Search results matching tag 'the new yok times'

Economist is a natural for paid content

255762 — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 10:39:00 GMT

On hearing the news this morning that The Economist is to charge for news content across its site I was wondering why they waited so long.

The Economist is a natural for paid content in the same way that the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times are. They are likely to end up being select members of a very small paid content club. With the power of the distinctive Economist brand and loyal readership (talking of, which check Campaign's "How the Economist changed tack to attract new readers"), I think it can successfully leverage the kind of analysis and insight it offers in to a paid content model.

The Economist.com website currently gives away its news and charges for its archive in the way that the New York Times once did. I'm betting that was not a huge money spinner.

Yvonne Ossman, publisher of The Economist, who confirmed the move to Media Week says they looked at a number of payment options, including an iTunes-style micropayment model. It's going to be interesting to see how this works and how quickly they get it going.

She also says that she's not "sure others will follow suit". She's right about that, of course, as mostly newspapers can't charge as much as some might like.

The most interesting development around at the moment for newspapers seems to be the club idea that The Guardian, The New York Times and others are exploring. The idea seems to be gaining ground.

Steve Outing has a blog post on how Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly (yes he of much right-wing Republican nuttiness) and his team have created something called the BillOreilly.com Premium Membership package (there are 16 reasons to become a member, apparently).

While the website for his show 'The O'Reilly Factor' is mostly free, he is now offering more for serious O’Reilly fans. Some of those people are very serious -- although shouldn't always be taken as such. O'Reilly and his people are serious as well as -- he's charging $49.95 a year or $4.95 a month (must be why there are 16 reasons to sign up).

As Outing says, "this is exactly the model that many newspaper and magazine publishers have been talking about lately, though many are having trouble figuring out what they’ve got that they can charge for".

Would love to write more, but boy am I suffering from a double whammy: right finger recovering from dislocation and now struck by man flu (I don't think its swine flu, but don't get too close).

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Hyperlocal; a goldmine or fool's gold?

255762 — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 10:27:00 GMT

Fast Company takes a look at the hyperlocal market that everyone is watching, which some say is a multi-billion dollar future of online, but might not amount to anything much more than a sizeable pile of nickels.

The projections say, according to Borrell Associates, that the hyperlocal market could (one day) be worth $15bn by 2013. Whether they happen or not, the big numbers are enough to attract the likes of The New York Times Company (the Local) and AOL (Patch) in the US and the likes of Newsquest, Trinity Mirror and Associated Newspapers in the UK.

But whether that cash will materialise is another question, considering how the growth rate for online advertising is not the steam train it once was.

The thing with Hyperlocal as Fast Company points out is that it is lauded by many, but success always "remains perpetually around the corner". The reason for this according to Mark Josephson, CEO of the hyperlocal aggregator Outside.in is that local advertisers are not online in force, but he insists they will be.

The piece also quotes Debbie Galant who runs Baristanet, one of the models for hyperlocal (championed by Jeff Jarvis), as saying only that they are making "real money" and that "ad revenue is six figures", but she won't go into more detail than that – probably because after costs there is not a lot left.

This growth in hyperlocal revenues is dependent upon a number of things. One is local advertisers ditching the Yellow Pages and local newspapers on mass, those mom and pop advertisers, which are not exactly overflowing with local classified advertising (anyone remember craigslist?).

Add to that their is an increasing amount of competition. The New York Times Co's Local project is going up against established local sites as well as the likes of Baristanet and Brownstoner in New York and Examiner.com, which has domains for sites in 70 US cities. The San Diego News Network is another established hyperlocal player, but look what is happening in that city. The San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper is to cut 112 jobs and says it too will focus on more local community news and advertising. It doesn't look like there are enough ad dollars to go around, which is part of the problem already.

For bigger advertisers to come in the hyperlocal market is also dependent upon sites having the right content to attract them. Local crime and townhall stories are not typically the kind of thing that many brands what to hook up with, but it is a catch 22, to develop other content takes time and more importantly staff -- something of a problem today for America's struggling local media as papers close and jobs are cut.

The conundrum about hyperlocal appears to be that it can be profitable if you employ next to no one and your content is user generated and free, but if it is user generated and free then the quality and appeal of that content becomes an issue.

Fast Company quotes Jim Schachter, editor of digital initiatives at the New York Times, as saying: "We're talking about several hundred thousand dollars a year in personnel costs. I don't think the local digital-advertising market anywhere would cover those costs."

With those costs in mind, The NY Times plans – if its experiment proves successful – to license the Local's platform to bloggers in other towns across the US who would like to be associated with the Times.

"We could help those people mobilize their communities and gather local-advertising dollars in extremely low-cost ways. That could work, economically, for these local journalism entrepreneurs, and, at scale, it might work for us."

That, of course, brings back the question of the quality threshold, which you can't do without an investment and in so doing cut any profit and the reason for doing it in the first place.

But the pioneers insist that eventually someone will make it work. Somehow.

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Big and bold Murdoch takes the paid content gamble

255762 — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 08:35:00 GMT

Huge sigh of relief has been breathed around the world this morning by newspaper executives everywhere who were all waiting for someone to make the first move and charge for content. Rupert Murdoch has never been a patient man.

