This Week in Review: The backlash against Greenwald and Snowden, and RSS's new wave
Greenwald, journalism, and advocacy: It's been three weeks since the last review, and a particularly eventful three weeks at that. So this review will cover more than just the last week, but it'll be weighted toward the most recent stuff. I'll start with the U.S. National Security Agency spying revelations, covering first the reporter who broke them (Glenn Greenwald), then his source (Edward Snowden), and finally a few brief tech-oriented pieces of the news itself.
Nearly a month since the first stories on U.S. government data-gathering, Greenwald, who runs an opinionated and meticulously reported blog for the Guardian, continues to break news of further electronic surveillance, including widespread online metadata collection by the Obama administration that continues today, despite the official line that it ended in 2011. Greenwald's been the object of scrutiny himself, with a thorough BuzzFeed profile on his past as an attorney and questions from reporters about old lawsuits, back taxes, and student loan debt.
The rhetoric directed toward Greenwald by other journalists was particularly fierce: The New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin said on CNBC he's "almost arrest" Greenwald (he later apologized), and most notably, NBC's David Gregory asked Greenwald "to the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden," why he shouldn't be charged with a crime. The Washington Post's Erik Wemple refuted Gregory's line of questioning point-by-point and also examined the legal case for prosecuting Greenwald (there really isn't one).
There were several other breakdowns of Gregory's questions as a way of defending himself as a professional journalist by excluding Greenwald as one; of these, NYU professor Jay Rosen's was the definitive take. The Los Angeles Times' Benjamin Mueller seconded his point, arguing that by going after Greenwald's journalistic credentials, "from behind the veil of impartiality, Gregory and his colleagues went to bat for those in power, hiding a dangerous case for tightening the journalistic circle."
The Freedom of the Press Foundation's Trevor Timm argued that Gregory is endangering himself by defining journalism based on absence of opinion, and The New York Times' David Carr called for journalists to show some solidarity on behalf of transparency. PaidContent's Mathew Ingram used the case to argue that the "bloggers vs. journalists" tension remains important, and Greenwald himself said it indicated the incestuous relationship between Washington journalists and those in power.
A few, like Salon's David Sirota, turned the questions on Gregory, wondering why he shouldn't be charged with a crime, since he too has disclosed classified information. Or why he should be considered a journalist, given his track record of subservience to politicians, as New York magazine's Frank Rich argued.
Earlier, Rosen had attempted to mediate some of the criticism of Greenwald by arguing that there are two valid ways of approaching journalism — with or without politics — that are both necessary for a strong press. Former newspaper editor John L. Robinson added a call for passion in journalism, while CUNY's Jeff Jarvis and Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi both went further and argued that all journalism is advocacy.
Snowden and leaking in public: The other major figure in the aftermath of this story has been Edward Snowden, the employee of a national security contractor who leaked the NSA information to Greenwald and revealed his identity shortly after the story broke. The U.S. government charged Snowden with espionage (about which Greenwald was understandably livid), as he waited in Hong Kong, not expecting to see home again.
The first 48 hours of this week were a bit of blur: Snowden applied for asylum in Ecuador (the country that's been harboring WikiLeaks' Julian Assange), then reportedly left Hong Kong for Moscow. But Snowden wasn't on a scheduled flight from Moscow to Cuba, creating confusion about where exactly he was — and whether he was ever in Moscow in the first place. He did all this with the apparent aid of WikiLeaks, whose leaders claimed that they know where Snowden is and that they could publish the rest of his NSA documents. It was a bit of a return to the spotlight for WikiLeaks, which has nonetheless remained on the FBI's radar for the last several years, with the bureau even paying a WikiLeaks volunteer as an informant.
We got accounts from the three journalists Snowden contacted — Greenwald, The Washington Post's Barton Gellman, and filmmaker Laura Poitras — about their interactions with him, as well as a probe by New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan into why he didn't go to The Times. In a pair of posts, paidContent's Mathew Ingram argued that the leak's path showed that having a reputation as an alternative voice can be preferable to being in the mainstream when it comes to some newsgathering, and that news will flow to wherever it finds the least resistance. The Times' David Carr similarly concluded that news stories aren't as likely to follow established avenues of power as they used to.
As The Washington Post's Erik Wemple described, news organizations debated whether to call Snowden a "leaker," "source," or "whistleblower," Several people, including The Atlantic's Garance Franke-Ruta and Forbes' Tom Watson, tried to explain why Snowden was garnering less popular support than might be expected, while The New Yorker's John Cassidy detailed the backlash against Snowden in official circles, which, as Michael Calderone of The Huffington Post pointed out, was made largely with the aid of anonymity granted by journalists.
Numerous people, such as Kirsten Powers of The Daily Beast, also decried that backlash, with Ben Smith of BuzzFeed making a particularly salient point: Journalists have long disregarded their sources' personal motives and backgrounds in favor of the substance of the information they provide, and now that sources have become more public, the rest of us are going to have to get used to that, too. The New York Times' David Carr also noted that "The age of the leaker as Web-enabled public figure has arrived."
Finally the tech angle: The Prism program that Snowden leaked relied on data from tech giants such as Google, Apple, Facebook, and Yahoo, and those companies responded first by denying their direct involvement in the program, then by competing to show off their commitment to transparency, as Time's Sam Gustin reported. First, Google asked the U.S. government for permission to reveal all their incoming government requests for information, followed quickly by Facebook and Microsoft. Then, starting with Facebook, those companies released the total number of government requests for data they've received, though Google and Twitter pushed to be able to release more specific numbers. Though there were early reports of special government access to those companies' servers, Google reported that it uses secure FTP to transfer its data to the government.
Instagram's bet on longer (but still short) video: Facebook's Instagram moved into video last week, announcing 15-second videos, as TechCrunch reported in its good summary of the new feature. That number drew immediate comparisons to the six-second looping videos of Twitter's Vine. As The New York Times noted, length is the primary difference between the two video services (though TechCrunch has a pretty comprehensive comparison), and Instagram is betting that longer videos will be better.
The reason isn't aesthetics: As Quartz's Christopher Mims pointed out, the ad-friendly 15-second length fits perfectly with Facebook's ongoing move into video advertising. As soon as Instagram's video service was released, critics started asking a question that would've seemed absurd just a few years ago: Is 15 seconds too long? Josh Wolford of WebProNews concluded that it is indeed too much, at least for the poorly produced amateur content that will dominate the service. At CNET, Danny Sullivan tried to make peace with the TL;DR culture behind Vine and Instagram Video.
Several tech writers dismissed it on sight: John Gruber of Daring Fireball gave it a terse kiss-off, while Mathew Ingram of GigaOM explained why he won't use it — can't be easily scanned, and a low signal-to-noise ratio — though he said it could be useful for advertisers and kids. PandoDaily's Nathaniel Mott argued that Instagram's video (like Instagram itself) is more about vanity-oriented presentation than useful communication. And both John Herrman of BuzzFeed and Farhad Manjoo of Slate lamented the idea that Instagram and Facebook seem out of ideas, with Manjoo called it symptomatic of the tech world in general. "Instead of invention, many in tech have fallen into the comfortable groove of reinvention," Manjoo wrote.
Chris Gayomali of The Week, however, saw room for both Vine and Instagram to succeed. Meanwhile, Nick Statt of ReadWrite examined the way Instagram's filters have changed the way photography is seen, even among professional photographers and photojournalists.
The post-Google Reader RSS rush: As Google Reader approaches its shutdown Monday, several other companies are taking the opportunity to jump into the suddenly reinvigorated RSS market. AOL launched its own Reader this week, and old favorite NetNewsWire relaunched a new reader as well.
Based on some API code, there was speculation that Facebook could be announcing its own RSS reader soon. That hasn't happened, though The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook is working on a Flipboard-like mobile aggregation device. GigaOM's Eliza Kern explained why she wouldn't want a Facebook RSS feed, while Fast Company's Chris Dannen said a Facebook RSS reader could actually help solve the "filter bubble" like-minded information problem.
Sarah Perez of TechCrunch examined the alternatives to Google Reader, concluding disappointedly that there simply isn't a replacement out there for it. Her colleague, Darrell Etherington, chided tech companies for their reactionary stance toward RSS development. Carol Kopp of Minyanville argued, however, that much of the rush toward RSS development is being driven just as much by a desire to crack the mobile-news nut, something she believed could be accomplished. RSS pioneer Dave Winer was also optimistic about its future, urging developers to think about "What would news do?" in order to reshape it for a new generation.
Reading roundup: A few of the other stories you might have missed over the past couple of weeks:
— Rolling Stone's Michael Hastings, who had built up a reputation as a maverick through his stellar, incisive reporting on foreign affairs, was killed in a car accident last week at age 33. Several journalists — including BuzzFeed's Ben Smith, The Guardian's Spencer Ackerman, Slate's David Weigel, and freelancer Corey Pein — wrote warm, inspiring remembrances of a fearless journalist and friend. Time's James Poniewozik detected among reporters in general "maybe a little shame that more of us don't always remember who our work is meant to serve" in their responses to Hastings' death.
— Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism issued a study based on a survey of nonprofit news organizations that provided some valuable insights into the state of nonprofit journalism. The Lab's Justin Ellis, Poynter's Rick Edmonds, and J-Lab's Jan Schaffer explained the findings. Media analyst Alan Mutter urged nonprofit news orgs to put more focus on financial sustainability, while Michele McLellan of the Knight Digital Media Center called on their funders to do the same thing.
— Oxford's Reuters Institute also issued a survey-based study whose findings focused on consumers' willingness to pay for news. The Lab's Sarah Darville and BBC News' Leo Kelion summarized the findings, while paidContent's Mathew Ingram gave an anti-paywall reading. The Press Gazette also highlighted a side point in the study — the popularity of live blogs.
— Texas state politics briefly grabbed a much broader spotlight this week with state Sen. Wendy Davis' successful 13-hour filibuster of a controversial abortion bill. Many people noticed that coverage of the filibuster (and surrounding protest) was propelled by digital photo and video, rather than cable news. VentureBeat's Meghan Kelly, Time's James Poniewozik, and The Verge's Carl Franzen offered explanations.
— Finally, a couple of reads from the folks at Digital First, one sobering and another inspiring: CEO John Paton made the case for the inadequacy of past-oriented models in sustaining newspapers, and digital editor Steve Buttry collected some fantastic advice for students on shaping the future of journalism.
Photos of Glenn Greenwald by Gage Skidmore and Edward Snowden stencil by Steve Rhodes used under a Creative Commons license. Instagram video by @bakerbk.
Tags: This Week in Review advocacy advocacy journalism AOL Reader cable news David Gregory Edward Snowden Facebook Glenn Greenwald Google Google Reader Instagram Instagram video leaks Michael Hastings mobile news nonprofit journalism NSA NSA spying opinion opinion journalism paywalls Project for Excellence in Journalism Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism RSS transparency Vine Wendy Davis Wikileaks
The newsonomics of Spies vs. Spies
So who do you root for in this coming battle, as Google petitions the feds? Are you on the side of Big Brother or Little Brother — and remind me, which is which? It's a 50-year-update on Mad Magazine's iconic Spy vs. Spy.
