Author Archives: Frédéric Filloux

Refining the Model

January 29, 2012 – 8:10 pm

TweetLet’s come back to the business model question. My January 15 column featuring a Simple Model for digital newspapers triggered a number of emails and comments, many  questioning my assumptions (my thanks to readers of the Monday Note who take the time to make insightful contributions to the discussion). Let’s see if we can sort [...]

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Piracy is part of the digital ecosystem

January 22, 2012 – 8:15 pm

TweetIn the summer of 2009, I found myself invited to a small party in an old bourgeois apartment with breathtaking views of the Champ-de-Mars and Eiffel Tower. The gathering was meant to be an informal discussion among media people about Nicolas Sarkozy’s push for the HADOPI anti-piracy bill. The risk of a heated debate was [...]

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Trying a Simple Model

January 15, 2012 – 8:16 pm

TweetAdvertising still dominates the newspaper revenue model. Depending upon the particular country, it is not uncommon to see print dailies getting 70% to 80% of their revenue from advertising. In the early days of the digital era, when business plans were driven by “eyeballs”, everybody hoped to replicate the tried and true print advertising revenue [...]

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Cracking the Paywall

January 8, 2012 – 11:04 pm

Tweet(This version corrects an error in the percentage for the price increase of the FT) Every newspaper, magazine or website is working on a paywall of sorts and closely monitoring what everyone else is doing. In almost every news company, execs are morosely watching advertising projections and finding numbers that are not exactly encouraging. For [...]

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My 2012 Watch List

December 18, 2011 – 11:00 pm

TweetWhen it comes to cracking the digital media code, 2011 involved more testing than learning. Media companies seem to be locked in a feverish search mode. Their sense of urgency is reinforced by the continuous depletion of worldwide fundamentals: digital advertising’s encephalogram remains flat (at best); and when audiences grow, revenues do not necessarily correlate. [...]

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The Best of Curation

December 11, 2011 – 10:43 pm

TweetI love talking about the things I enjoy using. The emerging ecosystem in which a bunch of smart people curate long form journalism is definitely one of those things. The companies are called Instapaper, Longreads, Longform. I love the material they find for me and I’m in the debt of developers who wrote neat applications [...]

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Datamining Twitter

December 5, 2011 – 7:00 am

TweetOn its own, Twitter builds an image for companies; very few are aware of this fact. When a big surprise happens, it is too late: a corporation suddenly sees a facet of its business — most often a looming or developing crisis — flare up on Twitter. As always when a corporation is involved, there [...]

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Unaccounted For Readers

November 27, 2011 – 11:04 pm

TweetNewspaper publishers need to quickly solve a troublesome equation. As carbon-based readership keeps dwindling, the growing legion of digital readers is poorly accounted for. This benefits advertisers who pay less for their presence. Putting aside web sites audience measurement, we’ll focus instead on the currently ill-defined notion of digital editions. A subject of importance since [...]

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Apple’s Antitrust Problem (Part 2)

November 20, 2011 – 8:41 pm

TweetLast’week’s Part 1 column about Apple’s dominant’s position in the tablet market triggered an abundance of comments and emails, both on the Note’s blog and on the Guardian. All interesting, most well reasoned. But, for some people, it’s always funny to see how an Apple topic can turn religious. Question a few basic facts and [...]

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Apple’s Antitrust Problem

November 13, 2011 – 5:58 pm

Tweet(First in a series) Will Apple face the type of antitrust issues Microsoft had to contend with in the 90′s? Possibly, but not with the same magnitude. Apple is by no means locking up its market the way Microsoft controlled the personal computer field with Windows. Still, the question arises for the iTunes Store, the [...]

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