stroemberg

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.

So, if you do the math, people were actually 6 times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they had encountered 6 than if they encountered 24, so what we learned from this study was that while people were more attracted to having more options, that’s what sort of got them in the door or got them to think about jam, when it came to choosing time they were actually less likely to make a choice if they had more to choose from than if they had fewer to choose from. And that really ended up starting an entire area of research where we began to look at “Why is that?” And a large part of that has to do with the fact that when people have a lot of options to choose from they don’t know how to tell them apart.

$2.75: That’s the average ad CPM, or cost-per-thousand rate gotten, at one top 15 news sites. Average rates have been going down and are likely to continue doing so. High-targeted and high-branded (combine the two, and you’ve got the best of both worlds) audiences continue to outpace average sites and average inventory. It’s less and less good to be average.

5-15 percent: That’s the percentage of many news sites monthly unique visitors that drive half or more of their pageviews. That’s a jaw-dropping number, and one that news companies are just beginning to acknowledge — privately. Why be quiet about it? Look at the annual reports and quarterly financial disclosures of the public companies; they trumpet uniques and pageviews. Yet in the age of news ubiquity, we’ve reached near-infinity in pageviews and of ad inventory. Is there much meaning left to one random web visitor hitting one random web page, courtesy of Google or Facebook, some time in any given month? Not much. Yet, that’s what most people still point to publicly. Privately, the question is the 5-15 percent. These are your customers. How much will they pay for access? How much more valuable are they to targeting advertisers, given you know much more about their reading and shopping habits? The metric needed: How much does a core customer yield annually, and in a lifetime? Then: How do I most efficiently find and convert more of them?

And that, to me, means that journalists should learn to separate the promotion of long-form from the promotion of time-shifting. Both are useful ideas, but the Venn diagram of the two is far from a perfect overlap.

The programmers of the commercial web have always seen their goal as the elimination of distance and friction from transactions, and that objective has, not surprisingly, come to shape online social networks. But, when carried too far, the minimization of transaction costs in personal relations ends up having the effect of reducing those relationships to mere transactions. Intimacy without distance is not intimacy, and sharing without friction is not sharing. Qualities of tenderness become, in the end, forms of commerce. “The straight line,” Adorno went on to say, as if he were explaining, sixty years before the fact, Facebook’s social graph, “is now regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points.

How you go into the process and how you come out of it is destined to shape the very nature of the company: it is simultaneously about dreaming big, and surviving tomorrow.

And thus I am keenly aware that implicit in this post is a sort of public confession that the next next thing that we’ve been stirring and hyping and sweating day and night on, won’t actually work like magic…that our mission of building a new model for the production and distribution of global news, of doing right by our readers, requires that others do right by us.