Category Archives: unbundling

Wired.co.uk: Mobile news apps vs tweet-led link economy

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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

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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

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"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

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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

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"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

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"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

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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

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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...

The Big Money: Death a la Carte: It’s not Google that’s killing the media

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Content unbundling, not Google or aggregation is the disruptive problem for media companies, argues Mark Gimein: "Memory is short, and people have forgotten what it was that Google saved them from. Before the triumph of search, the standard prediction was that the future of media was going to be dominated by portals like America Online. Folks believed that with these entryways, any media organization that wanted an audience would have to pay for carriage ... The total haul from news on the Web is not nearly sufficient to support everything that goes into reporting and presenting it. The reason for this has nothing to do with Google and everything to do with a la carte pricing. ... The perceived value of individual pieces of content is much less than the perceived value of an entire HBO subscription, album, or magazine."