MediaSavvy

Accoring to the Commerce Department, many Americans don’t plan to upgrade to broadband anytime soon. According to the AP, the report (which I can’t find on the Commerce Dept site) is based on data from various third parties:

• Almost all U.S. families live in areas where a high-speed Internet connection is available, but many see no reason to pay extra for it
• Only 10 percent of U.S. households subscribe to high-speed access, lower than the rate in Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong or Canada.
• Broadband is too expensive compared to dial-up ($50 vs. $20)
• More than two-thirds of dial-up users don’t plan to upgrade because of the cost.

Commerce thinks that broadband adoption can be increased, but increasing the amount of music, movies and games on the Net, justifying the monopoly rents of the cable co’s and baby Bells. This plays right in to the hands of the intellectual property oligopoly, who are using the promotion of broadband as a reason to force digital rights management on the public.
How about enforcing the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the Sherman Antitrust Act instead?

Google’s newly redesigned news page raises more questions than it answers.
Google spiders news sites, determines the most important stories algorithmically, and aggregates the stories under a common headline.
According to Nielsen/NetRatings, aggregators still aren’t a huge part of the news business. And it’s easy to see why when looking at Google News. Despite its undeniable coolness, it is editorially flat. There is no point of view and no sense that human beings were involved in its creation. The aggregation process soothes out all the rough edges and we’re left with something that has no point of view.
The strong NetRatings performance of Slate, Fox News and Matt Drudge, despite their small real-world footprint show us how important point of view can be in building an online news audience.

Nine of the top 20 news sites are run by newspaper companies, according to Editor and Publisher, based on stats from Nielsen NetRatings. Here’s what I found in the data they presented:

• Three news sites have average session lengths of more than thirty minutes: NY Times (34:13), Fox News (34:56), and Drudge Report (37:41).
• If you combine Gannett newspapers and USA Today, the unique audience may put Gannett sites in the top 3.
• The top 3 sites (CNN, MSNBC, and Yahoo! News) are better-suited to breaking news than the typical newspaper site.
• Yahoo! News, AOL.com News, and Drudge Report are the only aggregators in the top 20.
• NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times and NY Post (!) are the only single newspapers in the top 20. The other newspaper sites contain all the sites in multi-paper chains.
• AOL/TW sites (CNN, Time, AOL.com News) collectively have 50% more traffic than number two MSNBC.
• Internet Broadcasting Systems, which creates web sites for local TV stations is in the top ten.
• Knight-Ridder is not on the list, apparently humiliated by Belo, Internet Broadcasting Systems, NY Post, and Matt Drudge!
• Associated Press is number nineteen, just squeaking past Drudge Report.

My conclusions: It’s essential to build a reputation for covering breaking news in real time; having a point of view is desireable; the future probably doesn’t belong to aggregators, but partnerships (such as those cultivated by CNN and MSNBC) could be a very important success factor; and daily newpapers are not setting the pace in online news.

Fortune, unchastened in its shameless sucking up to CEO’s, is running a puff piece about Terry Semel at Yahoo. The story suggests that he’s really shaking things up by doing a deal with Overture and buying HotJobs.

By early this summer the partnership was responsible for an estimated 10% of Yahoo’s $226 million in second-quarter revenues–all with Yahoo’s barely lifting a finger or spending a dime.
So it’s no surprise why Yahoo did the deal: The listings are a rare bright spot in another year of advertising malaise. One question: Why didn’t Yahoo do this earlier?
The answer, says Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, has a lot to do with Yahoo’s vision of itself during the bubble. “In addition to doing a lot of great things, Yahoo had a sense of arrogance, of we-invented-this,” he says, fiddling with his silver-rimmed glasses. “If we are going to succeed, we have to have people with different attitudes.”

It’s not clear how the Overture deal is bolder than Yahoo’s original search deal with Altavista, or how buying HotJobs is different from buying Geocities or 411.
And in a more thoughtful article in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), the advertising market is dismissed by (also unchastened) Wall Street analysts hungry for breakthrough services. Supposedly, Yahoo’s stock is supposedly suffering as a result. But it has outperformed the S&P 500, AOL/TW, the AMEX Internet Index, and DoubleClick this year.
Both articles highlight Yahoo’s upcoming broadband ISP deal with SBC as an important test of Semel’s leadership and Yahoo’s viability. But SBC is the ISP in this relationship. Yahoo is providing some (generic) services — a Yahoo browser a 125 megabytes of e-mail storage — and its (unique) brand to the deal. At its heart this kind of licensing deal is the equivalent of looking for change in your sofa cushions.
Until Yahoo recognizes that

• “Yahoo” one of the most important brands on the Net.
• Paid consumer services and brand-licensing deals are only going to provide marginal revenue, and only if Yahoo maintains its brand.
• Its core businesses are its portal, advertising, and online services and they are badly in need of a makeover.
• Broadband is a distraction from its core business.

