The Nook Hook: Not Knowing What You Do Not Know
December 28, 2009
Short honk: I don’t have a Nook. I read Engadget’s “Nook Fails to Communicate, Download Purchased eBooks”. If true, this Barnes & Noble adventure is another example of folks not knowing what they don’t know. Barnes & Noble runs gift shops with some books in them in Louisville, Kentucky. The idea that a retail outfit can manufacture a consumer device is an example of the “lateral thinking” that Edward DeBono advocated in1970 when technology was different in its reach and scope among book store management. Clicking a hyperlink in a browser makes information technology child’s play. Live and learn that information technology is complicated. I will not include a reference to Google’s investment in technology to permit scaling. I will not toss in a comment about Amazon’s and Microsoft’s investments to achieve a similar end. I will just ask that you read the Engadget post and think about those book lights, notebooks, and greeting cards where books once filled shelves. I am looking forward to other dedicated reading devices from other outfits into the consumer electronics market.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 27, 2009
Okay, I want to be upfront. I was not paid to write this news item. I will report this fact to the Government Printing Office, an outfit still in the paper business and on top of publishing innovations.
Real Journalism Explains the Amazon Kindle
December 28, 2009
I looked at the article “Is Amazon Working Backward” and skipped it. I own a couple of Kindles, and I hate the devices. I am going to be 66, and the gray on gray screen, the dorky controls, and the weird limitations on content search drive me nuts. But some folks at Kindle Review read the article, and I think there was some mild disagreement with the NYT’s method. You can read “NYTimes Misuses Kindle Review States to Attack the Kindle”. Make your own decision. Your can follow the links in the Kindle Review write up. For fun, let’s assume that Kindle Review is on target. This begs the question, which outfit, blog or newspaper, does a better job of handling information in a fair and objective manner? I leave it to you.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 28, 2009
Listen up, people. I was not paid to write this. I am reporting this sad state of affairs to the US Marine recruiter in Louisville, Kentucky.
Google Described as a Giant Transaction Machine
December 26, 2009
I find it more fun than watching snakes sun themselves to learn from media mavens what Google is. The former grand vizier of Business Week said in “Google & Media: Biting the Hand that Feeds You”:
Google has become this massive transaction machine, and as everyone knows, transactions are the antithesis of relationships. If a brand wants a relationship with its audience, Google is getting in the way. It’s how Google was able to siphon nearly $22 billion last year in advertising from traditional media. And it’s the most obvious proof that media brands have diminished in value. People are more routinely turning to Google to get information, rather than a brand known for its expertise in a given area.
Are Google’s advertisers abandoning traditional media because Google is siphoning them from magazines and newspapers? Nope. I think that Google is delivering what advertisers think they want or need. Google is not running an ad sales operation in the mode of the 1980-style magazine or newspaper. Google is sort of there and people have to do their own heavy lifting.
The metaphor of a “transaction machine” may contribute to a fundamental misunderstanding of what Google is. A transaction is one part of Google’s functionality. The big part is that the company is functioning as a trans-national computing platform that scales reasonably quickly and economically. Software allows a platform to perform a large number of functions. Seizing on one fails to characterize the whole of the Google operation. But a failure to perceive reality accurately is one of the contributing factors in the decline of traditional media. Just my opinion.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 26, 2009
No one paid me to point out that this source article misses some of the Google’s more obvious features. I think I have to report my freebie penchant to the Taxpayer Advocacy Panel. What do you think?
AOL 2010 Unveiled
December 26, 2009
Short honk: I must admit I was surprised to learn how AOL will position itself in 2010. An organization that converted Relegence.com into Love.com has deeper thoughts than I. Navigate to Business Insider and read “AOL Is Just as Much a Journalistic Organization as The New York Times.” If you are a new media enthusiast, you can listen to a podcast in which the secret plans for AOL are disclosed. Here’s the stunner:
AOL is just as much a journalistic organization as The New York Times, as Bloomberg, as NBC News, as all kinds of organizations new and old.
Okay. The ambiguity in this statement is as delicious as it rhetorical halo.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 26, 2009
Oyez, oyez, I was not paid to point out this secret. Nevertheless I will do my duty because the Central Intelligence Agency needs to know this fact about a company so, so close to the “special” landing area at Dulles Airport. You never know, do you?
It Is Marketing, Not Content?
