Sips from the Firehose
A blog that seeks to filter the internet into a refreshing, easily-gulped beverage
Aug 31
Posted: under Uncategorized.
My take: If you want to know what people will pay for, ask them why they start hitting the # or 0 buttons the second they hear a recorded voice when they call customer support. Interesting thesis by Gerd Leonhard about what the viable models for monetizing content online are going to have to look [...] [...more]
My take: If you want to know what people will pay for, ask them why they start hitting the # or 0 buttons the second they hear a recorded voice when they call customer support.
Interesting thesis by Gerd Leonhard about what the viable models for monetizing content online are going to have to look like – he falls firmly on the side of “Freemium” in this presentation to Tokyo 2.0. I kinda wish there was some kind of audio accompanying these slides (some of them are rather cryptic without what is obviously necessary verbal expansion & explanation). I’ve embedded it below as well, if you don’t want to have to click away to see it.
Regardless, this is a real Web 2.0 story. Gerd added me to his follow list on Twitter this morning, and when I saw the sheer weight of followers + number of Tweets, I figured it’d at least be interesting to see who this person was, so I clicked through. This is rare for me these days. I’ve been getting a lot of porno Tweetspam lately, and I’m at about bandwidth capacity with the people I already follow, so I’ve been very, very picky about adding anyone to my Tweetlist.
Anyway, upon clicking through I found that Gerd works out of Basel, Switzerland, and writes about the same issues that I’ve been researching, writing, obsessing, gritting my teeth, banging my head against the wall, slitting my wrists in a warm bathtub, etc. etc.
The presentation above makes a point that I’ve been trying to make to my clients:
It’s not that you can’t charge for content online. I am not saying that. I don’t believe that to be true.
What I do believe with all my heart & soul is that you can’t charge for the same old content just shoveled onto the internet in the same old ways that you always have.
The question I asked in bold, at the beginning of this piece is, I think, key to what people will be willing to pay for. Why do we all immediately start punching the pound (#) or zero (0) keys when we hit one of those damned obtuse voicemail trees? And what does that mean? (Hint: the link goes to a site that should set some bells dinging in your heads.)
Well, we hit the button because the computer isn’t yet at the point where it can understand what it is that we really want. The computer can’t solve our problem right now. Anyone who’s had to do an extended “Google Hunt” on a complex issue to try to find the information you need knows that – you want to know how to rip video off a DVD, edit out the parts you need, and re-compress it for a client (to use a recent quandary of mine).
Pose that question to a video expert, and you will get an explanation of what VOBs are, how they differ from uncompressed video, how you can convert VOBs to AVIs that a video editing program like Premiere or Final Cut can ingest, and what your export settings have to be so that you don’t get awful artifacts, soundtrack buzzing or moire patterns.
Post that question to the web, and you get spam, ads, and links to dozens of video forums where the moderators and participants are all arguing about minutia that you can’t understand. And when you try to join in the discussion, you find that it either took place years ago and there is no decent answer (what is it with 2007 timesstamps? was that when everyone last participated in a forum chat or what? I keep seeing that all over the place…) – or that the forum denizens jump all over you for being a “n00b” and don’t answer your question.
What’s this got to do with paid content?
Plenty, as it turns out.
When we go to the web for answers, we are looking first for a free and easy solution. If that is not available, or if we find a lot of people arguing about how bad the solution is, we progress to the next level, which is having to engage our critical thinking apparatus (insert joke here about bad educational systems + lazy internet users). And it’s at this point, that we start getting willing to pay for something that will actually solve our problem.
Because we also mash down on the buttons to talk to a human operator because we JUST DON’T HAVE TIME. Remember that point. Machines were supposed to make things quicker & easier. But the contrary effect of the web has been to make information acquisition longer & more complicated. We don’t have the time to wait on the phone for 5, 10, 20 minutes, listening to the canned voice drone on and on about how pushing 4 in this menu will then take you to the next menu where you have to push the right button to hear the next speech that really doesn’t have anything to do with your problem … when you KNOW you could just explain things in about 5 seconds to a human to get the result you need.
