Oct 21st, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
The San Francisco Chronicle has a story about blogs as businesses, featuring comments from Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, Lisa Stone of BlogHer, Jon Callaghan of True Ventures (which is an investor in Om Malik’s GigaOm.com), Nick Denton of Gawker, John Battelle of Federated Media and Brian Sugar of PopSugar.com — the latter being one of the most successful blog networks, but not one that gets mentioned much because it’s mostly aimed at women.
Although there isn’t a huge amount in the story that we haven’t read in previous profiles of Mike and other professional bloggers (including one in BusinessWeek, which featured the infamous photo of Mike lighting a cigar with $100 bills), there are a few tidbits, including the fact that TechCrunch now has a full-time staff of eight, it and various related blogs get 1.2 million visitors a month and the company makes about $240,000 in revenue per month. According to Mike, he has also walked away from four venture capital deals because:
“Every time we almost did a round (of financing), we grew so fast the terms didn’t make sense anymore.”
Nick Denton Of Gawker.com, meanwhile, does his typical modest-mouse routine, in which he argues that blogs really aren’t that great and while a few people might be scratching out a living he doesn’t see it amounting to much:
“A few self-sustaining blog media businesses do seem to have emerged… but they’re still minuscule by the standards of traditional media. And none have weathered a downturn. So it would be unwise to sound too triumphant.”
But my favourite quote of all goes to Brian Sugar, who has turned a blog he started with his wife into a network of 11 covering everything from fashion to health, with a staff of 56 people and five million visitors a month. Sequoia has invested $10-million and NBC has put in $5-million. Does Sugar want to sell? No. Why? “This may be a weird answer,” he said, “but I’m having way too much fun.”
Oct 20th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Never one to miss an opportunity to be contrarian — although Andrew “I Hate The Internet” Keen has stolen much of his Prophet of Doom act — Nick Carr has a post about the New York Times’ subscription service, TimesSelect, in which he dismisses criticism of the venture as the misguided rantings of “free content” ideologues like Jeff Jarvis.
Carr refers to a Financial Times piece about a study by Matthew Gentzkow, in which the economist looked at the competition between the Washington Post print edition and Web edition. As the FT column describes it, Gentzkow analyzed the readership data from both the print edition and the website and came to some conclusions about how much one cannibalized the other. Says the FT:
“[Gentzkow] found that people who had access to fast internet connections were, other things being equal, less likely to read the print edition. He found reasons to believe this was specifically because of access to washingtonpost.com, not to the Internet in general.”
What are the reasons he found to believe this? I read (or tried to read) the entire paper online, and I still don’t know, in part because of sentences like this one:
“Both reduced-form OLS regressions and a structural model without heterogeneity suggest that the print and online editions of the Post are strong complements.”
And that was in the early part of the paper, where Gentzkow was summarizing his findings — before he got to the part with the long calculus-type formulas and algorithms. At one point, the economist says that according to his research on the levels of substitution between the two products:
“Removing the [news website] from the market entirely would increase readership of [the newsaper] by 27,000 readers per day, or 1.5 per cent.”
He therefore concludes that the Post has lost $5.5-million in newspaper revenue as a result of providing its news online for free. Does that make any sense? It might to an economist, but I would argue his thesis fails the reasonability test. If the washingtonpost.com website were to disappear or be locked behind a pay wall tomorrow, does anyone really think that 27,000 people would suddenly go out and start reading the paper edition?
Gentzkow clearly does. I think they would be more likely to just go elsewhere for their news, such as Google News or Yahoo News or MSNBC or CNN. It might be tempting — and make for a much simpler business case — to argue that a product like the Post competes primarily with its own website, and vice versa, but I don’t think that is the way things work.
A pay wall for the Post or the Times or any other paper simply blocks people out who then go elsewhere. That’s not a religious view, as Nick would like to portray it — in fact, I would argue that it’s a lot more “rational” than Gentzkow’s analysis.
