Jun 22nd, 2008 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
For quite awhile now, I’ve been writing most of my blog posts — about media, technology, business and anything else that captures my fancy — at my main blog (mathewingram.com/work), and then cross-posting the ones that were more media-focused manually to this blog. I thought that made sense for readers who only wanted the media-focused posts, but increasingly it has become hard to judge which ones are media and which ones are tech, and on top of that, it’s just a gigantic pain to cross-post things. So I’ve decided to consolidate things at my main blog — and as my friend and fellow media blogger Jason Preston mentioned, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of just the posts from the “media” category there, which accomplishes the same thing. Or you can just subscribe to the main RSS feed.
Jun 6th, 2008 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
There’s lots of buzz out there about how Microsoft supremo Steve Ballmer figures the newspaper will be dead in 10 years — oh yes, and magazines too. Here’s what he said to the Washington Post:
“Here are the premises I have. Number one, there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form.”
The former basketball coach and Peter Boyle (as Young Frankenstein) lookalike immediately qualified his comments, of course, saying that “If it’s 14 or if it’s 8, it’s immaterial to my fundamental point.” So there you have it. The end of the newspaper, as foretold by the guy whose company completely missed the importance of the Internet, not to mention the importance of Web-search, and about a dozen other things I don’t have time to go into. No doubt Microsoft will help out with Newspaper 2.0, a piece of shrink-wrapped software that only costs $350 and takes a Pentium Quad Core and 3GB of memory to run.
Seriously though, this is the kind of thing people say to get attention — and I’m not just saying that because I happen to be employed by a newspaper. If anything, I am even more convinced of the digital revolution that Steve is. But will newspapers as we know them disappear in 10 years? No. And not in 14 years either — or 20 for that matter. Will a lot fewer people be reading a printed paper than read one daily now? Undoubtedly. I got asked about the future of papers as part of a panel discussion on recommendation engines at mesh 2008 a few weeks ago, and I said what I always say: I think lots of people will continue reading papers — just not as many as are reading now.
People still listen to the radio, don’t they? Many of them listen to talk shows, and “radio plays” that consist of actors in a studio somewhere reading their lines. Lots of people still go to live theatre, and to the opera for that matter — heck, people still read books, and that technology is hundreds of years old. But not as many people do those things as used to do them when those forms of entertainment were at their peak. I think it will be exactly the same with newspapers — I fully expect to see people reading them for the remainder of my lifetime; they will just be fewer in number, and younger folk will see them as quaint.
Jun 2nd, 2008 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
I don’t do this a lot, but I just thought I would point out for those who might be interested that the Globe and Mail — which happens to be my employer — has removed the pay wall that used to block access to a lot of the paper’s online content. All of the columnists are now free to all readers, as are the horoscope and the crossword puzzle (which, as most journalists know, are the features that most readers really want). As the announcement on the Globe’s home page describes it, this means that all of the paper’s columnists “can join the fray and add their talented voices to the freewheeling conversations of the Internet era.”
Why did the paper decide to drop the wall? Without going into too much detail, my understanding is that we did it for the same reason the New York Times did: while the Insider Edition (as we called it) made money for the paper, the number of subscribers who were opting to pay for that content wasn’t growing, or at least wasn’t growing quickly enough to make it a very attractive business. Eventually, I think, senior editors decided that we would be a lot better off opening the doors and allowing people to link to our pay-walled content.
I haven’t seen recent numbers, but within a few months of the NYT dropping its wall, traffic to the site appeared to have surged. Whether the Times has been able to monetize all of that new traffic — and thus make up for the lack of a pay wall — is something I don’t know. But at least now they have a chance to grow that instead of managing what had become a slow or no-growth business, and so do we (the Globe continues to have a subscription product online, now known as Globe Plus, which includes the finance site GlobeInvestorGold and an “e-Edition” of the paper; access to the archives will also still cost a fee).
It’s interesting to look at some of the more than 180 comments that have been posted on the story since it went up first thing this morning: while most are of the “thank God you finally saw the light” variety, there are some who are less than enthused. One commenter says:
“I’ve long since found online alternatives to the Globe’s old ‘insider’ features. You can’t shut us out for a few years and then expect us to come back just because it’s free. You’re not the only game in town, and you’re going to have to offer us something genuinely new and original to get us to come back on a regular basis.”
Some commenters wish that we would go even further.
May 29th, 2008 | Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
Matt Marshall over at VentureBeat is reporting that Glam Media — an advertising/content network focused on sites that appeal primarily to women — has turned down a $1.3-billion acquisition offer from an unnamed party. Like Caroline McCarthy at Webware, I assume that this offer likely came from an “old media” company such as CBS (which has been snapping up digital properties like Last.fm) or possibly a large advertising player. But seriously, $1.3-billion? And Duncan Riley says this isn’t even that great an offer when you consider that Glam has gotten four rounds of financing totaling about $115-million.
There’s no question that the Glam Media story is an appealing one: the company says that it has more than 65 million unique visitors across its network — although as Mike Arrington has pointed out in the past, that figure is an aggregation of all the visitors who come to any of Glam’s partner sites. He also noted in that post that Glam owns a bunch of pure SEO plays such as free-beauty-tips.com and so on. In a previous VentureBeat story, one critic called Glam “Boo 2.0,” referring to the Bubble 1.0 shopping site — and Matt Marshall noted that half of Glam’s total pageviews came from a single site (MyYearbook.com).
Still, the network has grown at a fairly impressive rate, and counts some prominent sites like E Online as partners — and has just launched a fairly sophisticated video content/advertising system as well. According to PaidContent, the company gets a whopping $50 CPM on some of its video ads. But to turn down a $1.3-billion takeover offer? Either Glam’s financial backers have gotten greedy, or someone has been drinking an awful lot of Web 2.0 Kool-Aid.
May 28th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Despite the headline on this post, I have nothing against Belgium as a country. I am a big fan of their waffles, for example, not to mention their chocolate — and Brueghels is pretty cool as well. Still, they are inescapably intertwined in my mind with one of the stupidest lawsuits I can think of in the “new media” sphere (and that includes Viacom’s lawsuit against YouTube): the country’s media agency, Copiepresse, is suing Google for linking to its content, and is asking for $77-million in damages. I am not making this up.
The lawsuit was filed in 2006, and Google lost the case in Belgium — as well as a subsequent appeal — and had to remove links to Belgian newspaper content from its Google News index. At some point after that, it seemed as though the geniuses at Copiepresse realized how their “victory” was anything but, and talks between Google and the agency aimed at a settlement of some kind took place for awhile. Those talks have apparently fallen through and the group is now pressing forward with its suit, like someone who is determined to saw through the tree branch that they happen to be sitting on.
I know that some people are probably going to start arguing with me in the comments, so before you do, I encourage you to read up about the case — including some of my previous posts on the topic. As far as I can tell, Google’s use of excerpts from news stories meets (or should meet) every test of “fair use” imaginable — except perhaps in Belgium — especially since the company makes no money from advertising on Google News pages. On top of all that, linking enhances the value of newspaper content by exposing it to a broader audience. Belgium’s newspapers should be thanking Google, not suing it.
