Last week Facebook announced it's opening the stream to developers here.
The stream is the core experience of Facebook, giving users info on the activities of their friends. Every update, picture upload, photo tag, wall-to-wall exchange, status change, etc., is atomized and beamed to your homepage. It's sortable, I think, if you categorize your friends into groups.
Here is Mark Zuckerberg's blog post on the stream and latest redesign, which users invariably seem to hate.
Anyway, with Facebook's Open Stream API, developers can program new widgets and Web sites to allow people to see their Facebook content without logging into Facebook.
The NYTimes gives an imperfect analogy of a corner grocery store giving away all its merchandise to anybody to sell for themselves, in exchange for the extra foot traffic that would propel the store to the social nexus of the neighborhood.
Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop are two applications (using the cloud-computing-esque Adobe Air) that let people control their Facebook and Twitter info without logging into those sites every time. I haven't tried these two products because my five-year-old Powerbook doesn't work with Air. But over a million people use Seesmic alone, and these sites are gaining in popularity.
It will be very interesting if Facebook's "altruism" can make it money. As the Times writes:
And if the developers somehow find a profitable niche, that would pose another concern. These companies might actually end up inadvertently asphyxiating Facebook and Twitter, both currently unprofitable, by drawing users and advertisers away from those sites.
If you give the content away, such that customers come to expect it, doesn't that limit your options to charge later? Facebook is starting to do what the AP and news outlets already do - give access to their content for free. But I don't think the news outlets make money off this, or else media execs wouldn't complain about Google making money off ads on its Google News aggregator.
Maybe Facebook will succeed in this game, either through advertising or by becoming the ultimate one-stop shop for social networking on the Internet. If so, news outlets should take note and copy Facebook's success.
Showing posts with label can you charge for content. Show all posts
Showing posts with label can you charge for content. Show all posts
May 3, 2009
April 14, 2009
Can you charge for content?
A trio of big-name media execs think you can. This NYTimes article is a little vague on the details but that makes sense.
Journalism Online L.L.C., their company, will have an automated system for news outlet to charge for content. After reading a certain amount of a story, a teaser, the user is prompted to pay for more.
The names, straight from the story, are:
Steven Brill, creator of Court TV and American Lawyer magazine, among other ventures; L. Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, one of the few newspapers to charge online; and Leo Hindery Jr., who has headed communications companies like Tele-Communications Inc., Global Crossing and the YES Network, and now runs InterMedia Partners, a private equity firm that specializes in media.
This would only work, I imagine, if every news outlet in a given market area or reader demographic group only distributed through this company. Obviously if you could get an AP feed from Google or somewhere with the same info, that would negate the need to pay for access. So would a country-wide media conglomerate be allowed to exist? Isn't there an anti-trust problem here?
Journalism Online L.L.C., their company, will have an automated system for news outlet to charge for content. After reading a certain amount of a story, a teaser, the user is prompted to pay for more.
The names, straight from the story, are:
Steven Brill, creator of Court TV and American Lawyer magazine, among other ventures; L. Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, one of the few newspapers to charge online; and Leo Hindery Jr., who has headed communications companies like Tele-Communications Inc., Global Crossing and the YES Network, and now runs InterMedia Partners, a private equity firm that specializes in media.
This would only work, I imagine, if every news outlet in a given market area or reader demographic group only distributed through this company. Obviously if you could get an AP feed from Google or somewhere with the same info, that would negate the need to pay for access. So would a country-wide media conglomerate be allowed to exist? Isn't there an anti-trust problem here?
March 14, 2009
Clay Shirky: 'You're gonna miss us when we're gone!' has never been much of a business model
Internet consultant Clay Shirky wrote a great summary of why newspapers are in this financial dilemma and can't dig their way out.
To quote directly:
"Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the Internet just broke.
I agree with him. Newspapers long ago lost the opportunity to become the online news aggregators that Google, Yahoo, Newsvine, and myriad other sites have become. The fact that Google is serving ads on its Google News site, making money without paying the content creators it is displaying, shows that this distribution model could work. But as Shirky notes, the newspaper industry chose to build walls around its content rather than experiment with the brave new world of the Internet.
