultCheck). The monthly fee (say, $10) is divvied up among the content sites, with a central non-profit organization in charge of usage tracking and financial administration. This isn't an original idea — I've written on this in the past, as has Jason McCabe Calacanis of Silicon Alley Reporter) — but it's one worth trying. We're still waiting.
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Posted 10:33 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
A Paid-Content Success Story
Rich Gordon on the latest from Consumer Reports
When the subject of paid online content comes up, everyone mentions the Wall Street Journal. But it looks like Consumer Reports is actually the leader right now in website content subscriptions. According to ContentBlog, the magazine now has 650,000 paid Web subscribers. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal said the newspaper's site had 609,000. The Journal charges more for its Web subscriptions ($29 a year for print subscribers, $59 for non-subscribers; Consumer Reports costs $19 and $24). But you have to be impressed with what Consumer Reports has done. It's bringing in more than $12 million a year in subscription revenue.
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Posted 10:28 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Media Overview Europe
Norbert Specker on a helpful initiative of the EJC
The European Journalism Centre in Maastricht, The Netherlands, has proven a valuable information hub for European journalists. Particularly interesting for researchers will be the European Media Landscape, which provides an excellent overview to the most diverse — some say disparate — media landscape. The online media are only marginally included, which, particularly for this feature's readership, is a serious downside.
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Posted 10:20 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
The Price of Parody
Andrew Stroehlein on ISP censorship
The comedy site Portadown News has been pulled offline by its UK ISP, Freeserve, BBC News Online's Giles Wilson reports. The one-man operation poked fun at all sides in the ongoing political turmoil in Northern Ireland, but the ISP found that the editor of Portadown News, who wishes to remain anonymous, was publishing material that some might find offensive. "Some without a sense of humor," you might say. Once again, the issue of the ISP's place in the UK legal system has come to the fore. The editor told the BBC, "I think the whole episode reveals a gutless ISP industry."
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Posted 10:12 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
New 'Creative' Ad Formats
Rich Gordon on innovations in online advertising
It's been fascinating — and a little bit scary — to watch the latest efforts to make online ads more effective for advertisers. The two latest come from DoubleClick and Yahoo! Both use Flash and effectively insert an animated ad smack-dab in the center of a Web page — between the user and the content they came to see. I've captured a version of each. Take a look and see what you think. My thought is that they are less offensive than those awful pop-up or pop-under ads, but that they violate an important publishing tradition by inserting advertising into editorial space. It's a tradition that has long been cherished in newspapers, magazines, and even in television in recent decades. I think there are good reasons to preserve that tradition in online publishing, because it helps users/readers/viewers understand the difference between information and advertising. But there are thoughtful people who disagree. See the discussion of credibility in J.D. Lasica's report on the recent Online News Association conference.
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Posted 2:35 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Pay for Ad-Free Site
Katja Riefler on a Nando Times experiment
Responding to visitors who expressed their displeasure with pop-ups, exit ads, and other intrusive advertising formats, Nando Media has launched a subscription version of Nando Times; users can opt for an ad-free version for a low rate (US $1 per week). Nando Media has been considering the idea for much of the year, says Kathy Ives, marketing director of the Raleigh, North Carolina-based company. The "Nando Times No-Ads Edition," which launched Wednesday, will serve as an experiment to test visitors' acceptance of a paid model. Executives will evaluate the model in 60 days and send a survey to subscribers.
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Posted 11:39 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
AllTheWeb Adds News Search
Amy Gahran on new Web news tool
For some time now, I've had the home page of my Web browser set as AllTheWeb, a phenomenally useful and up-to-date search engine. Now I have yet another reason to love AllTheWeb: it's just added a new News Search feature. This feature uses its FAST (that's a brand name, not my emphasis) real-time search technology to continuously scan more than 3,000 news sources worldwide, adding more than 800 articles per minute to the news catalog. This beats the heck out of Yahoo! News.
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Posted 10:22 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
ABCNews.com Backs Off on Jennings E-mail Ads
Steve Outing on online advertising
As noted here last week, ABCNews.com recently began putting advertising at the top of a daily "personal e-mail from Peter Jennings" that goes out to tens of thousands of subscribers. Lots of people didn't like it, and ABC has now halted the ads — until it can figure out a way to make them less obtrusive. The Jennings daily e-mail goes out to 71,000 subscribers; 49,000 of them receive a text-only version. (Here's a USAToday.com report.)
