Hearst’s Houston Chronicle dropped mandatory registration Monday as part of a redesign of its site.
It will be interesting to see how dropping the registration requirement will affect the use of, and links to, its news stories by bloggers and others on the Web.
Registration data has to be a lot less useful in selling advertising than it was in the old days. Advances in behavioral targeting have made the kind of primitive demographics captured by registration to seem awfully primitive. Then, there’s the fact that Internet advertising has become a lot easier to sell in the last couple of years.
But, I’ve long considered the fact that only one industry (newspapers) requires registration to read its content to be prima facie evidence that registration is a bad idea.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Month: November 2005
The general lack of enthusiasm for buying Knight-Ridder, either the whole company or the individual papers, is making me wonder whether the company’s stock is properly priced after all.
To justify the cost of buying the company for more its current price, you’d have to either cut costs or increase revenue. No big newspaper company is going to achieve any special cost-cutting advantages without dramatically changing their business model. For another media company (or any other company) to do this would be to incur huge risk of failure with little upside potential.
The market seems to be saying that newspaper companies are doing a pretty good job of managing the decline of their core products. Keeping these companies as pure plays may be the best way for us to manage our portfolios.
The big question remains. Can newspaper companies create the next-generation news services that the Internet audience demands, or will they remain cash cows for someone else’s big ideas?
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
My reaction to Microsoft’s Live.com site was similar to my reaction to Google’s new toolbar. The ability to display RSS feeds on a page or a widget isn’t enough to get you into the game anymore. I’m about as excited by that as I am about the ability to add a clock or the weather to something.
One thing is clear from live.com: the Spartan look of Google will soon become as ubiquitous as the information-intense look of Yahoo was in the late nineties.
The big news is that RSS is going to be everywhere and it’s going to continue to get easier for ordinary users to display headlines wherever the like without knowing how they’re doing it. We’re all going to have to become aggregators. And we’re all going to have to get better at writing headlines.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.