The Surveillance State is — at least for this month — in front of the public. The Guardian's rolling revelations of National Security Agency phone and web spying have again raised the bogeyman of Big Data — not the Big Data that all the airport billboards offer software to tame, but the Big Data that the unseen state can use against us. We've always had a love/hate relationship with big technology and disaster, consuming it madly as Hollywood churns out mad entertainments. We like our dystopia delivered hot and consumable within two hours. What we don't like is the ooky feeling we are being watched, or that we have to make some kind unknowable choice between preventing the next act of terror and preserving basic Constitutional liberties.
Americans' reactions to the stories is predictable. Undifferentiated outrage: "I knew they were watching us." Outrageous indifference: "What do you expect given the state of the world?" That's not surprising. Americans and Europeans have had the same problem thinking about the enveloping spider's web of non-governmental digital knowledge. (See The Onion headline: "Area Man Outraged His Private Information Being Collected By Someone Other Than Advertisers.")
While top global media, including The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, dig into the widening government spying questions, let's look at the ferment in the issues of commercial surveillance. There's a lot of it, and it would take several advanced degrees and decoder rings to understand all of it. No, it's not the same thing as the issues surrounding PRISM. But it will be conflated with national security, and indeed the overlapping social and political questions are profound. Let's look at some recent developments and some of the diverse players in this unfolding drama and see where publishers do — and could — fit in.
The commercial surveillance culture is ubiquitous, perhaps even less hemmed in by government policy than the NSA, and growing greatly day by day. While Google asks the FISA court to allow it to release more detail about the nature of federal data demands, its growing knowledge of us seems to have no bounds. From our daily searches, to the pictures (street to sky) taken of our homes, to the whereabouts relayed by Google Maps, and on and on.
It's not just Google, of course. Facebook, whose users spend an average of seven hours per month online disclosing everything, is challenging Google for king of the data hill. A typical news site might have 30 to 40 cookies — many of them from ad-oriented "third parties" — dropped from it. That explains why those "abandoned" shopping carts, would-be shoe purchases, and fantasy vacation ads now go with us seemingly everywhere we move on the web. It's another love/hate relationship: We're enamored of what Google and Facebook and others can do for us, but we're disquieted by their long reach into our lives. It's a different flavor of ooky.
We are targeted. We are retargeted. Who we are, what we shop for, and what we read is known by untold number of companies out there. Though we are subject to so much invisible, involuntary, and uncompensated crowdsourcing, the outrage is minimal. It's not that it hasn't been written about. Among others, The Wall Street Journal has done great work on it, including its multi-prize-winning three-year series on "What They Know."
Jim Spanfeller, now CEO of Spanfeller Media Group and the builder of Forbes.com, related the PRISM NSA disclosures to commercial tracking in a well-noticed column ("At What Price Safety? At What Price Targeted Advertising?") last week. His point: We're all essentially ignorant of what's being collected about us, and how it is being used. As we find out more, we're not going to be happy.
His warning to those in the digital ad ecosystem: Government will ham-handedly regulate tracking of consumer clicks if the industry doesn't become more "honest and transparent."
Spanfeller outlined for me the current browser "Do Not Track" wars, which saw its latest foray yesterday. Mozilla, parent of Firefox, the third most-popular browser by most measures, said it will move forward with tech that automatically blocks third-party cookies in its browser. Presumably, users will be able to turn back on such cookies, but most will go with the defaults in the browsers they use.
The Mozilla move, much contested and long in the works, follows a similar decision by Microsoft with its release of the latest Internet Explorer. Microsoft is using a "pro-privacy" stance as a competitive weapon against Google, advancing both Bing search and IE. Spanfeller notes that Microsoft's move hasn't had much effect, at least yet, because "sites aren't honoring it."
These browser wars are one front, and much decried by forces like the Interactive Ad Bureau, the Digital Ad Alliance, and its "Ad Choices" program — which prefer consumer opt-out. Another front is an attempt at industry consensus through the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C. Observers of that process believe it is winding its way to failure. Finally, also announced yesterday was the just-baked Cookie Clearinghouse, housed at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. The driving notion, to be fleshed out: creating whitelists and blacklists of cookies allowed and blocked. (Good summaries by both Ad Age's Kate Kaye and ZDNet's Ed Bott.)
Never too far from the action, serial entrepreneur John Taysom was in Palo Alto this week as well. Taysom, a current senior fellow at Harvard's Advanced Leadership Initiative, is an early digital hothouse pioneer, having led Reuters' Greenhouse project way back in the mid-'90s. His list of web startups imagined and sold is impressive, and now he's trying to put all that experience to use around privacy issues. As a student of history, old and modern, his belief is this: "When they invented the Internet, they didn't add a privacy layer."
"We need a Underwriters Laboratory for our time," he told me Wednesday. UL served a great purpose at a time (1894) of another tech revolution: electricity. Electricity, like computer tech these days, seemed exciting, but the public was wary. It wasn't afraid of behind-the-scenes chicanery — it literally was concerned about playing with fire. So UL, as a "global independent safety science company" — a kind of neutral, Switzerland-like enterprise — was set up to assure the public that electrical appliances were indeed tested and safe.
Could we do the same with the Internet?
He's now working on a model, colloquially named "Three's A Crowd," to reinsert a "translucent" privacy layer in the tech stack. His model is based on a lot of current thinking on how to both better protect individual privacy and actually improve the targeting of messages by business and others. It draws on k-anonymity and Privacy by Design principles, among others.
In brief, Taysom's Harvard project is around creating a modern UL. It would be a central trusted place, or really set of places, that institutions and businesses (and presumably governments) could draw from, but which protect individual identification. He calls it an I.D. DMZ, or demilitarized zone.
He makes the point that the whole purpose of data mining is to get to large enough groups of people with similar characteristics — not to find the perfect solution or offer for each individual. "Go up one level above the person," to a small, but meaningfully sized, crowd. The idea: increase anonymity, giving people the comfort of knowing they are not being individually targeted.
Further, the levels of anonymity could differ depending on the kind of information associated with anyone. "I don't really mind that much about people knowing my taste in shirts. If it's about the location of my kids, I want six sigmas" of anonymity, he says. Taysom, who filed a 2007 U.K. patent, now approved, on the idea, is now putting together both his boards of advisors and trustees.
Then there are emerging marketplace solutions to privacy. What havoc the digital marketplace hath wrought may be solved by…the digital marketplace. D.C.-based Personal.com is one of the leading players in that emerging group. Yes, this may be the coming personal data economy. Offering personal data lockers starting at $29.99 a year, Personal.com is worth a quick tour. What if you could store all your info in a digital vault, it asks? Among the kinds of "vaults": passwords, memberships and rewards programs, credit and debit card info, health insurance, and lots more.
It's a consumer play that's also a business play. The company is now targeting insurance, finance, and education companies and institutions, who would then offer consumers the opportunity to ingest their customer information and keep it in vault and auto-fill features then let consumers re-use such information once it is banked. Think Mint.com, but broader.
Importantly, while Personal.com deals potentially with lots of kinds of digital data, its business doesn't touch on the behavioral clickstream data that is at the heart of the Do Not Track fracas.
Do consumer want such a service? Personal.com won't release any numbers on customers or business partners. Getting early traction may be tough.
Embedded in the strategy: a pro-consumer tilt. Personal.com offers an "owner data agreement," basically certifying that it is the consumer, not Personal.com, that owns the data. It is a tantalizing idea: What if we individually could control our own digital data, setting parameters on who could use what and how? What if we as consumers could monetize our own data?
Neither Personal.com nor John Taysom's project nor the various Do Not Track initiatives envision that kind of individually driven marketplace, and I've been told there are a whole bunch of technical reasons why it would be difficult to achieve. Yet, wouldn't that be the ultimate capitalist, Adam Smith solution to this problem of runaway digital connectedness — a huge exchange that would facilitate the buying and selling of our own data?
For publishers, all this stuff is headache-producing. News publishers from Manhattan to Munich complain about all the third-party cookies feeding low-price exchanges, part of the reason their digital ad businesses are struggling. But there is a wide range of divergent opinion about how content-creating publishers will fare in Do Not Track world. They may benefit from diminished competition, but would they be able to adequately target for advertisers? Will Google and Facebook do even better in that world?
So, for publishers, these privacy times demand three things:
Upscale their own data mining businesses. "There's a big difference between collecting and using data," says Jonathan Mendez, CEO of Yieldbot, that works with publishers to provide selling alternatives to Google search. That's a huge point. Many publishers don't yet do enough with their first-party data to adequately serve advertiser needs.
Take a privacy-by-design approach to emerging business. How you treat consumers in product design and presentation is key here, with some tips from Inc. magazine.
Adopt a pro-privacy position. Who better than traditionally civic-minded newspaper companies than to help lead in asserting a sense of ownership of individual data? If news companies are to re-assert themselves as central to the next generation of their communities and of businesses, what better position than pro-privacy — and then helping individuals manage that privacy better?
It's a position that fits with publishers' own interests, and first-party data gathering (publisher/reader) makes more intuitive sense to citzen readers. For subscribers — those now being romanced into all-access member/subscribers — the relationship may make even more sense. Such an advocacy position could also help re-establish a local publisher as a commercial hub.
News and magazine publishers won't have to create the technology here — certainly not their strong suits — but they can be early partners as consortia and companies emerge in the marketplace.
Photo by Fire Monkey Fire used under a Creative Commons license.
Tags: Columns Featured Art "Ad Choices" "Three's a Crowd" "What They Know" advertising audience business model collaboration Cookie Clearinghouse crowdsourcing Digital Ad Alliance Do Not Track Ed Bott Google Guardian Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative I.D. DMZ Interactive Ad Bureau John Taysom Jonathan Mendez k-anonymity Kate Kaye Ken Doctor m2e Mozilla New York Times Newsonomics NSA Files online advertising ooky paywall personal data economy Personal.com PRISM Privacy by Design Spy vs. Spy Surveillance State UL Wall Street Journal Washington Post Yieldbot
Lessons from Waze for media
Now that I've written my commuter's paean to Waze, allow me to get a bit journowonky now and examine some of the lessons newspapers should learn from the success of the service:
1. Waze built a platform that lets the public share what it knows without the need for gatekeepers or mediators — that is, media. That's how it keeps content costs at a minimum and scales around the world.
2. Waze does that first by automatically using the technology in our pockets to — gasp! — track us live so it can tell how fast we are going and thus where the traffic jams are. And we happily allow that because of the return we get — freedom from traffic jams and faster routes to where we're going.
3. Waze does that next by easily enabling commuters to share alerts — traffic, stalled car, traffic-light camera, police, hazard, etc — ahead. It also lets commuters edit each others' alerts ("that stalled car is gone now").
4. Waze rewards users who contribute more information to the community — note I said to the community, not to Waze — by giving them recognition and greater access to Waze staff, which only improves Waze's service more quickly.