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Posted 9:58 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Monster.com, Newspaper Join Forces: Can It Work?
Peter M. Zollman on online newspaper revenue models
In a deal announced last week that got surprisingly little notice in the online newspaper community, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin has formed an alliance with Monster.com to provide co-branded employment advertising services in Hawaii. Monster made some significant changes in its operations; the Star-Bulletin, which is the secondary newspaper in a two-newspaper market, is hoping to pick up significant employment ad revenue where now it has little. It's a unique combination of circumstances — a scrappy underdog newspaper, an isolated market, limited downside for the paper. Will it work? It's certainly an interesting experiment.
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Posted 9:56 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Plane Crash Slows News Sites
Steve Outing on impact of today's big story
Rafat Ali of Silicon Alley Daily reported today on the performance of news websites in the face of yet another big story, the crash of the American Airlines jet in New York. He found a couple sites that briefly went down completely from the traffic load, but most were able to meet demand — unlike on Sept. 11. Ali sent me some interesting data (from Keynote) that he collected while reporting this story, which was not published in the SAD article linked to above. I've posted his report in the Discuss this area for this item.
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Posted 2:51 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Bringing Broadband to All Canadians
Steve Klein on broadband access
Canada's native people want the Canadian government to create a "First Nations Broadband Network" to bring high-speed Internet access to all indigenous communities across Canada, Michelle Delio reports on Wired.com. The primary purpose of the high-speed connection would be to provide health and education services to communities that cannot support full-time doctors, nurses, or teachers, according to Matthew Coon Come, head of the Assembly of First Nations, the national organization of native people in Canada. "If done properly, this will not be a handout. It will be a hand up, and an investment by Canada in itself," Coon Come said. "It will be 'inter-national' development between First Nations and the Canadian nation."The AFN estimates the cost of building the network at between $400-500 million, $112 million of which it has committed to raising for the project. The AFN plan is a response to the government's election promise to make the Internet accessible in every part of Canada.
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Posted 1:46 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Black Boxes Obsolete; a Web Solution
Steve Outing on determining the cause of plane crashes
Here's a fascinating idea floated by Dave Winer in his daily Scripting News weblog: Jetliner "black boxes," which record flight data and are typically recovered and analyzed after a crash, are obsolete technology. Instead, airlines should update their planes so that the information is sent in streaming form, in real time, to ground-based Web servers, which record the plane's flight data. Writes Winer, "When a plane crashes, no need to hunt. Something like a weblog for each plane in our skies. As a bonus they could offer net connections to 802.11b laptop-using passengers." This is a great idea — though I doubt that Winer is the first to think of it — that could be a real boon not only to investigators, but also to reporters covering aviation disasters. Everyone's served by finding out the cause of plane crashes as quickly as possible. The technology exists to make this reality.
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Posted 10:46 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
No Repeat of 9/11 for Online Media?
Steve Outing on news website performance
With this morning's New York crash of American Airlines flight 587, we again have a major breaking news story that's attracting huge attention. (As I write this, we don't know if this is terrorism-caused of not.) As I've surfed to various major news websites this morning, it's been common to experience very slow-loading Web pages, as demand hits hard. But unlike on Sept. 11, it is possible (so far) to get to the sites; they've not been brought to their knees yet by the bursts of traffic. No doubt most sites learned the lessons of that day and beefed up server contingency plans for huge traffic demand.I've also been watching e-mail breaking-news alerts from the major sites. MSNBC.com was the first to put an alert in my inbox, followed by ABCNews.com. A little over an hour after the crash, I've yet to hear from any others. Clearly, the Internet is not yet a match for radio and TV in alerting the public to major breaking news.
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Posted 9:34 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Radio Japan Launches Thai Language Broadcast On Internet
Madan Rao on the international Web
Radio Japan's Thai-language service is one of the few Thai-language sources of in-depth information on Japan. But this short-wave service has been dogged by poor reception and inconvenient scheduling. A solution is at hand, with the recent launch of the Thai-language service on the Internet at www.nhk.or.jp. Shows in 22 other languages can be selected from the site's menu. The Hindi-language service seems to be the most popular of these.
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Posted 9:30 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Online Audience Stops Expanding
Paul Grabowicz on Internet demographics
The percentage of American adults who are online has not increased for the past year, leveling off at about 64%, according to a new survey by Harris Interactive. This could be just temporary — a reflection of the economic downturn. But it also could indicate Internet growth has reached a plateau — not good news for struggling online media companies.
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