Archive for the ‘News’ Category
November 9, 2009
There is something elegant about the theory that a digital entity, especially one based on networks and their associated dynamics, will obey, or at the very least, be susceptible to, the natural laws of science. Ergo, collapse under a dead weight, with nothing pressurising against external forces like costs, development and competition. In the case of Myspace, that “nothing” isn’t exactly true. There are still millions of accounts, the issue however is a growing percentage of dead profiles, not to mention the ever present issue of inaccurate account profile data that has made targeted advertising next to useless. As the ‘bounce rate’ indicates a site’s usefulness under certain search conditions, so the ‘echo rate’ predicates the social network’s usefulness and demise; a vast repository of accounts with no one home. A little preemptive? Well, that’s the point of social networks. They rise quickly, and collapse just as fast. This momentum affect of networks works to both its advantage and disadvantage. At the moment, the Myspace phenomenon is only sustained by lazy and unimaginative media buying groups. Once buyers run out of excuses in trying to explain the poor results of their $1m Myspace buy, the thing will commercially implode.
Curiously, the above estimates (source: Quantcast) of site traffic for Facebook (blue) and Myspace (green) suggest a type of zero-sum game, so that by April 2009 when the two networks crossed paths, they were set on on two divergent trajectories. The collapse of Myspace audience traffic (relatively speaking) is well documented, but what’s more interesting is the impending convergence of Facebook traffic growth with the steady decline in Yahoo.com site traffic (red). Based on this trend, the two sites are likely to converge around February 2010. Once ‘hit’ by the Facebook missile, is Yahoo.com likely follow the same downward spiral experienced by Myspace? There are clear differences in between two properties, but the one difference which clearly gave Yahoo its edge (i.e. 3x the site traffic of Facebook) is no longer sustainable. But we digress. Right now, brands need to clear the planet because Myspace is about to go Supernova.
September 27, 2009
The hacker culture is much maligned, often singled out as harbouring perpetrators of IT system break-ins. But a more accurate portrayal is a culture of learning, discovery and invention. Australian academic and author, McKenzie Wark, defined the ‘hack’ as “new information produced out of existing information.” In other words, taking a new perspective on current thinking.
Thus was born Music Hack Day in July this year, at the Guardian’s London offices. Hundreds of programmers, designers, artists and journalists were hot housed for a weekend, with the intention to create new tools and applications for accessing and manipulating music content.
Some of the stunning outputs created APIs to hack data hosted by Last.fm, SoundCloud, Google Maps, Song Kick and even the BBC itself (all with their blessing). The accessibility and transparency of the data enabled attendees to create music dating games, an iPhone app that visualises music and a music mapping system for global cities, including Sydney and Melbourne. In turn, the growth in applications further bolsters the publisher’s relevancy.
Other, more popular apps included software that automatically combines three tracks or more into a single remix, and the mobile phone app (developed via Google’s Android platform) which re-engineers the mobile phone into a musical instrument.
More recently, the Berlin Music Hack Day created music plug-ins for Wordpress, music-based viral games and mash-ups across numerous music sites. Again, the intention was to innovate and improve on existing data sets and music services, not to abuse the copyright of the content itself.
With more than 250 known music-related applications developed over 2008, Music Hack Day and the near-commercialisation of the hacking fraternity to encourage innovation across music consumption, will inevitably lead to the number of applications in 2009 dwarfing the previous year.
This innovation needs to be embraced by rights holders. New technologies, mash-ups and applications which tap into music services such as Last.fm, SoundCloud, and eventually, rights-friendly services such as Spotify, dramatically differentiate the legitimate channels from the pirates.
Access to data detailing demographics, geographies, music preferences, music history and even music purchases (the user’s meta-data) allows the hackers to mash these details with the music itself, creating a visual, more dynamic representation of an individual’s or community’s music profile.
Providing hackers with stem files, open platforms or unreleased material to remix and upload into systems not only encourages further remixing (2nd, 3rd generation music), but more importantly, exposes many more listeners to the original music (1st generation). This is the essence and value of an engaged hacking community - smart people developing new music distribution channels for new music audiences.
August 10, 2009
There is something very un-News Corp about this global steering committee to oversee, or to at least recommend, next steps towards the commercialisation of content. Where once the Sun King provided the autocratic guidance, now a coterie of editorial managers across the globe are collaborating in a workshop initiative. The company’s about-face on the preferred commercial model almost certainly started with the acquisition of the WSJ. The publication’s insistence on a pay-per-view model, and its general success as a proof-point, provided the content leviathan with some Dutch courage to publicly castigate Google and its parasitic ways. It certainly wasn’t the first shot fired in anger at the algorithm with a copyright blind-spot, but it was a particularly conspicuous comment to make. So while News Corp locks itself up behind the door marked “Special Projects, Scenario Planning”, the latest music whiz kid, Spotify, with its elegant UI and unfaltering streaming technology, makes the simple point to customers: mediocrity is free (160Kbps), while quality (320 Kbps) will cost. Likewise, it’s time for News Corp, or that other renowned first-mover, Fairfax Digital, to swallow the courage cookie, take a deep breath, and politely remind Google and every other freeloader of the same dictum. 
