nhaqueoi

Content matters

predictions for publishers in 2012

For any business â€" publisher or otherwise â€" grappling with how content can be positioned, generated, harnessed or otherwise manipulated to help grow revenue, this list from Niche Magazine has to be worth a close look. While it is targeted at publishers working off an ad-driven model, it could be adapted in numerous ways to suit other business approaches.

If anyone just stops and thinks for a moment, it captures a whole load of common sense and helps answer those questions about generating sustainable digital revenue streams. But what is so appealing is actually just how simple so much of this is to do. The list was generated from attendees to this yearâ€s Niche Digital Conference in September and polished off by some digital tinkering by Ryan Dohrn from Brain Swell Media.

Lovely little toy being pushed out there by TweepsMap. Now you can map where your Twitter followers are in the world by country or city. The results are shown on a map or broken down as a list or pie chart. Yummy. My TweepsMap is below:


Nhaqueoi's followers on Twitter across the world

Analysis of my followers tells me Iâ€m more popular in the UK than the US, London is the key hub of my followers and I have more people interested in my tweets in Bangalore than Tokyo.

This fun app is fully integrated with Twitter (thank goodness that wasnâ€t overlooked) and users can tweet maps for their friends and others.

But TweepMaps is not all about mindless fun, and will have a serious application for businesses looking to measure success in Twitter campaigns targeted at specific countries or regions.

Times Online tells staff its paywall nearing rollout. Roll up for trials.
0 comments By Andy Soloman Filed in Uncategorized Tagged with Chief executive officer, journalism, media, news, news international, newspapers, online revenue, paywall, Rebekah Brooks, subscribers, Sunday Times, the times, Times Online March 18th, 2010 @ 7:30 pm

So here it comes. The Times Online paywall is set to be launched. Thanks to our friends at paidContent:UK for Stephen Brook's posting today that reported News International Chief Executive Rebekah Brooks told staff that readers registered with Times Online will be invited to register for an "exclusive preview of the new digital proposition" this week.

Let me not just repeat Brook's posting. Go over and have a look for yourself. However, I will repeat the memo reportedly sent to News International staff today, and which will be distributed to Times Online registered users.

FAIR PRICING FOR DIGITAL CONTENT

Message from Rebekah Brooks
Those of you that subscribe to The Times and The Sunday Times or have registered on Times Online will receive a communication starting from this week inviting you to register for an exclusive preview of the new digital proposition. This shows that we are getting closer to the launch of the titles' new digital sites.
I have made no secret of our intention to start charging for quality journalism online. As you may have seen speculation in the media about our plans, I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know why we believe this is such an important development.
We are committed to producing quality journalism that is written by professionals with a profound understanding of their subject and a commitment to provide well-informed coverage of the issues. Each of our titles, in its own way, has pioneered quality, professional journalism and we are unashamed to say we believe it has value.
In contrast, the industry is making the mistake of chasing millions of unique users by giving the audience more and more content for free. An obsession with traffic just doesn't pay.

Great journalism needs investment and we are committed to supporting the fantastic work that you are all producing and delivering to our audiences. It is the quality of the journalism that you create, and the ways in which we produce and distribute it, that will continue to set our titles apart from the competition.
And to be clear, when we talk about charging for our content online, we are talking about charging a fair price. Price alone will not be a barrier to take up. Of course, we expect to see the numbers of unique users of our sites come down dramatically. But the people who register to our new digital products will be customers who have made a positive decision to pay a fair price for journalism that they value, and they will be those who are more committed to and engaged with our titles.
This is an exciting development for our company especially as we will be among the first in the world to take this step. There are many who declare we have set ourselves an impossible task. But our company loves nothing more than challenging the status quo.
Shortly I will update you on our plans in more detail. But, in the meantime, I believe that with the combined force of your talent, commitment and hard work, we will, in the months and years to come, define a new future in the way we create, deliver and profit from our journalism.
Rebekah Brooks
Chief Executive, News International

Has the bullet been bitten? Or is the bullet winging its way to the heart of its mark?

The announcement by top US newspaper, The New York Times, that starting January 2011 it will charge frequent users of its website has either been heralded by underfire newspaper execs, or derided as a desperate measure that will hasten the venerable institution's demise.

