The State of the News Media 2010: Audience Behavior
Monday, 15 March 2010, 07:01
"[For] this year’s State of the News Media Report. First we surveyed 2,259 American adults on landlines and cell phones about their news consumption habits … Only 21% say they tend to rely primarily on one destination; only a third even say they have a favorite news website. But these online news grazers do not range far. Most (57%) rely mostly on two-to-five websites. Only 12% use more than six."
New York Times: Online News Readers Use 5 Sites or Fewer, Study Says
Monday, 15 March 2010, 07:00
"Only 35 percent of the people who go online for news have a favorite site, and just 21 percent are more or less 'monogamous,' relying primarily on a single Internet news source, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center, in a report to be released Monday by Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. But 57 percent of that audience relies on just two to five sites"
Google Public Policy Blog: Newspaper economics: online and offline
Wednesday, 10 March 2010, 08:59
Google chief economist Hal Varian: "[The] real money in search engine advertising is in the highly commercial verticals like Shopping, Health, and Travel. Unfortunately, most of the search clicks that go to newspapers are in categories like Sports, News & Current Events, and Local, which don’t attract the biggest spending advertisers. … This isn't so surprising: the fact of the matter is that newspapers have never made much money from news. They’ve made money from the special interest sections on topics such as Automotive, Travel, Home & Garden, Food & Drink, and so on. These sections attract contextually targeted advertising, which is much more effective than non-targeted advertising. … Traditionally, the ad revenue from these special sections has been used to cross-subsidize the core news production."
Chris Dixon: News is a lousy business for Google too
Monday, 8 March 2010, 18:02
"… because their real business is selling ads on queries where the user likely has purchasing intent. Big money-making categories include travel, consumer electronics and malpractice lawyers. News queries are loss leaders."
Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog: How much is an article worth? ‘Dead tree’ thinking could hinder digital content economy
Thursday, 11 February 2010, 22:28
Patrick Smith on unnbundling, the ever-present elephant in the room during digital content discussions: "But to reach a competitive pricepoint, [Rupert Murdoch] and other publishers will have to massively realign the value of each piece of news and comment from its current-day, paper value of one or two pence to fractions of pence."
Wired: Tablets of the new covenant
Wednesday, 3 February 2010, 12:23
Some magazine publishers think tablets are going to create a more print-like, less unbundlied experience. This isn't going to work, is it? Peter Kirwan in Wired: "Consumers reading tablets will experience something 'more immersive', akin to a print based newspaper or magazine. 'When I'm sitting down to read a newspaper or a magazine," says [Ken Bronfin, president of interactive media at Hearst Corporation], 'I'll give it 30 or 45 minutes. I think I experience the medium and the advertising in a totally different way."
Wired.co.uk: Mobile news apps vs tweet-led link economy
Tuesday, 2 February 2010, 08:43
Peter Kirwan: "Promiscuity is limited by the opportunity for discovery. Searching for alternatives to stories that pop up inside your app will cost you time. And for most mobile users, that's a commodity in short supply. On this basis, it's a racing certainty that some news publishers perceive apps as a way of putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again, on the mobile web at least. … Suddenly, our work-flavoured, ADD-like, promiscuity-fuelled browsing for atomised content on laptops seems like just one scenario among others."
SteveOuting.com: Personalized news and why the iPad is no savior
Saturday, 30 January 2010, 15:15
Steve Outing: "[Am I] suddenly going to pay for news viewed on the iPad? Umm, not likely. Because my behavior as a news consumer has changed over the years. Like many Internet users, I view many news sources every day. … Why wouldn’t I want to pay to support journalism? … Simple: Because there’s too much to pay for! News brands cannot expect me, or most online news consumers who are not loyal to only one or two or three brands, to pay monthly or annual fees to each.:
Steve Yelvington: Regarding the iPad, I am Dr. Buzzkill
Saturday, 30 January 2010, 02:33
"It's certainly no savior for newspapers. What are you going to do, kill your website and sell your 'publication' in the App Store? Nonsense. The iPad doesn't change the economic equation. You aren't prevented from selling your content by lack of technology and tools; you're prevented by a lack of market demand. And the demand isn't there because people have, at their fingertips, far more alternatives than the human brain can process — literally billions. The iPad doesn't change that. If anything, it makes it worse by furthering mobile access to the Web."
Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog: Why the iPad isn’t the saviour of journalism as we know it
Saturday, 30 January 2010, 02:24
Patrick Smith: "Apple’s new device is just another distribution platform for words, pictures, videos and data, just like PCs, mobiles and print. Recreating a print experience on another device is not going to solve the economic crisis news finds itself in: Google will still be more efficient at selling advertising and will still point readers to free content."
Advertising Age: Google Exec Says Newspapers Need to Re-Think Their Models
Saturday, 30 January 2010, 01:31
"only significant evolution will save [newspapers], Google's chief economist, Hal Varian, said in a talk with journalism students at UC Berkeley. … 'The verticals that drive traffic are things like sports, weather and current news, but the money is in things like travel and shopping," says Mr. Varian. "Pure news is the unique product that newspapers provide, but it is very hard to monetize.'"
The Economist: Newspapers online: The promiscuity problem
Monday, 14 December 2009, 00:10
"On December 1st Google offered to let publishers who want to charge for news restrict traffic to five articles per reader, per day. This week’s study [by Oliver & Ohlbaum] suggests that the olive branch may be almost irrelevant. Readers do not need aggregators to point them to news sources, and they graze so widely that few would reach the five-article limit."
Our Real Problem: The Death of the News Package
Friday, 4 December 2009, 11:20
Adam Tinworth on what people are really paying for when they put down a few coins for a newspaper or magazine: "we journalists have a bias towards the news element of the publication that our readers do not share. We got into journalism to 'do news'. They were buying a mix of news, features, comments, comics and crosswords that added up to a valuable package of information and entertainment in one handy portable product. …
So, in essence, we never really charged people for news."
Daggle.com: Dear WSJ: To Avoid Google Disease, Please Put A Condom On Your Content
Friday, 23 October 2009, 00:02
Robert Thomson doesn't like promiscuity of readers who get their news online, and blames Google: "the whole Google model is based on digital disloyalty. It’s about disloyalty to creators." Danny Sullivan responds…
