Speaking to media writer and once-again entrepreneur Michael Wolff today about his Newser.com venture (he’ll be a guest on the next Naked Media, with Newser.com funder and co-founder Patrick Spain, August 7, 10a ET), it occurred to me there’s a sort of irony to news aggregation platforms, and those from whom they get their material.
Of course, Newser.com isn’t literally an aggregator. They may live off the news that others gather and produce, but they also synthesize it and summarize it in their own language. That would, at least for the time being, seem to protect them from the sort of DrudgeRetort vs. AP brouhaha that occurred when the Web site picked up the wire service’s material without enough re-crunching to distance itself from the original.
It wouldn’t be surprising if at some point those producing original material try to argue that even taking that material and rewording or repacking it, synthesizing it with others’ , is plagiarism at best, even a violation of copyright and fair use. Royalties are expected, after all, when someone samples a piece of a song to make another piece of music. I could see the same argument being made for the written word.
But here’s the irony: If the repackager is small and has minimal traffic and refuses to listen to automated or relatively low-level entreaties, it may not be worth the lawyer time and hassle of pursuing them. But if someone gets big enough to matter, it’s unwise from a business perspective to pursue them because the links they put up and the traffic they send you -- not to mention the branding and awareness -- will be worth enough that it also is likely to outweigh the benefit of shutting them down (assuming they’re not lifting entire stories, images, etc, willy nilly, and also assuming they link back).
Blogger is for Liberals?
It can be intriguing to poke around in a measurement system and get some surprises. One, today, from Quantcast, is that people visiting Blogger dipped in late Spring, then shot up in June through now.
And another, if Quantcast is to be believed, is that people who visit Blogger.com also have an affiinity for such Left-leaning matter as Daily Kos and The Atlantic. Hmmm. Never thought of blogging as anything but equal-opportunity. I'll have to poke around and see if Typepad or something else is a more "conservative" platform.
And another, if Quantcast is to be believed, is that people who visit Blogger.com also have an affiinity for such Left-leaning matter as Daily Kos and The Atlantic. Hmmm. Never thought of blogging as anything but equal-opportunity. I'll have to poke around and see if Typepad or something else is a more "conservative" platform.
Of Hulu, Ads and User Experience (and its New Widgets)
Watching TV on the Internet is great because it’s a true on-demand experience. It really is what, when, where I want, and how, with multiple benefits. Set up a laptop on the counter, and watch/listen while doing dishes, brushing teeth, watering plants ... no need to pre-set the device before a show to tell it what I want, plus the ability to pause, and jump back and forth and carry the laptop elsewhere to any room (or anywhere). No need for a subscription to any on-demand service. Ability to use the laptop to look up something while I’m watching, or have the video full-screen and sit back and relax. Send a link to friends, or embed. Use headphones. Shoot my own video response. Watch with a friend or my wife or kids....
Add to that the relative infrequency and shortness of commercial interruption. Hulu CTO Eric Feng points out in an interview for NewTeeVee that a 22-minute network show with eight minutes of ads on broadcast or cable has two minutes of commercials on Hulu. (He also says the average Hulu user watches for more than an hour, and that there were 90 million streams -- per month, if I understood). So, watch a show on Hulu and you get more TV for less. With only two minutes of ads, it would hardly be worth forwarding through.
Yet, I can’t help but wonder how long it will be before the economic pressure will cause Hulu and other services to increase the number and frequency of ads. TV used to have relatively fewer ads. Terrestrial radio has, many would say, been ruined by the ad-to-programming ratio. The pressure to increase revenues is relentless and hard to resist. As Feng acknowledges in the video -- there’s another of him on TechCrunch today, and both videos are due to Hulu’s newly launched widgets -- the ads at this point are somewhat repetitive. That’s surely because of a relatively low number of advertisers, the need to serve the promised number of impressions, and the lack of ability to interrupt every single type of clip, either because of its length or the nature of its content. But as users/viewers increase, and more advertisers move to Hulu-like platforms, and more platforms spring up, we’ll see more pressure to create more ad inventory, and downward pressure on CPMs. (I was intrigued to hear from a Quantcast exec in a recent panel I moderated for the Magazine Publishers of America say that CPMs will rise short-term because measurability is increasing and is not yet where media buyers want it to be.)
