What Fisticuffs?

Having gone to an all boys school this story is starting to have the ring of a playground fight. If you ever remember the inane chant ‘Fight, fight, fight!’ and rush of morbid onlookers as the contenders lined up against each other. In the Internet content wars it looks as though we’ve got to the “hold my coat” stage.

Ok, so Google hasn’t been doing a lot in the recent past to make friends. For example, the well publicised spat with the Association of American Publishers (http://bit.ly/3dQIdx). Now it appears that Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch are both entering the fray (http://bit.ly/mCPqi)

Entertaining for us bystanders, but what does it actually mean? And should we be worried?

As with everything in technology Microsoft’s involvement appears to boil down to a seemingly inconsequential acronym – ACAP…which as everyone knows means Automated Content Access Protocol (a little light reading can be found here: http://bit.ly/2NLbJm). The protocol is being backed by a powerful alliance of some “1,600 traditional publishers” and is proposing a more sophisticated approach to giving access to content. Rather than the all or nothing model of Google, ACAP would be designed to give the publisher greater control over things such as premium content. Something that Murdoch wants to do, but the Financial Times gave up on.

Why this innoxious protocol shot to fame was revealed by Techcrunch on Friday (should we read anything into it that it was Friday 13th?). It was leaked to the site that a senior figure from MSN had a closed door meeting with the heads of some of the world’s major print publishing organisations including the Financial Times, News International and Axel Springer. Apparently Microsoft’s revamped search capability, Bing, is going to put £100,000 of financial investment into the development of the protocol.

So what!? In his article Mike Butcher asks some extremely valid questions:

“…will ACAP – the development of which is so far being controlled by newspapers – be used by Microsoft Bing simply as an indicator of how to treat a publisher’s site? Or would Microsoft help the publishers engineer ACAP into a kind of a rights management engine – with Bing becoming the central clearing house for content from traditional publishers?…And who gets to decide who is a favoured traditional publisher and who isn’t? Bing, or a newspaper-heavy body like the European Publishers Council?”

And this comes as Jonathan Miller, News Corp’s chief digital officer, announced at the Monaco Media Forum (http://bit.ly/468wqg) that it would be “months and quarters – not weeks” before Murdoch’s empire took the step to block Google. Miller’s comments rightly underline the panic spreading in the traditional media about the ‘free vs. paid-for’ content argument and the mere fact that News International is considering this move underlines the depth of concern at the one of the biggest media companies in the world.

And yet is this just the death throes of a industry that has been caught completely on the hop by the Internet? Is it merely lashing out aggressively, because it has run out of ideas on how to monetise the Internet?

However it plays out it will be fascinating watching…much better than the X-Factor and Strictly Come Dancing combined!

@CairbreSugrue

The best business model for media today combines high quality content production, expert filtering of content from other sources and community loyalty. However, hybrid models are complicated to administer, particularly for dinosaurs with insitutional ways of working more suited to the days of fewer channels and higher barriers of entry to the media market. Thus instead of adapting to the idea of a new networked economy some organisations and individuals are trying to wrestle the internet into a shape that suits their old revenue models.

Mike Butcher over at Techcrunch reports on a meeting that took place between Microsoft/Bing and some big newspapers in Europe, regarding ACAP (the Automated Content Access Protocol), which aims to give publishers control over how search engines access their content.

“This is the more granular version of the robots.txt protocol which has been proposed by publishers to enable them to have a more sophisticated response to search engine crawlers….  “Some call it the “DRM of newspaper web sites”. That said some 1,600 traditional publishers have signed up to using ACAP.”

Badda Bing! Microsoft woos newspapers by funding their stick to beat Google 

Lose-lose

Basically ACAP will assist publishers who want to charge a premium for their content and control if and how search engines can index it. This development seems to be a lose-lose for all involved:

• The publisher: The publisher is restricting the ability for people online to learn about the existence of their content. This will likely impact an important stage of the ‘user flow’ I describe below, awareness.
• The user: The user of the web will not know that a website has some content she wants. This user may actually have been willing to pay for the content, if they only knew it were out there. Or, the user may have been inclined to read the content for free, but could have been persuaded towards paying in some way, given the understanding that doing so will be of benefit to the publisher.
• The search engine: By producing results manipulated by ‘big media’ the chances are web users will simply go elsewhere. If I notice 5 out of 10 search results I get from Bing are taking me to content I cannot read in full, or I learn it is not even indexing a lot of the content I want, I doubt it will be very long before I give up on it. As pointed out by a commenter below Mike’s article, with only 3.25% (Sept 2009) of market share, this is an even bigger risk for Microsoft’s Bing than it would be for Google, who thankfully are not currently being so evil.

Consider the users

So how can a publisher producing quality content, but seeing falling ad-revenue, move towards win-win?

They could do much worse than consider the users.

Note, I said users (plural). Where once we considered how ’the user‘ interacts with our website, now we must consider how ‘the users‘ interact with us, our website, and eachother.

