Microsoft withdrawing its offer to buy Yahoo is a sufficiently large story to demonstrate the problem of redundant news content on the web. Google News is currently tracking about 2,000 versions of this story. To get a better sense of why it’s a problem to have 2,000 stories about the SAME THING, I’ve reproduced about ten percent of them below — just the headlines and ledes. If you have the stomach to scroll through them all to see what else I have to say about it, check out the sources as you scroll:

UPDATE: The Google News example is reproduced here instead. You’re reading this in RSS or email a day after I posted it because this post was so large it broke my Feedburner feed. Too much content breaks the web — there you have it. Keep reading for my original argument.

Continue reading…

There are two principal ways advertisers are trying to create value for consumers on the web — and they must create value because, you know, consumers are in control. On the web, advertisers can provide entertainment or information.

How effective is advertising as information on the web? See Google’s $15B in ad revenue — an $5.19 billion in ad revenue in Q1 2008. The technology of web search enabled advertisers to create value for consumers in a way that was never possible in analogue media.

Continue reading…

Some publishers choose a paid subscription model, some choose an ad sales model, and some choose both as a revenue stream—a business decision with rippling implications for marketing and content strategies. During a panel session at MarketingSherpa Selling Online Subscriptions Summit, May 12-13 in New York City, executives from Zagat Survey, Rivals.com (from Yahoo! Sports) and Hoover’s will reveal why their companies chose the hybrid model, the pros and cons they weighed in making the decision, and the sales and marketing strategies that followed these decisions.

The panel participants, who will discuss their experiences in building very large user communities, tactics that can be applied to any online subscriber business, are:

• John Boris is Vice President of Marketing for Zagat Survey where he is responsible for the marketing, promotions and brand development for all Zagat Survey lines of business. With more than 300,000 surveyors, Zagat Survey rates and reviews restaurants, hotels, nightlife, movies, music, golf, shopping and other entertainment and categories.
• Bobby Burton is Chief Operating Officer and Editor-in-Chief for Rivals.com (from Yahoo! sports), the nation’s largest college and high-school specific online media property. He is a founding executive of Rivals.com, which was sold to Yahoo! in July 2007. Rivals.com has more than 200,000 paid subscriptions and 6 million unique users on a monthly basis.
• Marybeth Gavin is Senior Marketing Manager for Hoover’s, a company that provides proprietary business information through the Internet, data feeds, wireless devices and co-branding agreements with other online services. Hoover’s features a database of information on more than 25 million corporations and organizations.

In addition to this panel discussion on how to determine the right mix of free and paid content, the MarketingSherpa event offers the latest case studies on how to raise subscription sales in a recession-type economy, present market research on selling online subscriptions, and include sessions from leading online subscription marketers on tools and tactics that can improve online conversions and revenues.

For more information about MarketingSherpa Selling Online Subscription Summit and $300 off a ticket as a Publishing 2.0 reader, visit: http://www.sherpastore.com/sos_publishing.html?9720

The other day Erick Schonfeld wrote a post about how he’s feeling even more overwhelmed by new web content steams like Twitter and FriendFeed, and how he’s desperately in need of a better filter. I certainly agree with Erick’s clarion call for a better filter — that’s why I’m devoting all my time to empowering mainstream journalists to filter the web through link journalism (so many of the people who are great information filters aren’t doing so on the web).

But it struck me when I was looking at Erick’s screen capture of a seemingly endless series of Twitter and FriendFeed items in Twhirl that we shouldn’t just be working on the OUTPUT problem by building better filters.

We should also be working on the INPUT problem.

How do you reduce noise on the web? Simple.

Produce less content.

Continue reading…

Facebook has had an update feature similar to Twitter for a while. Now Facebook has a feature that lets users add feeds from other web services like Flickr and del.icio.us — just like FriendFeed. From a technology perspective, Twitter and FriendFeed are now reducable to Facebook features. Even if those two apps are currently more robust than their equivalent Facebook features, there’s nothing to stop Facebook from copying them in their entirety.

So are Twitter and FriendFeed features, or are they companies? Eric Eldon makes a strong case that many of Facebook’s younger core users will never user Twitter or FriendFeed because the same features are available right there on Facebook.

Ironically, Twitter’s and FriendFeed’s core asset — arguably their sole competitive advantage — is their people, their users.

Continue reading…

At the upcoming May 12-13 MarketingSherpa Selling Online Subscriptions Summit, Michael McCurdy and Leslie Semegran of premium job site TheLadders.com will present “Keep Them Wanting More: Maximizing Customer Lifetime Value through Strategic Offer Development and Delivery.”

The study is based on fidings taken directly from TheLadders.com’s long-term strategies increasing list revenue and extending customer lifetime value, and investigates the tactics McCurdy, CRM Director, and Semegran, Online Director, deployed to grow the site’s subscriber base to over 2 million users. The tactics for selling online subscriptions Semegran will present are based on her experience in managing acquisition, conversation, and product marketing for TheLadders.com and, previously, as marketing manager at TheStreet.com. McCurdy points to his own strategic use of email marketing and other touchpoint communications to improve the company’s long-term online conversations and revenues.

With the Summit’s focus on raising subscription sales, increasing customer retention, and imroving online conversations and revenues—especially in a recession economy—MarketingSherpa’s Selling Online Subscriptions Summit is expected to bring over 350 top executives in the paid online content and subscriber services industries to New York this May.

See the full summit schedule, including a list of speakers, at MarketingSherpa.com.

Learn more about the 2008 Selling Online Subscriptions Summit at MarketingSherpa.com, or call customer service at (401) 247-7655 for more information.

For years Digg has had an active comment community, where the comments are submitted and appear on the Digg landing page, rather than on the article linked from Digg. FriendFeed got into this game by making it possible to comment on content pulled in from multiple web services, where all the comments appear on FriendFeed, rather than on those services. Today, the tech blogosphere is debating a service called Shyftr that allows users to comment on the full text of blog posts, drawn from full text RSS feeds.

These are all forms of disintermediation on the web — disintermediation defines distribution on the web, made possible by RSS and hyperlinks.

The funny thing is that disintermediation is like a hall of mirrors — there’s really no end to it.

Continue reading…

Seems like now would be an opportune moment to clarify the terms of Publish2’s private beta.

It would be an understatement to say that it’s tricky to run a private beta for a user base that includes the same people who cover your industry and write about new technologies.

The whole purpose of a private beta is to be able to develop and test a product without the user feedback being aired in public — so that your beta testers don’t go posting screen shots of designs that will be outdated in a few weeks, or hold you publicly to competitive claims that you haven’t made yet because your application is still evolving based on the beta feedback.

Continue reading…