That interaction? That experience? That contact with a business/expert/publication that solves your problem when & how you need it?
That you can sell.
Bundle up services that allow you to filter & make sense of the relentless information flow, and the audience will choose that over spending all kinds of wasted time plowing through the info-overload SERPs — as long as the price is reasonable & proportional to the task at hand. There are rules for how you must prepare the ground for when the people come to you, looking for an answer, but this post is getting long, and I’ll have to address that later.
Aug 28
Posted: under Digital Migration, new media, Newspaper Deathwatch, Newspapers, This week in paid content.
Tags: ad spending, Alan Mutter, Aspen conference, buzzmachine, Demotix, Doc Searls, e-reader, economic optimism, fast company, Jeff Jarvis, jilted journalists, Kindle, Mark Cuban, mediactive, new business models for news, New Media Migration, newsosaur, newspaper death spiral, Newspaper Deathwatch, Nieman Lab, recession, Rue89, Steve Brill
This week's debate is not as acrimonious as in the past (although there are exceptions to that, of course), and in the wake of the biz models released by the Aspen conference, some people are taking building new revenue streams seriously. At least, they say they are. It turns out that a lot of what has been reported in this paid content debate is a little like Microsoft software releases: trial balloon "vaporware." [...more]
This week’s debate is not as acrimonious as in the past (although there are exceptions to that, of course), and in the wake of the biz models released by the Aspen conference, some people are taking building new revenue streams seriously. At least, they say they are. It turns out that a lot of what has been reported in this paid content debate is a little like Microsoft software releases: trial balloon “vaporware.”
Page design at Rue89.com looks a little like what splatters on the side of the carny Tilt-a-Whirl after you load it up with a buncha 10-years olds who've spent the day eating cotton candy and mystery meat hotdogs. I think the boxes up & down the sides are supposed to be clickable ads, but they were inert when I tried them... (click for larger)
The illustration here is of a new French news site that is apparently taking off at Rue89; I can’t decide whether the chaotic design is totally off-putting, or intriguing because it basically violates every rule of page design. Also, I can’t hear the word “Rue” in a title without flashing to “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Or some B-movie villain twirling a moustache and chortling, “You’ll rue the day, Rex Manly!”
As a bonus, this week I’ve broadened the focus a bit to include some big-picture thinking from some of the unusual suspects; Doc Searls has a post wherein it is posited that what we think of right now as the internet is just a finger pointing in the direction of what this thing is actually going to grow into. Which should fuel a couple of late-night dorm-room debates, if nothing else…
Read More
Aug 16
Posted: under Digital Migration, New Marketing, new media, Newspaper Deathwatch, Newspapers, Webconomics, Wrongheaded solutions.
Tags: access fees, aggregation, inbound links, Jeff Jarvis, link economy, Mark Cuban, media bundle, Michael Wolff, newspaper, online subscription, paid content, paying for news, paywalls, revenue stream
In which I get very "Meta" and write a blog post that aggregates other blog posts that were written about aggregation. The discussion in all cases gets heated very quickly. Insults are thrown around, fisking takes place in the comment threads, but a few actual new ideas & fact-based analyses sneak in here and there. The fact that some very smart entrepreneurs are actually interested enough to toss in some innovative thinking is rather heartening, actually. [...more]
In which I get very “Meta” and write a blog post that aggregates other blog posts that were written about aggregation.
I am also posting this over on the AIM Group blog, as part of what I think might become a regular feature, “This week in the paid content debate.” The best of the bunch is the back-and-forth between billionaire Mark Cuban, and the bete noire of many print publishers, Michael Wolff, who runs the Newser.com content-aggregation site. Cuban actually suggests something that shows that he’s put more thinking into the issue than the kneejerk “Up with the paywalls!” bunch. I note below the flaw in his plans – my ex-roommate used to describe for me in detail how impossible it was at Time-Warner-AOL to get the jealous VPs of Home Video, say, to play nice with the guys from HBO and pay-per-view. Why make someone else’s P&L sheets look good? That just means they are going to get the Exec VP slot faster than you…
This is an example of a newspaper that has developed multiple, reliable, alternative revenue streams. UOL in Brazil is doing quite well, thank you. They planned ahead, unlike so many complacent U.S. papers.(Click for larger)
Anyway, the discussion in all cases gets heated very quickly. Insults are thrown around, fisking takes place in the comment threads, but a few actual new ideas & fact-based analyses sneak in here and there. The fact that some very smart entrepreneurs are actually interested enough to toss in some innovative thinking is rather heartening, actually.