Murdoch has made the first move, taken the gamble and the turnpike towards paid content. What is so astounding about today's news is that he is not testing the waters, not finding little pockets of content to charge for, no. He says he is going to charge for news.

More to the point he says he is going to charge for the content that everyone else says you can't charge for. This is game changing and huge...either that or it’s a Titanic-sized disaster waiting to happen.

Potentially this means people in the UK will have to pay to get access to The Sun, The Times, The Sunday Times (interesting timing with its new standalone website on the way) as well as Sky News. Not to mention all those other properties he owns around the world from The Australian to Fox News.

Murdoch is not simply talking about his newspaper properties online as he clearly realised that if you are going to charge for one type of online news (say The Times) then you can't very well give away the very good Sky News for nothing. That makes no sense.

Over the past few months Murdoch has been mulling options with his executives. They have been looking at the great success that is the Wall Street Journal and clearly have drawn answers from that. Drawn answers from the WSJ's one million subscribers.

Maybe it told them that it’s a big number, but more important it is a big number with implications for other big numbers: ie the numbers of users visiting its digital properties around the world.

As that sat around those tables, phrases such as subscription charges, premium content areas, e-readers and e-wallets (I'm sure there are other "e's"), and micro payments were all bandied around.

In the end, having seen these options, Murdoch and his team have opted not to trial; not to fiddle while Rome burns; but to move forward on all fronts and charge for it all. Maybe Murdoch was looking at other people writing on the wall and he didn't what he was seeing (Goolge aggregation; Amazon Kindle) as it was all slowly chipping away at his business and the only future that promised was death by a thousand cuts.

It is easy (or easier) to see people paying for upmarket quality journalism. It is here that the Wall Street Journal model gives help hints. So from that maybe people will pay for Times Online and the the new Sunday Times website. I can see people making that case (it is still I think a tough sell), but looking at the popular journalism end of Murdoch's empire (The Sun/News of the World and New York Post) then I would love to hear that case convincingly made as I really can not see it. How Murdoch's freesheet Thelondonpaper fits into all of this is anyone's guess. I mean that is the definition of free.

Whatever the pitfalls that News Corp faces it is a bold move. No one knows what will happen when the paid content switch is flicked. Murdoch's rivals have all made noises. Le Figaro yesterday said it would charge. The Financial Times says it wants more people to pay. The New York Times has said it is "trying to work out how many of its readers would be willing to pay for online content and how much they would pay".

Guardian News & Media is hoping the New York Times will charge… so that it can charge. Right at the start of this year New York tabloid News Day said it would charge online. Looks like it will be joined by the New York Post.

When this happens there could be a massive drop off in user numbers. Gone will be the 21m unique users Times online has and the 25m uniques that The Sun has. Murdoch could fall flat on his face and people will desert his sites in favour of the BBC and to other sites that are still free, but commercial rivals know that time is getting shorter by the day and if this venture shows any signs of success they will have to act.

News groups of all shapes and sizes need significantly more online revenues. Maybe this will be the start of something.

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Harsh lessons: blogs belong on the internet

255762 — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:25:00 GMT

Who would have guessed? The idea of printing a newspaper full of blogs, you know, on like actual paper is not a winner.

Well, back in January, while the some of us were still trying to work off the turkey and the gazillion ridiculous non-Christmas like snacks that you eat at Christmas, there was a story about a company that had this genius idea (maybe after hitting barrels of sherry or barrels of other non-Christmas like drinks you drink at Christmas) of putting out newspapers with, um, blogs in them.

Okay, granted hindsight is a wonderful thing, but for this you don't need hindshight. The New York Times put it like this: "Amid the din of naysayers who insist that newspapers are on the verge of death, a new company wants to start dozens of new ones — with a twist."

Don't you just hate naysayers? What with all there crazy naysaying it's really hard to hear sometimes. Well, sometimes you should listen to the naysayers, they’re not shouting for "the love of god don't do that" for nothing. They do it for a reason.

Anyway, so a Chicago start-up called 'The Printed Blog' unveiled a plan (nice tag line "Like the internet, only inflammable") to launch dozens of newspapers that contained reprinted blog posts. The idea was that these papers were to be supported by local ads and would be distributed free in big cities.

Local ads? Well, okay, sure, if you can find "local advertisers" (wait aren't those called classifieds…).

The Printed Blog first launched two weeklies in Chicago and San Francisco laid out like a blog (yeah from the interwebulator that some people shorten to the "web") instead of columns.

The hope was eventually to publish free neighbourhood editions twice a day in many US cities.

At launch Joshua Karp, the founder and publisher of The Printed Blog, told The New York Times: "There were so many techniques that I've seen working online that maybe I could apply to the print industry."

Maybe you see the problem with that sentence, but I'm feeling too dumb to go into it, but I want to ask the question: Why? Why Josh?

