Subscribe to our XML feed
(?) or add to:
MyYahoo
Bloglines
Rojo
NewsGator Online
CNET Newsburst
|
| Wednesday, February 28, 2007 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 1:49 AM |
permanent link to this entry
 bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Monday, February 26, 2007 |
 In some ways it seems preposterous to be laying low the number one global destination Web site but that hasn't stopped Seeking Alpha's Eric Jackson from delivering a scathing review of Yahoo's financial performance in light of Yahoo's stock price sinking 7% for the past 2 years, compared to Google’s 151% increase. Jackson trashes just about every major Yahoo media initiative and lost deal-making opportunity in recent memory - not to mention CEO Terry Semel's half-billion=plus U.S. dollar compensation package over the past four years. Notably Jackson calls not just for the ouster of Semel but as well for the exit of six others from Yahoo's boardroom and steeper investments in R&D. In other words Yahoo has become just another top-heavy media company trying to focus on old world dealmaking and brand advertising plays while Google creates infinite reserves of user-tailored page inventory from its search results pages and embedded ads on any Web page that wants to host them. It's not an entirely fair characterization of Yahoo, given some of its good moves as of late into social media, but it's fair enough as a reflection of how many traditional media companies have failed to put their money where the growth is. Put simply, acquiring and generating traditional content is not generating the needed page views to justify the investments that Yahoo has made in recent years leading to an overall decline in site traffic. It's going to be hard for Yahoo to make the kind of radical moves that Jackson suggests, but shareholders will be pushing them in that direction soon enough. The hardest part of this shakeup will be that Yahoo's outlook on online media has been a major force in propping up many other media companies' hopes for being able to build traditional models for brand ad-supported content online - and in the process provide those with skills attached to those traditional methods and channels a comfortable career migration path. Ousting Semel and complicit board members is as much a slap in the face of the broader hopes of traditional media companies as much as it is for anyone at Yahoo in particular. Yahoo's significant traffic and membership assets are not going to disappear overnight, but the fundamental failure of Yahoo to fund growth in directions that build valuable user-defined contexts does not augur much for other media-centric portal plays. Here's hoping that the changes come in time to save many of Yahoo's best assets from becoming under-invested properties in a too-little-too-late belt-tightening exercise. Labels: advertising, aggregation, earnings, Google, Seeking Alpha, Trends, Yahoo
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:24 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 10:56 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
Want to catch up on last week's headlines? Try our weekly categorized summary with embedded commentary on the latest trends. Click here to view last week's headlines in reviewLabels: headlines, summaries
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 3:49 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Friday, February 23, 2007 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 7:21 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
Why do so many news and entertainment clips show up on services such as YouTube? Well, in part because many content producers make it so doggone hard to extract content through legitimate channels. Voxant is aiming to change that by leveraging users as distribution agents for legitimately licensed news and entertainment content from traditional outlets. The latest announced partner is McClatchy-Tribune Information Services, which will provide news stories, photos and graphics via Voxant's TheNewsRoom portal. TheNewsRoom allows one to search news text, audio, video and graphics by major categories or search terms and then to extract code for embedding the content into a Web page. The embedded object (example below) includes a "Mash" button that will allow others to copy the embedding code. The content is ad-supported, with a portion of revenues from ads going to the person registered with Voxant for initiating mashups. While TheNewsRoom portal is still a fairly raw work in progress the overall concept shows some promise. By adapting a Weedshare-style revenue-sharing scheme that enables clip copiers to benefit from ad revenues content can move from one context to another in a revenue-generating licensed digital object that observes copyright and still allows for a great viral effect in news distribution. A currently inactive tab in TheNewsRoom's "Mash" display is labeled "licensing," presumably a placekeeper for other ways to redistribute a given item under license such as via reprints, CD-ROM or other media. This may wind up paralleling or incorporating services of this kind from CCC, iCopyright or other online licensing services. While weblogs and other social media sites are obvious targets for this kind of service the question becomes why this type of feature does not become a standard offering in any site that's displaying a piece of syndicated content, much as many sites use embedded reprinting services today. TheNewsRoom is not likely to be a destination site that will attract social media mavens: they're more likely to find content in context elsewhere and want to take it immediately. So perhaps Voxant becomes a service that can manage "mashup" requests centrally for all of the media sites that take in licensed feeds already. These are important details to work out in the long run but for now Voxant has assembled a compelling model for providing legitimate viral distribution of news and entertainment content that deserves to be studied carefully. Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, Licensing, McClatchy, News, Social Media, Voxant
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 12:01 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Thursday, February 22, 2007 |
Mashable comments on the announcement of Answers.com's new AnswerTips embeddable lookup feature, which provides pop-up Answers.com reference content for any non-linked word on a page that's double-clicked. The comments aren't terribly positive: My first question about these tools is always: what’s the benefit to the blogger? Many of these add-ons just hold up your pageloads, direct traffic elsewhere and annoy your visitors. As others have noticed, the answer may be ad revenue: CBS is displaying ads on the pop-up, and presumably Answers will offer revenue sharing on these. However, I sincerely doubt that anyone is in an ad-clicking mood when they view these definitions: it’s really more of an ad for Answers.com, and surely they should be paying site owners a fee for the promotion these pop-ups provide.
