Sips from the Firehose
A blog that seeks to filter the internet into a refreshing, easily-gulped beverage
Feb 04
Posted: under advertising, Digital Migration, google, journalism, Multimedia, New Marketing, Newspaper Deathwatch, Newspapers, Uncategorized, Webconomics.
Tags: advertising, bandwidth charges, blog monetization, burn rate, click through rates, Facebook ad model, Google adsense, New Marketing, New Media Migration, newspaper death spiral, Pajamas Media, site traffic, video sites, Web commerce
General interest sites, however ... well, let me put it this way. Check out the sode aisle in the supermarket next time you're there. Diet Coke, Diet Coke with Lime, Diet Coke with Splenda, Diet Vanilla Coke, Diet Black Cherry Coke, Coke Blak, Regular Coke, No-Caffeine Coke, Coke Zero, Diet Caffeine Free Coke, Vanilla Coke, Cherry Coke, Diet Coke with Vitamins.
Each of those products exists because there is a niche out there that wants to drink them. Why would Coke want to waste its ad dollars for health nuts that want a soda that has vitamins and that they can delude themselves into thinking that is "good for them" ... on a site that has an audience of cigar-smoking red-meat-eaters?
The advertisers have had to fragment their products. Those fragmented products have to be marketed just to the people who are going to buy them, or they are not viable. That means that the platforms that those products advertise on have to be similarly well-defined.
The root of the problems with mass media isn't that there isn't interest in the information - it's that the advertising money is shifting away to places where the audience is better defined & targetable. [...more]
This is going to have to be quick – I haven’t had any spare time to blog, since I’ve been finishing up on editing the Great Big Scary Project, and I have to churn out my intros to said project, along with sprucing up my multimedia examples for my trip to Kiev.
But – two items this week converged (yeah, there’s that word) to illustrate one of the powerful, emerging lessons about New Media. It’s one that I learned years ago, when I first rode a couple of dot-bombs all the way down into the crater.
Big site traffic numbers do not necessarily mean big money.
Read More
Oct 29
Posted: under advertising, Digital Migration, New Marketing, new media, Newspaper Deathwatch, Newspapers.
Not a good week in journalism. And this cover story was, unfortunately, quite prophetic for a lot of Time, Inc. staffers. Of interest, amidst the “can you braid this into a noose for me please?”-type news, is the announcement by CEO Ann Moore that Time Inc. is cutting staff as part of a reorganization plan: [...] [...more]
Not a good week in journalism. And this cover story was, unfortunately, quite prophetic for a lot of Time, Inc. staffers.
Of interest, amidst the “can you braid this into a noose for me please?”-type news, is the announcement by CEO Ann Moore that Time Inc. is cutting staff as part of a reorganization plan:
…effective tomorrow, we are going to implement a much more centralized management structure, organized into three business units that will group together titles that share similar audiences, advertisers, and the talents and skills of their staffs. The goal is to enable our company to move faster, go to market smarter, save significant costs, and employ our editorial resources more efficiently.
Well, that part sounds pretty good. But this next bit kinda leaves me scratching my head. They’re organizing the company into three “Business Units”:
* News: the existing print and digital properties in the TIME group, the Fortune|Money group, and the Sports Illustrated group, as well as Life.com and GEE. John Squires, EVP Time Inc. will manage the News Business Unit.
* Style and Entertainment: the existing print and digital properties in the PEOPLE group, InStyle, Entertainment Weekly, and Essence. I will act as the EVP for this group so the Style and Entertainment Business Unit will report to me.
* Lifestyle: the existing print and digital properties of Real Simple, This Old House, All You, Southern Living, Cooking Light, Sunset, Health, Cottage Living, Coastal Living, and Southern Accents, along with MyRecipes.com and MyHomeIdeas.com. Sylvia Auton, EVP Time Inc. will manage the Lifestyle Business Unit, while also retaining responsibility for IPC Media.
