Newspaper brands like the NEW YORK Times, WASHINGTON Post, BOSTON Globe, etc. face a unique challenge in the online media age — how to value non-local readers.

I received this offer in the snail mail this week from the New York Times:

As I observed previously with my critique of the Washington Post’s circulation marketing, this marketing […]

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 […]

Nick Denton and Gawker Media are wrestling with the problem of content quality on the web — specifically, how to give bloggers incentives to create content that drives traffic based on quality rather than quantity. Gawker has announced that incentive pay for its bloggers will now be based entirely on the number of page views […]

The maxim goes that new technologies don’t kill off old media — radio didn’t kill newspapers, TV didn’t kill radio, etc. But it’s not clear this maxim will hold true in the digital age. The first industry to suffer the slings and arrows of digital technology was the music recording industry, back when MP3s and […]

Photographer Lane Hartwell, by making all of her Flickr photos private to prevent uncredited use, and by forcing the take down of a parody video containing one of her photos, has shined a spotlight on the question of content owner’s rights on the web.

Mathew Ingram and Mike Arrington argue that Lane is on the wrong […]

The case for why publishers should be able to charge for content on the web always revolves around the exceptions that prove the rule, e.g. Consumer Report and WSJ — which, let’s be honest, are the same examples everyone was using back in 1998. The problem with paid content on the web isn’t that it’s […]

Publishers trying to manage rising online ad revenue against declining print ad revenue are looking at the wrong metrics. Instead of looking at the advertising trends in silos and comparing percentage increases and decreases, they should be looking at the relationship between absolute increases and decreases in ad revenue over time.

For this purpose I’ve […]

I’ve been pondering this quote from Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons, dismissing rumors that Time Warner is considering selling off Time Inc.:

“I like our publishing business, I like the magazine business and I like the fact that it’s portable and can be moved into digital,” he said. “I am not an advocate of selling Time […]

Can you name an online media company that has billions in ad revenue but has never had to bother with measuring unique visitors or pages views — those antiquated measures that keep the dynamic web locked into antiquated ad sales processes and ruin the online advertising economics of most media companies?

Ok, so that was a […]

Here are some watershed moments that mark the radical transformation of the publishing industry to a non-print-centric business:

1. New York Times becomes an aggregator

The New York Times, paper of record and one of the last great bastions of the belief that one entity can create all the content that anyone needs, has finally capitulated to […]

Last spring I wrote a post “Has The MySpace Downturn Begun?” Dan Mitchell at NYT picked it up in a piece “MySpace No Longer Their Space?” My post was purely speculative and, not surprisingly, completely wrong. But the fact remains that MySpace belongs to News Corp, not MySpace users, which is why News Corp can […]

What is Google’s core competency? I would argue that it’s harvesting the value from massively scaled, complex human activity, i.e. millions of websites linking to each other and hundreds of thousands of advertisers bidding on key word and experimenting with ad creative, clickthrough rates, and conversion rates. The other critical element of this core competency […]

There seem to be two principal reactions to the collapse of the print classified business that is destroying the print newspaper business. The first reaction is to insist, as San Francisco columnist David Lazarus does, that people should pay for the news. The second reaction is evident in the report from Tim O’Reilly about trouble […]

Or maybe you know of one that has. If you do, let’s discuss.

I’m just curious.

Did NBC Universal and News Corp cut a deal to create content for the web? New production capabilities? New armies of web-only content creators? No. This is about creating a platform for aggregating and distributing existing content, which they already have too much of.

You’re looking at the new media business. It’s not longer about creating […]

Is it possible that the future of the content business is worse than being less profitable and worse even than not scaling anymore — is it possible that content creation will cease to be a business?

I was struck by this quote from a music business manager in the WSJ article about the complete collapse of […]

We’ve all heard that page views are dying. Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed pointed out a few weeks ago the problem with scaling an online advertising business based on revenue per thousand page views, an analysis which has now been picked up by the Dan Mitchell at the NYT. Jeremy’s analysis is correct, on one level, […]

Here’s a koan for everyone in media: YouTube had revenue of $15 million is 2006; what is the value of YouTube in 2007?