Here's what newspapers fail to acknowledge: the maxim "If you build it they will come" does not apply to the online world. They relaxed in their hegemony. They had a lock on the print medium. Buy a multimillion dollar printing plant, feed it dead trees all day, and create a spidery web of delivery routes - that's an expensive endeavor. Only a few folks in any media market could afford to set this up. It's why newspapers had enjoyed such high profit margins. But surprise surprise, the Internet comes around and lets anyone publish multimedia content - for zero cost in some cases - and destroyed the hegemony enjoyed by newspapers.
The newspapers execs needs to remember that they deal with two things: the creation of content (stories, photographs, graphics, etc) and the vehicle for delivering that content (the processed dead trees that arrives at your doorstep each day). When we say newspapers are dying, it's really the vehicle that's on the operating table. But the jobs that create the stories can - and must - survive. A bunch of journalists need to learn how to tell their stories in ways beyond text on a page. And then someone needs to figure a way to pay them sustainably. How? As Shirky says, nobody knows.
To quote directly:
"Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the Internet just broke.
"With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem."
"Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to District Attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
I don’t know. Nobody knows. "I agree with him. Newspapers long ago lost the opportunity to become the online news aggregators that Google, Yahoo, Newsvine, and myriad other sites have become. The fact that Google is serving ads on its Google News site, making money without paying the content creators it is displaying, shows that this distribution model could work. But as Shirky notes, the newspaper industry chose to build walls around its content rather than experiment with the brave new world of the Internet.
Here's what newspapers fail to acknowledge: the maxim "If you build it they will come" does not apply to the online world. They relaxed in their hegemony. They had a lock on the print medium. Buy a multimillion dollar printing plant, feed it dead trees all day, and create a spidery web of delivery routes - that's an expensive endeavor. Only a few folks in any media market could afford to set this up. It's why newspapers had enjoyed such high profit margins. But surprise surprise, the Internet comes around and lets anyone publish multimedia content - for zero cost in some cases - and destroyed the hegemony enjoyed by newspapers.
The newspapers execs needs to remember that they deal with two things: the creation of content (stories, photographs, graphics, etc) and the vehicle for delivering that content (the processed dead trees that arrives at your doorstep each day). When we say newspapers are dying, it's really the vehicle that's on the operating table. But the jobs that create the stories can - and must - survive. A bunch of journalists need to learn how to tell their stories in ways beyond text on a page. And then someone needs to figure a way to pay them sustainably. How? As Shirky says, nobody knows.
March 11, 2009
Seattle without a newspaper
NPR affiliate KPLU in Seattle has an article that nicely summarizes the quandary we're seeing in print media.
With the Post-Intelligencer on the brink of extinction, this article talks about the revenue model for the generic newspaper, subsizided heavily via advertising, and the fact it's unsustainable.
It makes the point that the legwork for the stories that matter (in a civic sense, the capital J journalism stuff) is done by reporters, sitting in council meetings, sifting through the back hallway chatter, following facts and sources over time, and bringing to light some story.
It notes that you can't just redirect the resources of the newsroom to the web site, because the web site doesn't make enough money for even 10 percent of the staffers as the legacy (dead tree) product.
Here's a quote from Seattle Times Director of Content Cory Haik on what people seek out online:
"Entertainment: tons of money," she says. "People click on those stories, those display ads are making money. Not so much necessarily for, say, something like the meat and potatoes like local news. People aren't necessarily that interested."
The article makes a point that journalists could do well as bloggers, investigating stories while sharing how the sausage is made during the reporting process, creating a transparent process that engages readers. That transparency and willingness to bring joe public into the action, are crucial ingredients of success.
I always thought news outlets would do well by partnering with local public schools, and I don't just mean giving them free newspapers. By engaging people when they're young, you hook them. You have to get people interested and involved in local politics, state politics, everything. Creating an attentive audience would do more for readership than paying them to read or watch.
With the Post-Intelligencer on the brink of extinction, this article talks about the revenue model for the generic newspaper, subsizided heavily via advertising, and the fact it's unsustainable.
It makes the point that the legwork for the stories that matter (in a civic sense, the capital J journalism stuff) is done by reporters, sitting in council meetings, sifting through the back hallway chatter, following facts and sources over time, and bringing to light some story.
It notes that you can't just redirect the resources of the newsroom to the web site, because the web site doesn't make enough money for even 10 percent of the staffers as the legacy (dead tree) product.