Apparently, this is to take advantage of one of the other key areas of the reorg, which is to set loose the Ad Sales staff on selling ads across a range of related properties. Which, in theory, would make sense — but I’m not sure that any internal measures are going to change the dynamics hitting national mags. When the Big Three automakers teeter on the brink of bankruptcy, offering them easier access to your ad pages because you can now sell them space in a dozen mags, rather than just a couple, is not really a game-changer.
Moore goes on to tout recent collaboration across Time Inc. properties, such as when Sports Illustrated shared photos to the TIME.com website, or the magazines sharing content, such as a Time cover piece on the economy that was written by a Fortune staff writer.
Why does this feel like making a virtue out of a necessity? Of course the SI photogs are shipping their photos to the TIME sites. That’s because TIME can’t afford to send their own photogs to Beijing to cover the events. And the fact that TIME has to rely on a writer from another magazine to provide the necessary perspective on THE GIGANTIC STORY OF THE MOMENT is evidence of the fact that TIME is getting so thin on staff that they have to reach out to magazines that still have core competency in economic issues to try to make sense of the global meltdown. Once upon a TIME, such people already on hand, working in the newsroom on deep, insightful stories.
BTW – I’ve been noticing that TIME hardly even runs ads anymore. Again, I remember the good ol’ days, when the mag was so crammed with ads that it was hard sometimes to read the stories, because they had to jump across so many pages. I can’t remember the last time I saw a double-truck car, computer or tobacco ad in TIME.
Likewise, missing in all of this is any real description of where the money is going to come from. Go ahead, click over and read the memo. I can’t figure it out. There’s brave talk about how the company is still profitable and making money, doing good work, the website is growing, yada yada … but other than streamlining some internal business processes, I can’t quite make out where there’s a description of the new revenue streams or multimedia products that TIME is developing that will grow to offset the circulation and readership declines.
And philosophically, creating more silos in your business is not really a step forward when it comes to the web. The mere fact of yanking a bunch of content from one arbitrarily created designation and sticking it under a newer, fancier title … really doesn’t mean all that much to the page traffic that’s coming in from Google.
Now then – if Time, Inc. had announced that it was going to be creating new topic verticals (retirement investment planning, children’s health, mobile electronics) as part of a wide-ranging web initiative … where the best writers, photographers, artists, etc., from ALL OF TIME’S PROPERTIES, clustered to create content for specific interest niches that would appeal to readers and advertisers alike … and that they were doing this as part of a long-term transition from a world where the branding on an ink-on-paper cover actually meant something … rather than a world where what matters is the SEO results that drive audience traffic to your content … and that Time, Inc, then went on to create these fascinating cross-property conversations between their writers … you know, something around which you also empower social clustering and affinity groups to comment on, add to, and repurpose your content …
…then that would have really blown me out of my chair.
Technorati Tags: TIME layoffs, reorganization, digital migration, TIME magazine, deckchairs on TItanic
Oct 07
Posted: under advertising, Digital Migration, Mobile advertising technology, monetizing mobile content, Multimedia, new media, Web Tech.
I know how you feel, Barry. This quote from an excellent Wall St. Journal interview with one of the smarter (and more ruthless) guys in the media biz. He’s coming forward to explain why he busted up IAC. “You really want to get a headache? Try to understand Internet advertising. Social-networking advertising is being discounted [...] [...more]
I know how you feel, Barry.
This quote from an excellent Wall St. Journal interview with one of the smarter (and more ruthless) guys in the media biz. He’s coming forward to explain why he busted up IAC.
“You really want to get a headache? Try to understand Internet advertising. Social-networking advertising is being discounted because there is so much inventory [of available ad spots], and because methods have not yet been found to make it very effective. Will that get figured out? I absolutely believe it will. What form will it take? Absolutely unknown.”
Technorati Tags: Barry Diller, internet advertising, social networking, monetizing content
Oct 06
Posted: under advertising, Blogs, Design, Digital Migration, journalism, Multimedia, new media, Newspaper Deathwatch, Newspapers, Online Video, Web Tech.