Be social

What is different about today’s media is the proliferation of many-to-many interaction opportunities. A capacity to feedback on a product / interest area, to have a conversation around it, and to influence it, is what people now expect and want. Users may not utilise the ability a website provides them to comment (see the 90-9-1 rule), but having that line open encourages trust in the content, product or service on offer.

Media organisations need sustainable business models that work with current market conditions: and part of that means being social.

Turning community loyalty into revenue

In my post on Community user flow: attending to every stage I looked at how social websites can succeed by paying attention to every potential step of a user’s relationship with them: awareness, visit, repeat visit, membership and active membership (participant).

Further to this a website needs to consider how to generate revenue, and hows its efforts to tend to user flow can translate into revenue.

If the organisation is not-for-profit, this might be as simple as generating funding via sponsorship, and proving to its funders that its online publishing activities are attracting a sufficient audience. However, most websites will need to adopt a model which draws revenue from many sources, including individual purchases or donations. In this case attending to the user flow and building community loyalty can generate revenue from many sources:

In conclusion, publishers spending their time looking into ACAP might well be wise to consider how the portion of their revenue that comes from premium content might be protected. However, they need to view this revenue alongside other potential sources of income. They also need to be cognizant that making money in one way can cut off another, in this case impacting on traffic and loyalty, resulting in an overall net loss of revenue.

If you haven’t heard of Farmville then you’re obviously not on Facebook. If you are on Facebook and don’t play Farmville, it’s either because you did and gave up due to the neediness of the game or because you’re taking a principled stance against the news feed spamming application.

For those that are blissfully unaware of the game, FarmVille is a a Facebook application in which you play the role of a farmer (obv), the aim of the game is increase your experience. As your experience grows you can access more and better crops and each time you level up, you’re rewarded with Farm cash. Farm cash, which can also be bought with real life proper cash, is the only way you can increase the size of your farm and get goodies like extra fuel for your various farm vehicles.

It’s a simple game, though the creator, Zynga, is continually enhancing it by adding seasonal goodies, new crops and extra tasks. All of which seems to be working as there are currently over 63 million active players, up from 30 million at the end of August, approximately one fifth of all Facebook users, one half of all daily active uysers  and a number not short of the population of the UK. Personally I find it scarier that it has roughly six times the number of players that World of Warcraft does, which took four years to get to 11.5 million subscribers.

So how does this relate to monetising social media? Well FarmVille encourages every player to send gifts to their friends, a gift consisting of a tree, animal or decorative item, like picket fence. When you receive the item, the note accompanying it asks you to reciprocate. I think some items are only available via gifting and you can certainly get higher level items than your current level from affluent Farmer friends. While you are encouraged to spend cash to get farm coins, I don’t actually know of anyone who has done so, and therefore I think it is fairly safe to describe it as a ‘gift economy’ which reflects the economy of social networking as a whole.

In a gift economy goods and services are exchanged with no expectation of immediate reciprocity or indeed an explicit agreement of such, which compares to a market or barter economy where there is an explicit quid pro quo. Farmville would like to be a market economy but as users can get everything need by spending only time and giving gifts, I doubt it will achieve significant levels of non-advertising related income. Advertising in its own way is more like a barter economy, users donate some of their attention in return for receiving a free service, the advertiser gives some form of entertainment, offer or knowledge in return for that attention. Obviously the advertisers are hoping that the attention will turn into a transaction in the real world related market based economy.

So finally to my point, the internet, currently, is a largely gift giving economy, social networks particularly so. We pass on information we feel will be of use, respond to requests to fill in surveys, vote for people and generally never expect a direct return. Rather we hope that we will receive the same in return.

Which is what will make it difficult, if not impossible to monetise, or make it into a market economy. Just like FarmVille, why would we pay for something when we know we can get it for free?

I wrote a post a while ago explaining how the freemium business model for websites works. As part of this I referred to farmville, a social game on facebook that charges for extras.

However there has been a recent exploration of another side of freemium on techcrunch.

“In short, these games try to get people to pay cash for in game currency so they can level up faster and have a better overall experience. Which is fine. But for users who won’t pay cash, a wide variety of “offers” are available where they can get in-game currency in exchange for lead gen-type offers. Most of these offers are bad for consumers because it confusingly gets them to pay far more for in-game currency than if they just paid cash (there are notable exceptions, but the scammy stuff tends to crowd out the legitimate offers). And it’s also bad for legitimate advertisers.

The reason why I call this an ecosystem is that it’s a self-reinforcing downward cycle. Users are tricked into these lead gen scams. The games get paid, and they plow that money back into Facebook and MySpace in advertising, getting more users. Who are then monetized via lead gen scams. That money is then plowed back into Facebook and MySpace in advertising to get more users…”

Of course there is a trade-off: every social application has to determine whether to betray the loyalty of users and potential users by cashing them in like this. However, it seems from the techcrunch write-up that the levels of income that can be generated by moving over to the dark side is so high any profit-making enterprise would be tempted. Thus, it will either be up to the might of the social media massive to stand up against the gamers they feel are exploiting them, or up to government regulation. Which brings us back to questions of internet sovereignty and borders and the need to answer questions like ‘Who right now can regulate and enforce a law which affects web users in 90 countries?’

