stroemberg

Dan Siroker helps companies discover tiny truths, but his story begins with a lie.

Everyone knows that half of all advertising dollars are wasted. And everyone knows that the Internet fixes that, because digital advertisers can spend money getting their messages to the people they want to reach.

Except that’s not true at all: The Web offers advertisers a slew of creepily effective targeting mechanisms, but they only work for some stuff, some of the time. An ad on the Web may do a better job of reaching its audience than, say, a magazine ad. But that doesn’t mean it does a good job.

What’s truly staggering about Facebook usage is not its volume—750 million photographs uploaded over a single weekend—but the constancy of the performance it demands. More than half its users—and one of every 13 people on Earth is a Facebook user—log on every day. Among 18-to-34-year-olds, nearly half check Facebook minutes after waking up, and 28 percent do so before getting out of bed. The relentlessness is what is so new, so potentially transformative. Facebook never takes a break. We never take a break. Human beings have always created elaborate acts of self-presentation. But not all the time, not every morning, before we even pour a cup of coffee.

Facebook, of course, puts the pursuit of happiness front and center in our digital life. Its capacity to redefine our very concepts of identity and personal fulfillment is much more worrisome than the data-mining and privacy practices that have aroused anxieties about the company.

The beauty of Facebook, the source of its power, is that it enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing reality of society—the accidental revelations we make at parties, the awkward pauses, the farting and the spilled drinks and the general gaucherie of face-to-face contact. Instead, we have the lovely smoothness of a seemingly social machine.

Facebook is merely a tool, he says, and like any tool, its effectiveness will depend on its user. “If you use Facebook to increase face-to-face contact,” he says, “it increases social capital.” So if social media let you organize a game of football among your friends, that’s healthy. If you turn to social media instead of playing football, however, that’s unhealthy.

Though digital revenues at newspapers have advanced 9.1% since 2005, the total online advertising market grew by close to 60% in the same period, according to projections based on mid-2011 statistics by the Internet Advertising Bureau.

The device manufacturers, mobile operators, OS providers, and end users operate in an overly complex virtuous cycle

A virtuous cycle is one where each side of the market both gives and receives positive value from the other sides. So much positive value is exchanged, with low friction, that the cycle grows and grows, like a snowball rolling down hill. The more sides to the market that exist, the more complex the system and the harder it is for the cycle to happen.

As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once observed, drama is as essential to journalism as it is to theater, and the theater of news is as filled with carnage, chaos and corruption as any play by Shakespeare. Though, obviously, there’s a lot more sex and the words are simpler. The public, of course, instinctively know that if it bleeds, it leads.

Appification opens to newspapers the powerful marketing and pricing strategy that the Berkeley economist (and now Google executive) Hal Varian dubs “versioning.” Long a cornerstone of the software business, versioning is the practice of creating many versions of the same underlying informational product, packaging them in different ways, and selling them at different prices to different sets of customers.

For years now, the line between the software business and the media business has been blurring. Software applications used to take the form of packaged goods, sold through retail outlets at set prices. Today, as a result of cloud computing and other advances, applications look more and more like media products. They’re ad-supported, subscribed to, continually updated, and the content they incorporate is often as important as the functions they provide.

He argues that the Guardian cannot hope to secure enough advertising revenue to create content through its traditional commissioning model, while the Times cannot attract subscribers who are one click away from free content elsewhere. Claiming that both loss-making papers survive by cross-subsidy, and therefore have the same business model, he argues, predictably, that he speaks from a unique position of business strength.

The news brand, in the past — for all its exclusivity, for all its anonymity — was much more than a brand, with all the corporateness and cravenness that that term can imply. It was also an identity. It was a purchased proxy for a personal worldview.

some two-thirds of people reading magazines, newspapers and similar publications on tablets and e-readers expect to be reading even more of those kinds of publications on their tablets in 2012. Of those, 63 percent say they want more publications available on their devices. The survey also found about 46 percent of users are consuming more publications in general, both in print and on tablets.

Instead I won’t appeal to publishers at all. I’ll just say again that the future is readable. This could include your site, as you’ve designed it, as it appears in a browser, where you can register some ad impressions — or not.

Readers are smart, and they love to read, and they’ll go where they can read, and they have more and more options.