Allan showed up in the comments section of my blog postNew York Times, Don't Die, Live. I replied. Then we switched to email. Now we are scheduled for a three way chat session tomorrow morning, him, me and someone from his team.
Right now I don't have a solid grasp as to the vision of this particular team, or how well they are going to execute, but the idea itself is a trailblazer. It is about time something like this got done.
Some questions that have popped up in my mind:
Who turns a blog into a password protected blog? Would that be a separate service?
Who will go seek the advertisers? If readers opt to pay for 99 cents or less through viewing ads, who makes sure to get those advertisers?
Can you get all the credit card options and still get paid only through PayPal as a blogger?
What would be PayCheckr's cut? A percentage? What percentage?
Just like Disqus takes care of everything to do with your blog's comments sections and Zemanta takes care of all your links, tags and images, PayCheckr should attempt to take care of all details to do with monetizing your no-longer-free blog. It could grow fast.
I find this "coverage" ironic because I am deep into Web 2.0, a big believer, and NYT is one of my favorite news destinations online. NYT need not, should not die. It just needs to go completely online. Put all your archives online. Cover news to be published immediately. 100% ad model. Encourage others to link to your articles. Dominate the search engine results. Go multi-media. Get the top, lone, super niche bloggers to contribute on a per post, for pay basis. Even more important, have thriving comments sections. Readers don't want to just read.
Stop calling them readers. That is so yesterday. Call them consumers cum contributors. Become a megasite that is megainteractive. Appoint a CTO. Don't die. Reinvent yourself. News is more important than ever in this new age. But the old medium has become indefensible. Face the reality and live, thrive. Go for the global, real time audience. Visitors, they are visitors. They are not readers. The paper version has to die for the brand to live and thrive. Life for the NYT will be so much simpler if there was no paper involved whatsoever. Do all business online. 100% online, 100% global, 100% real time.
This is a great blog post by Jeff Jarvis, someone I got to meet in person on February 3 at the Diller building. (NY Tech MeetUp: 02/03/09)
Davos 09: Open Bank full disclosure of performance and compensation. ...... a means to confirm that customers understood what they were buying ...... Bankers are in fortress mode ...... eimagined retail, education, and government. ....... obert Scoble, who has been arguing that the way out of our mess is to start a million companies ....... Shimon Peres, who made a forceful argument that the future will be secured with investment in technology (including biotechnology) and education (which he as much as said was the next thing to come after the internet wave). ........ giving trillions of dollars to the incumbents, to people like that sneering banker ....... We should, instead, be investing our money in entrepreneurs and technologists, the people who will change old industries, reimagining them under new rules with new people ..... need to look at replacing rather than just repairing these broken institutions .... We are bailing out the past. Instead, we must bail out the future. Scenario For News news - on both the content and business side - will no longer be controlled by a single company but will be collaborative. ....... provide platforms that enable communities to do what they want to do, share what they want to share, know what they need to know together ........ open the process of news in blogs ...... Editors will become more curators, aggregators, organizers, educators. ....... less about controlling a flow than encouraging and improving creation. ....... nvestigations matter more than ever ....... Do what you do best and link to the rest ........ covering a niche deeply ....... The old syndication model will die ..... he wire-service model is in jeopardy ..... any media, wiki snapshots of knowledge, live reports, crowd reports, aggregation, curation, data bases, and other forms ........ EveryBlock will organize data; Outside.in will organize geo content; Daylife will organize news; Publish2 will organize links; Digg will help the crowd curate; Clickable will help sell ads; Google will serve ads; YouTube and Brightcove will serve videos ......... algorithms mining newly transparent government documents ........ Seth Godin’s prescription for The New York Times ..... Why doesn’t the paper have 10,000 stringers, each with a blog, each angling to be picked up by the central site? The Link Changes Everything The more your customers take ownership of your brand, the less you will spend annoying people with your ads. Job Losses Hint at Vast Remaking of Economy
Jarvis is an imaginative optimist.
Instead of seeing job losses and folding companies and wrecked futures and dislocations he sees capitalism's creative destructions. Historic parallels still apply. What is happening right now to the economy seems to happen once every 70 years, has happened four times in a row now. After each such crisis the economy has come out better than ever before. Jarvis is suggesting the same is about to happen all over again. He is focused on the impending good news.