If you’re not familiar with koans, this is from Wikipedia:
A kō·an is a story, dialogue, question, or statement in the history and lore of Chan (Zen) Buddhism, generally containing aspects that are […]

The once monolithic media industry is undergoing a radical schism, dividing itself into content creation, on the one hand, and content aggregation and distribution on the other.

The nature of this transformation suddenly crystallized for me when I read Tom Foremski’s piece on the new West Coast/East Coast media industry divide. Tom seems to be focused […]

Everyone assumed that when Viacom demanded that YouTube take down 100,000 clips of Viacom content, it was just a hardball negotiating tactic…but maybe it wasn’t. What if Viacom suddenly realized that they don’t need YouTube.

I went to ComedyCentral.com, and thanks to a recently introduced embedding feature, here I am with a Comedy Central clip […]

The death of print publishing is coming, it’s just a matter of whether it happens in 5 years, 10 years, or 15 years. I’m betting it happens sooner than anyone expects. Colin Crawford, the SVP of online for IDG, posted some stunning figures:
Today the absolute dollar growth of our online revenues now exceeds the decline […]

If you spend too much time in Silicon Valley you’d think that the technology industry — with Google leading the charge — already owns the future of advertising. But don’t count out Madison Avenue just yet — they may be responsible for perpetuating the imbalance between media time spent online and ad dollars spent online […]

There’s more talk about the death of page views, this time from the Chief of Insights at Yahoo, the recently dethroned page view king.

The reason page views persist is that they are a key variable in the still dominant currency of online advertising — impressions, and its derivative CPM. Impressions themselves are merely the clunky […]

Can anyone think of a content business — meaning a company that produces original content — that has scaled dramatically in recent years? I can’t. Look at the businesses that have scaled — Google, MySpace, YouTube — all platforms for content, but not producers of content. Compare those to original content businesses like Weblogs, Inc., […]

Last week the big news was CBS and YouTube crowing that distributing video clips of CBS TV shows through YouTube was (ostensibly) increasing CBS broadcast TV ratings. Today, the big news is that UK viewers who watch online video are watching lest broadcast TV.

The online video boom is starting to eat into TV viewing time, […]

I was struck by this comment from a session on audience measurement at the Business Blog Summit (via conversationrater):

I don’t care about how many page views or visitors I really get. I care about getting the right visitors, the influential visitors, or the potential customer visitors. How can I tell who’s who?

Duh! But this truism […]

Isn’t there an odd contradiction in all the thinking about new media? Individuals are now empowered to create content, to publish and have a voice without going through the old corporate hierarchy. You can blog and be heard, all for free, without asking permission. But what about brands? The assumption that online advertising will finance […]

It’s inevitable that a PR firm like Edelman would create a phony blog for one of its clients (in this case Wal-Mart — see Shel Holtz for a great analysis). For all of the hype over “conversation” as the new media paradigm, no one has yet figured out how to use conversation to reliably achieve […]

There is now macroeconomic data to support the theory that Media 2.0 won’t be as profitable as Media 1.0 (from MediaPost):

In a break from historical patterns, the equities research team at Merrill Lynch says the rate of advertising price inflation now trails the overall rate of economic inflation. “Interestingly, advertising growth seems to be tracking […]

Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube solidifies Google’s position at the center of media. Google already has Google Video, so they didn’t buy YouTube for the technology. No, they bought YouTube for the traffic, the same reason they cut the $900 million deal with Fox Interactive Media.

So don’t believe Eric Schmidt for a second — […]

Buried in the Time interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt is an astonishing admission:

Another example of a question that we are debating right now is: we have this amazing product called AdSense for content, where we’re monetizing the Web. If you’re a publisher we run our ads against your content. It’s phenomenal. How do we […]

There is a fundamental tension in Web/Media 2.0 between openness and control — openness is required to leverage the network effect of the Web and harness the power of socially-connected users, but control is required to get a share of any money that changes hands.