Tags: Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, New Media Migration, Newspaper Deathwatch, Xing
I hate like hell to keep doing quick, off-the-cuff bites at such big topics, but maybe I should just resign myself to accepting the web ethos of not trying to do all things at once. Yeah, yeah, I know – “Eat the elephant one bite at a time.”So here’s an interesting coinkydink: two items I [...] [...more]
I hate like hell to keep doing quick, off-the-cuff bites at such big topics, but maybe I should just resign myself to accepting the web ethos of not trying to do all things at once. Yeah, yeah, I know – “Eat the elephant one bite at a time.”So here’s an interesting coinkydink: two items I bookmarked to read later – and actually got around to reading (pause here for an astonished gasp) – struck me as having a stronger relationship than was initially apparent.
First was this bit from the Economist, about how professionals are starting to really flock to online social networks:
On LinkedIn, the market leader, members have been updating their profiles in record numbers in recent weeks, apparently to position themselves in case they lose their jobs. The two most popular sites, LinkedIn and Xing, have been growing at breakneck speed and boast 29m and 6.5m members respectively. And, in contrast to mass-market social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, both firms have worked out how to make money.
The article goes on to raise two interesting points 1) if Facebook can start becoming friendlier to business users it might start actually making money, and 2) professionals are shit-scared about the economy and looking at social networks as great “Career Insurance” places to schmooze people you met once at a conference, snarfed their biz card and never had a use for.old friends.
Next to this was a piece from BusinessWeek, another in the seemingly endless series of kidney punches from the biz community about how newspapers are doomed, done for, goners, forks stuck into them and vultures already descending.
So who would profit from a disappearing newspaper? Local TV and cable, for starters. The city daily is still the biggest single media entity in virtually any market. Its main pitch to advertisers is brutally simple: We have more craniums to dent with your message than anyone else.
(snip)
Which brings me to a disquieting conclusion. The obvious venues for all this displaced journalistic energy are a gazillion new independent online endeavors, be they individual blogs or bigger efforts like MinnPost.com. They will make for fascinating media ecosystems within individual cities, and some will become hits. It is much less certain whether ad dollars will follow. Ultracheap classifieds site craigslist has simply “destroyed revenue,” [emph. mine - dlf] says Dave Morgan, a former newspaper executive who founded behavioral targeting firm Tacoda, and revenue that no longer exists won’t shift to new ventures. Others point out that key newspaper advertisers—local auto dealers and realtors, say—already have many outlets for ads online, not least of which are their own Web sites or national sites such as Cars.com that serve up targeted ads.
For those sensing untapped riches in ads from pizzerias and dry cleaners, well, good luck, says Borrell. “Local is a very unorganized and dirty business,” he says. “People look at local as this one-ton gorilla, but in fact it’s 2,000 one-pound monkeys.” And no publisher can afford to sit down with a city’s 2,000 small fry to sell each a $50 ad. The bitterest pill of all for newspaper denizens is that, while nature abhors a vacuum and all that, in this case there may not even be one left to fill.
Yowch. So newspapers will all just die, and by this point in time, they’ve become so irrelevant and useless that nobody will even really notice that they’re gone? Sheesh. Start passing out the pistols & hemlock in America’s newsrooms, eh?
El Tiempo
I’m going to have to disagree with this nihilistic conclusion. Yeah, I know the local online niche ad market is impossibly fragmented, and it would cost a publisher more to pay an ad sales rep than that person would produce in revenue. Solution: don’t pay the ad rep. Do what El Tiempo in Bogota calls “auto-pauta,” or DIY ads. BTW, I really do recommend you click through on that link to El Tiempo. They are one of the smartest operations out there, they are making piles of cash off internet ads, and they are constantly (ruthlessly, relentlessly) refining their approach.
Moreover. When you look at what the social networking sites are really selling their users, you start to come to the conclusion that what a local newspaper – correction: what the local newspaper of the future – offers can be a lot more compelling.
Think about what the users really want from these social net sites. Chatting with friends, yeah sure. Blowing your own horn in a socially acceptable way, yessiree. Looking for the next step up on the ladder? Well, yeah … but the problem with a lot of the listings on the social net services is that they are from all over the place. Yeah, you can filter them. But we all know that most of the really good jobs are never spamadvertised like this. We find them through referrals – which is where recruiters/headhunters come in. And local friends & business acquaintances.