May 13, 2009
Sulphur gas lays ankle deep, dressing the town square like a morbid magic show. The once distant echoes of cannon fire are now a persistent percussion movement, with undertones of service boots scrambling across broken glass and through shallow puddles. All the while, townsfolk play their games and make light of an abominable situation.
MySpace 2010 and the fight for survival.
The final Google ‘mortgage’ payment to MySpace is scheduled for June 2010; US$75m out of a US$900m deal, and the last serious money left in the forecast.
Arguably, this advertising agreement has been the only reason News Corp has persisted with propping up MySpace for so long, leaving the future of the social media behemoth in serious question post-contract. How did we get to this point? 70 million world citizens zipping to and from the mothership, yet no value creation? Actually, there’s plenty of value, its just all subjective and personal, not objective and commercial.
For all its sordid, trivial and intensely personal streams of consciousness, social media (collectively) is a much loved shanty town. Yet, it groans under the weight of rubbish, clutter and poor (and poorly designed) infrastructure. The land lords are going broke anyway, but the cash drain is accentuated by the increasing disengagement of residents.
In April 2008, for example, almost 42% of Facebook visitors also associated themselves with MySpace. In November that same year, that figure slipped to 35%. As of April 2009, just 28% of Facebook users had any association with MySpace (Source: Nielsen Online). This rapid decline in shared audiences between the two has resulted from a massive drop in the monthly MySpace audience and the rapid growth in FaceBook numbers.
In fact since April 2008, Facebook’s monthly AU audience has grown 80%, to more than 4.7m UAs, compared with a 26% decline in monthly UAs for MySpace over the same period to 1.9m. There is an indisputable trend downwards for the once Golden Child of the News Corp empire; a hard lesson which will be taught to every social media poster child - without an objective value, implicitly agreed to by end-users, social media business models have no longevity (or saviour), save for a quick buy-out devoid of due diligence.
Given the diabolical commercial nature of social media, a more interesting philosophical question in this period of bank and automotive nationalisation, would be to ask: should governments (and which governments?) step in and financially support a social media entity - arguably providing an important personal service to hundreds of millions of citizens - if it threatens to file for Chapter 11? And if bankruptcy is the result, what’s the fate of the Terrabytes of data sitting on servers in the rusting warehouses of Cleveland, Oxford and New York?
May 9, 2009
12 months ago Rupert Murdoch said the media industry simply didn’t understand what the future held for companies like News Corp. It was an admission that said more about the unparalleled challenges of today, with newspapers in particular, trying desperately to derive a net positive result from the digitisation of content.
Fast forward to the present, and by all accounts these problems have only become more acute.What has changed however is Murdoch’s explicit wish not to wait around around any longer to die a death of a thousand cuts, or to be turned into worm food for billion-dollar parasites like Google to gorge upon.
News Corp’s recently announced digital flying squad, represented by teams in London, New York and Sydney, has the remit to end the free ride; to restore order (and value) to an otherwise perverse state of affairs, where the only real source of daily news gathering, which is integral to the entire media eco-system, let alone to a functioning democracy, is being marked ‘free-of-charge’!
The urgency of this task has no doubt been precipitated by the latest 09/10 revenue forecasts suggesting that the online pennies, which have been substituting for offline dollars for several years, are likely to devalue further, perhaps to the level of the Zimbabwean dollar!
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) is cited as a positive proof point of how charging for editorial content, rather than face up to the full-force of a depression in advertising revenues, can work. The WSJ is also the exception to the rule; its one of those few information sources which have a very clear value-proposition - read me, and you too can drive that Mercedes to your weekender in the Hamptons.
An alternative walled-garden approach is for News to borrow from its Israeli cryptography business (NDS) and build a type of set-top box, or handset that effectively takes its content off the Internet and onto a proprietary network - online and/or wireless; mirroring the success of BSkyB, Sky Italia and Foxtel in becoming subscriber-based information and entertainment systems (with some peripheral advertising dollars). Is it time for News’ print assets to follow the same tune?
March 7, 2009
Well, its been almost six months since the last entry on this blog, and I’m pleased to resume my efforts on all matters digital, analytical, and here’s the twist, entertainment-related. The latter is more a reflection of my new role as Managing Director for Peer Group.