Here's a quote from Seattle Times Director of Content Cory Haik on what people seek out online:
"Entertainment: tons of money," she says. "People click on those stories, those display ads are making money. Not so much necessarily for, say, something like the meat and potatoes like local news. People aren't necessarily that interested."
The article makes a point that journalists could do well as bloggers, investigating stories while sharing how the sausage is made during the reporting process, creating a transparent process that engages readers. That transparency and willingness to bring joe public into the action, are crucial ingredients of success.
I always thought news outlets would do well by partnering with local public schools, and I don't just mean giving them free newspapers. By engaging people when they're young, you hook them. You have to get people interested and involved in local politics, state politics, everything. Creating an attentive audience would do more for readership than paying them to read or watch.
March 8, 2009
Hyperlocal websites - what newspapers should become?
Lost Remote, a TV-centric blog on new media, lists several hyperlocal web sites in New Jersey and Washington.
These hyperlocal sites (generally speaking) are the next-generation portal sites. Portal sites, as far as I can remember, were jumping-off points across the Internet with all the news and info you'd want all in one convenient place. AOL had one, Yahoo does, Google does, heck every newspaper in the U.S. has one.
It goes without saying that they don't really work. How could you possibly include everything every user wants? How much of it needs to be human-compiled versus aggregated by machine?
Google comes closest, IMHO, with its customizable homepage. Mine has news feeds from queries like "Richmond, VA."
Anyway, the hyperlocal web site hopes to gain readers and repeat visitors by offering info on specific communities or even city blocks. Local crime, local civic events, local sports, local restaurant reviews, local things to do, local weather, you get the idea. Content is submitted by Joe Sixpack in Internetland, and could be anything from a yard sale to a fundraiser to baby pictures. User interaction and feedback, in the form of "votes" on each story or item, comments, and posts, is ubiquitous.
The New York Times has started several of these, called The Local.
In contrast to some other sites, the Times has deployed actual reporters from its staff to add content, which you might assume boosts the quality of the reporting. (Assuming that even matters anymore)
How do these sites make money? Maybe they don't, but advertising from local businesses would make sense. My question is: how do you offer quality info without paying people for it? I've seen lots of sites where the entries or "stories" are basically PR pieces, self-advertisements. If you're encouraging user submission of content, but not giving people money for what they do, what incentive would they have to give it to you? How does the viewership grow?
Perhaps the delivery vehicle needs improvement. A lot of this hyperlocal stuff would be better on a mobile platform. I can see a good use for whipping out an iPhone and using an app to find restaurants near where I'm standing, with impartial reviews, and patron comments. It's so useful.
But that service is not a hyperlocal web site, it's a service that might tie into a hyperlocal site's database. I don't know how to make a hyperlocal site work right, but there's a good chance they do a better job at localizing things, or at least presenting them in a more accessible way, than the newspaper.
These hyperlocal sites (generally speaking) are the next-generation portal sites. Portal sites, as far as I can remember, were jumping-off points across the Internet with all the news and info you'd want all in one convenient place. AOL had one, Yahoo does, Google does, heck every newspaper in the U.S. has one.
It goes without saying that they don't really work. How could you possibly include everything every user wants? How much of it needs to be human-compiled versus aggregated by machine?
Google comes closest, IMHO, with its customizable homepage. Mine has news feeds from queries like "Richmond, VA."
Anyway, the hyperlocal web site hopes to gain readers and repeat visitors by offering info on specific communities or even city blocks. Local crime, local civic events, local sports, local restaurant reviews, local things to do, local weather, you get the idea. Content is submitted by Joe Sixpack in Internetland, and could be anything from a yard sale to a fundraiser to baby pictures. User interaction and feedback, in the form of "votes" on each story or item, comments, and posts, is ubiquitous.
The New York Times has started several of these, called The Local.
In contrast to some other sites, the Times has deployed actual reporters from its staff to add content, which you might assume boosts the quality of the reporting. (Assuming that even matters anymore)
How do these sites make money? Maybe they don't, but advertising from local businesses would make sense. My question is: how do you offer quality info without paying people for it? I've seen lots of sites where the entries or "stories" are basically PR pieces, self-advertisements. If you're encouraging user submission of content, but not giving people money for what they do, what incentive would they have to give it to you? How does the viewership grow?