One of the fastest-growing areas on LinkedIn is the “Question” section, where pros reach out to other pros in their groups, and ask something that’s on their mind. They’re trying to have conversations.
That should be taking place at a newspaper site. Sooner or later, it will. Either the papers will replicate it and include it in their future selves, or they will do a Borg takeover. The paper is a much more logical place for this kind of activity – it includes access to the reference materials from the past, a panel of trained experts to step in and help moderate the discussions, or kick new discussions off with provocative questions, and a huge archive of relevants facts and materials that can be used to make the conversations that much more valuable.
Example: One of the questions I’m participating in on LinkedIn is where to put your money now that the market is tanking so badly. There are some very smart market analysts chiming in here. But it would be nice to be able to have a window/panel open on the screen showing the various stock tables, and perhaps links to content locally that makes the point that some foreign markets are going to be able to ride out this storm, while others just get crushed.
The fact that biz users, those who have education & disposable income, have had to range far afield in search of information that they need to use in their careers, is an indictment of the lack of creative thinking at newspapers. It will take time and effort to reverse the momentum … because the very users that papers covet most are abandoning papers.
Sep 11
Posted: under advertising, Community, Design, Digital Migration, google, Mobile advertising technology, monetizing mobile content, new media, Newspaper Deathwatch, Newspapers, Online Video, visual storytelling, Web Tech, Yahoo oneConnect.
Packing up for the trip back down to LA, but couldn’t let these little tidbits from the CTIA pass without at least acknowledging them. 1. Yahoo is trying to drum up some support for its Blueprint mobile platform. They claim that it’s going to allow users to achieve the Holy Grail of mobile/web content – [...] [...more]
Packing up for the trip back down to LA, but couldn’t let these little tidbits from the CTIA pass without at least acknowledging them.
1. Yahoo is trying to drum up some support for its Blueprint mobile platform. They claim that it’s going to allow users to achieve the Holy Grail of mobile/web content – tying together 
all our virtual identities with its oneConnect application. It’s been said, over and over (AND OVER) again that the first company to figure out how to provide the one-stop platform for social media interactivity over cellphones, is going to be the next Google (if Google itself doesn’t snarf up that space as well). The dream is that oneConnect (or whatever) becomes the way to keep up with what your friends on Facebook, Flickr, Bebo, MySpace, YouTube, etc. etc. are doing, and a way to post constant updates on where/what/why/with whom/teh awesum!1!/go away now/overload to all the places where you share your life’s experiences with the world.
Leaving aside for the moment the sneaking suspicion that aggregating all our identities through one company’s pipe may not turn out to be such a bright idea, the software is apparently generating the skepticism already.
Yahoo has been trying to hype this app since, oh, Barcelone in February, and to my knowledge, they really haven’t gotten that much traction with it, despite the best efforts of their developers.
I’d like to see Yahoo manage to pull this off; like many others, I’m starting to get more & more uneasy about Google’s unchallenged dominance, and I’d just as soon they not have complete control over what I do, see, say & hear, as well as knowing who I’m doing said communicating with/near/for/against.
Moving on.
2. Pointroll is wowing the attendees at the CTIA, offering easy(ier?) ways of taking rich media ads and porting them over to the mobile platform. Their demo of interactive ads on the iPhone, done through and with USA Today, has publishers and advertisers pondering if the time has actually come to start migrating the TV ad spending over to the phones that the 14-24s are actually using, paying attention to, and carrying with them everywhere.
The bad news for Yahoo is that PointRoll is hyping that using their platform will allow ads to run across the entire Google content network. Viz:
The Google content network encompasses hundreds of thousands of
websites, including premium publishers and long-tail niche sites.
Google and PointRoll worked together to ensure that the ads served to
the Google content network meet Google’s policies and specifications.
After completing Google’s certification process, PointRoll’s
sophisticated targeting technologies can now optimize the breadth of
Google’s sites and categories, matching advertisers’ messages to the
users who find them most relevant.