In the meantime, those trying to monetise in a freemium sort of way need to consider the following and act accordingly:

“There’s an easy way to determine if something is a scam or not. For any particular offer, ask yourself if anyone would buy the product or service if the terms were clearly spelled out for them, and they weren’t being bribed with in-game currency. The answer for many of these is a resounding “no.” “

Michael Arrington

Article intéressant ce matin sur ruefontenac.com de la plume de Philippe Rezzonico.

Les ventes de musique en ligne franchissent les 10 pour cent de marché au Québec,

…en date du 4 octobre dernier, 4 881 500 millions de pistes numériques ont été achetées depuis le début de l’année, comparativement à 4 108 200 pour l’ensemble de 2008.

Converties en album, ces pistes sont l’équivalent de 367 808 disques compacts. En additionnant les 474 600 albums numériques vendus à la pièce depuis le début de 2009, on arrive à un total de 842 408 albums, soit une hausse considérable en regard des 721 315 albums numériques vendus en 2008, et ce, pour une période 25 pour cent (trois mois) plus courte.

Bien que les hausses de ventes numériques ne comblent pas les pertes causées par la baisse des ventes physiques.  Il est tout de même encourageant de voir que la population achète de plus en plus leur musique au lieu de la télécharger illégalement.

Par contre tant que nous n’aurons pas trouvé une façon pour que les adolescents puissent faire des achats en ligne nous serons très loin de régler le problème. Sans parler du problème des redevances demandé aux fournisseurs de contenu internet.

There is a real need for more and more organisations to embrace new ways of sustaining their online operations. However explaining monetisation avenues can be difficult - the how and why profit can be achieved just doesn’t add up for those struggling to hold on to models best suited to the old economy. 

I saw Paulina Bozek speak on ‘The Rise of Social Games:  New Trends and Future Directions for Interactive Entertainment’ at LSE today – as part of ‘Orientation Festival 2009′. (Not sure what happened to Freshers Fair, but not being so Fresh anymore, the new title works for me).

I found her lecture very interesting, a walk through gaming history and the latest in social gaming innovations. She referred to the concept of disruptive innovation, essentially improving a product or service in a way the market doesn’t expect, often by conceiving simpler solutions to those currently dominating (in relation to the Wii and Songstar).

Although the material presented was not particularly new to me personally, what struck me was how well she explained social web principles to the mainly non-technical audience. She seamlessly introduced the freemium model – giving examples of the Zinger (Farmville) and Playfish games on Facebook – both of which make money via micropayments. Presentation of the freemium equation in this context was so simple, it could get even the most cynical MDs on-side. 

Total number of users x Conversion rate x Average Revenue Per Paying User (ARPPU)

This model holds that if you provide a useful service for free, and attract many, many users (millions if you’re lucky) – you can sustain your website or application by charging a fee to a small percentage of users. Paulina told us that Farmville have amassed 50 million active players in just 5 months, Playfish 82 million across several social games. We live in a world where the marginal costs of digital distribution approach and reach zero – thus working on creaming some money off the top makes far better sense than restricting the user base with pay walls for membership and other core social actions. It is surprising what people will pay for a virtual ornament for their virtual house – it is those extras that can be monetised. In other words, it pays well to welcome the free-riders and then pay special attention to that all important conversion rate.

In response to the news that Google is throwing its hat into the online content micropayment ring, Mindy McAdams counters with a suggestion for a small daily fee for website access, as opposed to, say, a small fee for individual article access. She imagines:

a kind of token ID, sort of like a gift certificate code. (These must be secure, because every e-commerce site uses them.) The difference would be that you could use the same code on any computer, logging on and off, for the specified period of time. (The code would expire after 24 hours, for example.)

My response to this is that the biggest problem is not necessarily the willingness of people to pay for journalism (though, to be honest, I think they are less and less inclined to do this), but making the effort to actually do so.

Anything that puts up a barrier between user and content will drastically cut usage, be it registration, making people watch an advertisement before seeing the content they click through to, or making a payment.

The payment thing is a double whammy. I may (possibly) be prepared to pay my 50c to read the New York Times. But I can’t put coins into my computer. So I must be a member of some payment mechanism (PayPal, Worldpay, whatever) and so be able to pay through that, using my passwords and such. Or I must have my credit card to hand and go through the palaver of using that. Really – it would have to be extra special and useful content for me to do that, and 99.9% of the time online it isn’t.

The other issue is the difference between consuming paper-based content and online content. I may well pay $1 or so for a newspaper to read on a journey, or with a cup of coffee, but I’m much less inclined to do this for online content. Online, I’m much more likely to be reading an individual article that I find through search, or via a blog link. I don’t sit down and “read the paper” in the same way.