Perhaps the delivery vehicle needs improvement. A lot of this hyperlocal stuff would be better on a mobile platform. I can see a good use for whipping out an iPhone and using an app to find restaurants near where I'm standing, with impartial reviews, and patron comments. It's so useful.
But that service is not a hyperlocal web site, it's a service that might tie into a hyperlocal site's database. I don't know how to make a hyperlocal site work right, but there's a good chance they do a better job at localizing things, or at least presenting them in a more accessible way, than the newspaper.
March 4, 2009
E-paper on the horizon
This interesting article from Fortune goes into the e-paper possibilities for publishers. Tech makers are on the horizon with products that look like a thin sheet of plastic, but are flexible and display images and text on them. The Amazon Kindle is one example, but it's not flexible. Once the technology is ironed out, and the cost to buy an e-ink reading device is palatable to consumers (Fortune says $200 is the magic number), publishers may jump on board and license out their content for distribution. But author Michael Copeland writes:
"No one yet has figured out the perfect business model. Under one scenario publishers would license their content to an e-reader seller, such as Plastic Logic or Amazon, or to a wireless provider like AT&T (T, Fortune 500) or Verizon Wireless (VZ, Fortune 500). These companies would sell and manage the wireless e-readers and offer customers bundles of content the way a cable company does. You could buy subscriptions to individual magazines and newspapers or bundles of content on entertainment, sports, or business - or both. "
He continues:
"When the next generation of e-readers first hit the market, they will cost as much as $800. Will a customer be willing to buy a device that could download only the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and other News Corp. properties? Probably not. That means any print publisher that gets into the e-reader distribution game will have to offer an open system in which you can download any magazine or newspaper. A publisher that wants to control distribution will need to sign licenses with competitors that in all likelihood would rather be offering their own e-reader catalogs. Prepare for a battle royal."
If the question is: how do I make money distributing my content to an e-ink reader?
My answer is: you won't, not without creating an alliance between all content providers in existence.
The information you 're offering would have to be so locked into the medium's format that consumers could only get it through you. That's not true with anything online. Text is free. Photos are free. Video is free. Info is free. With rare exceptions like Consumer Reports, no one is charging the end user for receiving content online.
So e-ink won't compete with the paper, it competes with the Internet as a whole, and a content delivery vehicle called the computer. Locking your content so a reader needs to subscribe to your Kindle-like device means nothing if people can also get it on a computer or iPhone.
So the differences between e-ink readers and next-generation computers will shrink too. The next computer may have a touch-sensitive e-ink membrane keyboard, a flexible e-ink screen, built-in Internet connectivity, speakers, a webcam, and USB ports. In short, the computer will kill the e-ink reader.
"No one yet has figured out the perfect business model. Under one scenario publishers would license their content to an e-reader seller, such as Plastic Logic or Amazon, or to a wireless provider like AT&T (T, Fortune 500) or Verizon Wireless (VZ, Fortune 500). These companies would sell and manage the wireless e-readers and offer customers bundles of content the way a cable company does. You could buy subscriptions to individual magazines and newspapers or bundles of content on entertainment, sports, or business - or both. "
He continues:
"When the next generation of e-readers first hit the market, they will cost as much as $800. Will a customer be willing to buy a device that could download only the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and other News Corp. properties? Probably not. That means any print publisher that gets into the e-reader distribution game will have to offer an open system in which you can download any magazine or newspaper. A publisher that wants to control distribution will need to sign licenses with competitors that in all likelihood would rather be offering their own e-reader catalogs. Prepare for a battle royal."
If the question is: how do I make money distributing my content to an e-ink reader?
My answer is: you won't, not without creating an alliance between all content providers in existence.
The information you 're offering would have to be so locked into the medium's format that consumers could only get it through you. That's not true with anything online. Text is free. Photos are free. Video is free. Info is free. With rare exceptions like Consumer Reports, no one is charging the end user for receiving content online.
So e-ink won't compete with the paper, it competes with the Internet as a whole, and a content delivery vehicle called the computer. Locking your content so a reader needs to subscribe to your Kindle-like device means nothing if people can also get it on a computer or iPhone.
So the differences between e-ink readers and next-generation computers will shrink too. The next computer may have a touch-sensitive e-ink membrane keyboard, a flexible e-ink screen, built-in Internet connectivity, speakers, a webcam, and USB ports. In short, the computer will kill the e-ink reader.
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