As Jupiter Research analyst Bobby Tulsiani noted last week, “user experience is king” online. A key part of that experience is not only ease of use, clarity of clicking, architecture and so on, but also the experience of not having to see too many ads, especially ones that may be irrelevant or annoying. If ads didn’t hurt the user experience, folks wouldn’t forward through them when they could. And how long until users on the Web start clicking away from programs due to ads, even as they did on cable and broadcast long before the advent of TiVO? How much will a user put up with even if he has proactively gone to a program to watch it on demand? How long before there’s a TiVO for Web content? TV has finally started to change. World News Tonight recently had a sole sponsor and fewer minutes of interruption than the typical version of the evening news show. And, I’m hoping that after the video ad deluge on the Web, we’ll see that a change in online user behavior, will force similar consideration of balance between editorial and commercial imperatives.
Add to that the relative infrequency and shortness of commercial interruption. Hulu CTO Eric Feng points out in an interview for NewTeeVee that a 22-minute network show with eight minutes of ads on broadcast or cable has two minutes of commercials on Hulu. (He also says the average Hulu user watches for more than an hour, and that there were 90 million streams -- per month, if I understood). So, watch a show on Hulu and you get more TV for less. With only two minutes of ads, it would hardly be worth forwarding through.
Yet, I can’t help but wonder how long it will be before the economic pressure will cause Hulu and other services to increase the number and frequency of ads. TV used to have relatively fewer ads. Terrestrial radio has, many would say, been ruined by the ad-to-programming ratio. The pressure to increase revenues is relentless and hard to resist. As Feng acknowledges in the video -- there’s another of him on TechCrunch today, and both videos are due to Hulu’s newly launched widgets -- the ads at this point are somewhat repetitive. That’s surely because of a relatively low number of advertisers, the need to serve the promised number of impressions, and the lack of ability to interrupt every single type of clip, either because of its length or the nature of its content. But as users/viewers increase, and more advertisers move to Hulu-like platforms, and more platforms spring up, we’ll see more pressure to create more ad inventory, and downward pressure on CPMs. (I was intrigued to hear from a Quantcast exec in a recent panel I moderated for the Magazine Publishers of America say that CPMs will rise short-term because measurability is increasing and is not yet where media buyers want it to be.)
As Jupiter Research analyst Bobby Tulsiani noted last week, “user experience is king” online. A key part of that experience is not only ease of use, clarity of clicking, architecture and so on, but also the experience of not having to see too many ads, especially ones that may be irrelevant or annoying. If ads didn’t hurt the user experience, folks wouldn’t forward through them when they could. And how long until users on the Web start clicking away from programs due to ads, even as they did on cable and broadcast long before the advent of TiVO? How much will a user put up with even if he has proactively gone to a program to watch it on demand? How long before there’s a TiVO for Web content? TV has finally started to change. World News Tonight recently had a sole sponsor and fewer minutes of interruption than the typical version of the evening news show. And, I’m hoping that after the video ad deluge on the Web, we’ll see that a change in online user behavior, will force similar consideration of balance between editorial and commercial imperatives.
Mom Humor: The iTit
My mom sent me this in an email:
Apple announced today that it has developed a breast implant that can store and play music. The iTit will cost from $499 to $699, depending on cup and speaker size.
This is considered a major social breakthrough, because women are always complaining about men staring at their breasts and not listening to them.
Jarvis Likes His Bottoms on Top
I wrote teasingly about a year ago about an ad for clean bottoms on Buzzmachine. Now, author Jeff Jarvis says he likes the current underwear ad on his site that a few have called him to task for. Nothing heavy here, just jawboning on a Friday
In Whose Economic Interest?
Just read the Atlantic Monthly piece on Google making us dumber. A choice quote:
Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link&lsqauo;the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It's in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
Really? Aren't there models that support thought, depth, breadth, attention spans? I think so. And this sounds like the whingeing (thanks for reminding me of that word, Jeff Jarvis) of someone who would complain about how stupid TV makes us all, ignoring that it's not the box but how you use it. After all, I read the piece on my Blackberry. Really. Might never have gotten to it otherwise.
Surveyed in An Alternate Newspaper Universe
Just as the news broke that the New York Post and Daily News might cooperate in production to save costs for their print editions, I was called at home, randomly I suppose, to participate in a phone survey about my newspaper reading habits. I normally would hang up on something like this -- their callback number and company affiliation was masked from my caller ID, which I on principle find wrong. But I participated out of curiosity, and thinking I might get something out of it. The survey made me feel like I was answering questions from more than a decade ago. If this is the kind of research newspaper companies are commissioning, I fear they’re in even more trouble than we all think. The ways I was being asked just didn’t seem relevant to someone in the modern flow of media and information.
