February 21, 2010 – 10:49 pm
Among Australian media executives, like everywhere else, the talk of the town is the iPad. I was in Sydney this week, giving a talk at the Media 2010 conference. This gave rise to vibrant discussions of the ways in which the Apple device could transform our industry.
Among the group of speakers, the most enthusiastic one [...]
February 14, 2010 – 11:46 pm
For publishers: How much money is lost because of stolen contents? Of that, how much can be realistically reclaimed? Before getting into numbers, an overview.
In recent weeks, I’ve gained a first-hand media perspective on anti-piracy technology. The technology is Attributor’s, and the media is Agence France-Presse, one of the big three global newswires along [...]
February 7, 2010 – 6:07 pm
I’m not through with the iPad. Actually, I’m just warming up. For today’s column, let’s focus on the perils of a closed system.
I live in a country (France) where censorship is a big deal. It comes mostly from greedy celebrities (sorry for the truism); they use a legal system that largely favors them. Often, [...]
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 10, 2010 – 5:50 pm
The French cultural elite has come up with a bunch of ideas to stimulate the legal consumption of digital goods. The basic principles are stunningly original: subsidize and tax. These creations are detailed in a report ordered by the Président de la République to the Ministry of Culture. This is the way it works here: [...]
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 [...]
December 13, 2009 – 4:12 pm
Could Google and Publishers one day understand each other? Frankly, I doubt it. Two weeks ago I was in Hyderabad for the dual assembly of the World Association of Newspapers and the World Editors Forums (1).
There, Google-bashing was the life of the party. As I told in last week’s Monday Note (see The Misdirected Revolt [...]
December 7, 2009 – 9:04 am
The junkies are rebelling against their dealer. The dope is the traffic, and the dealer is Google. For years, the search giant flooded the market with an ideology built on the early 2000’s, ill-fated, get all eyeballs you can, the rest (i.e. monetization) will take care of itself.
Publishers have invested tons of money, energy and [...]
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: [...]
November 1, 2009 – 11:27 pm
Everybody wants to go local. Internet-wise, it sounds like the new flavor of the month week. Going local is a digital and idealistic version of Mao Zedong’s “hundred flowers blossom”. (The Chinese dictator did actually encourage the expression of dissenting opinions; this turned out to have unpleasant consequences for those who took Dear Leader to [...]
September 27, 2009 – 8:11 pm
The Long Tail is a beautiful intellectual construct. Beautiful, therefore right. Who wouldn’t want to see it succeed? Chris Anderson coined the term back in 2004, in a Wired magazine article. A skillfully marketed book followed, which turned out to be a bestseller (i.e. the the Tail’s profitable head). When the concept began to gain [...]
September 20, 2009 – 11:08 am
Let’s start with a counterintuitive move: At a time when, all over the world, publishers are tired of the red-ink their printing plans produce and dream of dumping the dinosaurs, the historic French daily Le Figaro fires up this Monday a brand new €80M printing facility to launch a redesigned edition. Behind this apparently irrational [...]
September 13, 2009 – 8:43 pm
An idea is gaining momentum: online readers must open their wallet. In recent weeks, several suggestions for moving from wish to implementation have popped up. The latest one comes from Google. The company proposes to give a boost to its not-so-successful Checkout service by harnessing it to online newspapers interests. Quite a change here. Only [...]
August 23, 2009 – 9:47 am
In today’s context of massive revenue depletion, everyone (almost) agrees on one thing: digital media revenue sources will have to be diversified. There is no magic bullet, no dominant model that will guarantee, by itself, a sustainable revenue stream. Time to think the hybrid way. Free will coexist with paid-for, different users (occasional vs. intensive) [...]
August 9, 2009 – 11:55 am
This week, I downloaded the iPhone application of the British newspaper the Independent. It’s a new breed of app, taking advantage of the new features embedded in the third iteration of the iPhone OS. For a daily newsmedia, Push Notification is the most interesting new feature, combined, in this case, with an offline reader. On [...]
Get a demo of a Bloomberg terminal. You’ll be is blown away by the depth of available data. Thousands of statistics, historical tables, sources… Everything is available through the proprietary terminal. Bloomberg started by offering a real-time news flow dedicated to the needs of the financial community, traders, analysts, etc. Over the years, the system [...]