Google has been most successful in walking this line — […]

As if it weren’t enough that digital technology has turned everything on your computer, from software to online stores to music, into media — digital technology is rapidly turning everything in the “real world” into media.

THE HOTTEST FORM OF DIGITAL media on Madison Avenue isn’t online. It’s out-of-home. Digital out-of-home networks are popping up virtually […]

I’ve advocated that media should evolve into marketing services — according to lastest Veronis Suhler Stevenson Communications Industry forecast, that’s increasingly where the money is going.

NON-ADVERTISING-BASED FORMS OF MARKETING - especially newer sectors such as branded entertainment, event marketing and experiential marketing - have emerged as the fastest growing segment of the media economy, […]

A debate has erupted over the definition of blogs and the value of blog “influentials” as drivers of advertising CPM rates, which is so Old Media in the particulars it’s really quite astonishing. Scoble challenges Windows Live Spaces’ definition of a blog and then plants this lightening rod:

What does Microsoft do when it says “we […]

Folowing the 2.0 maxim that “everything is media,” online retailers have woken up to the media value of their website traffic and have started selling advertising on their sites (from WSJ, sub required):

Last week, Amazon.com Inc. quietly began testing the sale of display ads on its home page to companies such as Ford Motor Co. […]

Flush with confidence after closing a $900 million deal with Google, MySpace is taking on its next challenge — convincing advertisers who have put up brand and product pages on MySpace for free that they should pay for “their space” instead:

Now, advertisers say the company is stepping up its efforts to convince big clients using […]

Google is allowing local businesses to offer coupons through Google Maps for free (some details from Google here), which is pretty good from the perspective of Google’s hallowed “user experience,” but far from revolutionary. Local searchers on Google Maps will be able to see which local businesses featured in the search results are offering a […]

Om Malik took an interesting critical look at the Google deal with News Corp, which got me thinking about whether MySpace matters much at all to this deal, despite all the hype:

In a conference call, FIM executives noted that a very large number of people leave MySpace to go to Google. According to data collected […]

I’ve been predicting for a while that the TV advertising house of cards would collapse, and McKinsey just huffed and puffed and predicted (to its big Fortune 100 advertiser clients) that “by 2010, traditional TV advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990″ (from AdAge):

That shocking statistic, delivered to the company’s Fortune […]

What does it say about an advertising format when an industry “council” has to be formed in order to arbitrate the problem of advertisers not knowing whether they are getting what they paid for? That’s what happened to both pay-per-click advertising and TV advertising this past week, and the similarities between these two ad councils […]

The Guardian observes (via Jeff Jarvis) that YouTube has overtaken MySpace — but here’s the thing — it’s not really YouTube vs. MySpace. It’s user content and community hosted by YouTube vs. user content and community hosted by MySpace. The hosting is besides the point. It’s people like Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz who are […]

Inform.com has wisely gotten out of the Web 2.0 news aggregator business and into the publisher services business. Erick Schonfeld at the Business 2.0 Blog has the scoop:

As readership declines for newspapers and online readership grows, every publisher faces the threat coming from the edge of the network. Sites like Google News, Yahoo News, […]

I’ve been predicting for a while that companies would find ways to leverage the community marketing power of social networking sites like MySpace without the network seeing any financial benefit. Here’s a perfect example (via The Economist):

MySpace seems to offer a chance for companies to take their marketing into new, potentially more lucrative territory, by […]

The Pew Internet & American Life Project released the results from a blogger survey today, which detailed the reasons why bloggers blog. The report focuses on some notion of storytelling vs. journalism (whatever), but what jumped out at me was that 7% of bloggers said that making money is a major reason why they blog. […]

According to Hitwise, MySpace accelerated past Yahoo and Google…in terms of visits, that is.

No word yet on whether revenue growth has matched traffic growth. I’m on the edge of my seat to see the next News Corp quarterly earnings report. If the revenue curve matches the traffic curve, I’ll be the first to agree with […]

Gawker’s Nick Denton has announced a restructuring, including a staff shake-up and the sale of two under-performing sites. Nick is a smart guy, and he’s clearly getting ready for the inevitable moment when the new media bubble begins to deflate — a “perversely countercyclical move” he calls it.

