Sometimes people need reminding of the basic laws of supply and demand. From a limited availability of journalism to more than you can ever read, any attempt to ’sell content’ must come up against this basic problem.
I'm no economist, but I think the problem comes down to this: The Internet is a single, efficient market governed by the laws of supply and demand*. Because there's surplus ad inventory online — particularly low-grade inventory — prices are falling. But what if the surplus inventory is largely the result of a glut of duplicative content? Would the problem go away if news organizations simply stopped doing about half of what they do and focused on the stuff nobody else is producing?
broadband and technology development. An investment there will do more for the future of news than any dollar, euro, or pound given to keep presses rolling.he says and maybe this in all his reasoning is the most important reason why
Advertisers will have no excuse but to go online, when most everyone is there and when it can serve rich media beyond the banner.
The network’s genome carries the “free” nucleotide. As in both freedom and free goods and services. Like it or not, its publicly funded origins (universities and the Pentagon) led to the emergence of widely adopted services such as search engines or Wikipedia. In turn, these have sealed the fate of the paid-for model as the dominant one. Right. I intentionally emphasize dominant. Because like everywhere else, hybrid forms are likely to emerge
The online magazine Slate came up with an interesting idea: charging people. In fact, a small fraction of them. Introducing another flavor of the hybrid model: a tiny proportion of users paying a fee that will subsidize the vast majority of non-paid onesand then there is China where
the software industry has been working that way for long: 80% is bootlegged versus 20% generating license fees, but the market is so huge that even a tiny monetized slice is sufficient to insure a sizable revenue stream for software makers
1.Anyone can come up with a "Tip" or story idea they'd like to see covered. People can "pledge" money toward that story.
2. Freelance journalists can sign up to cover those story ideas or pitch their own stories, attaching a cost to writing the story.
3. Once a story has a journalist attached to it, people can donate money to help fund it (but no one can give more than 20% of the total cost of the story).
4. When the story has full funding, the journalist writes the story, and a fact-checker is paid 10% of the funding to edit and check it.
5. Before the story is posted, news organizations have a chance to get exclusive rights to the story by paying the full cost, which is given back to the donors. Otherwise, the story is posted online and any news organization can run the story for free.
“If we are to safeguard the future of the papers, there is no other way to do it.”
'The severity of a downturn is more exaggerated in the media sector and it is hit harder and faster than any otherand adds that in
the last recession, in the early 1990s, it took three years for media companies to return to pre-recession levels of profitability. But crucially, the industry was not facing the technological challenges presented by new competitors. This time, he says, it will take far longer to recover - up to five years
the growth of online television could provide broadcasters with a financial lifeline, despite fierce competition from internet giants YouTube and MySpace.and this aligned with big increases in broadband takeup and a report out this week which shows that we are actually watching more commercial Tv will provide
Broadcasters with the ability demonstrate that they can create platforms worth advertising on.
With its public broadcasting-like format on the Web – supported, that is, by a relatively small number of subscribers, who receive an early email “bulldog” edition – it now generates around $8,000 a year. That’s not much; but along with income from books and talks, it’s enough to continue indefinitely, as long as renewals hold up and the base continues to grow. There’s no way to be comprehensive, or to compete with newspapers and magazines at what they do best, but EP still manages to maintain a baseline of coverage
the implications haven’t been sufficiently examined. To cope, papers have been eliminating beats, outsourcing coverage, and, in EP’s field, relying increasingly on economists to write rotating columns
Economics is a profession; news is a trade
throws a complex light on the collapse of the conventional economic model for journalism – which has consisted of trusting business with this mission so dear to our (and, we hope, the nation’s) hearts. That collapse feels no less catastrophic to those who are losing their jobs, nor to faithful news consumers who see shrinking newspapers and dumbed-down newscasts. And it’s still deeply worrisome when you think about who will have the power, guts and access to go up against big government and big business, so as to keep us informed about the nation and the world
The profit model may be responsible for much of the problem: “There is a major difference between a mission-driven business and a business,” he said. Profit-seeking companies “quickly go from no social mission to no social responsibility.” The result has been, in Wertman’s opinion, a distorted notion of “what the public wants” when it comes to journalism, and a terribly inadequate news diet for a self-governing people.
The stakes are enormous in a fast-moving crisis where the traditional concern about journalists causing a run on the bank is hardly a theoretical danger. But as news organizations chase exclusives about the Wall Street meltdown, they also are grappling with a troubling question: Why didn't they see this coming?
we journalists have had a long history with accepting what the smart people hand down to us, especially on complicated stuff. . . . When I would cover these very issues about problems with regulation, problems with 'is this a disaster waiting to happen?' people would say: 'Well, young man, you don't have an MBA like I do. Trust us. We went to business school.'"