A representative from a company called American Opinion Research Group, subcontracting for Discovery Research, asked me about my newspaper preferences, and what I thought of the Post (whom I suspect was commissioning the survey), the Daily News and sometimes The New York Times, as if picking up the print editions were still the way I read the papers. (The lady on the line seemed positively flummoxed when she asked how I got my print copy of the Post, and I said when I read it in print it was almost always because I'd been handed it for free; it was as if there were no check box in her survey form for that -- as opposed to “at work,” “newsstand,” or “subscription at home”.) There was also an implicit strain in the questions that I read the papers the way people used to: pick it up, flip from one page to another, go through it systematically, or at least jump to the section I like and flip through -- rather than the way I’m just as likely to now: find something through an RSS feed, or a blog or Twitter link, or randomly in a search, then perhaps poke around the site(s) as I look for more in a sort of serendipitous flow limited only by my attention span or time.
A lot of the survey taker’s questions centered on what I think about the Post and/or the Daily News, including, which:
Inserts
Ads
She also asked if I considered the Post “conservative” or “liberal”. (Guess which I picked?)
Other questions concerned my buying or reading habits (which are really two different things, though the survey seemed to conclude that “read” meant “buy” -- which as we all know isn’t the case). Nary a question about blogs, online preferences, RSS readers, whether I looked at the papers on a mobile device, click on any ads, prefer to read in print or online, would like the edition emailed to me ... etc, etc. It was as if the online universe didn’t exist.
The woman kind of had a hitch in her voice when I answered that the Post was less reliable but more enjoyable than the News. For many of us New Yorkers there's an enjoyment and amusement factor in reading the Post, as much as there is an information consumption one. Even if we suspect something isn’t all true, we enjoy the vivaciousness of the prose and the speculation that what’s written has an element of veracity. And I know from discussions with folks far and wide -- not just in the media biz -- that I’m not alone in this way of reading the paper.
I’m still waiting, too, for the email component to the phone survey I participated in, but it hasn’t come -- or the spam filter ate it.
A representative from a company called American Opinion Research Group, subcontracting for Discovery Research, asked me about my newspaper preferences, and what I thought of the Post (whom I suspect was commissioning the survey), the Daily News and sometimes The New York Times, as if picking up the print editions were still the way I read the papers. (The lady on the line seemed positively flummoxed when she asked how I got my print copy of the Post, and I said when I read it in print it was almost always because I'd been handed it for free; it was as if there were no check box in her survey form for that -- as opposed to “at work,” “newsstand,” or “subscription at home”.) There was also an implicit strain in the questions that I read the papers the way people used to: pick it up, flip from one page to another, go through it systematically, or at least jump to the section I like and flip through -- rather than the way I’m just as likely to now: find something through an RSS feed, or a blog or Twitter link, or randomly in a search, then perhaps poke around the site(s) as I look for more in a sort of serendipitous flow limited only by my attention span or time.
A lot of the survey taker’s questions centered on what I think about the Post and/or the Daily News, including, which:
- is more “fun and lively”
- is most compelling
- has better sports
- has better columnists
- know sthe boroughs and in touch with New York
- has the better
Inserts
Ads
- Front Page
- has stories that made me most interested in sharing with family or friends.
She also asked if I considered the Post “conservative” or “liberal”. (Guess which I picked?)
Other questions concerned my buying or reading habits (which are really two different things, though the survey seemed to conclude that “read” meant “buy” -- which as we all know isn’t the case). Nary a question about blogs, online preferences, RSS readers, whether I looked at the papers on a mobile device, click on any ads, prefer to read in print or online, would like the edition emailed to me ... etc, etc. It was as if the online universe didn’t exist.
The woman kind of had a hitch in her voice when I answered that the Post was less reliable but more enjoyable than the News. For many of us New Yorkers there's an enjoyment and amusement factor in reading the Post, as much as there is an information consumption one. Even if we suspect something isn’t all true, we enjoy the vivaciousness of the prose and the speculation that what’s written has an element of veracity. And I know from discussions with folks far and wide -- not just in the media biz -- that I’m not alone in this way of reading the paper.
I’m still waiting, too, for the email component to the phone survey I participated in, but it hasn’t come -- or the spam filter ate it.
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