Passion isn’t for sale
The Houston Chronic(what?)cle is looking for bloggers in what appears to be an(other) attempt by a mainstream news outlet to harness the passion of the blogosphere under its own brand. Dwight Silverman asks:
Would you like to tell the world about them? At Chron.com, we want to give you the chance to write about your passions, the things about which you consider yourself an expert, on our site.Are you into gardening, scrapbooking, astronomy, cooking, wine, fishing, knitting, birding, hiking, camping, cars, jewelry, antiques, travel, electronics, books . . . ?
Never forget Terry’s rule of citizens media: People who write because they have something to say are very different than people who are paid to write something. Passion can’t be bought.
Mr. Silverman’s statement — and one assumes the Houston Chronic(what?)cle’s position — puts bloggers in their place by assigning them to nice niches like knitting, birding and cooking. Sigh.
The conversation that IS citizens media already exists in every community in America (and probably around the world). Why big media refuses to accept that is both apparent and sad.
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Nice CPMs, if you can get them
From a piece in yesterday’s Online Media Daily:
The average cost per thousand impressions on premium sites came to $16.71–about twice as much as the $8.47 per thousand paid for run-of-network inventory in the fourth quarter.
I guess the trick is to be a “premium” site, whatever that is.
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Technology’s two-edged educational sword
Well, here’s a fun little piece from the LA Times (cleverly titled “The iPod took my seat”) about how colleges and universities are trying to deal with record levels of class-skipping enabled by the professors posting lecture notes online, along with audio and video recordings of lectures. Fascinating. The “system” helps students create their own learning schedules and then complains that people aren’t attending lectures.
“Too much online instruction is a bad thing,” said Terre Allen, a communication studies scholar and director of a center that provides teaching advice to professors at Cal State Long Beach.This last term, Allen experimented with posting extensive lecture notes online for her undergraduate course, “Language and Behavior.” One goal was to relieve students of the burden of furiously scribbling notes, freeing them to focus on the lectures’ substance.
Yet the result, Allen said, was that only about one-third of her 154 students showed up for most of the lectures. In the past, when Allen put less material online, 60% to 70% of students typically would attend.
When it comes to lectures with enrollment in the hundreds, universities usually don’t compel undergraduates to show up, or even lower their grades for poor attendance.
“This is one of the things that divide universities from high schools,” Allen said. “Students are expected to be personally responsible.”
Still, Allen said, to curb “the absentee approach to college,” she won’t put her lecture notes online this term.
I mean, isn’t the point of advanced education to actually get an education? What difference does it make how that takes place?
The article notes that the best students always attend class and usually sit in the front row. Well, good for them. I suppose the inference is that there is a causal relationship here and that if everybody attended lectures like the smart kids did, their grades would be higher. This is unbelievably naive, imo, and fails to take into consideration outside pressures on kids who aren’t gifted with scholarships or wealthy parents. Grrrr.
More importantly, this clearly indicates to me an opportunity for higher education — one that could expand enrollment without taxing physical resources. Why not explore the opportunity rather than circle the wagons?
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It’s the algorithms, baby!
Diane Mermigas is at it again. Her latest Hollywood Reporter column is a challenge to media companies to face the future by looking outside their comfort zone.
To be sure, Google’s road map of evolving search services is being guided by algorithmic strategies that are foreign to the creative likes of publishing, filmmaking, television production, marketing and advertising. But a willingness to embrace the new math and science of connecting with and selling to consumers and advertisers will make artistic media’s leap onto the digital broadband fast track quicker and more profitable.…the time has come for more deliberate reflection: surveying the big picture, getting in tune with consumer and advertiser responses and needs and thinking outside the box — whether it is a TV set, DVD player, Xbox, dust jacket or iPod.
…The next big new-media idea will reach beyond helping consumers and advertisers to find what they seek (through search) to giving them the tools to do something with it.
In our increasingly unbundled world, we make a significant mistake, if all we do is offer our content to those who’ve figured out the unbundled distribution platforms. We’ll make money — as Diane notes — but in so doing, we’re feeding the disruptive innovation that’s undercutting our way of life. Future success and profitability in the media world will come with the algorithms that make the unbundled world work, and we simply have no choice but to get in the water.
I’ll be with Diane next month in Seattle at a conference on public broadcasting, and I’m really looking forward to it.
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Don’t underestimate Google Video
The tech and media communities haven’t been kind in their reviews of Larry Page’s big announcement from the CES. Online Media Daily calls the Google Video launch “underwhelming,” while tech observers have been less diplomatic.
