Sullivan Communications

Murdoch: Paid-content bell cow for 2010

2010-01-01T07:11:00.000-08:00

Do you hear that clanging here in the wee hours of the new year? That sound is coming from the bell cow for paid content, Rupert Murdoch.

I wasn’t surprised to wake up this morning to news that Murdoch’s News Corp. and Time Warner Cable have extended their negotiations over retransmission fees for Fox Network programming that could have resulted in the yanking of Fox from several Time Warner systems as of last midnight. Fox wants somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 per subscriber for carriage. The cable company wants to pay much less.

Murdoch has been quite vocal in the past few months about a need to change the revenue paradigm for media. The high-profile bickering over the retransmission issue is just one of three areas in which Murdoch seems to be leading the charge to charge (or charge more) for content.

In addition to demanding more for retransmission of his television content, Murdoch has telegraphed forthcoming pay walls going up on the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and other publications in his stable. And he’s threatened to block Google and other aggregators from access to New Corp. content, while exploring a possible exclusive arrangement with Microsoft’s Bing search tool.

If it was anyone other than Murdoch carrying the flag for this campaign, it might be easy to dismiss the efforts. But he seems willing to dig in and he’s also efforting to enlist others. In early December his Wall Street Journal ran an op/ed piece adapted from comments Murdoch made to the Federal Trade Commission. Here’s a link to the column. I’d recommend you read it now, while you can still do so free of charge.

MediaNews to test pay walls at two papers

2009-11-04T13:34:00.000-08:00

MediaNews Group announced that it will put up partial pay walls at its York, Pa. and Chico, Ca. newspapers in early 2010.

MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton told Editor & Publisher that while the company doesn't think that putting all content behind a pay wall works, he wants to condition readers that they will have to pay for some things.

Exact dates, fees, and what content will go behind the wall has not been announced.

Just last week, figures released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the Daily Record showed the biggest print circulation increase among newspapers nationwide with a paid circulation of more than 50,000, rising 16.5 percent to 55,370.

Newsday.com moves to subscriber model

2009-10-22T06:25:00.000-07:00

Long Island's Newsday announced today that beginning October 28 it will begin charging a $5 weekly fee for access to most of its online content. Subscribers to the print product or to the Optimum Online service offered by the paper's owner, Cablevision Systems, will still have unlimited free access to newsday.com.

Some content, including classifieds, obituaries, weather and entertainment listings, will remain available to nonpaying readers.

New York Times to cut 100 newsroom jobs

2009-10-19T06:28:00.000-07:00

In a note to staff today, New York Times editor Bill Keller announced that the newspaper will cut 100 jobs from the newsroom by year's end. That represents about 8 percent of the news staff.

Keller's memo said that he hopes the reduction can be achieved by voluntary buyouts, noting that everyone in the newsroom will receive a buyout offer. He says if the reduction target is not met by buyout volunteers, they will be forced to resort to layoffs to make the number.

Keller also notes that the editorial, op-ed and business departments also face budget cuts, but he did not speculate on staff reductions in those departments.

A comment thread following an item about the cuts on the Times' Media Decoder blog has many readers offering to pay for online access to Times content.

CBS teams with GlobalPost.com for foreign news

2009-09-29T06:36:00.000-07:00

CBS News and the GlobalPost Web site announced Monday a partnership that will provide foreign news coverage to the network by GlobalPost's nearly 70 correspondents spread around the world.

GlobalPost, an eight-month-old site founded by Phil Balboni, who created the New England Cable News network, and former Boston Globe foreign correspondent Charles Sennott, uses a network of part-time correspondents to gather and report international news. Each of the correspondents has a minor ownership stake in the site.

CBS will primarily rely on the GlobalPost reports as background for stories that its journalists will then repackage.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

WSJ.com drops online fee for the day

2009-09-18T06:34:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal Online dropped its fee for access to premium content today (Friday, September 18).

An ad on the site's homepage states "The Wall Street Journal Online is free today. Explore the site and all its exclusive features." Cadillac is sponsoring the free-access day.

