Category Archives: advertising

The web’s design problems

November 22, 2009 – 8:48 pm

TweetApplied 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 [...]

Edited by Frédéric Filloux | Also posted in design | Comments (21)

Negative-sum games

November 9, 2009 – 9:01 am

TweetAs 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: [...]

Edited by Frédéric Filloux | Also posted in newspapers, online publishing | Tagged , | Comments (10)

The End of Walled Gardens

October 25, 2009 – 7:45 pm

TweetIf 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. [...]

Edited by Frédéric Filloux | Also posted in journalism | Comments (4)

Rotten Apples in the Reviews Barrel

October 19, 2009 – 9:11 am

TweetA 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. [...]

Edited by Frédéric Filloux | Also posted in journalism | Tagged | Comments (10)

Monetizing a social network, the Skyrock case

June 21, 2009 – 4:38 pm

TweetIn 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 [...]

Edited by Frédéric Filloux | Also posted in radio & TV, social networks | Comments (17)

The Internet Creative Deflation

May 31, 2009 – 1:16 pm

TweetWhen 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 [...]

Edited by Frédéric Filloux | Also posted in design, online publishing | Tagged | Comments (6)

Advertising: real change must happen

April 5, 2009 – 9:52 am

TweetThe 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 [...]

Edited by Frédéric Filloux | Also posted in Uncategorized | Comments (18)