September 4, 2008
A cut of 0.25% to the official cash rate and suddenly a mind-shift occurs, sending investor sentiment into positive territory for the first time in many months. This week the index hit 669.42 - up almost 10% in just four weeks - and carried for the most part by strong rallies around digital stocks like realestate.com.au (up 40%) and Seek (up 14%).
Perhaps the latter stock is being bouyed by expectations of higher unemployment figures!
Other strong performers included PMP (up 29%) and Austereo (AEO) up 24%.
While there were very few negative growth figures (with the exception of Village down alomst 10%), most of the high cap stocks were less than impressive, particularly newspaper publishers such as WAN and Fairfax, with both stocks bogged down by aneamic growth rates of 1.7% and 0.73% respectively.
Only in the coming weeks can we be sure that August was the month in which the market bottomed out.
September 4, 2008
Events at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in the US have seriously electrified the blogosphere and comments pages across the Internet. More accurately, it has been Sarah Palin’s introduction to the Republican ticket and her acceptance speech which has created some very serious seismic activity, outdoing even Steve Jobs and his iPhone hyperbole.
From Yahoo!’s poll of polls and TechPresident through to Politicaltrends and Wonkosphere, the measurement of online commentary and sentiment has never been so prolific or detailed. In short, the sudden reframing of this campaign has crystalised some very stark differences between all four candidates across the two tickets, effectively polarising general opinion, and more importantly, reducing the independent vote to a negliable number.
The result? A massive influx of individuals prepared to step forward and be counted by their words, many of whom, it might be assumed, have previously been observers (readers) rather than contributors.
This is a digital scream-fest, consuming the worlds of both UGC and professional media. Every story, video, sound-byte attached to the RNC, and Palin’s speech in particular, is being hammered by both liberals and conservatives with a blend reasoned opinion and out-right vitriol.
And the result? An immediate change in online sentiment, with McCain racing to intersect Obama’s lead. Palin’s introduction has been a game-changing event, for better or worst, and online momentum has resoundingly swung in the Republican’s favour. It is this real-time measurement of opinion (though skewed in so may ways) which acts as a very powerful barameter on issues, personalities and tone.
It also puts into perspective the relatively static social media space, in particular Facebook and MySpace and the weight previously given to such stats as Obama’s and McCain supporters (Obama outnumbering McCain more than 5 to 1 on Facebook and more than 6 to 1 on MySpace).
No doubt there is some correlation between funds raised and friends enlisted, but the true test seems to be whether these ’supporters’ are resolute enough to go in and fight for their candidate as the two party machines open up all guns in a broadside battle? The Palin factor was the opening salvo.
August 22, 2008
A Red Letter Day. This week the VM Index showed a positive gain - the first time since May 08 - rising to 617.7 after hitting a bottom of 610.80 at the end of July. Despite the glimmer of hope, any portfolio following the index’s weightings would still be almost 40% below water seven months on. Resource stocks these ain’t.
Strong gains by the likes of PMP (+23%), TEN (+9.33%), Austereo (AEO) (+8.5%) and realestate.com.au (REA) (+8.8%), demonstrated that the short burst of optimisim wasn’t confined to one particular media type or category.
Stocks which experienced a less than glowing endorsement included Village Roadshow (VRL) -8.7%, WAN (-4.6%) and Fairfax (FXJ) -0.4%.
August 19, 2008
What the…?
Another day of hard-hitting, relevant news items courtesy of the once venerated Sydney Morning Herald.
Forget about brand extensions or leveraging the brand to optimise reach, this is arguably a case of how one brand now seeks to appeal to a majority of daily AB readers offline, while growing its online marketshare by cutting into the ‘jagged and shiny’ of tabloid reporting.
The strategy to broaden the brand’s online appeal by emphasising the sensational over the newsworthy is risky, but with News.com.au hiding The Daily Telegraph under a bushel and neutering its potential to dominate the Sydney online news scene, the SMH has more latitude to experiment with its news coverage. In other words, so what if a section of the audience is offended by “Contraversial Katy”, where else are you going to go for your dose of Sydney-centric business and sports news?
This is audience segmentation at its best, and worst.
The following headlines for Tuesday 19 August are not buried three or four links in, but are front-and-centre on page one. And with offline circulation figures being less than healthy, these news trinkets are certain to become more mainstream and less a titallating experiment in audience reach than they have been in the past.
This all begs the question - what’s the eventual impact on SMH’s premium CPM pricing and Fairfax’s impressive record of protecting its advertising yields? Time will tell, but doing ‘tabloid’ better than tabloid is not the optimum strategy for securing a premium on ad contracts over the longer term.