Not all the observations are his, he borrows as freely as he expounds. But they together are a great narrative to these wildly depressing times for the most. Many jobs are lost forever. But new, better jobs have to be created, and people need to be helped to transition to those new jobs.
What are some of his observations, and that of others he mentions?
The market is rightly bringing down the artificially high prices on a host of things.
An old building is being brought down so a new building can take its place.
This fundamental restructuring is to the economy but also to society. How we relate to each other is changing.
Many jobs lost now will never return. "In key industries — manufacturing, financial services and retail — layoffs have accelerated so quickly in recent months as to suggest that many companies are abandoning whole areas of business." (New York Times)
Not just jobs, entire sectors of the US economy might disappear.
Newspapers, magazines, books, broadcast media, all are experiencing upheavals.
A lot of retail is going online.
Business travel will for the large part be replaced by more efficient communications.
Dirty energy will "shrivel."
Real estate construction will decline.
Health care and education will see reinvention and growth.
Jarvis emphasizes creating platforms and networks. He talks of "a network of spaces for independent work (the inverse of Starbucks: good with space and services, OK with coffee). Add payroll, insurance, hosting, and all sorts of services."
He wants to "rethink the auto industry in the image of the computer industry: disaggregating the car so we can reaggregate it from many new suppliers."
"Every one of the collapsing industries listed above will be replaced - in a different image, at a different scale - and that presents opportunities."
The promise is a new economy, a new society, a new world. Help people see through the transition.
Credit will have to flow again, spending will have to grow again. But they will go in new directions.
But right now we are in the destruction part of the cycle. Let the creation begin as soon as possible.
Jarvis has done a good job of describing where we are now and we are or should be going, but he has not done a good job of connecting the two. How do we help people with the transition? How to minimize disruptions? How to move people from lost jobs to better paying jobs?
I don't know a whole lot about publishing but I have an Internet enthusiast's feel for some of what is going on. There is a tectonic shift underway.
"......so I'm interested in your thougts on the matter. I'm a magazine publisher, and we're transitioning from print into digital media...so I'm trying to figure it all out...like everybody else in print and TV....."
That is such a huge topic. A paradigm shift is under way. And there will be winners and there will be losers. The winners will be those who choose to ride the wave. The losers will be those who stay stubborn and get washed away.
Murdoch said while buying the WSJ, people don't want to pay. As in, he was thinking of turning the WSJ into something entirely ad supported, give everything out for free. No subscription, nothing. Print will not go away completely, and subscriptions will not go away completely, but that top dog just might have a point.
(1) Focus like crazy on serving ads. Have a good ad team. Gawker Media asked for and got premium prices. They did not exactly do AdSense. (2) Your site should be a multi media experience. (3) There should be the latest web functionalities. Which these days seems to mean the web experience should feel social. (4) Remember, you are serving content, but you are also building community. But never forget content, your number one offering. (5) Keep an open mind. Change should be not a decision for today, it should be a lifestyle, or rather, workstyle.
"I felt like I was previewing the future of media." (on the CNN Facebook collaboration for January 20)
Case in study. Plum. Comes out once a year. Has a niche market that I am going to call prime real estate, beachfront property. Some of what might apply to Plum would also apply to the New York Times. When the New York Times goes completely online, it gets read globally. Its readership expands like huge. But the revenue per reader is less than it was with print circulation. You lower the price and you make money on volume. Check out the 99 cent pizza place on 41st and Ninth.
There are pregnant women above 35 in America. Well, they also exist in Europe, and Japan, and India, and elsewhere. In going digital a media property like Plum could go global with no additional cost in terms of content creation. And if you manage to build community, many users create content for you for free.
You are looking at becoming a global brand name, and a media powerhouse. From coming out once a year, it becomes a web destination that people visit every day. It already has a great ad base, it looks like.