“Hey, is it my imagination, or is [this] the first really bad product Google has launched?” wrote Dave Pell of Davenetics.
I’ve played with the thing myself, and I think it’s very much ready for prime time. I think the thing that upsets a lot of folks is that amateur videos are mixed in with the professional stuff, and that’s a jolt for people who haven’t explored the world of amateur video online. For example, I’ve been looking for a silly clip called “numa numa” that was floating around the Net in 2004. There it was on Google Video.
The service is spartan and raw right now, but all of the pieces are there, and its value to the unbundled media world cannot possibly be overstated. If you’re attaching short ads to your videos, why do you care where people find them? And if you’re selling video clips, where better to place them than the default search engine for the world?
Like all of their products, however, I’d like to see this being done at the local level, because (once again) Google is taking money from what could be local media. When will we learn?
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Alone with my coffee and my tribe
I’m back in my office this cold Saturday morning after a wonderful trip with a client in Florida. My “unbundled media” message is spreading, and I’m feeling fairly content as I sit here and write.
Those who don’t blog will never understand the phenomenon. This morning, I’m thinking about Doc Searls and his newfound respect for Tylenol, Jeff Jarvis and his “told you so” about Dell Computers, David Weinberger trying to figure out an error message from Movable Type, Cory Bergman’s pride in the war of words between Redskins and Seahawks fans growing out of a Seahawks blog he created for his employer, and how we’ve added another 18 bloggers to the Nashville Is Talking blogroll (now approaching 400). These are my friends, members of my tribe. I care about them, not just about what they write.
The book I mentioned below contains this wonderful paragraph from Douglas Rushkoff:
The Internet is not a technological or even a media phenomenon; it is a social phenomenon. And in this sense, interactivity has changed everything.
Premodernism: I believe, therefore I understand.
Modernism: I think, therefore I understand.
Postmodernism: I experience, therefore I understand.
It’s nothing to fear, and it certainly isn’t the great Satan that some evangelical Christians would have you believe (Note: If you’re looking for the devil, you’ll find him under every rock).
But I digress.
We had snow flurries last night. It does that in January. Nice.
Back to my coffee and my morning ritual with my tribe.
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On the road
I’m in Florida for a couple of days with a client. No blogging. I can, however, strongly recommend a new book — Douglas Rushkoff’s Get Back in the Box. Great stuff. See you all on the backside.
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VOD wants to be free
Two-thirds of TV watchers in the U.S. would rather view commercials than pay $1.99 for a download, if they miss their favorite show. That’s the finding of a November study by Points North Group and Horowitz Associates and reported today in MediaDailyNews. Here’s the key paragraph:
This research is good news for advertisers–as they could be more involved with VOD content, said Leddy (Craig Leddy, an analyst of Points North Group). Still, he adds that VOD deals will need to be careful. “Unless the advertising is short and sweet, it won’t work in the VOD environment.”
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Don’t miss the significance of this
The Washington Post is live streaming the Alito confirmation hearing. The stream is in embedded Flash and plays quite nicely. It’s very matter-of-fact and done without fanfare and hype. Who needs TV? This is the same newspaper whose VJs have won national NPPA awards. There is now officially no difference — online at least — between TV stations (and networks) and newspapers.
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Murdoch’s got the right idea
The Guardian is reporting that Rupert Murdoch plans to turn his latest acquisition, MySpace.com, into a portal (for lack of a better term) to compete with the likes of Google, Yahoo! and MSN. This should shock no one, but it’s evidence that Murdoch and his people understand what’s happening in the Media 2.0 space, where his media competitors do not. He realizes that simply providing content for use on-demand isn’t going to get his company very far in a world of fundamental changes in media use. It’s short-sighted to offer your content for consumption elsewhere without having your own “elsewhere.”
If you don’t read Umair Haque, you need to, because the guy IS the voice crying in the wilderness leading the way with this kind of stuff. In his most recent post at BubbleGeneration, he writes that media companies jumping on the on-demand bandwagon by offering their content to others are actually contributing to the value of those “others” in the name of short-term profits.
What the “on-demand” — AKA media 1.0-as-service — strategy amounts to is a bet on investing in production: that by investing in (and creating) the “best” shows, traditional media will retain a higher market share — a higher attention share, essentially……Content, in the near future, won’t be a source of market power — it will be commoditized. Value chain atomization means that the average return to content is already decaying fast across media markets. Focusing on content ultimately gives new models more and more leverage to realize attention economies of scale and scope.