Oct 19th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Google announced something kind of cool: a Facebook app for Google News, which allows you to choose categories or feeds based on your own keywords, and then share those stories with others and see what stories your friends have shared. Okay, it’s not a cure for cancer, but I think it’s a pretty useful app as far as Facebook apps are concerned — although that’s not exactly a high bar to clear.
I share stories I come across through either a del.icio.us feed (which is on my blog in the sidebar) and/or my Google Reader shared items (which are also in the sidebar), but lots of people don’t use those things, and may never use them. Google’s Facebook app gives them another way to see what stories their friends think are interesting, and to share their own picks from the headlines.
It will be interesting to see whether Google — which is about as data-obsessed as its possible for a company to be — will come up with any cool numbers based on what people have shared.
Oct 19th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Anyone who has read my blog probably knows that I have been hard on Dave Winer occasionally (and I think with good reason, but I don’t want to get into that right now).
The fact remains, however, that Dave is a pretty smart guy when it comes to things like RSS — let’s not get into whether he “invented” it or not — and he also thinks outside the box when it comes to things like how newspapers and other media present their content, and that is something I’m interested in as well. So I think it’s only fair that I point out when I think he’s doing something interesting.
The thing in this case is his New York Times keyword index. It’s a simple thing, in a lot of ways, since it just scans the newspaper’s index and comes up with the number of times a certain word is used, then ranks them from top to bottom — but it also has a couple of additional features, including the fact that it displays the headline of a story when you hover over the number.
That’s a nice touch. And it’s an interesting companion to Dave’s “river of news” NYT feed (something I tried to recreate with my Twitter feed of Globe and Mail headlines).
I don’t understand why the Times — or other newspapers, for that matter — don’t provide that kind of alternative search or browsing tool themselves. It’s not rocket science (no offence, Dave) and it might even attract users who don’t want to use the linear approach that most papers default to. Why not have a keyword tag cloud too? The Washington Post had a demo of such a feature awhile back as part of its Post Remix lab project, but it never became part of the actual site, which I think is a shame.
I think plenty of readers would be interested in alternative ways of finding stories, just as they now use features such as the “most read” and “most emailed” lists the Times and other papers have. Why not add even more ways of slicing and dicing the news?
Oct 18th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
I have to be honest: I’m not sure whether Viacom’s new plan for The Daily Show is a great idea or a really dumb idea (I’m also leaving open the possibility that it’s somewhere in between those two). The network — which has been feuding with YouTube for almost a year now over various clips of John Stewart that keep popping up on the site — is launching a site dedicated to the show, which will offer more than 13,000 clips dating back to the very beginning.
According to this story in the LA Times, Viacom has spent a lot of time tagging and identifying clips so that they can be searched and aggregated by topic, guests, etc. –and even plans to allow users to take part in the cataloguing to some extent, Wikipedia-style. In the piece, the head of digital media at Comedy Central thanks YouTube for jolting Viacom executives into awareness:
“Without YouTube, he said, Viacom might not have recognized the true value of the archives and dragged its feet in digitally archiving and tagging” the clips.”
Henry “I used to be a famous Wall Street analyst” Blodget thinks Viacom’s move is dumb. He thinks the network should quit suing YouTube (which it says it is still going ahead with) and upload all of its clips to the site. Part of me thinks that he’s right — why not make use of the service that everyone already associates with The Daily Show anyway? Plus it comes with built-in Flash encoding, easy embedding, commenting tools, etc.
At the same time, however, YouTube has constraints. Clips tend to be short and poor quality, for example — and to a large extent that’s what users have come to expect. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to do the kind of tagging and other things that Viacom is talking about, and even if they could be done they might be wasted on an audience that just wants to watch a funny clip.
I think (as my friend Steve Bryant at the Hollywood Reporter does) that in an ideal world Viacom would do both: upload short clips to YouTube and let people embed them wherever they want, and then have a much larger storehouse of longer clips and entire shows — all tagged and catalogued, with added features and possibly even HD content — at its own site.
