Yahoo, Microsoft and Google

Ian Schafer has it about right: What Microsoft sees in Yahoo is the chance to increase its ad serving reach, cover more of the market, and improve not only reach and frequency but also the third all-important, beyond “GRP” component in today’s ad sphere: targeting. Both Microsoft and Yahoo have been in furious competition with Google and AOL (and each other) to build or buy ad platforms like Blue Lithium and aQuantive that have a variety of ad-serving, targeting and amalgamating solutions for a networked society.

One thing Schafer hopes for (and Henry Blodget calls for) doesn’t seem likely: that Microsoft will let the Yahoo brand live separately and distinctly. Not only does that not seem to be the Microsoft way, it also would make it hard to achieve some of those efficiencies Microsoft keeps talking about. Ask yourself, if Microsoft buys Yahoo:

• Will they subsume their Hotmail (integrated with Passport and .msn) into Yahoo’s mail? Or are they more likely to migrate Yahoo’s mail over to MSN?

• Are they likely to let Yahoo’s small business and Web hosting area live on its own, or try to migrate all that small- and medium-sized business over to Microsoft (encouraging it all the while to buy Microsoft Office products)?

• Will they let Yahoo’s social networking and blogging and tagging and bookmarking properties live separately, or try to integrate them into Microsoft’s properties, trying to get some long-missing traction for Microsoft’s initiatives?

Blodget talks a lot about the different cultures and the difficulties of integrating the two companies, how Microsoft is already battling on many fronts and is unlikely to be able to fight all these battles and make itself into a GE-like conglomerate. He also talks of Google’s play to help Yahoo stay out of Microsoft clutches and in his post and another alludes to Google’s “Ahabian” desire to sink Microsoft’s Office products with cloud computing Web software.

All that cultural stuff is big, and important, and he’s right that senior execs at Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Internet division, will be working scared for the foreseeable future. But, as said above, the real rubber and the real road here is advertising reach and targeting. That’s what has to work for this deal to be worth Microsoft’s while.

Breakfast With Roger: “Me, Mine, Us, Them”

For me, this is a first. Blogging an event at which I not only moderated, but in which my company, Teeming Media, partnered (with the irrepressible Bill Sobel of NY:MIEG). But enough about me, and Bill. Our guest, the speaker, was the equally irrepressible Roger Black, who has managed to not only design some of the preeminent magazines, newspapers and other media properties of the 20th century, but also bring his knowledge and expertise further into the digital realm and relaunch himself as an eminence in the 21st. He’s redone Bloomberg.com, the popular Houston Chronicle website, and a bunch of other properties.

This morning, he revealed another venture which will be a U.S. version of the popular Mexican digital magazine Indigo. There are prototypes here, though Roger says it’s not done, and it will be named something other than “Indigo” for its north of the border version. He talked a bit about why this is Flash, and not a digital magazine technology like NextBook or Zinio, and I'd boil it down to greater functionality for a wider audience than those proprietary and more closed systems.

In a wide ranging discussion with a wonderfully combative audience trying to take Roger (and me) to task for the idea that there even needs to be such a thing as a “magazine” on the Web (even though we didn't really say that) or anything approaching traditional literacy (even though I'm not sure we really said that), Roger talked of the editor Ramon Alberto Garza whom he quoted, when asked what should be the sections of a general interest newspaper or magazine site as answering: “Me, Mine, Us, Them.” And that, said Roger, is the pinnacle of what the Web is about -- concentric circles moving outward from the individual. That phrase in a way sums up the essense of Facebook, or MySpace, or DIGG, PageFlakes, or maybe even YouTube. And those sections are more appealing, as Roger pointed out, than the constructs we're used to in the more designed media such as U.S., World, Business, Technology, Health and so on.

Later, at the AlwaysOn conference, which I ran to after the Roger Black breakfast, Jeff Jarvis blogged about “lazy advertisers who don’t want to converse with us.” Conversation -- not content, according to Jeff -- is what the Web is about, about “connections and relationships” which would, if I think about it for a sec, be me and mine connecting with us, and then them. An my friend and mentor Ed Fields, a finance consultant and expert lecturer, pointed out another reason the Web works for him that's related: “When I read a newspaper I’m letting somebody I never met decide what’s important for me. That’s not true on the Internet.” He was adding to a comment by Fred Seibert, also at the breakfast, who pointed out that his daily front page didn’t rely on any one writer, or any universe created by a magazine editor or any other editor, for that matter. It was, rather, created by him, aggregating and hunting and assembling what he wanted to read from the sources he wanted, and, he said, was every bit as immersive for him as a glossy mag is for any fan of that genre.

Off the Media: Pay Your Sources

NPR’s On the Media in its show before the most recent episode brought up the issue of paying sources and brought back some poignant thoughts about whether and why sources should or shouldn’t be paid. Sure, there are all the usual arguments about polluting the system, encouraging untruths, and starting a slippery slope of checkbook journalism. But, “I've always just questioned that taboo on talking about money,” says guest Robert Boynton, an NYU journalism professor.

I’ve been asked more than once, “Why should I help you?” Some folks I’ve interviewed have even pointed out that I’m being paid to report, that the organization I’m working for (whether a newspaper or TV show) is money-making, even for profit, and so why should we reporters feel sanguine about asking or requiring that the grist for our work be provided for free? It’s a hard question to answer, when you can’t say “for publicity that will help your business,” or if someone isn’t buying the argument that getting the word out may help others in other situations or that simply getting it off their chest will be liberating.

