With iPad (and Kindle), it’s about the content

January 31st, 2010

The idea of newspapers (and others?) bundling subscriptions with a free portable device is gaining traction. Here’s Joe Zeff:

Love it or hate it, the iPad remains the publishing industry’s best chance at resurrection, but only if enough consumers buy in. The price tag is the biggest obstacle — $499 for an iPlane Jane model or $629 plus monthly service for 3G-powered Pad. But what if the publishing industry helped to defray that cost, bundling an iPad with a multiyear subscription to hundreds of newspapers and magazines? It’s a short-term investment that could pay off handsomely, and one of many options that should be considered in order to lure a new generation of readers to a new world of possibilities.

Stan Schroeder at Mashable.com noted that the iPad is all about what’s IN the iPad, not the device itself. “The iPad “shouldn’t be sold in Apple stores, it should be sold on newsstands (together with a 24-month subscription to some newspaper), in video clubs, in libraries.”

I honestly expected a lot of subsidized options for the device if you agree to buy some content with it, but Apple hasn’t really delivered that — yet. If I’m right, and if Apple starts doing that, most of iPad’s shortcomings won’t matter.

A few weeks ago, I made the same suggestion via Twitter.

The response to my tweet was mixed. Some thought it spot-on; others thought it was foolish for an industry already limping due to lack of funds. I think that’s an empty argument.

And, as Poynter’s Damon Kiesow notes, this isn’t really “new” thinking.

The New York Times and others have already started down this path, selling subsidized Kindles in return for annual subscription packages. The advantages of this model were proposed a year ago when the Silicon Valley Insider calculated it would be cheaper for the Times to buy its subscribers Kindles rather then print and deliver them each a daily paper.

I feel pretty strongly that this is going to happen, and as a Kindle owner, I would welcome it. The device is fabulous for the treadmill, the bathroom and other places where the size of the font makes multitasking much easier. I promise to keep it out of my car.

Posted in Disruptions, Newspapers | No Comments » |

Will marry for health insurance

January 29th, 2010

Move over, “Pants on the ground.”

You think you’ve seen everything until something new pops up. Terri Carlson, 45, of San Diego has launched a website and YouTube videos advertising for a husband. The criteria? Health insurance! While I’m not sure it’s intended to be funny, Terri is quite a character. Take a look.

Of course, we’ve no way (yet) of knowing whether this is a put-on, but the story is already getting some media attention. Next up? The talk shows and yet another unexpected 15-minutes of fame.

Posted in Just Plain Fun Stuff | 6 Comments » |

C’mon, folks. It’s not about content!

January 29th, 2010

At the risk of being labeled “Johnny 1-note,” let me repeat this truth about media and the future. Paid content concepts divert media company attention from the real issue, which is the revolution in advertising. This keeps going through my mind this morning, as I read reaction to Apple’s iPad announcement and ponder the future.

Let me repeat: focusing on paid content concepts diverts our attention from the real issue, and that is the disruption to traditional advertising. The problem here is that media companies think they’re in the content business, but they’re not. Perhaps it was true in centuries past, but today the “business” of media is advertising.

The rise of content marketing and “advertising as content” in the Media 2.0 world are permanent disruptions in the way businesses sell their wares. Enabling commerce is the new mission of media, not serving ads, and the sooner we get going with it, the better.

I don’t doubt that there will always be a place for subscriptions and advertising, but those are not the kinds of growth categories that public companies need to impress investors. Yes, broadcasting has “matured,” but it will still make money (and lots of it), but media companies keep staring at red herrings instead of attacking what really matters.

Will the iPad help media, especially newspapers? I think it will, but not to the extent that newspapers especially need the help. So let’s all smile, but let’s do so with an eye on creating apps that enable commerce, especially locally.

Posted in Advertising, Broadcasting, Disruptions, Media 2.0, Newspapers | No Comments » |

One-third of U.S. adults post to the Web

January 29th, 2010

When Nokia predicted two years ago that, by 2012, one-fourth of all entertainment would be created and consumed within peer groups, a lot of people just rolled their eyes. It was a laughable notion, after all, that people would turn away from Hollywood to entertain themselves, but that was a misinterpretation of the prediction. And evidence continues to mount that suggests we are indeed moving in that direction.

