A few weeks ago I wrote a review of the best iPhone apps that magazines had produced. You can read it here. Some of these apps were paid, some free with advertising included, and some just me-too apps offering a basic rendering of the publishers RSS feed.
If you follow iPhone news, you will have heard [...]
I just got passed this article from Nieman Lab, which looks at the way in which the Guardian quickly built a system to allow a crowdsourced analysis of the recently released MP Expense Claims in the UK.
Imagine you’re a major national newspaper whose crosstown archrival has somehow obtained two million pages of explosive documents that [...]
The decline of print media has been explored endlessly. Everyone is agreed that the traditional business model is broken. And most people agree that there is no silver bullet which will solve the problems facing publishers in this new environment.
To summarise the new reality:
Print circulation is declining across the board, and in many cases will [...]
Business publications have traditionally been very good at building up quality databases about their readership. The closed circulation approach has allowed them to target content and advertising very specifically to readers. When selling additional resources (such as market reports) they have always captured extensive additional data, enabling very effective lead generation and sponsored content insertions. [...]
Standard display advertising generally does not work well. It provides the majority of revenue for most of the top-100 sites, but doesn’t serve advertisers, publisers, or consumers particularly effectively. From an advertiser perspective, interaction rates are generally very low, partially because of irrelevant positioning and poor creative, but mainly because standard formats separate off advertising into boxes [...]
A wonderful song & slideshow by L. McDuff about the Madison Avenue downturn.
Lyrics:
A not so long time ago, I can still remember
How the big three used to give you reach
If you splurged on a TV spot
Your brand could really gain a lot
At least that’s what they told you in the speech
But the digital revolution felt [...]
Ok ok, not the concept, but the actual word… “monetisation”. The whole Web 2.0 movement, and now publishers, repeatedly complain about poor monetisation, or proclaim new monetisation strategies, or compare thoughts on monitising content, or how to monetise users.
Let’s get things straight. All we are talking about is revenue. Plain and simple. Can you imagine [...]
As this critical TechCrunch post reports, the American Press Institute has created a plan to save newspapers through a paid-content model. Techcrunch’s slant might be amusingly derogatory, but there is a very serious issue to solve here, and very few are articulating clearly what are the potential options. Certainly, this “plan” seems to be founded [...]
Last night, whilst the Association of Online Publishers celebrated their awards evening, John Menzies Digital (a digital replica magazine stand) closed up shop and admitted it had overestimated the demand for digital replica magazines. John Menzies was offering a similar service to Zinio, basically digitising print versions from 11 major publishers, and then selling subscriptions [...]