Some attempts are being made to think around this problem. There are a few donation-based models now up and running that take money you put in a central pot and distribute it around web sites of your choice based on your actual usage. But as this is a charitable model, you’d have to be very motivated to set that up.

Could you make this sort of model compulsory? Maybe. But I think it’s the breaking of the link between the payment and the physical object of the newspaper that’s at the heart of this.

Breaking music albums up into MP3 tracks has destroyed consumers’ willingness to buy actual albums. Similarly, the breakup of content on the web has undermined consumers’ willingness to buy newspapers as newspapers online.

So, unless any suggested payment mechanism can accommodate much more promiscuous online reading patterns, I think it’ll be a non-starter.

What a difference a grinding advertising recession makes. Only six months ago, culture secretary Andy Burnham said that a three-month consultation between the government and advertisers had “failed to produce a convincing case for product placement”.

As ever, of course, the usual government terror of bad things happening to people because of the economy has meant a predicted U-turn. Now, new broom culture boy Ben Bradshaw is thought to believe the exact opposite – and that a ban on product placement puts UK programme makers at “a competitive disadvantage compared with the US and other rivals”.

Whatever. It won’t help the BBC, or children’s programme makers (and let’s not forget that it was the popular ban on junk food advertising that has helped to hammer independent sector children’s programming).

But, you know, it might just help us bloggers. In a comment on my recent blog stats geekery post, FleetStreetBlues said “Now if only we could make the damn thing pay…”

The answer is simple – strike a lucrative product placement deal and fame and riches beckon. My cheque should already be in the post…

]]> http://elliotpearson.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/sharing-is-becoming-less-of-a-dirty-word/ Thu, 27 Aug 2009 22:07:59 +0000 Elliot Pearson http://elliotpearson.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/sharing-is-becoming-less-of-a-dirty-word/

Developments in both the music industry and that of how we interact as a society (through an increased use and reliance on the internet as a means of communication) have gone firmly hand-in-hand over the last twenty years. In fact, it is quite possible to draw correlations between the two through the well-documented ups and downs that the record industry has been through.

As people grew more used to interacting online, services such as peer-to-peer networks gave them new ways in which they could share information, much to the dismay of those whose livelihood revolved around the sale of recorded music. We have become increasingly accustomed to utilising online platforms to communicate with our social circles, and those who we would never have had the opportunity to communicate with if it were not for such technologies. As we shift between ‘versions’ of the internet, we notice an increase in content and platforms centred around what the user helps to generate – either based around interaction with others, or on content that is generated based on our preferences, usage or specifications.

The music industry is learning that such developments can be harnessed for positive purposes, rather than feeling the need to restrict them at every possible opportunity. How has sharing gone from being the arch enemy of the world record business to a key ally in reaching the expanse of audience in such an information-rich society?

As long as music has been played, it has been a way of communication and was to be shared amongst a social group, from the caves of our prehistoric ancestors, through to the orchestral concerts of the great composers, and on to families gathered around the gramophone or wireless radio. As a society we have always found music enjoyed with friends as an enriching experience, both for the appreciation of music and as a social bonding. We have (and will always) share music as a cultural commodity on a social level, but emerging technologies are perceived to have converted this from a social information transfer based on a qualified gatekeeper approach, to being seen as a means of bypassing financial requirements of ownership. Whether it be bootlegs of live shows, mixtapes or simply the copying of borrowed music, such grey area use of recorded music has been prolific for a number of years, but the adoption of digital formats and the internet as a tool have lead to a faster, cheaper and easier way for such things to take place.

While the industry first tried to rectify it’s mistakes in missing the opportunities or threats that digital music posed by litigating and taking a hard legal line against infringements (further pushing the public further down a path they were hoping not to go down, vilifying themselves for good measure), they are discovering that by lining themselves up with options to help control how music is consumed online by adapting to how the audience wants to consume it, they can regain some control over revenue streams from legitimate music use.

With micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter, and sites that help to populate such platforms with musical discovery opportunity. such as blip.fm, and social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, sharing music can help to promote music between consumers in a way that feeds through as word of mouth has done for years, but covering a distance far greater than previously possible, with the internet amplifying an individuals voice further than ever before. It is key that the industry has music in place and available for people to find in a way that they can receive maximum possible returns as the internet increasingly involves interaction through technology and platforms that integrate with each other, such as Spotify announcing the ability to share album, artist and track links with others online through integrated Twitter functionality. Making official widgets and embeddable players available for consumers to place on their own sites, blogs and social networking profiles increases the likelihood that a greater audience will sample and use/purchase the music, all at little to no cost to the label concerned, and at potentially a far more valuable level of inter-personal recommendation than can be reached through standard marketing coverage.

In a world where music is reaching availabilities far greater than a person has time available to consume it, being heard is coming in as a second requirement after being found amidst the proliferation of music in the first place. Simple tactics such as making music easy to share, yet based in, and made available through, official partners so that monetisation is still possible will go a long way to optimising revenue returns from little outlay, as well as having a number of positive marketing benefits.