To “make” media, you have to begin somewhere, and new data by Forrester Research sheds light on where that’s taking place. One-third of U.S. Web users now post status updates once per week via social media, and Forrester has created a new Social Technographic term for them, as Josh Bernoff explains.

When we created the Social Technographics® ladder of behaviors, we anticipated most categories of social behavior that continue today with one exception: the rapid conversations that take place in tweets and Facebook status updates. To reflect the new behavior, we’ve added a rung to the Social Technographics ladder: Conversationalists.

Bernoff adds that the new category, Conversationalists, reflects two changes. “First,” he wrote, “it includes not just Twitter members, but also people who update social network status to converse (since this activity in Facebook is actually more prevalent than tweeting). And second, we include only people who update at least weekly, since anything less than this isn’t much of a conversation.”

Conversationalists are 56% female, more than any other group in the ladder. While they’re among the youngest of the groups, 70% are still 30 and up.

The new data from Forrester also confirms earlier trends spotted, that Spectators are maxing out at around 70%, Joiners are still growing rapidly, and Creators are still growing slowly. One-fourth of U.S. Web users are in the Creator category, and they’re the ones who are leading the revolution in personal media.

Of course, the greatest threat to traditional media from all of this isn’t the creation of competitive content, but rather that the people formerly known as our advertisers are participating on all rungs of the ladder, including making their own media. The Web has lowered the barriers to entry to any media business, and that includes everybody from kids to professionals, writers to film buffs, and, of course, those former advertisers.

Forrester has done us a favor by categorizing all of this and publishing it, because the sheer enormity of what’s happening tends to escape those who don’t wish to see it.

Posted in personal media | No Comments » |

Leno needs to take responsibility

January 28th, 2010

I realize this is a bit off-topic, but I do not like Jay Leno. I especially dislike his “I’m a victim” stance in this whole late-night talk fiasco of the last many weeks.

So Jay went on Oprah this morning to begin repairing his image. A great many people think he’s responsible for what’s happened to Conan O’Brien, but he doesn’t.

“It all comes down to numbers in show business. This is almost the perfect storm of bad things happening. You have two hit shows — ‘Tonight Show’ No. 1 and Conan No. 1. You move them both to another situation. And what are the odds that both would do extremely poorly? If Conan’s numbers had been a little bit higher, it wouldn’t even be an issue. But in show business, there’s always somebody waiting in the wings. Being me.”

As he has before, he blames Conan for poor ratings for The Tonight Show, even though he takes responsibility for his poor ratings at 10pm. But here’s the thing: Leno’s show killed late news ratings for most NBC affiliates, which, in turn, killed The Tonight Show. Lead-in program ratings impact any show on TV, so it was Leno’s crappy talk show that gave Conan O’Brien’s show lousy ratings, and it’s hypocritical of Leno to blame O’Brien’s demise on O’Brien.

If Jay Leno wants to repair his image, he needs to begin by taking responsibility for everything, including not being honest in 2004 when NBC suits first proposed moving Conan to The Tonight Show five years later.

Posted in Broadcasting | No Comments » |

If this is where news content is heading, what about the Web?

January 27th, 2010

As I predicted last week, Apple’s big announcement is more about the content providers and the infrastructure for moving that content than the device itself. The game-changer for media companies — both local and global — is that they are now seemingly assured of that vaunted “second revenue stream” in the form of subscriptions. It’s enough to make front office types drool all over themselves.

But if this is where that “content” is heading, what about the Web — that already established ecosystem of free, albeit advertiser-supported content? To rightly answer the question, we must first get past the obvious: will this work? Will people pay for something they’re accustomed to getting for free? Sensing artificial scarcity, the copyright owners are now faced with the opportunity to shut the spigot and create a demand for their products. That’s a very dicey proposition, but just for the sake of argument, let’s assume the answer is yes.

For the answer to the original question, let’s go back to an old theme: news is a process, not a finished product. For the past couple of years, my “solution” for the newspaper industry has been to charge for their finished product efforts (the newspaper) and create a free, advertiser-supported continuous news Web offering. As the Web shifts to real time, this is the logical move for the news industry as well. Save the analysis for your finished product; follow the news in real time. This would be a 100% Web-native offering.