December 23, 2009
I read with interest “Why Marketing Is Crucial for Publishers.” I have been under the impression that marketing supported sales. Sales produces revenue. Therefore, I thought, marketing has to make money. The publisher makes information too. I wonder what the relationship of marketing to information is. Probably money.
After reading the article, I am not sure. I keep coming back to the marketing – money hook up, but I think another angle lurks behind the words. Read the article. Verify my impression.
One idea that caught my attention was:
To best monetize a site, the ad sales team must harness the audience insight of the marketing team at a detailed level and align ad sales with generating more traffic.
The idea that sales and marketing are going to fall in love and get married strikes me as a Hatfield and McCoy problem. Sales makes sales, earn a commission, and head to the golf course. Marketing does “stuff” that is tough to tie to direct revenue. Sure, marketers can trot out traffic analysis, but the person who lands the sales is the hero. Apple had a brief marriage to a Pepsi marketer, and the company needed to bring the founder back to survive.
One passage that I noted was:
Here’s a simple example: The marketer knows his/her site has 20% of their visitors playing online games, where these visitors stay for between 15 and 30 minutes. Are the ad slots on those pages not worth more because the visitor watches the ad for so long? You bet! But the ad sales team can’t take advantage of it. Here’s another: The ad sales team knows it can sell its “health section” at a $20 cpm. What if the marketing team could buy search terms to generate traffic at less than $20? The marketer would reach its goal of more traffic and the ad sales would generate more revenue. From a technology perspective, the tracking of user behaviour already exists from both an ad perspective and a marketer perspective. Combining these two data sets is what will unlock significant value for both parties.
With automated ad systems, why have a sales person? The reason is that certain types of ads require a human to seal the deal. Inefficient and non-Googley for sure. But for most information companies, the notion of relying on semi autonomous agents is like a jigger of cod liver oil followed by a chunk of Limburger cheese. The idea of having a sales person and an AdWords program in order to “generate traffic at less than $20” strikes me as an expensive proposition.
Publishing, online or not, have some other tough math problems to solve. Online won’t do the job. The reality is that online cannot support the chubby overheads that were possible in the good old days of traditional publishing. Talking about getting sales and marketing to spend the rest of their lives together is far fetched in my opinion. One of the functions, maybe both, must be moved to software. Fire the humans. When that happens, the information companies may have a chance to generate sustainable income.
Tough love is needed for tough times. Fantasies of sales and marketing becoming soul mates is an idea that might have taken flight in the 1970s. A different approach is needed for publishers, online or traditional, in these uncertain times. I thought that information companies had to produce compelling, high value content to generate traffic and earn money. Guess I was wrong. I guess a great product and magnetic information are no longer important.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 23, 2009
Oyez, oyez, this is an uncompensated write up. No sales people or marketing pros involved. For that reason, I wish to report this miserable state of affairs to the National Drug Intelligence Center, which I hope is open during the snow storm in DC.
Quality Journalism Chases New Revenue Angles
December 20, 2009
I live in rural Kentucky so news doesn’t reach the goose pond as it does in a real city. I noticed in my hard copy Wall Street Journal, page W13 (?!) for December 19, 2009, an advertisement with the headline, “Engage journalists and bloggers with the perfect pitch.” There is also a news release on MarketWatch—part of the for fee service available on the Sony eBook reader—about this Dow Jones product. Paying for marketing collateral strikes me as an interesting approach. Charging Sony WSJ subscribers for a marketing pitch. That’s better than Google’s subsidizer model in my opinion.
Image source: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/242/446538765_bfa89f9875.jpg
With news of the London Evening Standard, owned by a certain high profile Russian business person (Alexander Lebedev, an alleged former KGB professional, I wondered about the combination of “journalists” and “bloggers”. Obviously media ownership and the economic crisis makes strange bedfellows. I thought “journalists” were a breed apart from “bloggers”. I am not even a blogger. I am an addled goose and marketing shill, flogging my studies chock full of patent references and the odd Latin or Greek phrase. This high quality journalism business is too sophisticated for mere waterfowl.
I plunged forward in the full page advertisement from the Wall Street Journal about the Wall Street Journal’s software. The product carries the name of Dow Jones, which is a unit of News Corp. As you know, the News Corp. stands for quality journalism and premium content. (I wrote about paying more for the Sony digital WSJ than the hard copy recently. I think the price difference was about $140. The paper edition was cheaper! I find that hard to grasp, but the addled goose was never a top notch economist like those employed by News Corp.)