- Mark Cuban gives some free advice to fellow billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch: http://blogmaverick.com/2009/08/08/my-advice-to-fox-myspace-on-selling-content-yes-you-can/ Basically, he advances the idea that to get consumers to pay for news, you have to bundle it up with other goods, services and content that exist within giant organizations such as Fox or Time-Warner. A “Newsjunkie” subscription would come with access to special sections of Fox News, a couple of books from HarperCollins, magazine subscriptions and DVDs of 20th Century Fox movies. Commenters point out that such “synergies” remain elusive in these big media conglomerates, as each of the divisions is still in its own silo, with its own P&L, jealously guarding its own turf. Cuban paid special attention to aggregators, suggesting that newspapers ban links from aggregators such as Michael Wolff’s Newser.com.
- Michael Wolff responds with a post entitled “Mark Cuban is a Big Fat Idiot” http://www.newser.com/off-the-grid/post/237/mark-cuban-is-a-big-fat-idiotmdash3bnews-will-stay-free.html Highlights include “some people” finding Cuban bumptious, arrogant and rich only through a dot-com fluke. Wolff maintains that news will always be free and ad-supported, and suggests that Cuban must be “smoking something” …
- …leading to Mark Cuban responding with a schoolyard-taunt opus: I’m Rubber, You’re Glue http://blogmaverick.com/2009/08/12/to-michael-wolf-im-rubber-youre-glue/ Not sure what it means when the discussion over paywalls degenerates so quickly, even amongst intelligent and successful publishers. Apparently, Cuban takes umbrage to Wolff calling him a “big fat idiot,” and in turn, taunts Wolff by criticizing his “outdated model” of a site.
- The fallacy of the Link economy: http://paidcontent.org/article/419-the-fallacy-of-the-link-economy/ This is another assault on the value of inbound links from Google and other news aggregation sites. Arnon Mishkin says that even sites that publish a headline and short description of a news story appearing on another site are destructive, because readers mostly skim stories, and therefore get the news content they need without having to click through. No word from him on what he thinks newspapers should do on newsstands – perhaps they should be like old-school porn magazines, in plain brown wrappers.
- Ken Ellis responds on NP-Harder: http://npharder.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/the-fallacies-of-arnon-mishkin/He picks apart some of the assumptions as to what constitutes value from links, and concludes, “All that being said, I still agree in principle with his final three points. However reclaiming value from aggregators isn’t going to help publishers much. They need subscribers and a pay wall. Not an iron curtain, but a permeable pay wall along the lines of the Wall Street Journal. There’s no save-my-business-model pot of gold out there in the hands of aggregators to help you pay for all that good journalism.”
- TechCrunch proclaims “The Media Bundle is Dead,” http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/16/the-media-bundle-is-dead-long-live-the-news-aggregators/ Erick Schonfeld addresses paid content by claiming that back when newspapers still enjoyed local monopolies on news, “80 percent of the stories in the paper sucked,” but that the audience was still forced to buy the paper because there was no alternative. Kind of like the argument that the music industry has failed because people are no longer willing to pay $15 for a CD that contains one song they like, and 9 others that are crummy.
- Five Key Reasons Newspapers Are Failing: http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/five-key-reasons-why-newspapers-are-failingOnly the first point really addresses paid content, but the suggestions at the end of the piece on how to transform a newspaper into a web-based news operation that will produce the type of content that readers will actually reach into their wallets and pay for – is very instructive.