What makes Plum cutting edge is it has a very sharply defined niche, this collection of rich women, to put it mildly. So Plum is digital edge cutting edge. The new medium is all about niches. And the niche you find can be global. Plum got there in terms of concept before it got there in terms of technology.
http://upendra.shardanand.com My friend Upendra seems to be doing some cutting edge, insane quality work, right at the edge. Daylife Select a game-changer for online publishing: the mind-bending Daylife Select. ...... gorgeous new pages of constantly updating content ...... lets publishers launch instant content portals containing thousands or millions of pages, with stories, topics, photo galleries, search (much like you see on our showcase, daylife.com), all in their own brand, voice, look, and feel. And without developer resources. It all happens through a simple point-and-click interface, not unlike launching a social network on Ning or a blog on WordPress. ........ through our integration tools, it can blend seamlessly with (or around) your existing property. ...... a content cloud computer ...... not only Daylife-collected content, but a huge range social media sources ...... videos from YouTube, photos from Flickr, topical streams from Twitter, search results from Yahoo!, comments from Disqus, and entries from Wikipedia. ....... ANY Google Gadget. .... not only do you have millions of pages – but every piece of every page is embeddable and shareable – so you now have millions of widgets ........ Smart Context automatically inserts hyperlinks into topical keywords ....... increase your URLs exponentially, which have huge downstream impacts on SEO and, of course, organic traffic acquisition. ...... let’s you curate the world around your content – do what you do best and outsource the rest. The New Architecture of News news consumption is, if anything, increasing – it remains one of the top three activities on the web ...... news organizations are just now turning from self-preservation to re-invention ...... all about offering superior navigation to the content ...... do what you do best and link to the rest. ........ More than ever, publishers need something unique - in voice, brand, content - around which to build. ...... even more need for differentiation. ...... unique, differentiated content & products can see increasing returns. ....... intelligent, malleable technology platform for organizing news from thousands of content-creators ...... News will do more than survive. It will flourish. Ethic of the link, revisited « The Future of Journalism
MediaTalk; A Journal for Women Pregnant Later in Life - New York Times Plum, the first pregnancy magazine aimed at women over 35 ..... produced by Groundbreak Publishing, is described as a joint effort with the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists. ........ Rebekah Meola, Groundbreak's principal ..... The 200-page glossy, to appear annually ...... 400,000 readers who are typically well-educated and affluent. http://www.plummagazine.com/content/story_65.php award-winning title's creative team. ..... Plum magazine, the award-winning publication for pregnant women 35 and older .... world-renowned publication designers ...... "We immediately recognized in Plum the spirit of a great magazine," says Milton Glaser. ...... Plum's commitment to continued excellence in both editorial and design. In just its second year, the magazine is building on the successes of its landmark debut by aligning itself not only with the leading practitioners in the fields of obstetrics and gynecology, but with the best the design industry has to offer. ....... wide range of editorial subjects, including health, fashion, child care, personal memoir, celebrity and personality profiles ......... text, photography, illustration, and exclusive graphic elements ....... educated, sophisticated, established women facing motherhood at a critical phase of their lives. ......... www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/25364.php New York-based publisher Rebekah Meola ...... scheduled to be published only once per year and distributed exclusively through doctors' offices, is "a cross between a woman's beauty and lifestyle magazine and a health/pregnancy manual ...... "one of the country's fastest growing demographics" -- older pregnant women. ....... between 1990 and 2002, the birth rate among women ages 35 to 39 increased 30%, while the birth rate among women ages 40 to 44 increased 51% www.telegraphindia.com/1040905/asp/look/story_3715336.asp women who do not know what to expect while expecting .... Plum, the first pregnancy magazine aimed at women over 35 ...... Rebekah Meola, Groundbreak's principal, said older, expectant mothers shared many of the same concerns as younger ones, but often had greater anxiety about medical complications, infertility and return to work. www.spoke.com/info/c5x1RHN/GroundBreakPublishingInc http://www.newsweek.com/id/150312 Many of these women put kids on hold as they climbed career ladders. Translation: they're smart, they've got money to spare and they want the absolute best for their babies. As a result, advertiser interest in the magazine--which will be distributed free to patients by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists--has been "exceptional," says Plum publisher Rebekah Meola, with heavy hitters like Volvo, Hewlett-Packard and Johnson & Johnson signed on.
The November NY Tech MeetUp had shifted to a new location. This place was fancy. This was Diller country. There was this huge screen. The demos could be seen on three screens within that huge screen.
There was this other huge screen when you first stepped in. Looks like the building hosts a few different companies. Or are they all owned by Diller? The first display was for Match.com. There was this huge globe that showed where all its page hits were coming from.
Page hits are all the rage all over again, but this time that is less fluffy because ad models are tied to page hits. If nothing else, you can always add Google ads to your page.