The Apple tablet also allows newspapers to provide an end of the day finished product, which they can then use the continuous news stream to promote. This puts them in the same position as local TV, for whom the concept of continuous news is perfect. Speaking of television, there’s nothing to prevent local TV from competing for eyeballs on the tablet computer as well. This should be on the front burner of any interactive division across the industry.

The point is that the Web has never been a newspaper, although newspapers have tried to make it so. Perhaps this new development from Apple (with others soon to follow) will alter front-office thinking to the point where all professional media can compete online in real time. That’s where the future of a hyper-connected universe is heading.

We’re going to hear MUCH more about all of this in the days and weeks to come, and we will certainly be following the developments for you. The love affair between Apple and media providers is sure to sparkle with intensity up front, but let’s see what happens when somebody has to do the dishes.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment » |

Exclusive: Mobile advertising to skyrocket

January 20th, 2010

The sensational growth of the mobile application (apps) market is causing forecasters to take another look at projections for mobile advertising. Borrell Associates, for example, has dramatically boosted its projections for the growth of mobile ad spending, according to new data being released this week. Borrell now predicts mobile advertising will be a $16 billion market by 2012, skyrocketing upwards from $1.9 billion in 2009. Kip Cassino, Vice President of Research for Borrell, thinks it’s going to be big. “We’ve seen the beginning of a swing,” he said, “that looks a lot like the swing we saw when search first started to get going back in 2003.”

“It’s going to get a lot stronger a lot quicker than we first expected,” he added. Here’s the dramatic graph:

The numbers are all about the mobile app market.

That market in and of itself is huge — projected to be $7 billion this year, with 8 of 10 apps being free, according to new data released this week by Gartner. Analysts predict mobile application stores’ revenue will grow to $29.5 billion by the end of 2013, but that has nothing to do with advertising. But this enthusiasm for apps is what researchers hadn’t anticipated, according to Cassino:

The apps in and of themselves don’t cost much to put on your mobile device, but they are the vehicles for an awful lot of marketing. They will be the way the TV stations, radio stations and others will bring their programming to people, the way all kinds of advertisers will try and get themselves in front of customers.

Gordon Borrell agrees but adds that local is a different animal when it comes to anything new.

We are sure mobile advertising will go up faster than we estimated in the past, and we’re now pretty sure it’ll go up faster than everybody else is forecasting. That said, I’m still skeptical that you’ll see the floodgates open in terms of spending by small businesses on mobile advertising. It’s never happened that way in the past with a new medium. They’ve always been reticent and conservative at first, then like lemmings when something begins providing undeniable and consistent results. So I suspect the big lemming-leap is probably a good two, maybe three years away for local mobile advertising.

So if you’re a local media company, what can you do to prepare?

The most important thing is to get into the app business, with emphasis not on content but commerce. The problem here is which phone do you build for or which service do you use? I’m not sure that matters as much as just getting into it. Start with the iPhone and move forward from there. In the beginning, it’s probably fine to start with content, but keep an eye on developments in the commerce space, like the aggregation of Twitter feeds from local businesses. Those could be turned into mobile apps.

Pay attention to your RSS feeds. I’ve been harping on this for a long time, but your RSS feeds simply must be more than “click here for more details.” Let’s not just shove links in people’s faces, but give them some real meat via RSS. This is what will drive your mobile apps downstream, so give it some thought today.

Pay close attention to the marketplace and be prepared to pull the trigger at a moment’s notice. Much of my day is spent reading and staying in touch with what’s happening in the tech world. You can and should do the same. Follow the folks at TechCrunch, GigaOm, TechMeme and elsewhere to keep abreast of developments in this rapidly-changing world.

I’m sure Gordon will be discussing this among many other things next month at Borrell Associates’ Local Online Advertising, The ‘Business of Making Money’ Conference.