- A post drawing an interesting parallel between Microsoft’s dilemma on how to compete with Google’s free Open Office product, while still maintaining its huge profits from its own MS Office suite http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2009/08/future-of-local-news-about-more-than-paid-content225.html
- A rather scathing piece on how Reuters should take advantage of the AP’s “suicide” http://techdirt.com/articles/20090724/1533155652.shtml
- From “Scooping the News” a post entitled: Newspaper Access Fees Destined for Failure: http://www.scoopingthenews.com/2009/08/newspaper-access-fees-destined-for.html He compares the paywall solutions to pop-up ads. He lists five points that he claims explain why access fees will not generate that much revenue. Basically, the argument against boils down to the “internet readers are used to getting information for free, and they have lots of alternatives, so they’ll never pony up when newspapers start slamming down the paywalls.”
- Steve Outing gets psychological in explaining what changes to user behavior will have to take place before consumers start paying for news: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/stopthepresses_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003997955
- And finally, another piece about how raising the paywall will “kill the buzz” around quality content, pointing out that even print newspapers get shared, picked up, discussed in the pub and curated. http://23musings.com/2009/08/15/raise-the-paywall-stop-linking-kill-the-buzz/
Aug 15
Posted: under Uncategorized.
Tags: ad age, ad spending, Digital Hollywood, omma, Online Video, print, recession, the big three
OK, I’m maybe a little over-emotional about this subject. But if you’ve ever tried to help some friends come up with a decent domain name for their business idea ONLY TO SEE SOME KNUCKLEHEAD SWOOP IN, BUY IT AND TRY TO HOLD YOU UP FOR BIG BUCKS, then you can understand my pain/outrage. And now, [...] [...more]
OK, I’m maybe a little over-emotional about this subject. But if you’ve ever tried to help some friends come up with a decent domain name for their business idea ONLY TO SEE SOME KNUCKLEHEAD SWOOP IN, BUY IT AND TRY TO HOLD YOU UP FOR BIG BUCKS, then you can understand my pain/outrage.
And now, my schadenfreude, over the news that ICANN’s crackdown on the practice, known as “Domain Tasting,” where some scum-sucking digital scammer would track the domain names you searched for, and then snarf them up before you made the decision to register them. Then they’d taunt you via e-mails with the carefully crafted URL you had come up with, and demand that you fork over exorbitant sums. This happened to me on a regular basis.
Then a year ago, ICANN started charging these internet douchebags when they cancelled too many domains.
The result? In June 2008, there were 15.7 million “returns” on registered domains. In June 2009? 37,000.
Yeah, baby!
According to Ars Technica, the domain tasters are pissed that this free stream of stolen money is getting snatched from their lazy, greedy paws. Nut graf:
One of the unfortunate aspects of networked computing is that the cost of antisocial behaviors is so small (especially if you have access to a botnet) that it’s easy to profit from activities that make the Internet a less pleasant place. It’s nice to see that ICANN has figured out how to make one of these behaviors unprofitable, but it will be difficult or impossible to apply this model to many other unpleasant scams… or spams.
Oh, if only. Can we pleez haz some way to make the spammers pay for clogging our Interpipes? They are certainly correct in pointing out that reducing the cost of distribution to effectively zero has paved the way for deceitful knobs to make all our lives miserable and prey on any idiots still naive enough not to recognize the Spanish Prisoner/Nigerian Prince scam. It’d be nice if internet companies started figuring out “antibodies” to rid ourselves of these persistent parasites.
Aug 10
Posted: under Digital Migration, monetizing mobile content, New Marketing, new media, Newspaper Deathwatch, Webconomics.
Tags: ad age, ad spending, Digital Hollywood, omma, Online Video, print, recession, the big three
Another quick hit, this one courtesy of an article in AdAge about how the free-fall in the ad industry has at least stopped, but what’s emerging out of the wreckage is that things will never go back to the way they were. “This current economy has stimulated a new marketing consciousness,” said Laurence Boschetto, president-CEO, [...] [...more]
Another quick hit, this one courtesy of an article in AdAge about how the free-fall in the ad industry has at least stopped, but what’s emerging out of the wreckage is that things will never go back to the way they were.