Youtube announced the monetization of its website on its official blog. Users who publish viral video will have the opportunity to win money via Google Adsense. An ad will be added next to their video and incomes will be shared between them and Youtube. If you want to learn more about it, click here.

Youtube vient tout juste d’annoncer sur son blog officiel : « In the future, everyone will monetize their 15 minutes on Youtube”, en référence bien sûr à la célèbre citation d’Andy Warhol (« À l’avenir, chacun aura son quart d’heure de célébrité mondiale. »)

En effet, le site de partage de vidéos va permettre à ses utilisateurs de gagner de l’argent grâce au partage des revenus. Les utilisateurs concernés seront ceux ayant posté une vidéo répondant aux conditions suivantes :

-          ils doivent être les auteurs de la vidéo ou bien en posséder tous les droits,

-          la vidéo doit avoir une certaine viralité c’est-à-dire être visionnée massivement

-          celle-ci doit être conforme aux conditions d’utilisation du site.

Si la vidéo correspond à cette description, l’utilisateur recevra un courriel l’invitant à « activer le partage de revenus » qui s’effectuera via Google Adsense où il devra automatiquement posséder un compte (nouvel exemple de promotion croisée des services Google). Une publicité sera alors positionnée à coté de sa vidéo et l’utilisateur rejoindra le Youtube Partnership Program (YPP) initialement réservé aux grands groupes et aux médias. Pour le moment, cette fonction n’est disponible qu’aux Etats-Unis mais Youtube a pour projet de l’internationaliser.

Cependant Youtube ne s’est pas prononcé sur le pourcentage des revenus qui reviendra aux auteurs. Mais il ne faut pas s’attendre à des sommes extraordinaires puisque dans le Wall Street Journal David Devore auteur de la vidéo « David after dentist » visionnée 28 millions de fois annonce qu’il a reçu seulement 10 000$ de revenus. Nous ne saurons jamais combien ont été les recettes publicitaires totales engendrées par cette vidéo mais la part reversée à ce cher David semble mince.

Cette nouveauté est une bonne solution pour monétiser l’audience grâce aux publicités et éveiller la créativité de nombreuses personnes ! Twitter ne devrait-il pas s’en inspirer pour monétiser le microbloging?

Sources: Infopresse.com, blogoergosum.com, zdnet.fr, commentcamarche.net

Considerations of how to sustain sites with great content and vibrant communities converge as publishers get as social as they can – and communities add multiple ways for their members to share all types of media. At the same time marketers are descending on these social destinations in droves, searching for the right time and tone to get their brand recognised, garner interest and secure sales. 

Pay walls (methods to restrict content access to paying subscribers) are annoying and counter-intuitive to growing a loyal, satisfied community, despite some powerful players insisting on giving them a bash. Miles Guildford has argued strongly that “the major shift in thinking that most publishers must make is the real value of an online content business is the audience, not the content“. But the core question publishers and community managers need to ask themselves is, why would a visitor or member make a decision to purchase a product via you? If you need to turn the love of your community members into hard cash, here are four core areas to look at:

• Usability: The option to buy something via the site should be  easy, quick, clear and safe – for example you should not unexpectedly send users off to affiliates – that open in a new window and set off pop-up blockers and browser warnings. 
• Relevancy: Where possible suggest the purchase of products and services alongside relevant content or to relevant members. Even better, also display reviews of those products and services by other community members (ala amazon reviews).
• Loyalty: Make clear to the user that if they buy something via the site, this will help it – and that this help is needed. Making a purchase will appeal to users for whom the site is useful - they should understand that without revenue it cannot exist.
• Honesty: Be upfront about activities on the site that are designed to make money. Don’t just happen to mention how great the turbo7000 hairdryer is in the middle of an article with a link to buy. Advertorial content ‘cunningly’ mixed in, is likely to be quickly spotted and serve as a massive turn-off to valuable visitors and members.

Here are some good examples of the above principles in practice:

Moneysavingexpert

The links within the content:

The explanation about links to members and visitors (read the ‘how this site is financed‘ section for lots of ideas on how publishers can make a ‘free’ website work):

Ladies who Launch

Has an online tool that allows community members (women starting or running businesses) to post their requirements and have those with relevant products and services bid for them:

Vous désirez partir un blogue (ou blog) et vous vous demandez quel interface choisir entre les gratuits WordPress ou Blogspot?

Ce n’est pas parce que Technoblogue est sur WordPress que je vais vous dire automatiquement de choisir la plateforme WordPress.

Je préfère grandement les options et les configurations permises dans Blogspot (propriété de Google) et aussi l’option monétisation de votre blogue que Blogspot offre.