Online subscriptions to wsj.com run $1.99 per week, and provide access to breaking news and updates, online market data center and news alerts.

Paid content on minds at Communicopia

2009-09-16T06:50:00.000-07:00

At the Goldman Sachs Communacopia XVIII Conference in New York on Tuesday, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch discussed possible moves toward monetizing access to two of the content properties with which he's involved.

Murdoch said that within a few months, the Wall Street Journal will begin charging for access via Blackberry, iPhone and other mobile devices. Mobile-only access will cost $2 per week, while WSJ print subscribers would pay a weekly fee of $1.

Murdoch, along with NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker, said he is also looking at charging a subscription fee for the online video venture, Hulu. That strategy is less well conceived at this point, but Murdoch said that both subscription and pay-per-view models are on the table at this point.

Adobe buys Omniture

2009-09-15T06:41:00.000-07:00

Software maker Adobe Systems announced Tuesday that it has agreed to acquire Omniture, an online business optimization company. The deal is valued at $1.8 billion.

Omniture is a leading provider of online analytics, conversion and marketing.

This is the second major acquisition by Adobe in the past two weeks. On August 31, Adobe announced that it was buying Business Catalyst Systems, LLC. Business Catalyst is the maker of the GoodBarry content management and e-commerce software.

Google rolls out FastFlip

2009-09-15T06:39:00.000-07:00

Google rolled out its experimental Fast Flip service on Monday. The service, which is based on Google News, lets users view articles from publishers with a user experience and speed similar to flipping through a newspaper or magazine.

The service launched with the participation of several dozen publishers, including traditional news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC News, and Web-based sites that include salon.com and Slate.

The Fast Flip page features thumbnails of the partner-site pages that can be scrolled through for browsing and clicked on for reading. Google will sell advertising around the news articles, with a share of the revenue going to the publisher.

For more information: Business Week, New York Times

The perils of porn

2009-09-14T06:43:00.000-07:00

Taking advertising dollars from adult-entertainment businesses is a lot like having a loaded gun in the house. You're certainly within your rights to do so, but once you decide to do it, you have to be extraordinarily careful.

Our newspaper has accepted ads for "gentlemen’s clubs" for years, placing them almost exclusively in the sports section where we provide the advertisers with exactly the demographic they’re seeking. The adult-entertainment business is a multibillion-dollar industry. The clubs have money to spend, and we want them to spend it with us. Otherwise, they’d just spend it with the growing number of area sports-talk radio stations.

Recently my team created a multimedia destination page for our coverage of an international youth sports championship that was about to take place in our area. Once we had populated the page with a Flash presentation, videos and photo galleries, I proudly sent a link to the PR firm we were working with so they could take a look. Minutes later, I received a call from the account rep, who said they loved everything about the presentation except for the strip-club ad that was prominently displayed on the page.

My first thought was that he was kidding. But when I called up the page, there it was. Or rather, there SHE was, adult film star Kayla Paige, whose special appearance was being announced by a local gentleman’s establishment. We quickly discovered the ad was running all over our site, not just in sports. And that wasn’t the worst of it. If you happened to click on the ad, you were redirected to a page that revealed the young woman in all her glory.

Fortunately for us, we caught the mistake before anyone else did, other than our PR friends who brought it to our attention. The ad was supposed to have been limited to our sports pages. But even then, a further restriction should have been put on it to keep it off pages like this youth sports one, where the audience – at least the parents in the audience – would likely have found it highly objectionable. And the click-through page was supposed to have been a benign splash page instead of the pornographic page that was there.

The lessons we learned? When dealing with adult-oriented ads, especially online, handle with care. Think about areas of your site where the ads might not be suitable, even if it’s within a category – like sports – where you might want the ad to run. And without exception, make sure you check and doublecheck any hyperlinks in the ads.

Star Tribune to charge for Vikings content

2009-09-11T06:52:00.000-07:00

As any major-market newspaper exec knows, few things move the online audience needle like NFL football. And that’s especially true when you’ve got a team many are picking to go to the Super Bowl. With that stage set, the Minneapolis Star Tribune is making a move to return a chunk of its Vikings coverage behind a pay wall.

