Online Economics, Ads, and Crash Landings
March 29, 2009
A number of articles have been sent to us here in the mind drainage choked goose pond in the last couple of weeks on the subject of monetizing electronic information. Our official view is that getting cash for online content requires a rethink of the available business models. The pay by the drink approach and the subscription approach don’t work very well in our experience. You can make these work if you have high value, scarce, hard to get information. Other types of information don’t have magnetic appeal so the connection between the user’s credit card and the vendor’s bank account doesn’t stick.
For a case example of how this fails as a business model, you may want to read and save Joseph Tartakoff’s “Tracking The Online-Only Seattle P-I: Traffic Down 20 Percent” here. What struck me was that without the hard copy paper acting as a sales flier, users are not going to the dead tree outfit’s online only service. Without traffic, online advertising becomes less attractive. Over time, the Seattle Post Intelligencer will realize that its online play won’t pay the bills. Without the cash to create the hard copy version, the marketing of the Web site becomes job one. The problem is that marketing is expensive. Ergo: the business models in use at this moment can be tracked casually by anyone with a yen to read news about the Seattle P-I revenue adventure.
I don’t want to quack harshly, but the glib words about online revenue underscore the lack of understanding about how online economics work in the real world. Google borrowed a useful model and now provides an example–or as the entitlement crowd of azure chip consultants likes to say–or a use case. Whatever lingo you prefer is fine, but the fact is that declining traffic means that ad and subscription models are not likely to pull this site out of a steep nose dive. Fasten your seat belts.
Stephen Arnold, March 29, 2009
Gun Shots and Knives: Wizard Suggests the Google Is Dangerous
March 28, 2009
As an addled goose, I ask quite a few questions about the articles I read. I try to be frisky, or as frisky as a fat, dumb, half deaf, poor sighted addled goose can be. I let out a bewildered honk when I read “How Google Shot Microsoft after It Took a Knight to a Gunfight” here. The headline interested me. I noticed the “it”, and I was not sure which antecedent applied. Next I remarked on the use of words routinely filtered by some of my more interesting customers; specifically, “knife” and “gun fight”. Needless to say, I paddled over to the article and dipped my beak.
The story pivots around the behavior of Google and its softened nemesis Microsoft. A Microsoft executive pointed out that the GOOG, as it ages, loses some agility. I too have remarked on the Google’s somewhat tame response to Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter. I am not Microsoft, so Google’s sleek and savvy wizards ignore me the way I overlook plastic bottles floating in this addled goose’s mine drainage filled pond.
The Google did notice Microsoft’s jab. And Googzilla roared. The article summarizes what the GOOG did and offered other examples of what was described as poking
at Google with a stick, and in short order, Google took a baseball bat to Microsoft’s head. But as I keep saying, this is a search war that Microsoft is involved with. It’s deadly serious. If Ballmer it going to talk about “advantages” he thinks his company has over Google in search, he needs to be damn sure they really are advantages. Otherwise, he can expect to have more cans of whoopass opened up on him by Google.
I find this quite exciting. Several reasons:
- A live and ambient pundit is documenting Google’s approach to public relations
- The metaphors used to describe the interaction of Google and Microsoft are escalating to images that suggest life and death
- The article makes it clear that those engaged in other aspects of search and content processing now recognize that the world has changed.
Knives, gun shots, and life and deadly serious are terms to notice. I am delighted that the behavior which I thought I had documented in my 2003 to 2005 work is this day news. Not Twitter speed but good enough for the newer version of the Hatfield and the McCoys of search.
Stephen Arnold, March 28, 2009
Library of Congress Makes Citizens as Fish Splash
March 28, 2009
For me, the Library of Congress is more of a museum than a research facility. Even Google looks like a limping dog when compared to the zippy content flashing across the Twitter spam machine. The Library of Congress, according to TechWhack here, is going to put some of its info on YouTube.com and Apple iTunes. Okay. But the best part of the TechWhack write up was this statement, a true classic in my opinion:
Matt Raymond, the library’s director of communications spoke about the new developments: “Our broad strategy is to ‘fish where the fish are,’ and to use the sites that give our content added value — in the case of iTunes, ubiquity, portability, etc.”.
I do like that citizens, users, customers, whatever as “fish”. Good stuff.
Stephen Arnold, March 28, 2009
Textbook Publishers under Siege
March 28, 2009
First, it was the YouTube education “collection.” If you missed that story, you can catch up here. Most of the blog pundits skip dull stuff like educational videos for good reason. Pretty dull. But if you are in the text book publishing business, the GOOG in education is an item of interest. Since I cover this topic in my new for fee study, I want to mention another force lining up to take on the dead tree crowd and its $100 plus textbooks–open source texts. TechDirt’s “Open Source Text Book Company Flat World Knowledge Gets Funded” tells the story. You can read the article here. What happens when you sweep into a mixture the Apple iTunes educational videos and podcasts and MIT’s decision to make its educational content like professors’ articles into a pile. The mixture blows up the traditional textbook business. Oh, the mixture is volatile. I hated paying big prices for my econ book which I thought was almost worthless. I learned years after Economics 101 that that book and its pricing kept one publishing company solvent for decades. Boom. Good bye.
