marypcbuk | Entries tagged with business models

Glenn Beck gets the traffic for Fox, but not the ads: according to the Washington Post over 200 companies (including Apple) have boycotted the slots around Beck's show - and Apple isn't running ads on the network at all. The same column has some interesting stats around Web news usage; it doesn't say but I assume is for the US and PEJ is behind http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2010/media-ownership/sector_online.php, which might have these stats in.

The WP says "Eighty percent of the traffic for news and information is vacuumed up by the top 7 percent of such sites, says an annual survey by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. These, according to Nielsen figures, are led by aggregator sites: Yahoo (No. 1, with 40.8 million unique monthly visitors), AOL (No. 3) and Google News (No. 6). The television news sites are also strong: MSNBC (2), CNN (4), Fox News (7) and ABC News (8). And three newspapers make the list: the New York Times (5), Washington Post (9) and USA Today (10, with 9.3 million unique visitors).

But all Web destinations are not created equal. Consumers spend more than twice as much time on cable TV sites (23 1/2 minutes a month) as on newspaper sites (10 minutes a month). Online-only sites fared only slightly better (12 1/2 minutes a month). Two political sites stand out: the right-leaning Drudge Report (nearly an hour each month) and the liberal Daily Kos (48 minutes). "

And the State of the News Media 2010 study has an excellent study of the relationship between bloggers and tweeters and the mainstream media sites they're referencing

I'm sure this isn't a widely held view. That won't work, I hear people saying; information wants to be free.

That's a good example of why un-fact checked, un-edited community reporting isn't always the best way to get your information. The quote is actually "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." The tension rather than the cost is the point of the quote - and Brand talked about the cost of getting it out - not the cost of creating, checking and curating it in the first place.

This isn't just about The Times going behind a paywall (which, by the way, has worked very well for the FT). A few weeks ago Ars Technica pointed out that it couldn't stay in business if everyone blocked the ads that pay for the site. And then there's the forest of Google-ad-funded third party sites that grab content from primary sites and republish it, which many people seem to think is fine and dandy. Speaking as someone who makes their living from writing, it puzzles me that like downloading music and video, republishing content without paying is seen as a victimless crime. While the publishing and music industries have acted like cretinous dinosaurs and by refusing to offer affordable downloads in usable formats and have instead turned their users into thieves by treating them as if they already were, I'd also rather like to get paid for the work I do. I'd like it to be a living wage rather than pocket change - because if you pay so little that the only people who can afford to write are the ones with an independent income from elsewhere, you're going to get rather short of full-time, specialist writers who aren't backed by someone with an interest in what they write. And if you think that enthusiasts never have an axe to grind, why have there been mommybloggers turning out to be getting paid by suppliers to review their products?

What we need is a decent micropayments system and a decent identity system behind it so payments aren't onerous to deal with and then publishers can choose their business model (and readers can choose whether they want to spend money, attention or rely on the BBC surviving the re-org). There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Stephen Carter, minister for Communications, Technology & Broadcasting Sector, author of the Digital Britain Report and the Digital Economy Bill that is currently reducing photographers rights and promising the recording industry power by statutory instrument has a new job. In April he'll become Chief Marketing, Strategy and Communication officer at Alcatel-Lucent. Is this a gamekeeper driven out of the preserve by Mandelson's changes to the DEB post consultation or a poacher starting the poaching while they're still a gamekeeper?

When you switch jobs in industry it's common for there to a be a 6 month gap before moving from one company to a competitor; wouldn't it be nice if there was some kind of gap to make sure that those involved in legislation didn't move to somewhere they might be felt to taking advantage of the same legislation for buisness so quickly that it raises eyebrows? After all, Alcatel-Lucent has a lot of interests in various forms of digital distribution which must be affected by the legislation...

I followed the arguments about the TechCrunch intern who asked for (note - not was offered but asked for) a MacBook Air in return for covering a company with interest: between the FTC demanding that bloggers declare when they get gifts relevant to their blogging, the site that collected the name of everyone loaned a laptop to test the M3 build of Windows 7 so it could declare all their coverage biased and the US paper that sacked a writer who accepted travel expenses for a piece in another title, there's plenty of debate on what are the ethical limits for journalists. The US rules - at least for 'main stream media' - have long been: no gifts, expenses paid by the title. We have a slightly different approach in the UK; don't be biased.