The NYT's David Carr, in the Times' Media Decoder blog, said the move represented a hedge.

People who remain reflexively bullish on free [content] ignore the fact that the clock is ticking on many of the legacy businesses that produce that content. The new approach is an effort to replace that ticking clock with a meter, and its success is not assured but to sit still would be dumb.

News International confirms banning NewsNow crawlers from linking
0 comments By Andy Soloman Filed in Uncategorized, journalism, media, news, newspapers, online revenue Tagged with Add new tag, aggregator, aggregators, Associated Press, audit bureau of circulation, circulation, google, links, Microsoft, news, news international, news of the world, newsnow, Newspaper, newspapers, online revenue, rupert murdoch, search engines, the sun, Times January 13th, 2010 @ 5:14 pm
Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and Chief Executive O...

Image via Wikipedia

Following on from my earlier post that The Times Online had barred aggregator NewsNow.co.uk from crawling its website, it seems News International as a whole has the bit firmly between its teeth and has also banned the linking service from crawling any of its newspaper sites including including The Sun Online and the News of the World.

The Guardian reported News International as saying:

"We've been in communication with NewsNow for several months. We asked them to remove our content repeatedly from their indexing," said a News International spokesperson. "Now, we will update our files accordingly for all our titles."

"NewsNow has been using Times Online content as part of its paid-for, commercial as well as free services. They have continued to do so despite our direct requests for them to stop. As a result, we have taken the decision to disallow their indexing of our content," the company said in a statement.

"News International makes a significant investment in journalism and we believe that it is entirely appropriate for us to ask that our rights are respected. NewsNow has acknowledged that they require our permission to use our content and, in the absence of our permission, has ceased to do so.

News International owner Rupert Murdoch and other media organisations, including UK newspapers and the Associated Press (AP), accuse NewsNow and other news aggregators such as Google and Microsoft, of being parasites and insist they should pay for access to news content. While Google quietly stopped indexing AP news shortly before Christmas, the News International action represents the first live bullets in what is destined to be a significant battle over the right to link and the basic building blocks of the Internet's interconnected world.

For the moment NewsNow seems to have been singled out. From where I sit, I wonder whether the relatively small UK-based operation represents a soft target for a posturing Mr Murdoch as he tries to find ways to bolster declining circulation and revenues at his major titles?

The really big target would be Google, but here the trade off between losing the opportunity to monetise traffic driven by the search giant while trying to unilaterally build online revenue from brand loyal readers sounds a little trickier. Is this a case of wanting it both ways, or will Murdoch eventually put his money where his mouth is and try and hold back the tide of internet traffic by hitting the big boys?

Come on chaps, play the game. The financial woes afflicting newspapers and their general inability to generate meaningful online revenues are not the fault of third party aggregators, who afterall, are driving traffic to their websites. The challenge here is to adapt and develop new business models that can thrive in a new digital world. Yes, it is not cheap to produce original news, but unfortunately it is not a rare commodity. Newspapers needs to find ways to engage with ther communities, not cast themselves adrift.

EVENT -- Essential free Online Content Marketing webcasts
0 comments By Andy Soloman Filed in Uncategorized, events, media, social media, social networks Tagged with Add new tag, brent willen, Business, Digital media, Information overload, Knowledge Management, Marketing, publishing, Site Management, those in media, twitter, webcasts January 13th, 2010 @ 11:23 am

Media and digital convergence offers myriad options and opportunities. Fine, if you know what you're talking about that is. But for many, the emerging digital landscape is confusing. Those nice chaps at Those in Media have put together a programme of free webcasts and discussions on 20 January to help you all get the most out of your content.

Topics covered include tracking content ROI, publishing as the future of marketing, reading "digital body language" and managing content to avoid information overload.

These pages have previously mentioned another Those in Media initiative -- the plans to host Mediastock in Europe in the summer. Sadly, as Brent Willen says, it was just too ambitious. So that idea is on hold, but other ideas including the webcasts and a tie up with AuthorsGlobe to produce Online Executive Education Sessions, with the first due on 4 February.