Parcontre j’ignore pourquoi le moteur de recherche de Google fait une très mauvaise job en ce qui concerne le référencement des blogues de Blogspot pourtant sa propriété.  Google fait mieux avec les blogues de WordPress de ce côté et c’est uniquement pour cette raison que j’ai choisi WordPress. Attention!  Je mentionne ici la version gratuite de WordPress hébergé sur les serveurs de WordPress comme c’est le cas de Technoblogue.

Car vous pouvez aussi décider de prendre l’interface WordPress pour votre blogue et avoir votre propre hébergeur et avec votre propre nom de domaine.  Dans ce cas-ci il y a un gros pour et un gros contre.

Le gros pour c’est que vous pourrez monétisez votre blogue avec par exemple le populaire Google Adsense ce que la  version gratuite de WordPress hébergée chez les serveurs de WordPress ne permet pas.  Parcontre avec ce choix, le gros contre est l’indexation de votre blogue.  Dû fait qu’il ne soit pas sur les serveurs de WordPress, l’indexation par Google de votre blogue se fera beaucoup moins bien et surtout beaucoup moins rapidement.

Dans le cas de Technoblogue on a choisi d’être plus lu au détriment de l’argent.

Despite years of debate over the damage the web’s wreaking on traditional newspapers, what to do about it remains unsettled by those at the helm. From the UK perspective, our daily rags are literally forking off in different directions.

There is the pay wall, the route Rupert ‘We intend to charge for all our news websites’ Murdoch seems to be taking. Then there is Emily Bell’s freemium strategy:

“I don’t know how many times or how clearly I can say we won’t be charging for content on the site, but we won’t. Only six months ago we removed the last remaining paywall from web content from around our crosswords.

“Our strategy is entirely around reach and audience engagement — both if which would be irreparably damaged by pay walls.”

Guardian considers ‘members’ club’ to boost revenue

If I had to pick one of Charlie Beckett’s descriptions I’d say Murdoch is gambling or asset-stripping, the genius tag doesn’t cut it. This is because Rupert’s rhetoric just doesn’t seem to acknowledge that the dynamic has changed. In the age of abundant information the only way you can expect users to pay for strings of characters is a) Quality and b) Loyalty.

The trouble with relying on a) Quality is that as publishing costs approach zero there can be content out there which is as good as,  or even better, than that created by newspapers. Empirical evidence indicates:

“the blogosphere can produce content of a higher quality than that produced by the profit driven, industrial model of production employed by the traditional media” 

Tim Watts (PDF)

No online newspaper will survive if it ignores this fact. It can only win by engaging with it – being open to the new publishing environment. Ultimately, this means adopting a many-to-many virtual community model rather than a broadcast model: creating b) Loyalty, even if that means giving away content for free. It also means letting in and listening to the madding crowd, who, if you listen hard enough, might actually tell you what they are prepared to pay for.

glass wall picture by poritsky

…largely in the comments section to my post a couple of days ago, oddly enough.

Soilman points me to an interesting article in the Telegraph about Swedish peer-to-peer site The Pirate Bay and the general unwillingness of consumers to pay for content these days.

Here’s what the Telegraph thinks:

Why won’t consumers pay for content? The answer is very simple. Consumers have been so spoilt by free content over the last fifteen years that they now take it for granted that content should be free.

Uh, yes. Those selfish, thoughtless consumers.

Well, actually – in more specific economic terms – the cost of publication and the barriers to entry are so low that there is a vast supply of content. And that means consumers are just shopping in a media mall where everything is at bargain basement, loss-leader prices. Of zero, mostly. 

Attempts to choke off that supply and so create artificial scarcity – a bit like De Beers and the diamond trade – are doomed to failure because there’s just so much stuff out there to read. 

And I loved this bit:

At a certain moment in the not too distant future, consumers will finally have to acknowledge their own guilt in the destruction of our paid culture. 

Yeah. Sure. That‘ll happen…

Here’s a nice piece from Scooping The News that outlines clearly why they think charging for online news content is a bit of a non-starter.

It covers the main bases:

• The supply of web content is now vast
• Charging hasn’t worked for anyone else yet.
• Newspapers don’t have compelling enough content to compete
• There will always be free competition

And as Rupert Murdoch has noticed – the main free competitor in the English-speaking world will be the BBC. In the face of such asymmetric competition, I wonder if anyone can make a go of charging for content online.

More on the position of the BBC in all this to come…

Even casual readers of Freelance Unbound will know I’m pretty sceptical that the news media will find it easy to make a go of charging for online access to plain old news. But, you know, I could be wrong.

A case in point is the Boston Globe, which has announced it will definitely, absolutely, start doing this soon.

Although, according to the report from Editor and Publisher:

Neither the specifics of the plan nor a potential date to begin charging have been officially announced.

Hmm. Well, we’ll wait and see I guess.

Don’t get me wrong – I’d be delighted for the Globe if the plan works. And it seems from the noises being made by publishers that newspapers with their back against the wall see no other option. So we may well see this experiment happening.