5. Waze lets users record their own frequent destinations — work, home, school, and so on — so they can easily navigate there.
6. This means that Google as Waze's new owner will now reliably know where we live, work, and go to school, shop, and so on. We will happily tell Waze/Google this so we get all of Waze's and Google's services. Google will be able to give us more relevant content and advertising. We will in turn get less noise. Everybody happy now?
How could, say, a local newspaper company learn from this?
1. Use platforms that enable your communities to share what they know with each other and without you getting in the way.
2. Add value to that with functionality, help, effort (but not articles).
3. If you knew where users lived and worked and went to school — small data, not big data — you could start by giving them more relevant content from what you already have.
4. You could give them more relevant advertising — "going to the store again? here are some deals for you!" — increasing their value as a customer by leaps and dollars.
5. You could learn where you should spend your resources — "gee, we didn't know we had a lot of people who worked up there, so perhaps we should start covering that town or even that company."
When I say that news should be a service and that the news industry should be a relationship business and that we should act as platforms for our users and that small data about people can lead to more relevance and greater value … this is what I mean.
So now go ask Waze how to get there. Oops. Too late. Google got there first. Again.
Tags: Uncategorized google local newbiznews newspapers waze
I trust Waze
I've had to learn to trust Waze in a few traffic jams. Now every time Waze tells me to turn, I turn. I've missed horrendous traffic jams that way. I've learned new routes to work and home I'd never imagined. I've seen parts of the countryside that are new to me. Waze is wonderful. Here's hoping that Google keeps and nurtures every bit of wonderfulness.
More than a dozen years ago, I wrote a business plan for a Waze-like social traffic service. Our local traffic services sucked; still do. A long-ago colleague of mine said his rule was to go wherever the radio traffic reports said there was a jam because (a) by the time they found out about it, the jam was gone and (b) every other idiot was listening to the radio and avoiding that spot themselves. He was right.
I envisioned a service in which commuters would program our routes in and then report on how long it took them and also alerted the system to jams — all via cell phone calls (mind you, this was before smart phones). The more data you contributed, the more points you earned to get alerts back for free. If you freeloaded, you paid (see, I wasn't against pay walls). It wouldn't have worked then. No $1 billion for me.
Waze built that social notion and more, outdoing Google in finding the means to listen to and learn from the public to both feed in automatic data on traffic speed — your phone knows how fast you're going — and alert the service to jams and other problems as well as errors in maps. It's brilliant: a platform for shared knowledge.
One concern I have with Google buying it is that if *everyone* ends up using the service, then does *everyone* take the same alternate routes and then they get crowded and my old colleague's rule comes into force again? Nah. Google and Waze are a helluva lot smarter than anybody on radio.
Congratulations, Waze. May you grow and prosper and get me home sooner.
Tags: Uncategorized google traffic waze
The newsonomics of climbing the ad food chain
The numbers are sobering.
While digital advertising has been growing at a 15 percent pace annually in the United States, the digital ad sales of news companies have largely plateaued, struggling to find any growth year over year. The New York Times Company reported digital ad sales down 4 percent for the 1st quarter, while McClatchy managed a 1.5 percent increase in the first quarter. Most news-based companies are significantly underperforming that 15 percent average — in the low single digits, either positive or negative. Meanwhile, the top five digital ad companies, led by Google, increase their share of ad revenue year after year and soon will hold two-thirds of it.
Why are publishers lagging?
Publishers describe their digital ad woe with these terms: "price compression," "bargain-basement ad networks," and "death of the banner ad." Each describes a world of hyper-competition in digital advertising — a world of almost infinite ad possibility and unyielding downward pricing pressure.
Not long ago, news companies believed that their premium-pricing models would withstand the competitive onslaught. Now they're retooling, trying to speed their adaptation to the new nature of the digital ad beast.
It's a matter of survival. For some, all-access circulation revenues are a good positive (pushing overall circ revenue up 5 percent in the U.S. last year). All, though, find themselves running as fast as they can to make up both for the freefall of print ad loss and that overall digital ad pricing downturn. "The ground is falling away under you" is how FT.com managing director Rob Grimshaw describes it.
Let's look at what some of the leading digital ad innovators among publishers are doing to regroup. Let's look at the newsonomics of climbing the ad food chain, checking in with two global publishers, The New York Times and the Financial Times, and two regional ones, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and Digital First Media. They provide a snapshot of a world in ever-spinning change.
Their strategies are all fairly similar: employ a range of new techniques that will justify premium prices. Let Facebook, which controls as much as a quarter of all web ad inventory, sell at 80-cent CPM and make money on scale. Publishers know they will never win that game. They want rates *20 to 50* times that, offering increasingly better targeting of their affluent readers.
Climbing the ad food chain is mainly about three things: technology, creativity, and sales relationships. It is also, overall, about differentiation, the roar of a lion in a crowded landscape.
Grimshaw, a former ad guy, says simply: "You've got to be doing something unique."
Let's look at each of the areas:
Digital advertising is all about technology in 2013, and you'll see lots of talk of the ad-tech stack, and who owns it. Google, of course, owns much of it, through its successive AdWords/Doubleclick/AdMob and more creations, acquisitions and integrations. Its stack is so efficient that many publishers feel compelled to use it, though they are wary of getting their businesses tied ever more directly to Google — or the Google "Death Star," as some critics call it.
For most publishers, Google is the classic frenemy. They work with it when they think the advantages outweigh the hazards, even as top publishers build their own programs. In fact, expect to soon see U.S. news publishers transition their Newspaper Consortium partnership with Yahoo into something intended to be broader, something that allows publishers to opt into and out of the ad programs of multiple portals — not just Yahoo — harnessing the ad tech of the day.
Six-month-old Smart Match is one of the FT's latest innovations to stay "premium." In brief, the content of an advertisement is matched, dynamically, to that of an article. The technology: semantic targeting of both article content and the FT's current "ad library" for the best matches on the fly, as compared to standard keyword targeting.
Advertisers commit specific budgets for specific time periods, and the FT does the matching. The FT says it gets a major lift in ad engagement with the technology, an average of 9x over its average clickthrough. Ten clients are now live in Smart Match's soft launch period.
Ad effectiveness isn't a one-time process; breakthroughs like Smart Match require ongoing engagement with marketers, as publishers work with them to figure out what works and what doesn't — and to tweak constantly. "Ads can't be a fire-and-forget enterprise" any longer, says Grimshaw.
The FT is setting floors on pricing and better controlling inventory, testing small "private exchanges" with select ad buyers and agencies, working with Google in the U.S. and Rubicon in Europe. Exchanges have caused publishers lots of headaches, as too much of their inventory — mixed and matched with lots of "lower quality" inventory — helped drive down pricing and deflated the meaning of "premium." So many have pulled back from exchanges in general; a few are starting to harness the exchange concept, but in a members-only approach.
"We are constantly evolving our approach to the programmatic marketplace, and private exchange activity is one part," says Todd Haskell, the New York Times Co. group vice president for advertising. "We've been using private exchanges for a series of single-client buys executed using private exchange technology, and are now exploring several single buyer/multiple brand programs."
One big notion here: minimize channel conflict, so that a publisher isn't competing with itself, making its inventory available at variable prices here and there. Private exchanges are proceeding cautiously. Buyers get more flexibility, but within the control of publishers.
Such private exchange testing follows the adoption of RTB (real-time-bidding), which publishers are honing to get better rates for the ad inventory they can't sell locally. "We moved away from a remnant inventory model a few years ago with the adoption of RTB and actively manage all of the programmatic demand that we see through the ad exchanges," says Jeff Griffing, the Star Tribune's chief revenue officer. "As a single-entity, local site publisher, our strategy is to make sure as many bidders/buyers as possible can transact on their audience impressions that we fulfill on our site."
Similarly, Digital First Media is moving to add new data — including third-party data from traditonal sources like Experian — into its own systems. "As we move more into the programatic world, with our own Trading Desk and all our own inventory in our private exchange, we keep adding data to all that traffic and match it in a way that enhances the ROI for the small and medium advertisers," says Digital First Ventures managing director Arturo Duran.
Ad tech is also allowing publishers to do things they couldn't previously do. The Times is using new brand new ad formats to help marketers gain interactivity. One new program will allow for coupon delivery within an app.
The idea of delivering more experiences within experiences — rather than alongside — can be seen in another recent announcement. Twitter Amplify allows advertisers to deliver videos in-stream — part of a slew of ad-friendly moves, well described by Ingrid Lunden at TechCrunch. Among the early partners to sign on: BBC America, Fox, Fuse, and The Weather Channel. The goals here: make ads both more experiential and more lead-generating.
Yield optimization is a term now part of everyone's vocabulary. Optimization — the better use of data through adjustment of the digital pulleys and levers that adjust what's offered, at which price points when — has always been a part of the advertising game. Cycle time, and sophistication, though, have markedly moved up. Where the Times used to adjust in 24-month cycles, says Haskell, it now makes significant moves in three-month periods.
There are lots of moving pieces to optimization. The Star Tribune's chief revenue officer Jeff Griffing describes how his company does it: "The push to premium help us drive our effective yield on pageviews; we've established baselines that our different pageviews should meet or exceed and factor in our directly sold campaigns with those indirectly or programmatically filled. We have an optimal formula for how will fill inventory and have set up systems that make sure we're delivering maximum revenue across all ad units."
Of course, publishers have long adjusted based on supply and demand. Today, though, the complex external development — various sales partners, through networks, private exchanges and more — requires fine tuning to get the highest possible price for fleeting inventory.
If this all seems like four-dimensional chess, mobile adds a fifth dimension. Haskell recalls the boom in second-screen tablet usage found on election night last November. That development provides a new place for the text-, numbers-, and analysis-driven Times to play in what is usually an immediate TV story. Consequently, it opens up new ways for the Times to exploit the tablet as a second-screen, timely ad vehicle.
The tablet (and mobile, generally) is quickly moving from niche to main play for the Times and others. Of its 43.6 million U.S. unique users in March, 18.3 million arrived via mobile devices, the Times says.
There's targeting — and then there's super-targeting. So the Times is selling what Todd Haskell calls "super premium." It is able to target, through its growing audience database, readers with certain job titles, reading certain sections of content. That kind of targeting drives higher rates, and it's part of the Times' plan to move up on the food chain, just as the middle and bottom of that chain widens infinitely.
Over the past year, publishers have reawakened to the notion of commercial storytelling. They now see it — a cousin to editorial storytelling — as a core competence, and one that many marketers envy.
"Agencies and many advertisers don't know how to do it," says Grimshaw. "There's a constant need for fresh [marketing] content."
Enter content marketing, which I recent covered in depth in "The newsonomics of recylcling journalism." The Star Tribune's Griffing points to his company's first big foray into the field, a Kids Health site. Sold to a single sponsor for one year, Children's Hospital, the new content was produced by Star Tribune staff and is a prototype for products to come. Griffing says the company's innovations, overall, have pushed year-over-year digital ad growth into the teens.