What I found most fascinating is the […]

It’s nothing new.

I get this comment all the time when I’m trying to describe what I think is a (r)evolutionary change. It’s human instinct to cleave to what we already know, to hope that we can continue to live comfortably in the world that we’ve already wrapped our minds around.

Sometimes, what’s hailed as a revolution […]

In a review of Digg v3, TechCrunch declares that Digg is challenging The New York Times online in terms of page views. As evidence, Mike references an Alexaholic graph. Let’s look at the actual numbers.

According to TechCrunch, Digg has 800,000 daily unique visitors and 9 million page daily views. Here are the NYTimes.com […]

I increasing believe that in order to survive and grow in a digital, networked, social, participatory world, media companies need to evolve into marketing services companies. Here’s what’s driving me to that conclusion.

Advertising took another significant step yesterday towards graduating from paid media placements (i.e. traditional ads). Ironically, it starts with a paid media placement […]

When Seth Jayson at Motley Fool suggested the other day that Google’s AdSense is killing the internet by driving the creation of sites that exist solely to squeeze money from AdSense, many people scoffed. But here’s more evidence that he’s right:

A venture-backed Waltham company that’s quietly amassed more than 650,000 Internet domain names is stepping […]

There’s another Techmeme frenzy about a blogger’s departure from an institution, but Om Malik’s departure from Business 2.0 does represent an important macrotrend — individual talent as media brand.

Traditional media brands are built around institutions — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, ABC News, CNN. The blogging phenomenon has made it possible for […]

Never before in the history of business has the collision of two industries caused so much confusion. According to CEO Eric Schmidt, Google is not in the media business:

It’s better to think of Google as a technology company. Google is run by three computer scientists, and Google is an innovator in technology in our space. […]

News flash: Google is indeed fallible — and vulnerable. I predicted on several occasions (here, here, and here) that Google’s Print Ad program was less than promising (to put it kindly), and sure enough:

GOOGLE’S RECENT FORAY INTO PRINT advertising fell short of the company’s expectations, a company executive said Wednesday. Speaking on a conference call […]

If the “long tail” is the organizing principle of web/media 2.0, why shouldn’t we expect revenue distribution to follow the same pattern, with a handful of companies (i.e. Google, Yahoo) controlling most of the revenue and the remaining online players fighting over the crumbs? When Google found a way to monetize the long tail through […]

Umair Haque and Jeff Jarvis are engaged in an ontological debate about what constitutes “the edge” and what will ultimately be the winning business strategy at the edge. What struck me about their debate is how little clarity there is on how money will actually be made at the edge — and this despite Umair […]

Word of mouth marketing has been around for a long time, but brands are becoming more sophisticated. P&G, one of the largest advertisers, is pioneering a 2.0 approach to marketing that has little need for paid media advertising and leverages good old-fashioned face-to-face social networks. From a BW article:

About a year ago, P&G began developing […]

I’m not making this up — brands really are eschewing paid media advertising and are instead creating their own media 2.0 platforms for connecting with consumers directly. And the web makes it possible, because anyone can create media AND because spiraling online ad pricing are driving brands to more quickly abandon the paid media ad […]

Query: If marketers can get their own consumers to create marketing messages for them, and then get those same consumers to propagate those messages through online social networks — all for free — why should they give a dime to media and advertising companies to serve as intermediaries?

If your best counterargument is “We’re not […]

Randall Stross, in a Times article, wonders who will pay for TV now that ad-skipping DVRs and on-demand broadband video have destroyed TV’s mass media advertising model. I wonder whether late 20th-century TV content production will follow the same path as early 20th-century transatlantic ocean travel, milk delivery, and buggy whip manufacturing — marginalized or […]

It’s official — Microsoft is no longer a software company. With the launch of adCenter, Microsoft will be joining the ranks of Google and other media companies:

“Ad-supported software services are an integral part of Microsoft’s plans to give consumers access to a broader variety of digital media, whenever they want and on whatever device they […]

There are only two plausible reasons to publish a “digital edition” of a print publication, as the New York Times is now doing in partnership with Microsoft:

1. To prop up print advertising revenue by artificially increasing the “print” circulation through “digital distribution”

2. To make a bucket of content, i.e. the print edition, available for “browsing” […]

Even before the advent of broadband video and video iPods, the $2 billion+ market for network television advertising was a house of cards, held losely together by the “Nielsen ratings,” a data set so deeply problematic that it may soon bring down the entire house.