 Unfortunately this may have been a bit of a premature swing of the bat at a problem that doesn't really exist. Ads don't appear on this feature by default: note that the CBS implementation is showing only ads for CBS shows, and the pop-up window is co-branded. In other words, this is an opportunity for add-on revenues or marketing for those who would like to use the pop-up for that purpose. Other sites do not display co-branding or ads with the tool embedded, so clearly ads are an option but not a requirement. Since the answers provided in the pop-up is a light summary view of information available from Answers.com there is the potential to lose visitors on a click-through to more details, but if a visitor needed to look up a word to understand what you were writing about you were going to lose them anyway. The pop-up gives you a chance to keep them in context on your site before they move on out of frustration. The real "why" of this feature is not so much ad revenues as the need for Answers.com to build more brand equity in an increasingly crowded marketplace for answers services. The habitual use of Google for looking up basic answers is now being hemmed in also by Wikipedia's rising role as a default for reference information (Answers.com includes content from Wikipedia and many premium sources). How to break out of this squeeze? Get more trend-setters to see Answers.com as a cool "must have" tool so that broader audiences will get the bug as well. Since a user doesn't have to do any downloading to use this feature on a site using the embedded service getting people to try it is that much easier - if they get the idea to double-click a word to use it. Since the provided icons from Answers.com include a "double-click any word" suggestion hopefully the training becomes fairly simple. While I can accept that there is a bit of "embed fatigue" settling in for some folks I think that there's a certain amount of hypocrisy involved in Mashable's critique. On the very page that they mash Answers.com Mashable offers an oodle of their own links to promote their site via others' social media sites. Embedded tool users need to be careful about how they manage their own brands with a branded embed, but the preponderance of direct endorsements through blogrolls, social bookmarking links and other services makes the wise selection of tools such as AnswerTips a reasonable and productive tip for many publishers. In a world where the user is the ultimate aggregator it pays to play nice with free - need we remind you - content partners.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 10:55 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 10:42 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Wednesday, February 21, 2007 |
About a year ago I posted an item on the XM satellite radio service's failure to use an extremely powerful content distribution technology to support old content licensing schemes. Not much has changed since then, except the announcement of a pending deal to merge XM with the equally challenged Sirius satellite radio service. So the solution to aggregating overpriced media in a subscription model is to...aggregate more of it in a monopoly? Hey, it works for cable, why not satellite radio? The press release claims that there will be a cost savings in the neighborhood of USD 3 to 7 billion by the merger, but that's a pretty big neighborhood - it really says that they're still grasping at how to make this a more potent business model. Anti-trust considerations aside it probably makes sense to allow these two companies to see what they can make of a combined service that may be of more use to consumers. They're both chasing a fictional "chokehold" on content distribution that is probably best left to dwindle of its own accord. A better deal would be to open up the production of satellite radio receivers to any manufacturer - and to require those receivers to take in signals from any satellite radio supplier on auctioned-off channels, much as terrestrial radio is managed today. A subscription could get you access to the same number of channels as one receives today, but it would leave open the door potentially to additional programmers to leverage individual channels as well. But a still better deal would be to open up satellite-based services to digital content suitable for mobile downloaders of all kinds. Thanks to the Web programming and publishing has become much more segmented and asynchronous. Why not have a satellite feed that allows downloads to updates on the top 50 games or top 50 blogs? Why not have a Zagat channel that keeps my restaurant and entertainment directory as fresh as possible? Why not pump out the top podcasts for specific market sectors? Why not - please! - give me a feed that keeps my handheld digital road maps and nautical charts up to date with user-contributed content? Let the channel programming providers be responsible for monetization management, with the satellite service provider taking a flat or negotiated cut of the action. Let's hook up those stubby little antennas to the content that people really want - and watch a new era in mobile entertainment take form on "radios," iPods, PCs and whatever other device wants to park itself under a satellite signal. Just because the signal is serial doesn't mean that the programming needs to be serial. Satellite signals have been wasted on the most unimaginative content marketing imaginable. Let's move on to the good stuff soon, please.
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 4:33 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 4:30 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Monday, February 19, 2007 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:05 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 4:29 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Sunday, February 18, 2007 |
Want to catch up on last week's headlines? Try our weekly categorized summary with embedded commentary on the latest trends. Click here to view last week's headlines in reviewLabels: headlines, summaries
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:53 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Friday, February 16, 2007 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:23 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
As in publishing the printing business has been undergoing quite a bit of consolidation and scaling lately, creating ever-larger printing conglomerates focused on higher margins and revenues. The key to their improved economic performance will be "short run" printing for customers wanting to reach highly targeted markets with customized messaging. What will happen when the economies of mass customized printing are married with the source-agnostic aggregation of today's Web? Call it Google Print - and call it the next major challenge facing today's publishers. Click here to read the full News Analysis
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 1:50 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Thursday, February 15, 2007 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:17 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