The idea which I gleaned from a quick trip to http://www.dowjones.com/product-mrm.asp is:
a news-enabled media database and journalist/blogger contact management tool that helps communications professionals pinpoint and engage the right influencers and quickly evaluate the outcome of their media relations activities. Dow Jones links its global collection of traditional and social media with journalist and blogger contact, profile, beat and pitch data so that media relations professionals can easily understand what journalists and bloggers are writing about today and then easily correlate resulting media coverage to their efforts.
I as skimmed the marketing information for this product, I got the impression that this product allows a person with a story idea or a marketer to develop a mailing list and crank out a bunch of targeted emails. I don’t know about you, but I thought this sounded a bit like a spamming program or spamming system.
According to FinChannel.com:
The launch marks the further expansion of Dow Jones’s workflow solutions for communications professionals. The company’s media monitoring and media evaluation tools are used by Global Fortune 2000 companies, public relations agencies, government and nonprofits to research campaigns faster and more thoroughly, stay ahead of breaking news, monitor social media conversations, detect issues earlier, measure campaign effectiveness and easily share campaign results with executives and employees.
Here’s what the software can do, according to the Dow Jones Web site:
Craft highly relevant and personalized pitches, increasing the likelihood that your story will be covered… Understand at a glance what journalists and bloggers are covering today and how best to contact them … Fine tune your contact list to those most likely to be interested … Find the right editorial opportunity for your story … Email a personalized pitch that will get results.
In order to buy the product, Dow Jones provides a “contact me” button. You can also download a free eBook. I found that interesting because books are subject to considerable scrutiny these days. I suppose a book that is about buying a product from Dow Jones is different from the content provided in the newspaper. I think marketing collateral is “free” and okay to use.
You can download a fact sheet and learn about other Dow Jones marketing programs like Insight, which I don’t fully understand because I didn’t bother to download the brochures on these topics. I must admit that I did not visit the “Knowledge Center”. The addled goose has a tough enough time understanding a commercial spam system, thank you very much.
I do understand one thing. Not a single word about the cost of this system. Other thoughts:
- I wonder if those spams urging me, a subscriber to the hard copy newspaper, to take out another subscription were generated by this system?
- Who makes the determination about journalists in the database?
- Who makes the determination about bloggers in the database?
- What are the rules for removing a person or entity from the database?
- What are the tracking mechanisms in place for licensees; that is, what does Dow Jones collect about the users of its software?
- How does the email blast get around spam filters?
Interesting stuff. Right up there with the free Evening Standard and the Washington Post’s running stories from Web logs as hard content.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 20, 2009
Okay, okay, another disclosure. A freebie. Who is the oversight authority today? I will report the non paid status of this article to none other than the Council on Environmental Quality. Keep information pure, I say.
Murdoch Business Acumen Sparkles
December 19, 2009
I read in the hard copy version of the Wall Street Journal a short self-congratulatory article called “Sony Reader to Offer Journal Subscriptions.? In my Harrod’s Creek, mine-drainage edition, the story was on B6 in the December 18, 2009 edition. I did a quick search on Topix and found lots of articles about this news development. I am very sensitive to the value of an important news story, and I fully expected to have to pay to see information about this news development. Was I wrong? Yes.
The story reported that Sony and the Wall Street Journal have crafted a deal for digital subscriptions. The idea is that I can get the Wall Street Journal plus some other high-value content on my Sony reader. My Sony reader suffered a broken screen. My queries to Sony went unanswered, so I disassembled the device to see what was inside and vowed never to buy another Sony book reading device. The device lacked sufficient rigidity for the rigors of this addled goose’s fast-paced life. Fatal flaw in my opinion.
The information that interested me in the Wall Street Journal and Sony announcement was I would have to pay $20 for the digital edition and another $14 for the MarketWatch information. I have documented the spam I have received from the Wall Street Journal, and I demonstrated that if I simply hold out, the Wall Street Journal will sell the paper edition to me in Harrod’s Creek for less than $80 per year.
So, let’s think about this bit of Murdoch business acumen. I wait for an email or coupon promotion and buy the paper edition for $80. I know that $80 does not cover the cost of much more than a pizza for the IT guys in lower Manhattan on the Sunday night shift.
For a mere $240 a year, I get a digital edition. For the electronic version on the Sony gizmo which costs somewhere between $150 to $400, I pay $160 more.