2013 is the year of content marketing, from New York to D.C. to Minneapolis to Dallas to San Francisco. The creative spark comes from a combination of old-fashioned journalism skills, both editorial and marketing. Sums up Rob Grimshaw: "Publishers have tremendous assets that have never been exploited."
Now, often, the creation and placement of "native advertising" are inextricably tied. As with the Times' IdeaLab, the Washington Post's Brand Connect, and Atlantic Media Strategies, global publishers have asserted their high-end editorial skills, applied to other people's storytelling, and are packaging that skill with an ad buy. Haskell points out that the creative costs can be built into the ad buy itself, if the buy is big enough. "We're not looking to make money on the creative," he says.
That combination of the creative and the buy shows the newness of it all, and the early flux in the content marketing craft. Over time, we'll likely see a greater cross-title placement of above-average creative, saving on creation costs. How then will the various content marketing works of a Times, an FT, a BuzzFeed, or an Atlantic Media compare? Which will become go-to creative companies, and which will return to the old comfort area of selling placement?
Video creation has also unearthed new creativity among the formerly ink-based wretches. In fact, most companies tell me that video ad demand, at anywhere from $25 to $75 cost per thousand rates (many multiples beyond display ads), is still outstripping supply.
The Star Tribune's Griffing puts it this way: "This one is simple. We are selling as much video inventory as we have; 1.2 million plays per month, which is significantly more than the next closest competitor, a local TV station. That said, until we're doing 10M plays a month, revenue for video will be relatively small."
In a nutshell, that describes the dilemma. The New York Times recently hired Rebecca Howard, late of AOL/HuffPo, to expand its sold-out video inventory.
For Digital First Media, a pioneer in local news video through the Journal Register Company, new video formats offer premium possibilities. It's going short, and long. "For short format we just closed a deal with Tout.com, and we are deploying their player in all our sites." DFM journalists will take videos, through Tout ("The newsonomics of leapfrog news video") and place them quickly on the sites, says Digital First's Arturo Duran. "Some of those 'Touts' are embedded inside the articles. This is following what the consumers are doing, and the tests by WSJ and BBC. They have created snippets of 15 seconds of information that feed their sites with real time information on events. For end users, it's a faster, easier way to watch it. There is a big play in the mobile arena, specially smartphones, as end users are watching more video in this [short] format than any other."
Longer-format video is still in the planning stages for DFM, says Duran, pointing to the potential of live events, interviews with personalities, direct chats with readers, and more. It's noteworthy that despite the success of video advertising, text-based sites still haven't mastered greater quality production of greater scale and aren't well-using third-party, "higher quality" video to satisfy ad needs.
Sales relationships
In an age of self-service, spawned by Google's paid search products, the sales channel is still multi-tiered. Self-service works profoundly for some products, but telesales and in-person, feet-on-the-ground sales forces are finding new life.
Blame complexity. The choices advertisers now have are endless. Top-tier advertisers are served by such specialized teams as the FT's "strategic sales" unit. The group works matches the complexity of FT's analytics-fueled approaches to marketing with advertiser needs.
At the other end of the spectrum, the burgeoning marketing services business ("The newsonomics of selling Main Street") is bringing these new approaches to smaller, local businesses. The Star Tribune's Jeff Grilling, a major proponent of the marketing services business, has already learned some lessons from his company's Radius marketing services foray.
"I'm finding more similarities than less, to our traditional sales approach. I'm finding that we are only as good as our sales people and the relationship they create, and that many small business customers have been approached by some sort of digital solutions vendor in the last few years. Make no mistake, there is no easy money in the SMB digital solutions business — it is very competitive and customers have are typically skeptical because of weak solutions they've experienced by other vendors in previous years. So if it's a quick and easy revenue stream that a media company is looking for, I would look at options other than SMB digital solutions. I do still believe, however, that if your intention is to genuinely help local businesses grow, and you have the stomach for investment, strategy, execution, and patience, SMB digital solutions can be a viable product line."
That tells you how long a haul this digital transition remains, and how many twists and turns even the innovators must endure.
Photo by NJR ZA used under a Creative Commons license.
Tags: Columns Featured Art advertising Arturo Duran Brand Connect business model DFM Digital First Media FT FT Smart Match FT.com Google Idea Lab Jeff Griffing Ken Doctor m2e New York Times Newsonomics newspapers online advertising paid content paywall private exchanges Rebecca Howard Rob Grimshaw RTB Star Tribune Todd Haskell Tout Twitter Amplify video video ads Washington Post Yahoo Newspaper Consortium
The newsonomics of value exchange and Google Surveys
What happens when a reader hits the paywall?
Only a small percentage slap their foreheads, say "Why didn't I subscribe earlier?" and pay up. Most go away; some will come back next month when the meter resets. A few will then subscribe; others just go elsewhere.
So what if there were a way to capture some value from those non-subscribing paywall hitters — people who plainly have some affinity for a certain news site but aren't willing to pay?
Welcome to the emerging world of value exchange. It's not a new idea; value exchange has been used in the gaming world for a long time. As the Zyngas have figured out, only a small percentage of people will pay to play games. So they've long used interactive ads, quizzes, surveys, and more as ways to wring some revenue out of those non-payers.
It's a variation on the an old saw that says much of life boils down to two things: money and time. It also brings to mind the classic Jack Benny radio routine, "Your Money or Your Life." If people won't pay for media with currency, many are willing to trade their time.
Now the idea is arriving at publishers' doorsteps. It is being tested mainly, but not exclusively, as a paywall alternative. Yet, as we'll see it, there may be many other innovative uses of time-based payment.
In part, this is part of the digital generational shift we might call "beyond the banner." Static, smaller-display advertising is increasingly out of favor, with both prices and clickthrough rates moving deeper into the bargain basement. But marketers want to market, readers want to read, and viewers want to watch, so new methods that combine the marketing of brands and offers and the go-button on media consumption are au courant.
That's where value exchange fits. Publishers are seeing double-digit, $10-$19 CPM rates from value exchange, and that's more than many average for their online advertising. Annual revenues in the significant six figures are now flowing in to the companies that have gotten in early on the business.
The big player in publisher-oriented value exchange is Google Consumer Surveys (GCS), a year-old brainchild born out of the Google's 20-percent-free-time-for-employees program (and first written about here at Nieman Lab). GCS now claims more than 200 publisher partners, including the L.A. Times, Bloomberg, and McClatchy properties. It says it has so far exposed some 500 million survey "prompts" to readers.
GCS will soon have more company in the value exchange game. Companies like Berlin-based SponsorPay, which offers interactive ad experiences in exchange for access mainly to games, is beginning to pursue publisher possibilities, both in Europe and the U.S, where half of its current clients are based. SponsorPay emphasizes mobile and social in its business.
L.A.-based SocialVibe, newly headed by hard-charging CEO Joe Marchese, is an ad tech company. It's mainly oriented to non-newspaper media, especially TV companies.
How does this value exchange exactly work? Typical is the implementation at one smaller paper, the Whittier Daily News in the L.A. area., one of some 35 Digital First Media papers (both MediaNews and Journal Register brands) that have deployed GCS almost since its inception. Upon reading their 10th, and last, free metered article of the month, readers get a choice: buy a sub for 99 cents for the first month — or take a survey. "Do you own a cat?" for instance.
Publishers get a nickel for each completed response. Response rates tend to fall between 10 and 20 percent. "Completion rates" improve by targeting specific questions to specific audiences. The nickels add up.
For publishers, then, we have a new acronym: PAM, Paywall Alternative Monetization.
Consider the innovation a by-product of the paywall revolution. If you haven't created a barrier to free access, you have less leverage to force wannabe readers to choose the lesser of two choices to proceed with their reading. Now, publishers can say, pay me for access with money — or with time. The time is short — measured in seconds or maybe minutes, depending on a video's length or a survey's questions.
What does the consumer get for answering a question? It varies. Respondents can get as little as a single "free" article, or an hour, or a day of access.
These programs can offer side-by-side offers. For instance, someone like a Press+ (which now powers some 380 newspaper sites) may power a subscription offer in one box, and Google Surveys or a SocialVibe can offer up an alternative in a neighboring one.
Digital First Media, long a public skeptic of paywalls, is using value exchange as an adjunct to its paywalls, many of which were deployed before DFM took over management of the MediaNews papers. While it is using it successfully as a paywall alternative, says Digital First Ventures managing director Arturo Duran, it's also finding a couple of other ways to wring money out of surveys.
At many of its digital properties, including The Denver Post, its photo- and video-heavy Media Center hub offers Google surveys as speed bumps for continued access. Readers perceive value; enough of them are willing to pay with a few seconds of time to keep getting access to visuals. Similarly, Boston.com's The Big Picture "news stories in photographs" uses GCS.
This approach, putting up a speed bump — in the form of a survey — instead of paywall explores the nuances of differing consumer valuation of differing parts of news sites. The Texas Tribune has offered a similar approach, having used Google surveys on its extensive data section. How often a survey is deployed can be adjusted by the publisher, working with Google, to maximize both revenue and reduce traffic lost. The search here is for the magic sweet spots.
The Christian Science Monitor is also an earlier surveys adopter. "We don't have a paywall," says online director David Clark Scott. "So we tried an experimental speed bump." Those bumps were installed first on a single section, and now have grown, popping up on much of the site. One CSM twist: If you come to the site directly, you won't see the surveys. If you come via some search, social, or other referrals, you will.
Digital First is also testing survey deployment for a group notoriously hard for the news industry to monetize: international readers. "We can't sell [ads] in Kenya, Japan, and India," says Duran. Instead of fetching bottom-of-the-ad-network prices, as low as 25 cents, surveys can return money in the whole dollars. One lesson so far: "It's a much better experience than an ad," for many readers, says Duran.
Publishers are also finding other ways to get readers to "pay." At the Newton (Iowa) Daily News, the paywall also provides these two alternatives: answer a survey question or a share an article (via Twitter, Facebook, or Google+) in exchange for continued passage.
"It wasn't about market research at all — it was about trading time for content," says Paul McDonald, head of Google Consumer Surveys. McDonald, who developed the product along with engineer Brett Slatkin, says they tested out what people would most likely be willing to do, in exchange for some good. They tested a million impressions at The Huffington Post and found that question-answering was the most likable activity. Hence, Google Consumer Surveys.
"Most research is stuck in old ways — paper, email, and phone. It's a stagnant industry, " McDonald says. The industry, of course, has responded, offering its own critique of GCS' rapid-fire — surveys can be commissioned and deployed within a day, with complete results, broken down by customized demographics (at an extra cost to survey buyers) within 48 hours — disruption of the market survey space. Still, industry reaction is more than mixed, with the positives of Google's new technique winning adherents among bigger brands and smaller businesses. It's a self-service buying technique, borrowing from Google's flagship AdWords model.
Interestingly, Google itself is using Surveys to obtain consumer insight. Yes, the company that derives more data from our clicks than anyone still finds asking a human being a question can yield unexpected learning — which, of course, can be combined with clickstream analytics. YouTube is among the many GCS deployers.