MediaPost reports on a new tale of error and inaccuracy involving […]

The advent of web-based e-commerce fundamentally lowered the costs of doing business, increasing the scalability (and in many cases the viability) of thousands of small businesses. The introduction of micro-marketing through Google AdWords gave a huge jolt to this trend, making marketing scalable and profitable for these same small businesses. Two companies — Google and […]

Can’t we lay to rest the endlessly inane debate about whether blogging can succeed as a business? (The latest miss-the-point round is between Jason Calacanis and Alan Meckler.)

Since everyone seems to be having so much trouble with this, let’s make it really simple:

- Blogging is just a form of publishing

- If you publish useful or […]

There’s so much uncritical, blinders-on optimism in the Web2.0sphere that I savor the rare occasions when I stumble on a skeptic/contrarian after my own heart, in this case Rob May, who writes for businesspundit.com:

A small percentage of the population enjoys doing things just for the sake of learning, exploring, helping, etc, and we hold them […]

A few weeks ago, I got hung out to dry for suggesting that “questionable” content residing on MySpace along with underage users would potentially harm News Corp’s business interests when advertisers refused to assume the risk. Today, we learn that MySpace agreed me, and suddenly it’s fashionable to talk about “questionable” content without being accused […]

It’s happening again — the numbers just don’t make any sense. Facebook turns down $750 million, hoping to hype themselves up to $2 billion. And why? Well, just look at that CASH COW MySpace — it’s making…how much money? I’m on the edge of my seat for News Corp’s first 2006 earnings release, but “in […]

I’ve been very skeptical of Google’s Print Ad program since its inception. So I’m hardly surprised by the news from BusinessWeek that the program is a dud (thanks to David Utter for passing on the article):

Carl D. Haugen, president of BluePenguin Software, spent $3,000 on an ad through Google, which ran in the November issue […]

Here’s a quote from an Economist article — guess what year it was published:

Jessica Reif Cohen, a media analyst at Merrill Lynch, reckons that profits from online advertising and paid content could represent up to 8-9% of total earnings for Disney, Viacom and News Corporation in 3-5 years and considerably more for Time Warner, courtesy […]

I’m not sure if I’ll be the first to predict it, but search advertising is headed for a cliff. I can’t say with any certainty when–or whether–the crash will come, but the evidence is mounting.

Everyone is talking about the $90 million click fraud settlement, and the Google apologists are out in force, arguing that $90 […]

I’ve read A LOT about Web 2.0 — I haven’t seen so much Koolaid since I was at summer camp. And I’ve taken a stand that Web 2.0 is a long way from Media 2.0.

Kent Newsome has the latest antidote to Web 2.0 hype, invoking Monty Python’s Holy Grail to show that most Web 2.0 […]

A great synthesis of 2.0 thinking on new marketing paradigms for social media from, no, not a blogger or Web 2.0 evangalist, but from the president of OLD Market Research company Yankelovich Partners:

These days, the best way to get people’s attention is not to engage consumers with a brand, but to host or facilitate a […]

Media is about conversation and participation. Consumers can create their own media. Value is being created at the edge. You’ve heard all the New Media maxims.

The problem, as many people have stated many times, is that the more everyone participates in content creation and content interaction, the harder it is to navigate the sea of […]

Everyone in Old Media, and many in “New” Media (which isn’t as cutting-edge as it thinks it is), should fear the radically different media habits of the Digital Generation now coming of age. As Jon Fine points out:

Today’s teens are the first for whom self-created content competes with teen-aimed media like videogames. There are now […]

Here’s what’s wrong with all the discussion about the future of blogging as a business — blogging is not a business!