I think one thing that goes kind of unnoticed is how good Scott is in doing presentations himself. He is comfortable, succint, funny. He is a non techie in the tech field. He brings a lot of the soft skills to the table. And the dude is now even rich after his share of hits and misses in the roaring 90s.
Of all the social events I go to in town, the NY Tech MeetUp stands out. There is nothing else like it. And now this things just went to a whole new level.
These were the companies that made presentations. Perceptive had multi touch display technology. From the mouse to the hand, quite a leap. Vimeo had high def video stuff. Cool. I asked a question to the Drop.io guys. "The .io in your name, what country is that?" That was my way of telling Adam I was there. We had arranged to meet after the MeetUp. We are cooking something together. We walked to Union Square talking it up. It was good talk. He had one big surprise for me. Or perhaps more than one. The day ended on a happy note. I walked over to Times Square and ordered three slices at the 99 cent pizza store. That is one great business model. You make money on volume.
The Microsoft presentation told me the PC era will not end. PCs will stick around. You are looking at an ecosytem. There is room for more than one organism.
Liveblogging Facebook Advertising Announcement (Social Ads + Beacon + Insights)Facebook is getting into the advertising business in a big way. ...... three things: Social Ads (ads targeted based on member profile data and spread virally), Beacon (a way for Facebook members to declare themselves fans of a brand on other sites and send those endorsements to their feeds), and Insight (marketing data that goes deep into social demographics and pyschographics which Facebook will provide to advertisers in an aggregated, anonymous way). These three things together make up Facebook Ads. ........ "the next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today. As marketers pushing our information out is no longer enough. We are announcing anew advertising system, not about broadcasting messages, about getting into the conversations between people. 3 pieces: build pages for advertisers, a new kind of ad system to spread the messages virally, and gain insights." ........ "Where Facebook really excels is in helping you keep up with all of your connections at the same time. It is making the cost of communication so low ........ "More than 80 applications have more than one millions users." ...... "Once every hundred years media changes. the last hundred years have been defined by the mass media. The way to advertise was to get into the mass media and push out your content. That was the last hundred years. In the next hundred years information won't be just pushed out to people, it will be shared among the millions of connections people have. Advertising will change. You will need to get into these connections. ....... A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising. ...... "Have already passed 50 million users, doubling once every 6 months. only active users who have used facebook last 30 days. More than 25 million people are using Facebook every single day. Each person is viewing more than 40 pages a day, more than 65 billion page views a month."
This is not just about taking the web experience to a new level, this is also about the human mass on the web. That mass has to be near total. And that can not be on and off. So wires are going haywire. And slow does not count. So that is universal, wireless broadband. You don't wait for the rest of the world to get rich. You focus on the mindspace as a business space. Mindspace is mindspace regardless of the income bracket of the person. Every additional mind connected to the web adds value.
So when you have almost everyone online at zip speed, that is something. And then you also focus on the web experience. That experience goes beyond the two dimensions we have today. That part need not go universal right away. Meeting someone online has almost to be like meeting in person. That is what geography being irrelevant means. It does not mean that even though you are 10,000 miles away, I can still email you, chat with you. It means you get transported to me.
Geography being irrelevant also means the web experience should not have to be a strain on your body, not on your spine, not on your eyes, not on your wrist. You are looking at much, much better screens, screens as good as paper. You are looking at standing up, walking around experiences. You are looking at complex voice commands, as in, no need to type all the time. You are looking at near similar experiences for the physically challenged, the audiovisually impaired.
Web 3.0 does not just pertain to software applications. It pertains to connection, software and hardware. It pertains to the digital divide. A web that does not have a near total human mass is not really a web. Because the web is about humanity, not technology. Technology merely facilitates.
One constant will remain. There will never be enough of two things on the web: content and search. The possibilities are as limitless as the human mind itself. We are back to all becoming farmers. The vast majority of us can go into the business of producing and consuming mindfood.
Or maybe it is two stages, Web 3.0 and Web 4.0. Or maybe it is three stages, Web 3.0 and Web 4.0 and Web 5.0. But the future is now. Entrepreneuers playing with technology and capital can break all barriers to make it happen. It is mostly about creating things that never existed before. And so there is little competition, much win win situations for most. It is to be largely a creative endeavor.
This is to launch a new millenium. The future is now.
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