It's a new frontier, and one that I think offers a number of curious potentials.
At scale, if there is scale to the business, it's about significant new sources of revenue.
As a paywall alternative, it may be a detour that leads back to the road to subscription. If a reader is engaged enough with a news brand over time — kept engaged in part through value exchange — maybe he or she will eventually subscribe. Does a value exchange-using customer have a higher likelihood of subscribing in the future? It's too early to know, but we may have soon have sufficient data to see.
Value exchange could expand the ability to gain customer data. Each time someone trades some time for reading, she or he could be asked for an additional piece of profiling information. Essentially "registered," that new customer becomes more targetable for subscription offers or advertising.
We can start to widen the idea of trading time for access. Remember the idea of the "reverse paywall," espoused by then-Washington Post managing editor Raju Narisetti and Jeff Jarvis? Spend enough time with a news product, and get rewarded, they proposed. Value exchange begins to structure that kind of relationship, providing value both to readers and publishers. Rough equalization of value would be a painful process, but it may be doable through much experimentation.
Let's combine two things: the rise of mobile traffic and value exchange. Mobile may not be ad-friendly, but customers might be far more willing to watch a video or touch through a quick questionnaire on a cell phone — and that can ring a different key on the digital cash register. "Mobile is already more diversified," says SponsorPay CEO Andreas Bodczek, explaining that it is moving beyond gaming companies for value exchange and will soon include publishers.
GCS is an easily deployable tool for small- and medium-sized businesses. As such, it could be an interesting add-on for publishers' emerging marketing services businesses ("The newsonomics of selling Main Street"). That's a line Google could allow newspaper companies to resell, just as many resell Google paid search.
Tags: Columns advertising AdWords Arturo Duran Beyond the Banner Bloomberg Boston Globe Brett Slatkin business model Christian Science Monitor David Clark Scott Denver Post Digital First Media engagement GCS Google Google Consumer Surveys Google News Huffington Post Jeff Jarvis Joe Marchese Journal-Register L.A. Times m2e McClatchy New York Times Newsonomics newspapers Newton Daily News paid content Paul McDonald paywall Paywall Alternative Monetization Press+ Raju Narisetti SocialVibe SponsorPay Texas Tribune The Big Picture Whittier Daily News Zynga
Jaron Lanier wants to build a new middle class on micropayments
"We're used to treating information as 'free,'" writes Jaron Lanier in his latest book Who Owns the Future?, "but the price we pay for the illusion of 'free' is only workable so long as most of the overall economy isn't about information."
Lanier argues that a free-culture mindset is dismantling the middle-class economy. In his estimation, the idea "that mankind's information should be free is idealistic, and understandably popular, but information wouldn't need to be free it no one were impoverished."
Who Owns the Future?, like his 2010 book You Are Not a Gadget, is another manifesto attempting to rebuff what he sees as the contemporary ethos of the web. But the followup also refreshingly attempts to pose solutions, one where all participants in this information-based world are paid for what they do and distribute on the web. Throughout, it places particular emphasis on the ways digital technology has unsettled the so-called "creative class" — journalists, musicians, photographers, and the like. As he sees it, the tribulations of those working in such fields may be a premonition for the middle class as a whole. It's "urgent," he writes, "to determine if the felling of creative-class careers was an anomaly or an early warning of what is to happen to immeasurably more middle-class jobs later in this century."
I recently spoke with Lanier and we discussed the ways he sees digital networking disrupting the media, why he thinks advertising can no longer sustain paid journalism, and why he misses the future. Lightly edited and condensed, here's a transcript of our conversation.
Eric Allen Been: You were one of the early advocates of the notion that "information wants to be free." An idea most media companies initially embraced when it came to the web, and one that now some seem to regret. Could you talk a little bit about why you changed your mind on this line of thinking?
Jaron Lanier: Sure. It was based on empirical results. The idea sounded wonderful 30 years ago. It sounded wonderful in the way that perfect libertarianism or perfect socialism can. It sounds right, but with all these attempts to make a perfect system, it doesn't work out so well. Empirically, what I've seen is the hollowing out of middle-class opportunities and that there is an absurdity to the way it's going. I think we're not getting the benefits that I initially anticipated.
Been: When it came to journalism, what were some of those benefits that you originally expected? I imagine you then thought it would be a largely positive thing.
Lanier: Yeah. To use the terminology of the time, we — that is, me and others who were behind a lot of the ideas behind the Web 2.0 ethos or whatever — wanted to "supplant" or "make obsolete" the existing channels of journalism and the existing types of jobs in journalism. But what would come instead would be better — more open and all of that — and less intermediated. What happened instead was a little bit of what we anticipated. In a sense, the vision came true. Yes, anybody can blog and all that — and I still like that stuff — but the bigger problem is that an incredible inequity developed where the people with big computers who were routing what journalists did were getting all the formal benefits. Mainly the money, the power. And the people who were doing the work were so often just getting informal benefits, like reputation and the ability to promote themselves. That isn't enough. The thing that we missed was how much power would accrue to the people with the biggest computers. That was the thing we didn't really think through.
Been: Historically, technological advances have caused disruptions to industries, but they've also tended to provide new jobs to replace the wiped-out ones. There seems to be some optimism in a lot of quarters that journalism can get eventually get on the right track, economically speaking, within the digital world. But you don't think so.
Lanier: The system is slowly destroying itself. I'll give you an example of how this might work out. Let's suppose you say in the future, journalists will figure out how to attach themselves to advertising more directly so they're not left out of the loop. Right now, a lot of journalism is aggregated in various services that create aggregate feeds of one kind or another and those things sell advertising for the final-stop aggregator. And the people doing the real work only get a pittance. A few journalists do well but it's very few — it's a winner-take-all world where only a minority does well. Yes, there are a few people, for instance, who have blogs with their own ads and that can bring in some money. You can say, "Well, isn't that a good model and shouldn't that be emulated"? The problem is that they're dependent on the health of the ad servers that place ads. Very few people can handle that directly. And the problem with that is the whole business of using advertising to fund communication on the Internet is inherently self-destructive, because the only stuff that can be advertised on Google or Facebook is stuff that Google hasn't already forced to be free.
As an example, you might have a company that makes toys and you advertise the toys on Google, and that might show up in journalism about toy safety or something. So journalists can eek some money from people who sell toys. That's kind of like the traditional model of advertising-supported journalism.
But every type of business that might advertise on Google is gradually being automated and turning into more of an information business. In the case of toys, there's a 3-D printer where people print out toys. At some point, that will become better and better and more common, and whenever that happens, what happened to music with Napster will happen to toys. It'll be all about the files and the machines that actually print out the toys. If the files that print out the toys can be made free, the only big business will be the routing of those files, which might be Google or Facebook handling that, and there will be nobody left to advertise on Google.
That'll happen with everything else — pharmaceuticals, transportation, natural resources — every single area will be subject to more and more automation, which doesn't have to put people out of work. The only reason automation leads to unemployment is the idea of information being free. It's a totally artificial problem, but if journalists are counting the Google model to live on, it won't work. Google is undermining itself, and there will be no one left to buy advertisements.
Been: Speaking of advertising, I'm interested in hearing what you think about a lot of people currently lauding BuzzFeed and its use of native advertising. There's a lot of talk about it solving "the problems of both journalism and advertising at once", or it being some sort of guiding light for a "future of paid journalism."
Lanier: Advertising, in whatever form, just can't be the only possible business plan for information. It forces everybody to ultimately compete for the same small pool of advertisers. How much of the economy can advertising really be? It can't be the whole market. Why on earth are Google and Facebook competing for the same customers when they actually do totally different things? It's a peculiar problem. You're saying that there's only one business plan, one customer set, and everybody has to dive after that. It becomes a very narrow game — there's not enough there for everybody. It could work out locally a little bit, but it's not an overall solution.
Been: And your solution is what you call a "humanistic information economy." Could you talk a little bit about how such a system would work?
Lanier: There are some theoretical reasons that lead me to believe that if you monetized a deeply connected open network, the distribution of benefits to people would look like a middle class. In other words, there would be a lot of wealth in a lot of people's hands that could outspend any elite, which is critical for democracy and a market economy to survive. So one benefit is you could get a consistent middle class even when the economy gets really automated. It becomes a real information economy.
A humanistic economy would create a middle class in a new way, instead of through unions and other ad hoc mechanisms. It would create a middle class by compensating people for their value in terms of references to the network. It would create an expanding economy instead of a static one, which is also important. It's built around the people instead of the machines. It would be a change in paradigm.
Been: In the book, you write: "If we demand that everyone turn into a freelancer, then we will all eventually pay an untenable price in heartbreak." But a lot of what you're proposing strikes me, in some senses, as a freelance economy.
Lanier: That's right. What I'm proposing is actually a freelance economy, but it's a freelance economy where freelancing earns you not just income but also wealth. That's an important distinction to make. What I think should happen is as you start providing information to the network, it then will become a part of other services that grow over time.
So, for instance, let's suppose you translate between languages, and some of your translations provide example phrase translations that are used in automatic translators. You would keep getting dribbles of royalties from having done that, and you start accumulating a lot of little ways that you're getting royalties — not in the sense of contractual royalties, just little payments from people that are doing things that benefited from information you provided. If you look at people's interest in social networking, you see a middle-class distribution of interest. A lot of people would get a lot of little dribs and drabs, and it would accumulate over a lifetime so you'd start to have more and more established information that had been referenced by you that people are using. What should happen is you should start accumulating wealth, some money that shows up because of your past as well as your present moment.
Been: So if I simply shared a link to a New York Times article on Twitter, for instance, would there be a payment exchange? If so, who would it go to?
Lanier: It would be person-to-person payments. Right now, we're used to a system where you earn money in blocks, like a salary check, and you're spending on little things like coffee of something. And in this system, you'd be earning lots of little micropayments all the time. But you would be spending less often. That terrifies people, but it's a macroeconomic thing. I believe the economy would actually grow if information was monetized, and overall your chances will get a lot better than they are now.
Been: You say in the book that this person-to-person payment system is partly inspired by the early work of the sociologist and information technology pioneer, Ted Nelson. Particular, his thoughts about two-way linking over a network. Could you talk a little bit about why you think this is a better way to exchange information?
Lanier: The original concept of digital networking that predated the actual existence of digital networking is Ted Nelson's work from the 1960s. It was different from the networks we know today in a few key ways. All the links were two-way, for one. You would always know who was linking at your website — there would always be backlinks. If you have universal backlinks, you have a basis for micropayments from somebody's information that's useful to somebody else. If the government camera on a corner catches you walking by, and it matches against you, you'd be owed some money because you contributed information. Every backlink would be monetized. Monetizing actually decentralizes power rather than centralizing it. Demonetizing a network actually concentrates power around anyone who has the biggest computer analyzing it.
Been: Let's talk about that last point. This is an example of what you call in the book a "Siren Server." That is, computers on a network that gather data without conceding that money is owed to those individuals mined for the information.