Posted in Advertising, Mobile | 2 Comments » |

NYU hires Winer; others should follow the lead

January 18th, 2010

A few months ago, I read of an old friend and colleague leaving the news business to take a position teaching journalism at a big university. That’s the way it’s been done since the beginning. You practice for awhile, then you teach. But I wondered at the time if this was really the kind of person we need teaching budding journalists today. I remember the guy as very competent but also very old school. “Big-J” is what we used to call it.

That’s why an announcement last week really got my attention. Jay Rosen, who is the chair of the Journalism Department at NYU, has hired Dave Winer as a visiting scholar and technical adviser. He explained it this way.

For me and the students of Studio 20 this is a major “get,” as the bookers for TV shows like to say. Our focus is on innovation in the news system and adapting journalism to the web. As a software developer and one of the proto-bloggers, Dave Winer has been an innovator from the moment his career began in the 1980s. As a co-founder of blogging, RSS and podcasting he is directly responsible for some of the disruptions that are shifting power to the users. This is a change that journalists need to recognize and adapt to without complaint.

…I’m betting that he can help us synthesize a new approach to doing J-school, post-disruption. As technical adviser and visiting scholar (discipline: empower the users!) Dave will be sitting in on classes from time to time. He will be available to students as they tackle their own projects. Occasionally he will be hanging out at 20 Cooper Square with his laptop. You know… visiting.

I’m going to be following what Jay and Dave will be doing, because Dave Winer has a way of shaking things up for the better. He rubs some people the wrong way, but that’s because they don’t get his passion. He is the penultimate news consumer, and if you track his innovations over the years, you’ll come to the conclusion that he’s simply trying to make it easier to indulge his habit. And that’s why I have so much faith in what he’s calling “Year Zero for Journalism.” If anybody is going to be successful in reinventing journalism, they will have to begin with the consumer.

I’m teaching my ethics class again at UNT this semester, and the young men and women who’ve been my students eat it up. That’s because we’re talking about ethics in a networked world, not some canned program of traditional ethics. I’m proud to have been chosen to do this, and I think the university is pretty happy that I’m there, too.

Congrats, Jay, and good luck, although with Dave, I’m sure you won’t need it.

Posted in Journalism | No Comments » |

If it smells like it, it probably is

January 15th, 2010

So Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Universal Sports, is jumping to the defense of his network in the colossal foul-up involving a high-stakes game of musical chairs with late night talk show hosts at NBC. “What this is really all about,” Ebersol told The New York Times, “is an astounding failure by Conan.” Referring to Conan O’Brien’s critical comments this week, Ebersol said it was “chicken-hearted and gutless to blame a guy you couldn’t beat in the ratings.” Indeed, ratings have been down for Conan, but let’s look at this.

Leno’s performance at 10pm drove late local news numbers for NBC affiliates into the sewer (down 25%), because lead-ins to programs matter. Without big ratings at 10pm, the news at 11pm was bound to suffer. And guess what? If the news numbers suffered, it follows that The Tonight Show numbers would suffer, too.

This stuff is BS. Pure spin.

Posted in Broadcasting, Networks | No Comments » |

“Pants on the ground”

January 15th, 2010

In case you live in a cave, the first cultural “15 minutes” of 2010 occurred during Tuesday night’s American Idol broadcast in the form of Larry Platt’s “Pants on the ground” audition. Platt, a veteran, is a 62-year old African-American who calls himself “general.”

There are over 2,000 entries on YouTube when searching “pants on the ground,” and many of them are tributes. Searching “pants on the ground” (in quotes) on Google produces over 18 million results, the first 582 (I stopped after that) relating to Larry Platt. As of today, “Pants” is number three on the list of top searches on Google.

The producers of American Idol knew what they were doing when they let this guy on the show (he didn’t qualify as a contestant), and I think the message of the song will carry on long after General Platt’s fame. It is considered politically incorrect for a white guy to comment about the dress of “urban” youth, but it’s perfectly appropriate for a 62-year old African-American.

Does wearing your pants below your butt make you look like a “foo?” Well, yes, and I’d add: obviously so. Let’s hope Larry’s message gets through and is talked about in the right circles.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: I tried to embed the official Fox version, but the code doesn’t work)

Here’s Jimmy Fallon last night as Neil Young doing “Pants.”

Posted in Culture, YouTube | No Comments » |