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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