Lanier: That's right. It's my name for one of the biggest, best, most effective, connected computers on the network. A Siren Server is a big server farm — a remote unmarked building somewhere in the countryside near a river so it can get cooled. It has tons of computers that run as one. It gathers data from the world for free and does more processing of that data that normal computers can do. What it does with the processing is it calculates several moves that the owners can make that put them in an advantage based on a global perspective.
If you're Amazon, it means you keep track of everybody else's prices in the world, including little local independent stores, so you can never be outsold. If a store wants to give a book away, Amazon will also do that, so nobody gets a local advantage. If you're Google, it gives advertisers a way to use a behavioral model of the world to predict which options in front of you are most likely to steer you. If you're a finance company, it's a way of bundling derivatives in such a way that somebody else is holding the risk. It's almost a cryptographic effort. If you're an insurance company, it's a way of calculating how to divide populations so you insure the people who least need to be insured. In all these cases, a giant computer calculates an advantage for yourself and you get a global perspective that overwhelms the local advantage that participants in the market might have had before.
Been: In the book, you call Craigslist a Siren Server, one that "created a service that has greatly increased convenience for ordinary people, while causing a crisis in local journalism that once relied on paid classified adds." You write that it "has a tragic quality, since it is as modest and ethical as it can be, eschewing available spying opportunities, and yet it still functions as a Siren Server despite that." So a Siren Server, in your mind, isn't necessarily always a malevolent construction.
Lanier: That's true. I don't think there's much in the way of evil or competitive intent. It's the power of having one of the biggest computers. When you suddenly get power by surprise, it's a seduction. You don't realize that other people are being hurt. But if it wasn't Craigslist, it would have been something else. Some computer gets a global perspective on everything and the local advantage goes away. Craigslist calculated away the local advantage that newspapers used to have.
Been: So far, the reviews of Who Owns the Future? have been largely positive. But in The Washington Post, Evgeny Morozov criticized it by saying "Lanier's proposal raises two questions that he never fully confronts." One being whether a nanopayment system would actually help the middle class once automation hits its tipping point. He cites cab drivers being replaced by self-driving cars and says: "Unless cabdrivers have directly contributed to the making of maps used by self-driving cars, it's hard to see how a royalty-like system can be justified."
Lanier: This has to do with the value of information. In the book I ask this very question — in the future, in the case of self-driving cars, it's certainly true that once you've been through the streets once, why do it again? The reason is that they're changing. There might be potholes, or there might be changes to local traffic laws and traffic patterns. The world is dynamic. So over time, maps of streets that need cars to drive on them will need to be updated. The way self-driving cars work is big data. It's not some brilliant artificial brain that knows how to drive a car. It's that the streets are digitized in great detail.
So where does the data come from? To a degree, from automated cameras. But no matter where it comes from, at the bottom of the chain there will be someone operating it. It's not really automated. Whoever that is — maybe somebody wearing Google Glass on their head that sees a new pothole, or somebody on their bike that sees it — only a few people will pick up that data. At that point, when the data becomes rarified, the value should go up. The updating of the input that is needed is more valuable, per bit, than we imagine it would be today. Cabbies themselves, that's irrelevant. There won't be cabbies. They'll have to be doing other things.
Been: His other question is "how many [online] services would survive his proposed reforms?" Morozov brings up Wikipedia and says the "introduction of monetary incentives would probably affect authors' motivation. Wikipedia the nonprofit attracts far more of them than would Wikipedia the startup."
Lanier: But in what I'm proposing, Wikipedia would not pay you — it would be a person-to-person thing. I'm proposing that there's no shop and people are paying each other when they create things like Wikipedia. Which is very different. If it's going through a central hub, it creates a very narrow range of winners. If it's not, it's a whole different story.
The online services that would survive would be the ones that can add value to the data that people are providing anyway. Instagram could perhaps charge to do cool effects on your pictures, but the mere connections between you and other people would not be billable, it would just be normal. People would pay each other for that. The services would have to do more now than they are. A lot of services are just gatekeepers and would not survive and they shouldn't. It would force people to up their game.
Been: Speaking of upping one's game, you get a strong sense throughout the book that you think society is no longer future-minded. Towards the end, you write that you "miss the future." What do you mean by that statement?
Lanier: It seems that there's a loss of ambition or a lowering of standards for what we should expect from the future. We hyped up things like being able to network — and we understood it was a step on a path — but these days I call the open-source idea the MSG of journalism.
An example would be this: Take some story that would be totally boring, like garbage bags are being left on the street. But if you say, "open-source software is being used to track garbage bags on the street," there's something about it that it makes it seem interesting. And that makes it a low bar for what seems interesting. A very unambitious idea of what innovation can be.
Photo of Jaron Lanier by Dan Farber used under a Creative Commons license.
Tags: Regular post advertising CraigsList creative class Facebook free free culture freelancing Google information wants to be free Jaron Lanier micropayments middle class native advertising Who Owns the Future?
The newsonomics of where NewsRight went wrong
Quietly, very quietly, NewsRight — once touted as the American newspaper industry's bid to protect its content and make more money from it — has closed its doors.
Yesterday, it conducted a concluding board meeting, aimed at tying up loose ends. That meeting follows the issuing of a put-your-best-face-on-it press release two weeks ago. Though the news has been out there, hardly a whimper was heard.
Chalk it up, first, to how few people are really still covering the $38.6 billion U.S. newspaper industry. Then add in the fact that the world is changing rapidly. Piracy protection has declined as a top publisher concern. Google's snippetization of the news universe is bothersome, but less of a central issue. The declining relative value of the desktop web — where NewsRight was primarily aimed — in the mobile age played a part. Non-industry-owned players like NewsCred ("The newsonomics of recycling journalism") have been born, offering publishers revenue streams similar to those that NewsRight itself was intended to create.
Further, new ways to value news content — through all-access subscriptions and app-based delivery, content marketing, marketing services, innovative niching and more — have all emerged in the last couple of years.
Put a positive spin on it, and the U.S. newspaper industry is looking forward, rather than backward, as it seeks to find new ways to grow reader and ad revenues.
That's all true. But it's also instructive to consider the failure of NewsRight.
It's easy to deride it as NewsWrong. It's one of those enterprises that may just have been born under a bad sign. Instead of the stars converging, they collided.
NewsRight emerged as an Associated Press incubator project. If you recall the old AP News Registry and its "beacon," NewsRight became its next iteration. It was intended to track news content as it traversed the web, detecting piracy along the way ("Remember the beacon"). It was an ambitious databasing project, at its peak taking in feeds from more than 900 news sites. The idea: create the largest database of current news content in the country, both categorized by topic and increasingly trackable as it was used (or misused) on the web.
AP initially incentivized member newspapers to contribute to the News Registry by discounting some of their annual fees. Then a bigger initiative emerged, first called the News Licensing Group (NLG). The strategy: harness the power of the growing registry to better monetize newspaper content through smart licensing.
NLG grew into a separate company, with AP contributing the registry's intellectual property and becoming one of 29 partners. The other 28: U.S. daily newspaper companies and the leading European newspaper and magazine publisher Axel Springer. Those partners collectively committed more than $20 million — though they ended up spending only something more than half of that before locking up the premises.
Renamed NewsRight, it was an industry consortium, and here a truism applies: It's tougher for a consortium — as much aimed at defense than offense — to innovate and adjust quickly. Or, to put it in vaudevillian terms: Dying is easy — making decisions among 29 newspaper companies can be torture.
It formally launched just more than a year ago, in January 2012 ("NewsRight's potential: New content packages, niche audiences, and revenue"), and the issues surfaced immediately. Let's count the top three:
Its strategy was muddled. Was it primarily a content-protection play, bent on challenging piracy and misuse? Or was it a way to license one of the largest collections of categorized news content? Which way did it want to go? Instead of deciding between the two, it straddled both.
In May 2011, seven months before the launch, the board had picked TV veteran David Westin as its first CEO. Formerly head of ABC News, he seemed an odd fit from the beginning. A TV guy in a text world. An analog guy in a digital world. Then friction between Westin and those who had hired him — including then-AP CEO Tom Curley — only complicated the strategic indecision. Westin was let go in July, which I noted then, was the beginning of the end.
Publishers' own interests were too tough to balance with the common good. Though both The New York Times Company and AP were owners, it was problematic to include feeds of the Times and AP in the main NewsRight "catalog." The partners tried to find prices suitable for the high-value national content (including the Times and AP) and the somewhat lesser-valued regional content, but that exercise proved difficult, the difficulty of execution exacerbated by anti-trust laws. Potential customers, of course, wanted the Times and AP as part of any deal, so dealmaking was hampered.
Further, all publishers take in steady revenue streams — collectively in the tens of millions — from enterprise licensors, like LexisNexis, Factiva, and Thomson Reuters, as well as education and copyright markets. NewsRight's owners (the newspaper companies) didn't want NewsRight to get in the way of those revenue streams — and those were the only licensing streams that had proven lucrative over time.
Long story short, NewsRight was hobbled from the beginning, and in its brief life, was able to announce only two significant customer, Moreover and Cision, and several smaller ones.
How could it have been so difficult?
It's understandable on one level. Publishers have seethed with rage as they've seen their substantial investment in newsrooms harvested — for nothing — by many aggregators from Google to the tens of thousands of websites that actually steal full-text content. Those sites all monetize the content with advertising, and, save a few licensing agreements (notably with AP itself), they share little in the way of ad revenue.
But rage — whether seething or public — isn't a business model.
Anti-piracy, itself, has also proven not to be much of a business model. Witness the tribulations of Attributor, an AP-invested-in content-tracking service that used some pretty good technology to track pirated content. It couldn't get the big ad providers to act on piracy, though. Last year, after pointing its business in the direction of book industry digital rights management, it was sold for a meager $5.6 million to Digimarc.
So if anti-piracy couldn't wasn't much of a business model, then the question turned to who would pay to license NewsRight's feed of all that content, or subsets of it?
Given that owner-publishers wanted to protect their existing licensing streams, NewsRight turned its sights to an area that had not well-monetized: media monitoring.
Media monitoring is a storied field. When I did content syndication for Knight Ridder at the turn of the century, I was lucky enough to visit Burrelles (now BurrellesLuce) in Livingston, New Jersey. In addition to a great auto tour of Tony Soprano country, I got to visit the company in the midst of transition.
In one office, older men with actual green eyeshades meticulously clipped periodicals (with scissors), monitoring company mentions in the press. The company then took the clips and mailed them. That's a business that sustained many a press agent for many a decade: "Look, see the press we got ya!"
In Burrelles' back rooms, the new digital monitoring of press mention was beginning to take form. Today, media monitoring is a good, if mature, industry segment, dominated by companies like Cision, BurrellesLuce, and Vocus, as social media monitoring and sentiment analysis both widen and complicate the field. Figure there are more than a hundred media monitoring companies of note.