Again, nice hype. But in light of the struggles that Google has had with Android, I remain skeptical that they have managed to so quickly solve all the problems with serving mobile ads in anything like a timely manner. I just think that there’s still too much market fragmentation to be able to claim that this One Size Fits All app will reach a mass audience.
To backup my point, allow me to quote a piece in the paper today: one of the problems many sites are running into is that about 25% of web users are still limping along with Internet Explorer 6.0.
(Pause to allow veteran web developers to spit, vomit, scream, make the two-fingered “sign of the devil’s horns” to ward off evil.)
IE 6.0 is widely recognized as the shittiest web browser ever inflicted on the public. It was launched in 2001. Since then, Microsoft has bugged users to upgrade, remove, kill, quash, forget, shred, this browser. The fact that a quarte
r of users in the U.S. still view the web through its Funhouse Mirror interface shows that 1) A large proportion of the public continues to employ legacy technology no matter how Christawful it is, 2) these folks ignore new technology, no matter how much better it is, for fear that upgrading will somehow cause them a problem, and 3) any tech solution based on the assumption that people will be running the latest&greatest hardware and software is doomed to die like like a possum wandering onto the Indy 500 speedway.
3. Millennial Media is competing with PointRoll to serve multimedia ads to the mobile market. And we’re going to have to stop here, because it’s time to load up the Conestoga wagon and head back to LA.
Technorati Tags: monetizing mobile, google, yahoo oneconnect, PointRoll
Jul 07
Posted: under adsense clickfraud, advertising, Digital Migration, google, journalism, new media, Newspapers, Online Video, television, Web Tech.
Tags: adsense clickfraud
Meanwhile, Google whistles nervously, hoping nobody thinks to raise the issue of AdSense clickfraud again… There’s a yawning gulf in New Media. It stretches from the pittance that most media creators get for their ad space to the other side, where the results of those ads sit, filing their nails. In between are the bleached [...] [...more]
Meanwhile, Google whistles nervously, hoping nobody thinks to raise the issue of AdSense clickfraud again…
There’s a yawning gulf in New Media. It stretches from the pittance that most media creators get for their ad space to the other side, where the results of those ads sit, filing their nails. In between are the bleached bones of media tracking companies that have tried to draw a connection between the two.
From the LA Times story:
NBC has created TAMI — the Total Audience Measurement Index — to better understand how viewers are consuming Olympic content. The system, which Wurtzel has spent the last year assembling, will use technology and old-fashioned focus groups to closely monitor this.
For example, Wurtzel will be able to tell with greater certainty whether viewers are surfing the Web in search of Olympic content. He will be able to determine whether live alerts delivered via cellphones drive fans to television sets or computer screens to catch a record-breaking performance. And he will see how fans use online and VOD replays.
The system also will attempt for the first time to track Olympic watching outside the home via mobile devices created by San Mateo, Calif.-based Integrated Media Measurement Inc. A limited number of people will have the cellphone-like devices designed to monitor every bit of media consumed — whether in a bar, a movie theater or someone else’s house.
NBC Universal also is assembling focus groups to find out how consumers are interacting with what Wurtzel described as “the first 360-degrees Olympics.”
This is refreshing. I’d like to see more major media outlets doing this. Why? Because it’s pretty much the only way to break Google’s stranglehold on ad dollars. See, the problem is that everybody has fallen in love with search advertising, because it seems to offer such great results. Someone clicks on the link, they come to your site, and then it’s up to you to get them to convert to sales, right?
But see, that kinda ignores one little point: howinhell did the user know what to search for in the first place? Clairvoyance? Come on.
I think if NBC can start connecting the two sides of the results gulf, they can start showing that ads on TV (and display ads in newspapers, and morning drive-time shout-athons) have a lot bigger effect than what Google has claimed. And that will mean that advertisers will start realizing that buying search ads is not the end-all, be-all of advertising.
Which could be a very, very good thing for all the Old Media giants who are stuck in midair over that yawning gulf, their feet doing the Wile E. Coyote mid-air invisible bicycle pedal…