Stephen Arnold, March 28, 2009
Google: No Human Customer Service
March 27, 2009
Quite an interesting post and even more interesting sequence of comments about Google Checkout here. The headline is arresting, “Google Is Evil, Worse than PayPal: Don’t Use Google Checkout for Your Business.” For me the interesting point is that fully automated systems make decisions that Google cannot explain. My take on this issue is that if one depends upon Google Apps, for example, for a service, is a customer vulnerable to a unilateral and inexplicable termination of the business relationship with Google. If the allegations in this article “Google Is Evil…”, the GOOG may have to revisit its policies. Terminations are justified. Not knowing why a termination of service occurred is not in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, March 27, 2009
Yahoo: To Catch a Google
March 27, 2009
Yahoo wants to leverage its technology and serve its users. To improve on both points, Yahoo—according to PaidContent.org here—has tested 141 versions of its home page. Advertisers may wonder if 141 variants are necessary. I would be happy if I could read the text and get to my email without the unnecessary news display. My view: too much clutter and unnecessary cycles. Improving search would be helpful too.
Stephen Arnold, March 27, 2009
Social Networks in the Organization: Choppy Water
March 25, 2009
Why was I not surprised? Read “Enterprises Struggle to Adopt Social Networking Internally,” an article by C. G. Lynch in CIO Magazine here. Mr. Lynch reported that cultural barriers, not technology was the barrier. Little wonder that organizations are unable to exploit technology. “Getting it” seems in my opinion one issue. Then organizations have to do it, which is another hurdle in a recession. The task may be too much for aging, financially challenged, and regulated deciders. Maybe these Enterprise 2.0 managers should turn to their kids, not business buzzworders who don’t know a twit from a tweet? Just my opinion, of course.
Stephen Arnold, March 25, 2009
Connotate’s Agent Approach Explained
March 25, 2009
The Connotate Web log here offers up a transcript of Bruce Molloy’s explanation of the firm’s software agent approach. The venue was a podcast interview with an interlocutor named Mike Lippis of the Outlook Series. You can find the transcript here. The information is useful, but the best way to read it is by scrolling to the end of the post where Part One is located and then reading upwards to Part Five. For me, the most interesting comment in the transcript was:
I’ll give you 2 or 3 ways that is realized through the simple design of our software. One is Agent creation. If you have someone who’s working in business intelligence or research or an analyst or someone who wants to do price comparisons and that person wants to monitor certain, say, prices or developments or products from a competitors’ site they can very quickly and easily paint the screen, if you will, create an Agent and have that agent then available to monitor over time, every day, or every hour, every minute kind of, what’s going on. Secondly, in terms of the Library and this is, there’s a real multiplier effect here in terms of the Library. As you get people starting to share the Agents, those Agents come to represent really best practices, best ways to get information delivered, to look at it, to compare it, to mash it and as such it’s a repository of expertise that is then shared and multiplied in the organization. And lastly, in terms of output just because it’s so easy to get this output because it’s so well personalized it becomes a solution that individuals, non-technical folks in an organization can use without having to go to IT and get into a long development cycle, if it’s even possible.
A social spin on creating and sharing intelligent software. Interesting idea in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, March 23, 2009
Valley Wag on Copyright, Wikipedia, and a Dead Tree Outfit
March 25, 2009
Short take. Click here and read “Is the Los Angeles Times Cribbing from Wikipedia? Valley Wag presents snippets from an LA Times’s story and source or coincidental snippets from Wikipedia. I am no expert in legal matters and copyright, but these snippets looked similar. Maybe it is a coincidence? Maybe it is another example of the ease with which information can be located and possibly repurposed. I haven’t had an original idea or sentence in my goosely life, but I am no journalist. I am not sure what to think. I am afraid to quote an Associated Press story, but if this alleged similarity is valid, the Los Angeles Times seems to operate with some interesting methods.
Stephen Arnold, March 25, 2009
Google Interview Worth Reading
March 25, 2009
The interview with Alfred Spector in ComputerWorld is interesting for what it says and what it omits. You can find the article “The Grill: Google’s Alfred Spector on the Hot Seat” here. This is a three part interview. Mr. Spector is billed as Google’s vice president of research. For me, the most interesting comment was:
Do you have plans to go after that huge body of information on the Internet that is not currently searched? There is stuff on the Web, the so-called Deep Web, that is only “materialized” when a particular query is given by filling fields in a form. Since crawlers only follow HTML links, they cannot get to that “hidden” content. We have developed technologies to enable the Google crawler to get content behind forms and therefore expose it to our users. In general, this kind of Deep Web tends to be tabular in nature. It covers a very broad set of topics. It’s a challenge, but we’ve made progress.
I would hope so. Google has Drs. Guha and Halevy chugging away or had them chugging away on this problem. Furthermore, Google bought Transformics, a company that most of the Google pundits have paid scant attention to. Yep, Googzilla is making progress. Just plonking along with the fellow who worked on the semantic Web standards and the chap who invented the information manifold. I enjoy Google understatement.
Stephen Arnold, March 24, 2009
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