By focusing on the short-term, as it’s done so many times in the past, the media industry is mortgaging the future. This time, though, the price of antistrategy will be steeper than ever before; like Ford and GM never recovered from their inability to understand and dominate the economics disruption of the 70s and 80s — cheap information — so it will be difficult for media incumbents to recover the market power incumbents are about to cede to Apple, Google, and a clutch of new startups.
Meanwhile, MediaDailyNews reports that the folks at Time, Inc. have ceased charging for three of their online business titles–Fortune, Fortune Small Business, and Business 2.0. They’ve brought them under the CNNMoney.com umbrella in an attempt to move into the aggregator space.
Vivek Shah, president of digital publishing, The Fortune/Money Group, attributed the move to several trends in online media: a growing desire from readers to get all the news they care about from one source like a news aggregator; a demand from advertisers and media buyers for scale in order to increase the effectiveness of their buys; and, of course, a strengthening ad market.“All of the research we do tells us that readers are narrowing the number of sites they visit in a day,” said Shah. “And from an advertiser perspective, it’s very attractive because it allows them to build large campaigns that will have a bigger impact.”
You think your brand is enough to stop that? Think again.
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The question of serendipity
Ben Compaine offers a nostalgic and, therefore, shallow response to Matthew Gilbert’s Boston Globe article in support of a la carte programming for cable. The bio for Ben says he’s been around awhile (”when manual typewriters were considered state of the art”), and that’s evident by his dismissal of anything unbundled. He argues, for example, that the Boston Globe wouldn’t sell him just the City/Region and Business sections, so why should cable do the same? Then, he gets to the usual high ground of the bundlers.
And we should not under estimate the value of serendipity and diversity in the value of the bundle. One of the great joys of the newspaper is stumbling across something that we wouldn’t have seen if all media were stove piped– that is, focused only on what we know we want or like. Like the Web is for many. I’m glad I saw your column, just as I’m glad that in using the “next channel” button on my remote I occasionally stumble on something on the Biography or History channels. If asked to pay for them I probably wouldn’t. But they’re bundled and it’s not such a bad thing to hear some promotion on the radio or elsewhere for one of their programs and, what the heck, I watch since it’s available. Bundling equals diversity.
- It isn’t serendipitous when an editor or promotions manager puts something in front of you designed to drag you into another section or segment. That’s called marketing, and it’s what people are trying desperately to escape. If such is perceived as serendipity or an “occasional stumble,” then the marketeur has especially won, for that is the ultimate goal of the ad pro. That’s an absurdly cynical perspective, I realize, but very little happens by accident in the media world. The difference between now and then is that the people themselves want to determine the accidents. We’re not as naive as we used to be.
- The notion that bundling equals diversity assumes much and begs many questions, the first of which is who determines the diversity — presumably the owner of the bundle. It assumes that people are somehow resistant to diversity, and I would argue that that’s pretty tough to prove. I don’t know anybody who isn’t curious, but I know a lot of people who don’t want to be told what they should be curious about.
The biggest complaint I have about this bundled diversity theory is that it assumes people are stupid and — absent the “serendipity” of a bundle with lots of choices — they’ll just wither away stuck in their own cocoons. Where’s the proof?
- Finally, this argument suffers from the “all-or-nothing” syndrome that accompanies most media opinions (sadly, I get that way too), regardless of which side they’re on. The mainstream way of doing things isn’t going away completely. Blogs aren’t taking over completely. People will always leave themselves choices, and if there’s profit to be made from “serendipity,” then someone will move in to claim it. Matthew Gilbert makes good points in his Boston Globe article, and Ben makes some good observations too. But finding our way to tomorrow would be a whole lot easier if we could drop the notion that new media is REPLACING everything that’s old. It’s just not so.
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Haque: “No words to express the suckage.”
Umair Haque on U.S. television news:
Now that I’m in the States, when I make the mistake of trying to watch some news, I get, instead, a dose of catastrophically stupid anchorbots yelling at each other (or better yet, at me). You know the score - O’Reilly, Anderson Cooper, Paula Zahn, etc…This is a mini case study in why Media 1.0 is dying such an agonizing, painful, awful death. I mean, here in SF I get about 10 news channels - and I still can’t get any news. All I can get is screaming, shouting, honeymoon murders, infotainment, blah, blah. Not to mention about 30 mins/hr of ads.