And maybe once some papers take the plunge, others will rush to copy them. Although this flies in the face of most commercial experience, which will normally see companies sitting back to watch as higher prices kill off a competitor rather than happily joining in with the strategy.

[HT: Annette Novak]

There’s a good piece on PaidContent.org about Rupert Murdoch’s plans to charge for News International’s web content. Part of this will be to charge for access to The Sun and the News of the World online.

How will he manage to do this?

“Just make our content better and differentiate it from other people. And I believe if we’re successful, we will be followed by all the media.”

Well, maybe. Anyone familiar with this blog knows I’m sceptical about the ability of general news media to charge for content to the extent that they need to. Sure, they may make some money from subscriptions online, but enough to fund an entire news operation? And enough to make up for the decline in advertising revenue that will come from having a much smaller readership?

As others have suggested, the real commercial model for media will probably come from added value services (maybe apps, maybe something else). I suspect the old menu of news and, increasingly, entertainment is just not different enough from the free alternatives.

And before anyone starts banging on about how the free stuff is no good, look at how many people happily read the crappy free newspapers on the train rather than buying a “quality” paper. People don’t see it as a problem for the most part.

But Murdoch himself acknowledges the key problem:

“Frankly, the big free competition will be coming from the BBC.”

Perhaps the solution is to force the BBC to put up a pay wall at the same time. That way we’ll see if users can be tempted to pay for news content when there’s no decent free alternative…

[HT: Jessica]

• Tweeting all the way to the bank

Push too hard for revenue in the short term, they might drive away users, undermining a network. Leave it too late to monetise and the business could collapse.

Social media – is it about money or people?

[From The Economist]

• The Irresistible Illusion

There are no self-evident connections between the key objectives of counter-terrorism, development, democracy/ state-building and counter-insurgency. Counter-insurgency is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for state-building.

Rory Stewart knows Afghanistan, and this essay is a expert analysis of the problems with the Afghan ‘mission’; it is a pity that his solution to the problem is not as clear as his diagnosis of the problem.

[From the London Review of Books]

• What went wrong with economics

Of all the economic bubbles that have been pricked, few have burst more spectacularly than the reputation of economics itself.

A spirited but balanced defence of the dismal science.

[From The Economist]

Very interesting piece by Stan Schroeder on Mashable on the different implications of free online content.

• “Free” is not just about price – it’s also about simplicity and ease of use. 
• Some content will be difficult to charge anything for. Unfortunately for journalists, it’s news.
• Forcing charges down people’s throats is a bad way to go. So that broadband tax to pay for content is a bit of a loser.

For once this is a piece whose author really seems to understand the nuances of online monetarisation. Well worth a read…

[HT: HyperwriterUK]

Friends,

You may have noticed that my stance of remaining optimitic post budget was not misplaced. Hardly any thing has factually changed since then but there is now a tendency to see with an eye of approval, all that has positive implications, not only here but all around the world. It is for this reason that the second consequitive day of positive closing is witnessed all over the world, ours too should be like that.

Goldman Sachs has posted very decent quarterly earnings on back of equity underwriting business. Back home our bankers are shy of undertaking such business on grand scale. I think the big banks here should have an arm devoted to doing merchant banking with courage and flare. They have been sitting on cash and letting growth in lending slip and are suffering for that. India can not afford to have shy bankers, here every rupee lendable should find way into borrowers’ hands as this would be spurring economy, getting job for every idle hand. As per RBI report, YoY credit growth ending June is paltry 15.68pc, the lowest in six years. Now when there is money and when the govt has big borrowing target, how was it interpreted to mean as bad for economy. The both will balance each other.

PSU banks will be rejuvinated, 20pc (750000) employees are going to retire by 2011. There is now pressure on them to open new branches to help inclusive growth, good sign on two counts ie employement and economic growth.

FM has told that the deficit will not be monetised. I think he should not have promised it for the monetisation under certain conditions, like in current times, is not bad or a crime. The RBI will however ease the impact of govt borrowing through its ‘open market operations’ which is not lending directly to govt but increasing money supply in market.

So, rejoice in the markets bullish mood and keep track of ‘panch-tattva/post result’ and take advantage.

You should also participate in ‘panch-tattva contest’ and predict Nifty closing. It closed at healthy 4111, today’s you have to mention.

HariOm,
krsnaKhandelwal

I love the peer-to-peer success story of mapping Martian craters. Yochai Benkler and other commentators on the new digital economy reference the ‘Martian Clickworkers’ example as proof that that the Wisdom of Crowds can really work.

The  story goes that NASA were using images of Mars to map the craters on the planet’s surface. Instead of fully trained PhDs spending months or even years doing this – the work  was broken up into small components and put online. Then participants, using a very simple interface, spent five minutes here, ten minutes there, clicking to map the craters. After six months, 85,000 people were mapping martian craters at a faster rate than images were coming in. Their combined work was at a quality which was, quote, “practically indistinguishable from the markings of a fully-trained PhD” on average. (You can watch Benkler explain this and more in this great TED video on the new open-source economics.)