With freelance rates that haven't really gone up since the late 1980s and no expense payments to speak of, many writers can't afford to pay their own way to important events that are outside London; if they invite a journalist, companies typically offer to cover expenses for events. Don't think all-expenses-paid; think, they'll probably cover Internet access costs and buy you a drink... I've never met a company that expected paying for a train ticket or lending an item for review to be rewarded with anything more an honest writeup. And yes, maybe after a long loan for comparison with other products that you review, maybe with the journalist saying how much they'll miss it - but sooner or later, the kit goes back. We don't expect anything else.

Editors (should) make the point clearly when they start working with someone; don't expect freebies and don't allow any freebies to influence your judgement. That's what management and mentoring is for; that's what discussing the meeting and the angle of the story is for; that's why editors should go to events with new in-house writers for a while, to make sure everything is on track. With a 17-year old intern, that should apply in spades - but the pile-em-high-and-sell-em-cheap approach to online journalism doesn't seem to have time, funds or sometimes even the desire to do that.

The apology from the intern mentioned the Teens in Tech conference; I picked up a recent copy of Fast Company this morning and spotted it in their diary for the month, with this gushing write-up: "Any parent seeking to make a kid feel inadequate need only point to 17-year-old Daniel Brusilovsky. The Californian is founder and CEO of Teens in Tech Networks (for young media producers), a TechCrunch writer, and a marketing manager for mobile-video startup Qik. The whiz kid, who's cochairing this San Francisco conference, says his generation has the power to lead technological innovation, citing Facebook as inspiration. Does he hope to be the next Mark Zuckerberg? "I'm the kind of person who doesn't look far ahead -- I live in the moment," he says, channeling his inner adult. "But if I wasn't doing what I loved, I wouldn't be doing it." And then he put down his iPhone to go network at a conference. In Rome. Where he was a featured panelist. Again, he's 17."

Living in the moment, with minimal editorial mentoring; that's not the way to do journalism. I have no personal animus towards Daniel and I think he was badly let down by the people who should have been teaching him (he was an intern, not a journalist), but I'll worry about our industry if he just goes charging ahead, speaking at all those conferences, without some serious re-evaluation. It's called adult supervision for a reason...

The Amazon/Macmillan spat is about pricing and control. Macmillan's range of pricing will allow for initially high prices, like hardbacks, and later lower prices like paperbacks. Getting the ebook early is as much of a benefit as getting the nice artefact of the hardback - though maybe not as nice as getting the artefact AND getting it earlier. So far, so Amazonfail. But the two things I've noticed recently are:
1 it takes a long time for books to make it from hardback to paperback
2 more paperbacks are being reissued as trade paperbacks at twice the price

1 I waited about a year for a Sharon Shinn book to make it to paperback. I've been waiting for the fourth book of Bujold's Sharing Knife series, Horizon to get out of hardback since - well, the audiobook came out last august and I think I saw the hardback last spring. This feels like much longer than in years gone by; didn't it used to be 3 or 6 months?
(EDIT: everyone tells me they think it's always been a year - I guess I've not noticed hardbacks as quickly because it's not felt that long to me before)

2 I've been reading books by Donna Leon and Andrea Camilleri for the last year or so, picking them up in paperback as I go - but over the last couple of months, they've all been republished as trade paperbacks at $14 rather than $6.99 and $7.99. I doubt the author gets twice the royalty and the cover art is exactly the same and I'm not getting much advantage from the change - and the old paperbacks are gone so I don't get the choice. Yes, I want the publishers to make enough money to stay in business, and I desperately want authors to stay in business but this feels more like gouging.

One of the reasons I'm in the 'plague on both your houses' camp on Amacmill-fail is that they're quibbling about which of them gets most of the money form ebooks and who gets to decide how much to charge for them before they inevitably fall to the $4.99 price the mass market will accept for them in a rather deckchairs on the Titanic way. Neither of them has a solution for getting mid-list writers the mix of editing support, marketing support and income stream they need. Take one of my favourite writers, T A Pratt. His four Marla Mason books are fantastic (magic plus snark plus PUNCHING); you can get the first one as a free ebook but that didn't make the rest of them sell well enough for book to get picked up. That's bad for any fan; worse when book 4 ends on a cliffhanger. Pratt wrote a near-novel-length novella prequel that he put on his Web site and solicited donations for; it did better than he expected but he told me he didn't want to get into the self-publishing game; as both a writer and editor myself I completely understand that. Good editors make good books better; good publishers make good books sell better. This is the quandary neither Amazon nor Macmillan (nor Apple nor Barnes and Noble....) is really addressing. So, I was really excited to see him say this today:

"I'm debating whether or not to write Broken Mirrors -- the fifth full-length Marla Mason novel, which will resolve the cliffhanger in Spell Games -- this spring, to be published online as a reader-funded serial in the summer or fall... I suspect I'll use this model: I'll put up the first chapter, and post subsequent chapters as soon as I receive a certain amount in donations for each chapter (probably between $200-$300 depending on how many chapters there are), not to exceed one chapter per week... If I get a pretty healthy response to this call for interest, I'll do it. If I only get a handful of responses, well... I probably won't."

So, if you wouldn't mind wandering over to http://tim-pratt.livejournal.com/105839.html or mailing tapratt@marlamason.net to say Make Mine More Marla, I'd be very grateful...

The BBC micro was the first computer I got my hands on; I spent weeks writing a program to draw the Union Jack (you can tell I'm not a natural programmer!). It was the era when the PC and the Mac were becoming available, but when you could also replace your 8-bit gaming machine with a 16-bit gaming machine of dubious ability (Enterprise Elan anyone?) or a true home computer like the ST or Amiga. Even on a gaming machine you were probably typing in the last of the games listings. You got your hands dirty with these machines. Moving into either programming or just thinking programmatically was a natural progression (read Jeanette Wing of CMU on why computational thinking should be on the curriculum with the three Rs). Consoles were slicker, glossier, faster - and I think they deprived us of a generation of programmers, because fewer people were challenged to start tinkering and if they wanted to tinker they couldn't.

Extreme Tech's interview with Alex St. John, one of the original DirectX developers, has him arguing that the day of the console is done. Never say never; it's a huge industry that's profitable the way razors and printers are, but his argument about changing economics is persuasive. And I love the way he ends up with the interviewer answering the questions; it's a judo flip someone extrememly knowledgeable can do, but the interviewer makes a good if slightly tetchy recovery.[My snark in italics]

ASJ: [argues that the Wii proves cheap graphics are good enough for consoles]. That means that if there is another generation, it's gotta be about either input devices, or online community. Graphics will just be good everywhere. And if it's about community, that puts the console out of business. Because why the hell does Wal-Mart want to sell a money-losing loss leader device, when all the valuable content will be tied to online services and subscriptions and downloadable stuff? So for all the talk about downloadable content on the console, the console depends on the retail channel for that market to be valuable, and the retailer, if they don't get a cut of that, is going to say why the hell am I trying to sell these consoles at a loss for?

ET: [this is where the interviewer starts having a conversation rather than running an interview; always very tempting when you have someone smart to talk to] True…there were rumors last year that the next PlayStation would not have an optical drive. Everything would be downloaded.

ASJ: Yeah. Yeah, that's a good—that's a very interesting—and here's another point. Why is World of Warcraft the most profitable game on the PC?

ET: [definitely conversation now] Community.

ASJ: Yeah, but what makes it so profitable? There are a lot of community games out there. What is it about a massive multiplayer game that makes it make so much revenue? Is it just community?

ET: [aaaand swiftly back to interview mode!] Why don't you tell me?

ASJ: There's one very important feature: DRM. You can't f---ing steal the thing.

ET: Ah. Gotcha.

ASJ: You can't pirate a community. So an MMO has two properties that make it hugely valuable. One is community; frankly, that's almost secondary. The truth is, you can't steal a community-based game. And because you can't steal it, you get all the revenue from it. All a console is is a giant DRM device. A console's job is not to enable you to play games, but to stop you from playing games you didn't pay for.

[A lot of interviews go like this in real life. But a lot of editors and some readers prefer the interviewer to take out their interjections and would have wanted the back and forth edited to sound like ASJ asking and answering rhetorical questions; one of the rules of journalism is that the writer is not part of the story and should absolutely never be in the way of the story. I loathe Sunday magazine interviews that are all about the interviewer's arrival at the location, their reaction to the decor, their family anecdotes, their alleged rapport with the celebrity, their sparkling conversation and only peripherally an actual interview. But podcasts and blogs are taking the broadcast interview model where the interviewer is on screen and can't be edited out; plus there's a trend to personalised writing and the journalist as expert making a personal connection with the reader. I think this is a charming example of the interviewee turning the tables briefly and perhaps I'm only imagining 'Why don't you tell me' coming from slightly gritted teeth']