MinnPost.com is reporting that the Strib will move some, but not all, of its content behind a pay wall "in a few weeks."

Other major markets - most notably Dallas - have made similar moves in the past. And it’s not the first time the Strib has done this. A simliar initiative in 2002 was deemed a failure after about 1,000 subscribers paid $30 each for coverage of a team that stumbled to a 6-10 record.

This time, though, the Strib is taking a more cautious approach. Only a portion of the Vikings content will be part of the premium package, which will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of a cup of good coffee. That way they can still use their base coverage to lure readers to the site, while using the premium coverage to generate revenue.

In recent years the NFL has placed heavier restrictions on the access to and use of its content by media outlets. If the Strib’s venture with paid-access to Vikings coverage proves successful, it will be interesting to watch the league’s reaction to see if they become even stingier with their product.

IPod Nano to include FM tuner

2009-09-10T06:48:00.000-07:00

Among the announcements Apple made on Wednesday was the inclusion of an FM tuner in its nano model. The tuner includes a live-pause function and iTunes Tagging.

Radio execs have been lobbying Apple for such consideration for years, and the move represents a major lifeline thrown to the struggling industry by one of its main competitors. Previosly Microsoft's Zune added HD Radio as a built-in feature.

Emmis CEO Jeff Smulyan told Inside Radio magazine that he hopes the moves by Apple and Microsoft will lead mobile phone makers to routinely add FM tuners to more of their products.

To jump or not to jump

2009-09-02T06:46:00.000-07:00

A friend recently sent me a link to a New York Times column about a growing exodus of Facebook users. I've seen the story, or its type, many times before. I call those stories, "QUBE 2." The gist was that the social medium has now been around long enough that people have discovered it's drawbacks or that it's become so mainstream that the tragically hip have packed up and gone in search of the next big thing.

If the QUBE reference is unfamiliar, let me explain. I've spent nearly 30 years in interactive media, starting my career in 1980 at Warner Amex QUBE in Columbus, Ohio. QUBE was the world's first interactive television operation, launched in Columbus (a major test market) in 1977. The system signed on with a tremendous amount of media fanfare, heralding the promise of the interactive application. Those stories I call "QUBE 1," and they're loaded with details of technical innovation and breathless optimism. Some of those reports can still be found in YouTube. if you've got the time and want a good laugh, see what the networks were calling the wave of the future in 1977.

Give it a few months or years and then one day you open your paper, turn on your TV or radio, or log onto your news feed and you'll find the "QUBE 2" story. That piece will include statements of disillusionment and unmet audience and/or revenue expectations. The only things that change are the names.

But, does "QUBE 2" equate to an obit? No. But it should be a wake-up call.

The interactive part of QUBE shut down in 1984 but that obviously didn't put an end to interactive media. One of the greatest gifts QUBE gave me was an appreciation for metrics, finding out what audiences responded to and why. And if you or someone in your organization isn't buried in metrics reports on a daily basis, you're flying blind.

So, let's get back to Facebook. Is it time to give up on it? Probably not. At this point there are still more people coming to it than leaving it. Social media costs you little more than an investment in time. You should be test driving every social medium that comes along. Skepticism is healthy but there's nothing lost in finding out what it's all about and establishing a presence. Play with it and see what it can do for you. These things can be good for building community, giving your organization some personality, and generating news, sales or employment leads. But their ultimate measure is how well they perform in driving audience to your core product.

Let your metrics help you determine your ROI. Is your strategy doing what you want it to? Is it helping grow audience? Are you getting traffic from Facebook? Is the trend growing?

When do you jump? Not at the first sign of a "QUBE 2" article. When the numbers suggest that your audience referrals are trending down over a period of time, then you should be prepared to either tweak how you're using the medium or abandon it.

Be fearless and be nimble - quick to adopt, quick to experiment and quick to jump out - but only at the time when your numbers support it.

Welcome to Our Blog

2008-10-06T03:39:00.000-07:00

This blog will bring you important, interesting and amusing information about clever uses of communications and technology.

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