In Japan, it’s common to pay sources, especially when they’re experts -- and, yes, they also get the advantage of publicity. There is, in giving over a token amount of cash, a display of gratitude, and acknowledgement that value has been given. I had one uncomfortable interview in Tokyo while working for Newsweek, when an expert in the construction and maintenance of the Bullet Train gave me some inside information about troubles the line had had in its earlier days. I wondered why he was telling me such info so frankly. At the end, he expected -- as he had come to expect from journalists -- a gratuity, and it was left to a Japanese co-worker to explain to him, with both in considerable discomfort, that American organizations didn’t do that. I was uncomfortable, too.

As OTM co-host Bob Garfield and guest Robert Boynton point out in the radio piece, even when no money is exchanged there is a currency of those who give their time and information in exchange for exposure, perhaps the chance to flog their point of view. Some journalists talk of disinterest in how money is made by the organization they work for, which I find a little odd. Is there another such for-profit industry, where the folks steeped in producing the product are willfully ignorant of how it's sold and makes money? There is certainly a coin of the realm, and one in which journalists spin and get spun, journalists and sources use each other in various ways. Boynton says it would be OK to pay, if it were disclosed that someone had done so. That would be an open and honest way of doing it. Let the consumer make his or her own decisions. And it would be more open than the hidden agendas the public sometimes can’t see.

The Power of Convenience

Bob Pittman to VideoNuze on how much ease of use matters:

"My experience from the Internet is that just one more click means a lot less response. You think, well it's just one more click. But for example, when I was at Time Warner, we had 2 options for ordering PPV - one to click a button and one to call an 800 number. The response rate for the former was three times the latter - that's the power of ease of use and convenience."

Comcast Must Kill (Its Ads)

We’re already well aware of the hatred for Comcast embodied in Bob Garfield’s “Comcast Must Die” campaign. Now, we’ve got a call from Gene Keenan of the ad agency Isobar that Comcast Must KILL ads it runs on the bottom of its screens that viewers are forced to click through on the directory of shows, to view information about shows they’re interested in. In other words: Want to see information on what show you're going to watch on your (PAID) cable service. Click through this ad to see it.

It may sound crazy, he said, “but I called Comcast just about every day for awhile to complain about having to click through these ads. ... The tech people told me they get a lot of complaints about the ads.” Keenan pointed out to me that he especially resented the ads because he’s already paying for the service. “It becomes a question of, ‘who owns the screen?’ ” Keenan said. He said the ads, which rotated, could be for anything -- a consumer product, service, whatever.

I can imagine how the ad deal might have gotten done: Someone in biz dev or ad sales tells the other execs around a conference room table that if they could guarantee a certain number of impressions, especially in a choice group (he'd call it a "demographic"), they could get a big ad rate, and bring in some amount of millions more dollars at no real cost. From that business perspective, it's a slam dunk, and conceptually is kind of a replication of the cable model (which I’ve sometimes resented) of making viewers watch ads on cable channels we’ve already paid for. On the other hand Nickelodeon’s chief a long time ago said to me that it was those ads, more than the cable fees, that allowed the channel to produce the original programming -- everything from Sponge Bob to Jamie Lynn Spears’ “Zoey 101."

I understand the business argument. But how much is that ad revenue worth to Comcast vs. whatever ill will the campaign creates among the paying subscribers, who are apparently PO'd enough to phone in about it (and you can be sure, reading Garfield's blog, that it takes awhile to get through to tech support)? And as the options for getting the content through means other than cable providers increase, how long until there's enough people dropping the service that the business model must change? An ad exec at another agency told me they're already seeing a trend of people in the recently graduated from college demographic dropping cable TV service altogether, instead getting their favorite shows via the Internet, DVD, iTunes and so on.

WSJ NOT Free. Surprise. Surprise?

I hedged quite a bit in writing about whether the Wall Street Journal could, should and would go free, rather than paid, noting a lot of IFs... They may be able to do it IF they're willing to forego more than $60 million a year in revenue for a few years. IF they can get enough synergies from other properties. IF they can keep their CPMs high enough even as they open the floodgates.

Now, it seems, those IFs are too substantial and the WSJ will remain paid for the most part. (And I guess I'll be re-upping for my $99/year.) There had been rumors of people holding off on renewals amid talk of the Journal going free, and speculation that going free would cut into not just the online revenues, but also a not-insignificant amount of print subs. (Another, probably more minor, complication would have been unwinding all kinds of others deals, from archives and current articles and headliens in paid data services like Factiva to the new subscription service on the Amazon Kindle and so on.)

Yahoo Accepting Open ID is Big

Joseph Weisenthal, with whom I'm friendly, of PaidContent, for which I've worked, writes that the list of sites accepting Open ID is "spare." True. But that Yahoo, which claims close to half a billion registrants, has signed on and bumped up Open ID's potential base an order of magnitude or so, is big news. If people can use one logon, or ID, and log on to myriad sites, such as Six Apart blogs and the contact storing software Plaxo, it bring a utility to the Web that's not there today, allowing one logon and more seamless execution across registered platforms.

With a genuflection to another friend, Daniel Gross, I say this is one of those little things that could prove to be of big import. Whether Open ID or another scheme, open, cross-platform utility is only going to progress geometrically, when it's fast and easy. Now, let me try the thing once it launches and see if it actually works (!).