Forget strategy for a second. We don’t need any economics to tell us why media’s dying anymore: (how can I put this nicely) it sucks. Beyond sucks. It absolutely blows. There are no words to express the suckage anymore.
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Copycat?
Jupiter Research analyst David Schatsky offers a realistic appraisal of the media landscape in The Fragmented Media Future. Readers of this blog and my essays will discover that it all sounds vaguely familiar, for what Schatsky calls “Fragmented,” I call “Unbundled.” It proves that good ideas aren’t born in a vacuum. It’s a good read.
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Unbundled music — a lesson for all
Music industry sales figures from 2005 provide the clearest example yet of what I call the shift to “Unbundled Media.” The numbers from Nielsen SoundScan, as reported in today’s Tennessean, show album/CD sales dipping last year, while legal digital downloads rose by triple digits.
“Bottom line: It was a down year,” said Geoff Mayfield, director of charts and senior analyst for Billboard magazine, pointing out that high gas prices may have affected entertainment spending.“Spinning it as anything but that would be like gift wrapping the garbage,” he said.
This industry is a harbinger — or perhaps now a testament — of what’s happening the media world altogether. The unbundling of TV is taking place before our eyes, as networks and producers offer new distribution models almost every day. The local level is next.
As with any disruptive innovation, we have two choices: We can spend our resources in denial and protecting our business models, or we can jump into the disruption with both feet.
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The growing ubiquity of RSS
Allie and I were in the doctor’s office yesterday and tore out this page from the latest issue of In Style magazine. It’s a promotional page for their website, instyle.com.
Note what’s at the bottom of the page. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen it in print, and I think its use here says a lot about not only the magazine but also where RSS has come in a relatively short time. Now when I tell people that RSS is everywhere, I’ll include this example. Nice, I think.
Amazing what you can find in the waiting room.
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A few broadsides for the newspaper industry
In what has to be the worst factual error in American newspaper history, scores of major morning papers reported that 12 of 13 trapped coal miners in West Virginia were been found alive and safe. Tragically, they were not, and now an industry pummeled on every side must once again explain itself. The error is being attributed to a “tragic misunderstanding,” and I’m sure this will be dissected for a very long time.
Morning papers are in an awful spot on stuff like this, and clearly the journalism community believed for a period that the miners were indeed alive. While cable networks and websites were able to quickly change the story, as the truth was revealed, the morning papers were screwed. Unlike the famous “Dewey Defeats Truman” mistake, this one involves the emotional turmoil of death, and the lawyers of the land won’t be able to leave it alone. Perhaps they shouldn’t.
Papers simply can’t compete on breaking news, and pushing the envelope only invites error. Many will say that something like this was inevitable, but the only thing I’ll say is that it’s incredibly sad. Imagine the pain of these families. I cannot.
And this is not the only embarrassment for the newspaper industry today. Via Romenesko:
Longtime Sun columnist Michael Olesker resigned Tuesday amid allegations that he used passages from other newspapers without attribution. “I made mistakes,” says Olesker. “I would never take somebody else’s work and call it my own.”
Doug Bandow (of the Los Angeles Times) says he’s “paying a high price” for taking money to write op-ed pieces favorable to the positions of lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s clients. “In retrospect, it was stupid because it created an appearance that would bring all of my work into potential disrepute. And the appearance was made worse by Abramoff’s other shenanigans. But it’s silly to suggest that $1,000 or so would buy my opinion…”
We are in a time of profound change in the world of media, and it’s just — as I said — incredibly sad to watch this once-vaunted institution crumble. I have great faith in tomorrow, however, and I hope that whatever blossoms downstream will learn from what’s taking place today.
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The Economy of Unbundled Advertising
Here is the latest in my ongoing series of essays, TV News in a Postmodern World. The Economy of Unbundled Advertising continues the theme of unbundled media by applying the same unbundling concepts to the ads that support all media. Advertisers are projected to spend $292 billion in 2006, and like the content players they support, the industry is dealing with real threats due to the unbundling of media. The same energy that’s pulling apart the packaging of media also demands that merchants who sell goods and services do the same in their communication with the public.
Who wants to sit through the pitch of a sales person at any kind of dealership? Just give me the price, man.
This essay proposes a form of advertising that doesn’t currently exist but certainly could. Like the personal media revolution, the concept levels the playing field for anybody wishing to sell goods and services, so I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to predict that something like this will come about.
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