… the full, extraordinary value of the Yahoo brand will never be realized.

During the Internet bubble, I talked to a lot of silly companies who claimed a million or two users. I think PointCast reached around a million users before churn stalled their growth.
Interestingly, this is roughly the number of people who speak Esperanto.
Apparently, you can get a couple of million people to do just about anything, but that doesn’t make it a business.

Unless the news industry is willing to stand up for the first amendment rights of the porn business, we’re all going to suffer in the long run.
For nearly a decade the censors have used pornography and terrorism as an excuse to impose filtering on us all and to occupy the Internet’s choke-points. Even the sleaziest news corporations decry porn on the Net, rather than defend the first amendment rights of pornographers and their customers.
Declan MacCullagh’s outstanding Politech site is essential for anyone who cares about what our government is doing to the first amendment in the name of protecting us from ourselves. Declan recently posted a excellent roundup of civil liberties issues and an Internet, pornography, and law update.

The Online News Association has announced the finalists for the 2002 Online Journalism Awards.
I went to the awards last year and was impressed by the nominees, but events like this always leave me feeling there are lots of remarkable sites that will never win an award.
Last night, I cruised recently-updated sites as they were listed on the Moveable Type home page and was stunned by the quality and creativity that has been unleashed now that real people have access to real publishing tools. Most of these people will never win anything for their work.

Here’s some good news: news is the most frequently used category of web site at work. Now the bad news: perhaps a third of companies that use web filtering software block news sites, and that number may increase.
“Initially we saw the most abuse in pornography and gambling sites, now we are seeing more time spent on shopping and news sites,” said Harold Kester, Chief Technology Officer of Websense, the Web filtering company which conducted the survey. Important findings:

• 23 percent of those workers surveyed said they considered news the most addictive Web content, compared with 18 percent who reported pornography, eight percent for gambling and six percent online auctions.
• Overall news came in a very close second to online shopping, which 24 percent of those surveyed said they considered addictive.
• 67 percent of workers surveyed said they were allowed them to use their office Internet connections to read news.

Already, a third of sites that employ filters are blocking news, and the filtering companies are clearly saying that employees reading news at work is costing companies money. “I think a lot of companies to react to the current vogue, and now a lot of their concerns center on pornography and gambling sites,” said SurfControl Chief Executive Officer Steve Purdham. “But (concern about) news sites is starting to grow, especially sports news and financial news.”
According to Nielsen Net Ratings, the number of Americans accessing the Internet at work grew 17 percent in the last year.
Web filtering at work may be set to wipe out one of the largest and most desireable audiences for news on the Web.

Disney wants to sell subscription services to AT&T mobile customers. According to Reuters:

“Disney’s Magic Kingdom” will offer color graphics and games, “Disney’s Fun for Families” will parenting tips and entertainment services from Disney TV shows, and “City Lounge” will offer movie reviews and showtimes, among other features. Each will cost $3.99 per month.
Disney’s ESPN sports network will also offer its own mMode product, “myESPN,” on AT&T Wireless. The $2.99 per month service will offer live player statistics, team news, injury reports and scoring data for athletic events.
…
Disney said Sprint customers can download ring tones and screen savers, among others, for $1 to $2 each and games for $3 to $4 per game.

That last plan might make some sense. eMarketer says “mCommerce” in the early-adopter Asian market is a decent-sized business, but more than two-thirds of Japanese “mCommerce” is for ringtones and other phone enhancements.
The other Disney offerings (games, parenting tips, movie reviews, and sports stats) look like a classic case of selling what you have, instead of what consumers want. According to the eMarketer report, consumers probably want reservations for entertainment and travel. But that would require a much bigger investment.
Dopey and Goofy were unavailable for comment.

The broadband market will grow 361% by the end of 2007 according to the Yankee Group. Right now, they say 58% of the market is using cable and a third is using DSL.
It would be a mistake to use this prediction as an excuse to heavy-up multimedia on our web sites. The performance of text-oriented web pages on broadband connections is still inferior to ink on paper. We ought to be focusing on improving the performance of our pages: removing tables, promoting text advertising, eliminating unnecessary graphics, and using CSS.
Let’s agree to confine our use of graphics and animation to applications where they make sense and not simply to dress up our content.