The question is how could this tendency, or even compulsion, of people to work together and help others online translate to business revenue, and even profit?

Intuit’s QuickBooks Live Community provides an example of how facilitating remote strangers to work together can support a business, and even save costs.

The Chief Executive of Intuit learnt that the forums for their popular TurboTax product were a hive of activity:

“Customers were not only asking technical questions, they were often outshining Intuit’s own tech support staff by answering 40% of the queries themselves.”

Business Week: How Intuit Makes a Social Network Pay 

The social side of the TurboTax product has led to increased sales and falling tech support costs. Intuit’s outsourcing of tech support to participants over social web shows how the Martian Clickworkers model can translate into a core component of a successful product business model.

mars crater picture by TopTechWriter.US

In a vibrant virtual community members like to stay in touch - with the latest information relating to the social object they gather around - and with others. Mobile is the next step in facilitating that desire to keep up to date and build social capital. How can organisations and communities start to utilise and capitalise on the trend? The following examples illustrate the possibilities presented by the most simple of mobile technologies, SMS:

Case Studies

• National Express encourages customers to Rant and Rave at them via SMS.
• The Where Are You Now social network allows members to send SMS through the site for a price. 
• Laura Papworth states SMS has been profitable in Australia, for those offering messaging between members and text voting.
• MGM Grand Hotel LLC cross promote hotel room offer via SMS & email marketing.
• Scottish Institute for Enterprise uses mobile marketing to reach entrepreneurs.
• Rangers Football Club uses Rant and Rave to tackle prejudice.
• Philladelphia campaign uses SMS to link city residents with HIV test locations.
• The Pink Ladies’ luxury vehicle service send regular text alerts providing clients with booking numbers and a reminder to book early on busy nights.

Mobile Tools and Services

These are examples only, it is advisable to investigate a range of options and verify relevant testimonials before embarking on any projects:

• Text Marketer allows you to upload your database of mobile numbers and send SMS in bulk. Cost per message sent is 4.9pence or less.  You could generate revenue by finding a sponsor who is willing to pay to support the service, or use messaging to drive sales or other objectives.
• Startup Adfonic enables advertisers and agencies to bid for advertising on mobile sites and applications. This depends on having a mobile site or application, and gives communities and websites the opportunity to find suitable advertisers for their mobile activities.
• FrontlineSMS is free software that turns a laptop and a mobile phone into a central communications hub. Once installed, the program enables users to send and receive text messages with large groups of people through mobile phones.

If you wish to get financial support for your website from an organisation, company, brand or government, you will need to create a proposal. Here are some must-haves to include (not neccessarily in this order):

1. Your mission: What are you about? What are the aims of what you are doing / your product or service? This is the sales bit.
2. Your vision: Be clear about where you feel your organisation is going. This is where you articulate your dream – but don’t be too pie in the sky. It needs to look rational and achievable. Statements about saving the world or overtaking Dyson or Tesco will probably look too over-ambitious.
3. Your success: Play up your personal, and organisational successes. What is it about you, and your organisation to date, that stands out, shows willing, demonstrates a likelihood of future success? Linda Mason has said her prior experience in the Sudan helped convince funders for her fantastically successful childcare business in the US.
4. Paint a picture: If you have numbers, create graphs (if they have an upward trajectory). Traffic numbers, members, sales, are great to have. Target market, sales forecasts and projections  make it look like you have done your homework. Any other diagrams or pictures that show how fantastic your idea is will also help your proposal to look interesting, but be sure they are relevant. There is no need to overwhelm your potential donor with detailed schematics and web site maps.
5. Match your visions: Why would the organisation you are pitching to support you? Find their criteria for project funding, or Corporate Social Responsibility Policy, or previous projects they have backed. Match what you are doing to what they want to achieve and make your common aims clear – tailoring to your target is key.
6. Your backers: Who backs you already? If you already have people willing to support you state who they are. People like to think they are part of something safe, or popular – show that if they back you, they stand shoulder to shoulder with giants. That if they dont back you, they are missing out on the party.
7. Your offer: What’s in it for them? A piece of the pie? A logo on your home page? A year’s branding of one your most popular sections? A direct communication with your members once every six months? Be careful not to offer spots on your site for adverts that will turn off and away your visitors. But your offer has to be worth it. Give a range of options if you can. Consider including a line in this section which states *final sponsorship packages are negotiable. This implies sponsors cannot expect everything in your list of items, and also gives them an opportunity to tell you what they would like for their money.  

Your web sponsorship proposal should draw on, but not be the same as your business plan. It is about someone buying into what you can do for them, rather than buying into your business and what it does. Remember, the 13th Law of power is “When Asking for Help, Appeal to People’s Self-Interest, Never to their Mercy or Gratitude.”

If you are looking for funding in the UK try these sources and shortlist those most suitable:

• Sunday Times 100 Best Companies
• Superbrands UK
• Directory of Social Change (Social Enterprise funding)