Yep, maybe that will work for some folks. I don’t think this will work for me in Harrod’s Creek. I heard that newspapers are being given away in a number of cities. Why? People aren’t buying them. So, will differential pricing work? In my experience, the old pricing models are not amenable to the rigors of the digital crowd.
If I search Topix for the phrase “brilliant pricing models”, will this news story come up?
Stephen E. Arnold, December 19, 2009
You got me between a rock and a hard place. I was not paid to write this article, but I have to report to the Council of Economic Advisers this sad situation. I wonder if any of those bean counters can find a way to make this Wall Street Journal pricing work?
Digital Magazines and Hope
December 18, 2009
Anyone remember the Dyke Britton or the Graham Blue Streak? These were American automobile manufacturers, and they did not survive. The automobile industry and the magazine business on the surface seem to be very different. First, the automobile replaced the horse. The magazine did not replace anything. The automobile moved people. The magazine moves intangibles stuff like pictures, ideas and cartoons. The automobile created a massive social upheaval that is responsible for fast food and Tata’s cheap vehicle. The magazine created advertising.
Those autos are gone. Lots of magazines are gone. What is happening in automobiles may be happening in magazines. One difference is that I don’t think government subsidies and bail outs will be forthcoming. An information manufacturing era may be coming to an end.
Now the magazine crowd wants to move from the intangible world of content into the Frankenstein environment of digital information and a physical reading device. Don’t get me wrong. I think the magazine crowd has to find a way to survive. Charging me $15 for a Macintosh magazine from Future Publishing is probably not a recipe for mass market success.
I know the magazine crowd in the US wants to cook up an iTunes for magazines. The idea is that a person who reads “quality” content will gladly pay for certain articles. Well, maybe? When I read “Mag+, a Concept Video on the Future of Digital Magazines”, I asked myself, “Can folks who can’t make their core business work be able to jump outside their core competency?”
I look at quite a few digital magazines. Some like Zmags are quite interesting. Others rely on hardware that is ill-suited for the arts and craft approach to information that seems to be popular today. Even the Harvard Business Review magazine is going to try and be more “with it.” Get out the party hats!
Several thoughts:
- Traditional magazines have an editorial slant; today I can get information on topics of interest to me without my having to do much work
- Traditional magazines have been trying to be design conscious; today I prefer information
- Traditional magazines delivered an audience to advertisers; today I prefer information targeted to my specific needs.
In summary, magazines—regardless of format and media—are out of step with what I do to get information. The concept of a “magazine”, therefore, is going to have to be stretched in a different way. In my opinion, that concept will not have the elastic properties necessary to accommodate the odd shapes of consumers’ information needs. What happens when an elastic sheet is subjected to frequent stretching, it weakens and then gives way.
There you have it.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 18, 2009
I have to report that this is a free write up. No one paid me, but I think I have to reveal this fact to the Internal Revenue Service, an agency stretched thin due to various exogenous factors.
New York Times Gets Excited about Traffic Analysis
December 18, 2009
Navigate to “A Day in the Life of NYTimes.com.” You will learn that the New York Times has discovered that traffic to its Web site in mind 2009 is heavier at certain times of the day. There are other insights from the New York Times’s Laboratory. A couple of questions flashed through my mind.
First, what percentage of this traffic is in some way due to Google searches?
Second, why doesn’t the New York Times command the Web presence of the entertainment site TMZ.com, which is cited in the article as a big deal?
Third, how many New York Times executives are mesmerized by the videos showing traffic patterns?
Be still my goosely heart!
Disclosure: no one paid me to point out that these mesmerizing maps did not mesmerize this addled goose. I have to report this to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). This information constitutes an emergency.
Google Paper and Fast Flip
December 17, 2009
Navigate to Google Labs and fiddle with Fast Flip. The idea is that Google is once again making itself work like paper. No trees die and maybe newspapers and magazines will live. If you want an explanation of Fast Flip, you can get a useful summary in the story “Google adds New Media Partners to ‘Fast Flip’”. The obvious point is that Google is trying to help some companies survive the economic downturn. There are some other explanations as well. Are these alternates as benign? Depends on point of view I presume. Does Google need intermediaries between its paper and the readers?
Stephen E. Arnold, December 17, 2009
A disclosure. This is a freebie. I will email this fact to the House Leadership Offices, an outfit that does fast flips and consumes traditional paper.
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