Yet even within the relatively slim segment of the media monitoring space, NewsRight couldn't get enough traction fast enough. Its ability to grow revenues there — and then to pivot into newer areas like mobile aggregation and content marketing — ran into the frustrations of the owner-newspapers. So they pulled the plug, spending less than they had actually committed. They decided to cut their losses, and move on.
Moving on meant making NewsRight's last deal. The company — which has let go its fewer than 10 employees — announced that it had "joined forces" with BurrellesLuce and Moreover. It's a face-saver — and maybe more.
Those two companies will try to extend media monitoring contracts for newspaper companies. BurrellesLuce (handling licensing and aggregation) and Moreover (handling billing and tracking) will make content available under the NewsRight name. The partnership's new CAP (Compliant Article Program) seeks to further contracting for digital media monitoring rights, a murky legal area. If CAP works, publishers, Moreover, and BurrellesLuce will share in the new revenue.
What about NewsRight's anti-piracy mandate? That advocacy position transitions over to the Newspaper Association of America.
NAA is itself in the process of being restyled into a new industry hub (with its merger and more) under new CEO Caroline Little. "As both guardian and evangelist for the newspaper industry, the NAA feels a tremendous responsibility to protect original content generated by its members," noted Little in the NewsRight release.
What about the 1,000-title content database, the former AP registry that had formed the nucleus of NewsRight? It's in limbo, and isn't part of the BurrellesLuce/Moreover turnover. Its categorization technology has had stumbles and overall the system needs an upgrade.
There's a big irony here.
In 2013, we're seeing more innovative use of news content than we have in a long time. From NewsCred's innovative aggregation model to Flipboard's DIY news magazines, from new content marketing initiatives at The New York Times, Washington Post, Buzzfeed, and Forbes to regional agency businesses like The Dallas Morning News' Speakeasy, there are many new ways news content is being monetized.
We're really in the midst of a new content re-evaluation. No one makes the mistake this time around of calling news content king, but its value is being reproven amid these fledgling strategies.
Maybe the advent of a NewsCred — which plainly better understood and better built technology to value a new kind of content aggregation — makes NewsRight redundant. That's in a sense what the partners decided: let the staffs of BurrellesLuce and Moreover and smarts of the NewsCreds make sense of whatever newer licensing markets are out there. Let them give the would-be buyers what they want: a licensing process to be as simple as it can be. One-stop, one-click, or as close as you can manage to that. While the disbanding of NewsRight seems to take the news industry in the opposite, more atomized, direction, in one way, it may be the third-party players who succeed here.
So is it that NewsRight is ending with a whimper, or maybe a sigh of relief? Both, plainly. It's telling that no one at NewsRight was either willing or able to talk about the shutdown.
Thumbs down to content consortia. Thumbs up to letting the freer market of entrepreneurs make sense of the content landscape, with publishers getting paid something for what the companies still know how to do: produce highly valued content.
Tags: Columns anti-piracy AP AP beacon AP News Registry Attributor Brand Connect BurrellesLuce Buzzfeed CAP program Caroline Little content marketing David Westin Factiva Flipboard Forbes Google Ken Doctor Lexis Nexis m2e marketing services Moreover NAA New York Times NewsCred Newsonomics NewsRight NLG NYT IdeaLab Tom Curley
At The Wall Street Journal, a smartphone app has reporters on board for shooting video
The text-based web is dead, says Michael Downing. When AOL CEO Tim Armstrong announced his intention this month to transform the company into a platform for video, Downing heard a death knell — one he's been expecting for some time. We are, after all, as he says, on the precipice of "the rise of the visual web."
Downing has a dog in this fight; he's the founder of Tout, a video sharing website and app that makes it easy for users to upload and share short — under 15 seconds — videos in real-time. Although originally designed as a consumer device, it also appealed to publishers: The Wall Street Journal approached Downing with the idea for a proprietary app that reporters could use as a news gathering tool. With the addition of some analytics tools and a centralized management function that allows editors to quickly vet clips before they're published, that became WorldStream, which we wrote about in August.
"Consumer behavior has become much more accustomed to consuming the news they want as it happens," says Downing. "The WSJ was trying to be much more in line with real-time news and real-time publishing."
More than half a year later, how's WorldStream working out? The Journal seems pretty happy. On the business side, WorldStream point man and WSJ deputy editor of video Mark Scheffler describes the project as a "destination but also a clearinghouse." While all of the WSJ's mobile videos are first published to the feed, many go on to live second lives across a wide variety of platforms. Some clips follow reporters to live broadcast appearances, while others are embedded into article pages and blogs. Andy Regal, the Journal's head of video production, said that they don't break out WorldStream views from the newspaper's overall video numbers, which he said total between 30 and 35 million streams per month.
That kind of traffic across platforms draws the attention of advertisers. The WSJ says video ads generate "premium" rates, meaning somewhere around $40 to $60 CPM. Says Tim Ware, WSJ director of mobile sales, of the Journal's broader video strategy: "We're very bullish on the growth of WSJ Live this fiscal year, and thus the growth in video ad revenue. We're also starting to contemplate some one-off sponsorships within our overarching video coverage of select events and stories." (After spending about a total of about an hour on WorldStream, however, I only saw one ad — for a "smart document solutions" company — repeated about a half dozen times.)
But the surprise, both for Downing and WSJ management, is how readily — and ably — the WSJ's reporters have taken to the new medium; getting reporter buy-in has been a struggle for many newspaper video initiatives. "It started out as an internal tool because we didn't know how many people would be able to accommodate this kind of approach with the technology and the software," Regal says, "but they think about it as part of their daily work now." Armed with iPhones, iPods, iPads, and Android devices, hundreds of WSJ staffers have filed video clips via Tout; in the 229 days since launch, that's 2,815 videos. In many cases, Downing said, the reporters didn't even need training: "They just jumped right in and started using it."
Charles Levinson has been reporting for the Journal from places like Syria "What are the assets that give us an advantage over the competitor? We have 2,000 reporters around the world," he said. "How do you parlay 2,000 reporters into good video?" Levinson says the Tout app is helping the WSJ avoid print media's tendency toward "mediocre" video production.
Christina Binkley is a style columnist at the WSJ who first experimented with the app while reporting on New York's 2012 Fashion Week. She says there's a lot of pressure on reporters to be producing a huge variety of content — articles, columns, blogs, Instagrams, tweets. She said, unlike some other apps, WorldStream has really stuck with her: "I can add a lot of value to my column very quickly without having to mic somebody up."
Scheffler says some of the reporters have gained basic video shooting skills so quickly that the footage they file can be edited together into longer clips that could pass for more traditionally produced video. Going forward, Scheffler hopes to put better mobile editing tools in their hands: "Being able to be full-fledged creators on a mobile platform is something that we're just going to continue being at the frontier of," he said.
Regal's focus, meanwhile, will be to make sure none of that prime footage is being lost in the ever quickening deluge that is the WorldStream feed. He's considering a "Best of WorldStream" weekly digest, and a variety of other news packages that make that valuable content more findable, and more shareable.
News organizations have been chasing the promise of video advertising for years now, and the rise of apps like Vine illustrate the rise of social video sharing. But Downing says he isn't worried about the competition. "Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the existing video sharing apps have to do with self-expression," he says, comparing Vine to something like Instagram. Tout's enterprise apps skip the idea of sharing with friends and focuses on fast, concise updates from outlets that users follow based on broader personal interest.
"It's a real-time, reverse chronological vertical feed of updates," says Downing, "Whether it's Twitter or LinkedIn, that is becoming the standard form factor for being able to track that information that you curate yourself."
Since partnering with The Wall Street Journal last year, a number of publishers have pursued similar agreements with Tout — CBS, Fox, NBC Universal, WWE, La Gardere and Conde Nast are among them. By the end of 2013, Downing expects to host around 200 media outlets, including some of News Corp.'s other brands. Downing says these publisher agreements are now the company's "primary mode of business," not the consumer product.
What does Downing see coming in video? He confidently points to Google's spring 2012 earnings report, when for the first time, its cost-per-click rate fell. "That was the sounding bell. That was the beacon. That was the one clear signal to the world that the era of the print metaphor defining the web experience…was over."
Tags: Regular post Android Andy Regal AOL CBS Conde Nast Facebook feed Google Instagram iPhone LinkedIn Mark Downing Mark Scheffler mobile video editing NBC Universal real-time analytics real-time reporting streamification Tim Armstrong Tout Twitter video video advertising Vine Wall Street Journal WorldStream
1. Garfield: There is no 'golden age' of journalism: Free does not mean better (Guardian)
2. A driving force behind Wikipedia will be stepping down (NYT)
3. Social media unites supporters of same-sex marriage, but is that enough? (PBS)
4. Windows phone is outselling iPhone...in a few places (memeburn)
5. Report: Twitter ad revenues higher that expected with strong mobile numbers (PaidContent.org)
6. Google wants to keep sponsored newspaper content out of Google News (Search Engine Land)
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Tags: Must Reads ad revenues digital disruption facebook google google news iphone mobile same-sex marriage sponsored content twitter wikipedia windows phone
Daily Must Reads, September 4, 2012
The best stories across the web on media and technology, curated by Lily Leung
1. TV viewership of the GOP convention down, social media engagement up (AP)
2. 2.2% of global newspaper ad revenues are from digital, study shows (Journalism.co.uk)
3. One reporter's love-hate relationship with Twitter (GigaOm)
4. A look behind Reddit's success (NYT)
5. Will Google be our next cable provider? (Business Insider)
Tags: Must Reads ads cable google gop convention must reads newspaper reddit revenue twitter
Kobo to replace Google e-books for independent booksellers
Wall Street Journal :: Kobo has struck a deal to sell e-books and its line of e-readers through independent U.S. booksellers, giving the Toronto firm a new chance to establish a foothold in the American digital books market.
A report by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, online.wsj.com
Tags: e-books Google
The newsonomics of leapfrog news video
Our political conventions reminds us that this is not the summer of love. But it may be the season we'll remember as the summer of video.
Certainly, video's — news video's — growth has been noteworthy for awhile. But now there's a bursting of new news video forms, a hothouse of experimentation that is both refreshing and intriguing. The blossoming has implications far and wide, not just for "news," but for tech companies like Facebook and television brands from Ellen to Piers to The View. Within it, we see the capability of non-TV companies to leapfrog the TV people.
Just Monday, both The Wall Street Journal ("The Wall Street Journal wants its reporters filing microvideo updates for its new WorldStream") and The New York Times made video announcements. A couple of weeks ago, the ambitious Huffington Post Live launched, hiring the almost unbelievable number of 104 staffers. In these three forays, and in the thinking in and around them, we see the boundaries of old media being slowly broken. We're on the edge, finally, of new ways to both create and present news — and how to talk about the news.
It's funny: "Video," as a term, as a category, barely defines what we're seeing. All video means is moving pictures, and we've had those since George Méliès (as Martin Scorcese reinterpreted in Hugo). We've known broadcast news and then cable news, witnessed their triumphs and now the declines of both. Because of twin technologies — all the iGadgets reintroducing us to the world as we know it and the behind-the-scenes digital pipes making content creation and distribution increasingly seamless — we're seeing what creative people can do with moving pictures.
