January 24, 2010 – 6:21 pm
Finally! The New York Times is coming out with its paid-for content strategy. A quick summary of the Gray Lady’s paywall plan: a monthly allotment of stories to be read for free and, above that, a flat fee for full access. Subscribers to the print version (including those who only get the Sunday paper) will [...]
January 17, 2010 – 7:49 pm
Forget Joe Average, he’s dead. Ten or twenty years ago, analyzing audiences was much easier. Medias enjoyed well-defined and relatively unchanging target groups. For television, networks had a precise idea on who was watching what, and specialized cable outlets knew their viewers pretty well. Newspapers had their content structure sliced to fit various audiences by [...]
January 3, 2010 – 6:22 pm
No predictions, just a few of many hot topics for the newborn year.
Paywalls. 2010 could see a significant number of newspapers jumping into the paid-for option. Among the conditions to be met:
- Grouping around a toll collector. It could be Journalism Online in the US, a big media group in Europe, or even Google [...]
December 20, 2009 – 8:18 pm
What can we learn from classifieds web sites? Are there some features, strategies that could apply to online news media? On Google.fr, one of the most searched terms is “Le bon coin” (the good spot). (1) Leboncoin.fr, is a free classifieds site that ranks n°7 on the French market. It generates stunning monthly numbers:
4bn page [...]
November 22, 2009 – 8:48 pm
Applied to news, the web doesn’t suffer from one, but three flaws. Let’s call these the Rectangle, the Bottleneck, and the Diversion. These flaws got built into the system from the very beginning and, now, their impact has become harder to deal with. For new sites, these unforeseen aftereffects have grown to become real obstacles [...]
November 9, 2009 – 9:01 am
As if current economic conditions weren’t dire enough, several forces conspire to push the media sector’s financial performance further downward. These factors are an obsession with market share, price wars, and first movers’ ability to set the tone, often for the worse.
Take the iPhone application market as an example. At first, publishers were elated: [...]
October 25, 2009 – 7:45 pm
If there is one side of Scandinavian medias’ strategy I find particularly convincing, it is their ability to cooperate as much as they can, and to compete on what matters most, that is the product, the user experience, the reader. To describe this, Americans, the world’s best neologists, invented the world “coopetition”, cooperation + competition. [...]
October 19, 2009 – 9:11 am
A few weeks ago, professional blogger Kevin Dixie received a strange proposition: a US‑based company offered to buy from him 30,000 reviews for a new iPhone application at $1 per review. Positive reviews, needless to say. Moreover, the marketing company proposed to extend the deal for 30 applications, about 10 to 20 times a month. [...]
In the social network business, the European success story is called Skyrock. Built on top of the #1 FM radio station for 18-25 year-olds, it first expanded into a blog platform, then into a full-blown social network making full use of links users waved between themselves. In Europe, according to ComScore, Skyrock.com ranks #3 among [...]
When LG, the cell phone manufacturer, started work on far-reaching future concepts for handset, it had two choices. The most obvious one was setting up a competition between world-class design firms, getting a stampede and a bidding war as a result, and picking one firm to work on its concept-phones. The Korean electronics giant took [...]
The brutal recession reveals how flawed the current Internet business model is. As advertising-only business models are falling apart, even the Google ecosphere is under stress. The search giant’s preservation of its margins at the expense of its media partners’ revenue stream could be shortsighted. –First of two parts.
Sorry to be blunt, but Internet advertising [...]