The idea was that bloggers would give the Printed Blog permission to reprint their blog posts in return for a share of the ad revenue. That sounds like so many other great ideas that I heard about out in the digital frontier. Do you remember syndication? That was going to be quite awesome. Other people were going to pay you money for your content. They would republish it elsewhere on the interwebulator, but the returns proved just enough to send a number of companies out of business.

I digress, the Printed Blog was talking about cities like Chicago having 50 separate editions tailored to individual neighbourhoods. The amount of advertising needed to support an endeavour would probably need half of the ads of Craigslist. And apparently Craig just will not give those ads back. Bad Craig.

So, here we are six months later and the whole thing is over. The Printed Blog also dubbed hyper local free papers has ceased publication due to a lack of outside investment capital, according to Josh who blogged it. No, not in print dummy, online; on an actual blog, which is like all ironical or something.

"Friends, It is with great sadness that I must report that, due to a lack of outside investment capital, The Printed Blog is ceasing publication. Despite a significant personal investment on my part, and the additional support of six or seven credit cards, we were unable to raise the minimum amount of money required to reach the next stage of our development.

"This was a difficult decision for us, but the financial reality of the situation demanded that we suspend further publication immediately, and indefinitely. Last year, I had an idea. I wondered what would happen if some of the business model principles that work online were applied to the troubled newspaper industry.

"Everyone said I was nuts, but I did it anyway."

A certain amount of respect is due, but yes Josh you were nuts, but at least now he knows what would happen. I feel bad about the credit cards. There should be a fighting fund.

The Printed Blog made it to 16 issues and distributed 80,000 print copies with another 100,000 or so copies downloaded.

So there you have it. Excuse the snarkasm. Blogging brings it out in me.

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Critics take a swipe at Chris Anderson's new book

255762 — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:35:00 GMT

Chris Anderson is not having a good week. It's open season on the Wired editor-in-chief who earlier this week suffered an assault by Malcom Gladwell in the New Yorker. Today it is the turn of the FT and its message is clear: "Free does not live up to its billing".

Gladwell kicked off an East Coast versus West Coast face-off with his New Yorker piece earlier this week, but you know without the hollow points, in a damning review of Chris Anderson's new book 'Free: The Future of a Radical Price' his follow up to his best seller 'The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling More of Less'.

First up, the New Yorker writer dismissed Anderson as a technological utopian who had got it wrong.

"It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for 'non-monetary rewards'. Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels? Anderson’s reference to people who 'prefer to buy their music online' carries the faint suggestion that refraining from theft should be considered a mere preference. And then there is his insistence that the relentless downward pressure on prices represents an iron law of the digital economy.

"Why is it a law? Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power. 'Information wants to be free,' Anderson tells us, 'in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.' But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle?"

Today John Gapper in the FT has a crack at Anderson and his argument that "there really is a free lunch. Sometimes you get more than you pay for" although he says early on it is unfair to dismiss Anderson as a "digital utopian who is in intellectual and financial hock to Silicon Valley companies".

He argues 'Free' is more than propaganda for the West Coast software firms and venture capitalists, who have made their money and hope to make more out of being free although to be fair some have made it by charging you $2000 for a shiny laptop with a picture of a piece of fruit on it.

Gapper says the book is largely insightful. He describes it as "steady and scrupulous analysis of the past and present of free products and services" all at a time when newspapers, who are after all part of this "free revolution", are going out of business faster than you can say "free lunch" as the reporters whose jobs are going (thousands this week alone in the US with Gannett and in the UK with Trinity Mirror) could sure use it.

To borrow from Shakespeare "the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves". The same appears to be true of Anderson. It is not in his writing, which is as engaging as ever, but in the very nature of his sweeping arguments.

Gapper says the problem is that Anderson veers between sweeping statements and balancing paragraphs in a manner that leaves the reader unsure of what he is actually saying.

"It is an intellectual version of a ride in a New York taxi whose driver alternately pumps the accelerator and stamps on the brakes.

"Early on, we learn: The new form of Free is not a gimmick, a trick to shift money from one pocket to another [like razors and blades]. Instead, it's driven by an extraordinary new ability to lower the costs of goods and services close to zero. While the last century's Free was a powerful marketing method, this century's Free is an entirely new economic model'.

"That is a big claim and it never really gets substantiated, at least not at the scale of Mr Anderson's rhetoric. Actually, quite a bit of what he claims to be new appears really to be the virtual equivalent of 'buy one, get one free' or the cheap subscriptions long offered by US magazines."

Gapper goes onto argue that Anderson's vision has two flaws: first, as Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, has pointed out, network effects unleashed by digital technology tend not to spawn free competition among equals but a "winner takes all" effect in which a single company emerges with all the spoils. In the software era, that company was Microsoft; in the internet era, it is Google.

"The second flaw is that, even if the cost of digital distribution is lower than that of physical distribution, the marginal cost of production is not cut to zero. Companies have many costs, from marketing to employing people to make things. Offering things free on the internet is loss-leading just as surely as handing Jell-O recipe books to American housewives was in 1904."

Whatever happens we are all going to be reading this and I for one am looking forward to hear Anderson answer some of these critics tonight "Free–The Future of a Radical Price" 2 July Royal College of Physicians".

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