While this week's Journal's announcement focused on WorldStream, that semi-raw feed (all staff contributions are okayed one-by-one for public view) is but one of the full handful of Journal experiments with video.
Watch video now better embedded into stories (as the Times also has done with QuickLinks). Get appointment programs on WSJ Live ("The newsonomics of WSJ Live"). Watch on demand, in a variety of formats. Go directly to a video page, where all of the video output is categorized. And now, WorldStream, that rawish feed the Journal is doing, because it can — and because such video becomes great bait for the social web. Pick up the url, tweet it, and the Journal has happened on a social video strategy that is curiously akin to Upworthy's.
It's a multi-point access world for video producers. The Times will tell you that its viewing is roughly divided in thirds among its video center, its homepage video player and embedded-within-stories video. The Journal says more than half its views are now coming from embedded videos, with less than five percent of its views come from its video page. It makes sense that "video center" usage will decrease over time; these are transitional pages. Convergence is now becoming real, and we expect to see the content, text, voice, and pictures delivered in context. Finally. We don't go to a place on sites called "Words."
What's most important about we're seeing flickering before our eyes? Try these, as we look at the newsonomics of leapfrog news video.
It's about money. Video advertising rates are holding up far better than display-around-text rates. "Give me inventory" is a cry heard from the salespeople, who find agencies and top advertisers' pre-roll appetites nowhere near satiated. For top premium brands, $45-60 CPM (cost per thousand views) are still available, as display rates fetch as little as a tenth and as much as one-half of those numbers. In addition, companies are selling video packages and sponsored tile ads in addition to pre-rolls to sweeten their take. So production of video makes financial sense — even as news companies cut back, lay off, and pinch, pinch, pinch. The smarter companies are investing in video — staffers, training, technologies — even as they make those cuts, while other companies find themselves just stuck. Video is the second-fastest growing ad category in the U.S., according to IAB, up 29 percent year-over-year. It will be worth about $2 billion this year.
It's about platforms. The Journal's Alan Murray, who heads digital news efforts, says the company's video traffic has doubled in six months. Why? It's not mainly because of more use on Journal platforms, even though it's been an innovator on the tablet. Most of that growth comes from the deals the Journal has done with an astonishing 26 "platforms." They range from the ubiquitous iPad and Kindle to lesser known 5Min and LiveStation.1 By way of comparison, The New York Times is currently using three (Hulu, Google TV, YouTube).
It's about technologies. The Times and the Washington Post have been using Google + Hangout, to facilitate conversation, and we've seen the fruits this week at the Republican Convention. As well-described by The Daily Beast's Lauren Ashburn, Google Hangouts are a major, disruptive force; "no longer needed are satellite trucks or underground cables to beam talking heads to people's living rooms. A simple Internet connection and a camera are rendering expensive gadgets obsolete." The Journal is touting Tout, a Silicon Valley start-up that has taken much of the "friction" out of the business of video production. "Make it drop dead simple," CEO Michael Downing says is his goal. That means taking the background tasks of uploading smartphone video from the field, "transcoding" it and then translating it to work in all the various formats (devices, screen sizes, operating sizes). That removes the work from media companies, and lets them focus on content and audience. In addition to the Journal, broadcasters including CNN, CBS, and ESPN have become customers.
It's apparently not about appointment TV. HuffPo's Live is the most interesting here. While it has 10 telegenic anchor/producer/hosts, those hosts don't have standard daily program times. Segments will last between 12 and 35 minutes (most average 20-25), HuffPost Live president Roy Sekoff told me this week. Yet, they are fluid, with segment length adjustable on the fly. Readers pick topics — before, during, and after "Live" — from a reader-activated conveyor belt at the top of the page. "It's the Internet," says Sekoff pointedly, meaning it's a flow, not a TV Guide-like grid in how readers/viewers use it. The Journal agrees. Even with on-the-hour blocks of News Hub programs, the majority of its viewing is on demand. Even for HuffPo, all of that live programming is then chunked into segments, and Sekoff estimates that he'll have about 10,000 of them archived and ready for long-tail viewing by year's end. We want what we want when we want it — and expect it to be there. Thus, findability becomes the issue, and the multiple points of access now being offered are very much a live test of consumer behavior and want.
It's about simplicity. The Times' announcement basically said this: You've proven you like video. Now we're cleaning it up and making it more pleasurable to watch and easier to find. In the cleanup, the Times moved to 11 "navigation items" from 25, says Peter Anderson, director of video product. We see that translation in more uniform positioning of video panels on NYTimes.com pages, and a more elegant 16 × 9 video player format, replacing the oh-so-20th century 4 × 3.
It's about the news — and talk about the news. In the approaches of the Times and the Journal on the one hand, and of HuffPo on the other, we see two quite different philosophies and strategies, but ones that may find meeting points. Both the Journal and the Times see their reporters as the foundation of the video process; Murray calls Dow Jones' 2,000 journalists "the core asset." So both are putting cameras into the hands of journalists, or enabling them to better use smartphones, thereby creating more impactful, multi-dimensional, multi-platform journalism. HuffPo, from its early days of being mainly a curator/aggregator, has had its pulse on what its progressive audience is wondering and talking about. Those topics, mostly off the news (Marissa Mayer's pregnancy, veterans and poverty), are the ones front and center in its Live pages. Some, of course, derive from its journalists' work, and now staffers like Howard Fineman are suggesting video segments as they prepare stories. By and large, though, the talk-about-news drives the 12-hours-a-day site (5 days a week), with actual news supplementing. Sekoff says some 1,300 HuffPo community members have "raised their hands" and been featured as talking contributors on its segments. They're unpolished and a far more diverse (for all the good and bad that implies) lot than we see among the too familiar faces of cable TV. For the Journal and the Times, traditional stories drive the video, and then, as Peter Anderson describes it, "The New York Times starts the conversation." (Here, the Times brings civilians more prominently into its Opinion pages.) How these somewhat opposite approaches come together will be something to watch.
Maybe, most intriguingly, this video revolution may be morphing into a social revolution.
Watch a few of the HuffPo Live segments. Call them semi-slick. The technology works. The production values are okay, even if blogger/contributors faces seem a bit low-def, as TV itself moves moves from HD to Ultra. Some raise interesting, unorthodox issues and views; some are deadly boring. They are not, though, the lookalike programming of traditional news outlets. In their socialness, they cross lines.
Here's what I find fascinating as I watch those, and smaller steps toward engagement taken by the Times, Journal, and others. As we all watch more video, where will the minutes come from? They may come from other news, text news. They may also come from Facebook. Compare HuffPo Live to Facebook and we see lots of social/sharing commonalities — but in picture form. Discussions — less in linear words than with in-motion video. They may come from morning talk shows like "Ellen" or "The View," or compete with The Young Turks.The minutes will come from somewhere, as these technologies are more universally adopted and the world of competition only gets more complicated. This is the world in which news companies now compete.
For the news industry specifically, we see that legacy lines are written in disappearing ink, as the Journal, for instance, out-innovates ABC. One dirty little secret of broadcasting is being revealed, as technologies like Google+ Hangouts even the playing field for the print guys: it's a game of numbers. The number of journalists in newspaper newsrooms still far outnumber those in broadcast ones. In addition, traditional TV has demanded many staffers to do the technical work of creating the broadcast. So, newspapers — if they can rapidly connect their workforces with the new technologies — have a chance to do what seems illogical: leapfrog broadcast and outflank them in the move to fully available, multi-platform news video.
The full list: YouTube, iPad, iPhone, Apple TV, Google TV, Boxee, Roku, Hulu, Ustream, DailyMotion, Panasonic Internet-connected TVs, Samsung Internet-connected TVs, Sony Internet-connected TVs, Vizio Internet-connect TVs, Yahoo Internet-connected TVs, Windows Phone, Xbox (announced, not yet launched), Kindle Fire, Google Nexus 7, Pulse, 5Min, TouchTV, Flud, WatchUp, LiveStation, Tout, Etisalat.
Tags: Columns advertising aggregation Alan Murray Apple business model Ellen Facebook Google Google Hangouts Huffington Post Huffington Post Live Hulu IAB iPad m2e Michael Downing New York Times Newsonomics newspapers Peter Anderson Roy Sekoff social media The View The Young Turks Tout Twitter Wall Street Journal Washington Post WorldStream
Following in Google's footsteps: Time Warner investing $25m in 1Gbps fiber network
Mashable :: Time Warner announced Tuesday it will be investing $25 million in expanding its fiber broadband service to businesses in New York City. Time Warner is taking a different approach than Google, targeting businesses rather than consumers.
A report by Emily Price, mashable.com
Tags: Google Time Warner
Google reacts to Apple-Samsung verdict (and Kara Swisher translates)
Kara Swisher's report includes a "translation for those who don't speak passive-aggressive."
AllThingsD :: Google — which went curiously silent on Friday after a blockbuster court win by rival Apple against its Android partner Samsung — finally found its voice today by releasing a statement about the patent infringement verdict.
A report by Kara Swisher, allthingsd.com
Tags: Apple Google Legal Issues
U.S. voters still tuned in to traditional news media, especially local TV
Los Angeles Times :: Facebook and Internet portals such as Google and Yahoo increasingly provide Americans their gateway for news, but the bulk of voters who catch up on current events daily turn to traditional sources, particularly local television stations, according to a nationwide poll.
A report by James Rainey, www.latimes.com
Poll (via L.A. Times): New USC Annenberg - Los Angeles Times Poll on Politics and the Press
HT: Andrew Beaujon, Poynter
Tags: Facebook Google Yahoo
HTML5, Apps and JavaScript Video
Watch video from the August 2012 TimesOpen event on HTML5, Apps and JavaScript.
Tags: Open Google HTML5 javascript web components
YouTube launches TrueView in-stream video ads on mobile devices
YouTube Creator Blog :: More and more traffic is coming from people watching video on smartphones and tablets. People are watching video when out with friends, while waiting in line, or on the bus home. Mobile growth on YouTube has been phenomenal. So to help you monetize your mobile traffic as effectively as on PCs, today we're launching TrueView in-stream video ads (cost-per-view) on mobile devices.
Announced here Phil Farhi, youtubecreator.blogspot.co.uk
Tags: advertising Google YouTube
Huge drop in Google Traffic? Google search query alerts notify you
SEO Roundtable :: Google announced on the Webmaster Central blog that they added a new notification to Google Webmaster Tools message center. The new notification informs you of big changes in traffic from Google due to search query changes.
A report by Barry Schwartz, www.seroundtable.com
India: Twitter, Facebook accounts blocked for inflammatory content
NDTV :: The Press Trust of India reports that user-accounts on social networking sites including Facebook, Google and Twitter were banned to avoid panic among people of the North-Eastern region living across India.
Continue to read here Press Trust of India, www.ndtv.com
Tags: Facebook Google Twitter