Here’s the latest me-too analysis from The Chicago Tribune (which cites a recent Gallup poll on blog readership):

Even if blogging flops as a business and doesn’t attract more readership, many bloggers will still have […]

Search advertising has been all the rage the last few years, leaving sellers of traditional display advertising to fear a slow death as Google and other search engines siphon off all of the ad dollars. But after a dramatic run-up in search, there’s evidence that we’re reaching a plateau.

I try to avoid the dangerous business […]

Everyone thought TiVo, with its ad-skipping technology, would lead to the death of TV advertising — but it’s actually the shift of audience and media value to digital media that is draining the value from broadcast media. Take Coldwell Banker’s new ad campaign in which TV plays an ancillary role, supporting the real action which […]

Michael Arrington declares that BlogBurst Can Save Big (print) Media. To suggest that the lack of blog content is all that ails Old Media is deeply naive. Old Media needs to follow bloggers into the new content creation frontier, but that in itself will NOT solve the problem of business models.

I will give BlogBurst […]

Is it possible that the text ads pioneered by Google have near zero branding value and, as one search advertiser noted in a Stifel Nicolaus analyst report on Google, the “lifetime value of a customer acquired through Google for his/her business [has] approached zero”? The Stifel Nicolaus report by Scott Devitt is cited in a […]

The Guardian wonders whether “massive media companies have a compelling reason to exist in an era of media fragmentation”:

The argument is simple: as global media conglomerates struggle to hold position against falling sales in publishing, a fractured TV market, music piracy and advertising migration to old fashioned billboards, what are these groups for? The market […]

The demise of Publishing 2.0 was predicted early on — I’m still chugging along, but Phil’s point here is spot on — starting to blog is easy but blogging successfully over the long term is really, really hard. Which makes me wonder about the future of consumer-created media, especially in light of a fascinating analysis […]

Old Media executives have been stepping forward lately to assert their will to survive — even thrive — in a New Media world. Only time will tell whether Old Media brands can indeed survive, but there is ample evidence of forward thinking and emerging digital strategy.

From Time Inc. president Ann Moore:

We will continue to look […]

It’s now conventional wisdom that the future of media is digital and on-demand — content creators no longer own the distribution channels. But the economic center of gravity in media has not shifted to reflect this change. The laws of media dynamics will force the center to shift — advertising dollars always follow the audience, […]

From Karl Martino at Philly Future — corporations see blogs as media they can manipulate. If it happened to Karl, it can happen to any of us. Please blog about this and show your support:

Here goes a strike against grassroots (efforts without $6million dollar backer) civil journalism sites….

Without naming any names….

A user on our site […]

The citizen journalism movement is shaking Old Media journalism out of its complacency, but is it realistic to believe that citizen media can and should replace institutional media? I remain deeply skeptical.

Jeff Jarvis is out in force again today, smacking the “dinosaurs” of Old Media for not understanding the power of the people. As usual, […]

There is a bubble in the tech industry, but it has nothing to do with the behavior of venture capital, as so many people are discussing. There’s a bubble because the tech industry is trying to be the new media industry, and very few people in the tech industry understand what’s really happening to the […]

The news that Google is testing rich media supports the view that traditional brand advertising is not about to go away. Having wrung every penny from smaller advertisers with more transactional businesses — which are the ones that work best with text ads — Google is aiming now at the BIG advertisers who have […]

The reactions to Dan Gilmor’s open letter on Bayosphere have fallen into two camps — lessons on start-ups and lessons on the dynamics of citizen journalism.

These perspectives, while important, miss the critical question in middle — who will fund citizen journalism, or any journalism, for that matter? As Justin Fox puts it in his […]

Until recently, a principal business objective of publishing was to amass an audience that advertisers would pay to reach. A good publishing business plan clearly defined the audience and how advertisers would value the audience.

Bloggers are so enamored with their ability to publish without going through the gatekeepers of Old Media. But they could learn […]