Shudders from the credit crisis have reached the online and media industries as research shows that internet advertising is facing a slowdown after five years of breakneck growth.
Research published on Monday by Enders, a media analyst group, pared back growth rates for the UK online advert market to 18.5 per cent for 2008 to £3.3bn, against estimates of a 28 per cent increase on 2007
Enders estimates display adverts will grow by 9.8 per cent to £650m, and classifieds by 7.8 per cent – representing a “collapse” on last year’s equivalents of 30.5 per cent and 54 per cent respectively, said Mr Maude. In contrast, search adverts will grow by 25.4 per cent to £2bn this year, Enders forecasts, because they give a quicker and easier return on investment.
So few newspapers and broadcasters these days employ Labour and Industrial Correspondents the Group which represented them - in their heyday a more influential pack than political writers in the lobby - is reduced an informal network
the media no longer covers properly the reality of working life, the decline of specialist reporters in the field leaving large gaps. When I covered employment and industrial relations for the Daily Telegraph in the first half of the 1990s there must've been 30 or 40 hacks doing similar jobs across Fleet Street and the airwaves. Now I can only think of three specialists: Christine Buckley on the Times, the FT's Andrew Taylor and the superb Alan Jones on the Press Association news agency.
If there is a transaction cost for a copy-a direct cost of copying, an inconvenience cost, or the copy is inferior to the original in some way-then the seller can set the price low enough that it is not attractive to copy.
"A whole host of nanny state regulation, about where we put advertising minutage, how we have to treat our suppliers... the contracts we enter into with independent producers are controlled by a regulator. "This is all Alice in Wonderland, this all belongs 20 years ago. It's so out of date
ITV isn't hiding behind the same excuse used by newspapers - that ad spend is migrating to the web. Sales head Rupert Howell: "The growth of the internet as an advertising medium is taking business way from direct marketing, classified and local and regional press but doesn't appear to be taking away from television. What matters is that we outgrow the growth in internet advertising - in the first half of this year, the internet grew as an advertising medium by 24 percent and we grew at 43percent so we're growing at nearly double the rate."
The dilemma facing VoD service providers is that the market is too nascent to yet be treated as a significant revenue stream in its own right.
Last week officially rolled out Demand Five, which offers a mixture of free and paid-for shows. The broadcaster's head of strategy Kieran Clifton says the service has achieved early growth, but he expects it will take some time to gather real momentum.and according to its head of strategy is at the moment
losing money and, effectively, the more popular it is, the more money we lose, whatever we do with advertising,' VoD is a small fraction of our audience right now and we do it because we have to give viewers what they want. It also -allows us to learn about what people want to watch and when, and what they will put up with in advertising.'
identifies key areas, such as pre- and mid-roll spots, as well as sponsorship, overlays and display formats, which could work well on the platform.
The thing that worries me most at the moment about the condition of journalism is, frankly, who's going to pay for the journalists and the journalism in 10 years' time? Teenagers, people in their twenties, even in their late twenties, have now got to the position where they wouldn't pay for news. They expect their news to be free, they expect it to be in a free newspaper on the underground or at the bus station or, more often, they expect it to be a free good on their laptops. My kids wouldn't dream of buying a newspaper – and we are a newspaper household."
In the blogging world there is a vast, swirling typhoon of comment, grandly called analysis. A reporting journalist is someone who is paid to spend lots of time asking questions, reading, going back again. Anyone can produce words but you need a system which pays journalists to spend time to find stuff out."
"We've had huge numbers of stories about the extent to which Gordon Brown is depressed, gloomy, not sleeping. We have had lots of analysis of David Cameron's media strategy and style, all of which is interesting and important up to a point – but I worry how much is being slipped through in terms of policy changes
We are trying to reflect the reality out there. If the economic news is bad, we can't pretend it is good.
And we would seem to be out of touch with you if we didn't highlight the problems you are facing.
As with the Northern Rock story, we haven't created the concern but we are reflecting it.
It’s old original cover contained a list of stories contained inside, allowing it to be read like a web site, from front page link to story and back again. And it knew its audience, providing a mix of serious, human interest, educational, and humorous stories. It was also upbeat, not providing stories that make readers feel uncomfortable, helpless, or negative
Along came the Internet and advertisers thought that finally they could actually track how effective their spend was. They could tell how many times people were drawn to their ad (click) and what happened afterwards. But recent market evidence is showing that as economic times grow harder Web advertisers are looking more and more for proof that a Web display ad campaign will really work before they are willing to make a long-term commitmentwrites Philip Stone over at Follow the media.
None of that is what traditional media needs to hear these days. Everyone accepts that newspapers have to be multi-platform and that means all of their digital projects have to make up the money that print is losing, so far a losing battle. If Web display advertising is slowing down, then that’s not going to help the cause any.