“This current economy has stimulated a new marketing consciousness,” said Laurence Boschetto, president-CEO, DraftFCB. “Clients are saying they want accountability for every dollar they spend, and they want cause and effect. Clients will continue to rally behind ideas that build business, and we as an industry have to accept that things will never revert back to the pre-recession mind-set that wasn’t totally focused on accountability.”
At every conference I’ve attended this year, especially OMMA and Digital Hollywood, I’ve sat in the room with media planners and ad buyers (AKA the guys in expensive suits who write the multi-million dollar checks to buy 30-second spots on American Idol), and listened to them piss & moan about their jobs.
“The goddam clients are calling me every day and screaming in my ear,” groused a Tums-chomping buyer for a major food company. “All they talk about is ‘The Board,’ and how everyone is shit-scared of winding up on the front page of the New York Times for blowing millions while we’re in a Depression.
“The orders have come down from on high that every nickel they spend has to be tracked, assessed, spreadsheeted and connected to a dollar in sales. Well, it all rolls downhill to me. I have to show results for everything, and when it comes to print and broadcast, that’s getting harder and harder to justify.
“Even if the scale and the reach aren’t there yet, when I’ve got a Google Analytics spreadsheet tracking the ad buy, at least I can walk into the client meeting with more than my dick in my hand.
“I’ve got a $300 million budget for the next year. Zero point zero zero is going to print. Nada. Nothing. I can’t justify it anymore. And broadcast TV is next.”
Aug 04
Posted: under Design, Multimedia, New Marketing, Uncategorized, visual storytelling.
Tags: Adobe MAX, animated, conference, Los Angeles, popularity, tag cloud, UGC
This is a 3-D animated tag cloud to promote the Adobe MAX conference here in LA; but I think they might want to regulate this a bit more, because some of the user-chosen tags are getting a little ... pungent. [...more]
I stumbled across this today while poking around at the new Adobe products, trying to decide whether it’s worth it to upgrade to CS4 for the new features in Premiere Pro and Photoshop, or to just hang on to CS3.
Anyway, this is a 3-D animated tag cloud to promote the Adobe MAX conference here in LA; but I think they might want to regulate this a bit more, because some of the user-chosen tags are getting a little … pungent. Hey. That’s pretty good. Maybe I’ll go there and add “pungent” to the mix…
- I’m not sure if you can geo-anchor the text; if not, having “PORN” appear about where Chatsworth is located, is a stroke of serendipitous genius… (click to embiggen)
Aug 02
Posted: under Uncategorized.
Saw this stuck in my spam filter; I think it’s obviously a joke, but in light of the gullibility and freaky denial of reality on the part of the “Birthers,” maybe someone is actually getting people to click through on the link: I am Christian Kenya Prince. I have Obama KENYA birth certifikate in safe [...] [...more]
Saw this stuck in my spam filter; I think it’s obviously a joke, but in light of the gullibility and freaky denial of reality on the part of the “Birthers,” maybe someone is actually getting people to click through on the link:
I am Christian Kenya Prince.
I have Obama KENYA birth certifikate in safe deposit box. I fear for my life and want to sent to you for safety keeping. Please send bank information and address to I can paid small bank safe fee and ship to you. In God name I pray you keep sckret and tell no one until box get safe to you.
Tahnk you for help getting thsi important done
With God Love,
Dr Mubuto Obenteabaggin, Prince in Exile, Logos Nigeria
Hey – maybe this is the solution to funding the health care reform – just keep promising the lunatic fringe that if they send the cash they would otherwise blow on the slots down at the Indian Casinos to a P.O. Box, they will get final and absolute proof of all their crazy conspiracy theories: that Obama is an alien, the election is a fraud, secret re-education camps have been built by FEMA in Indiana, and Muslimofascists have had plastic surgery and one by one, have kidnapped & replaced the staffs of the New York Times, U.S. State Department and water-flouridation plants…
