Category: Analysis

Ed Foster has a excellent exchange on how Comcast is handling the takeover of AT&T Broadband. Comcast’s user agreement requires the purchase of a higher-priced service if you want to use a virtual packet network to, say, communicate with your office, but AT&T didn’t. It appears that Comcast is beginning to sporadically implement extra charges for VPN across their own and AT&T’s old network.

The access duopolies can be expected to ratchet up this behavior as they break free from regulation and start looking for ways to extract revenue from their customers without investing in their networks. Especially since there is no commonly agreed definition to “broadband”, “Internet”, or “access”.

[Ed Foster used to write the excellent Gripe Line column for InfoWorld. HIs new blog is really promising.]

Ryan McFarland of Liquify says that we ought to be tagging premium content so it can be indexed and searchable on the search engines. This is a killer idea.

Now, I would prefer if all that premium content were free, and I think publishers would be better off. But, if we’re going to move to a world where some content is behind a barrier, we should make certain it’s not a barrier to linking and indexing.

Anybody who has spent time trying to track down useful articles in the current maze of databases knows that it doesn’t work. Furthermore, there’s evidence that no one is making much money doing it this way. Ryan McFarland’s suggestion looks like a good way to harness network effects for paid content.

What is “content’ and what does it mean when we talk about selling content on the Web?

A while back, I expressed my unhappiness with the Online Publishers’ Association and Jupiter’s definition of content. They included a lot of stuff their sizing of the content market that didn’t seem like content to me. But I didn’t propose my own definition of content sales. I know from experience that creating these definitions and taxonomies is really hard. And it makes my head hurt.

I have been thinking about defining the content market. I’d like to share my ideas with you and get your feedback.

I went back and read some of the responses to the reports. Vin Crosbie was critical of the OPA about six months before I caught on.

“Digital intellectual property”? I can understand Brittanica.com’s content being defined that way. But a personal ad labeled “Sexy Guy Seeks Comfy Girl” on kiss.com? A post of “Uma’s Unmentionables” on The Well Dressed SIM? Gift certificates on Hallmark.com?

Do I detect OPA inflating the definition of paid online content? Why not add online revenue from Ticketmaster and other traditional services?

…

Did American consumers spend $675 million for online content last year? Depends how you define content. Most people wouldn’t define it the way OPA does. But OPA’s definition sure makes for a spectacle of a press release.

He followed up with a fanciful (and clever) definition and a suggestion that the real problem with the content business is that it’s not satisfying its audience:

In several European languages, the word “content” has two meanings: subject matter and satisfied. I know one director of content development who jokes his real job is to make his company’s developers happy.

Why not combine the meanings? Subject matter that satisfies. People will pay for satisfaction but won’t hand over a dime (or centime) for content that doesn’t make them content.

After I beat up the OPA and Jupiter definitions, Rick Bruner at MarketingFix took a swipe at defining content and said I was defining it too narrowly:

Since I invoke the name Interwoven, which is a leading “content management system,” I went to their site and found this definition for “content”:

Narrowly defined, Web content is HTML. Broadly defined, it includes rich media, documents, application code, and XML. Whether your initiative is an intranet, Internet or portal, Interwoven manages all Web content from creation to delivery.

The broad definition is a lot closer to what to what Jupiter, the OPA and I would seem to have in mind compared to Barry’s narrower one.

So, like most IT vendors, Interwoven defines content as “bits”. That definition is broad enough to be meaningless, and it’s a lot like “digital intellectual property”. Even their “narrow” definition isn’t very useful. But I don’t necessarily disagree with it.

Literally, “content” is something that is contained. Back in the 90’s we started using the word “content” to refer to information that was to be repurposed from physical media to the Internet. It’s the stuff the media were intended to convey. A book is the container, but the words, pictures, and ideas that it contains are the content. If you buy a book, you’re buying the physical thing and not its content. Ditto for CD’s, or even MP3 files. The file is not the content. The music is the content.

In other words, the medium isn’t the message. At least not literally.

I’d have to agree that “content” is the bits (but not the file), the intellectual property (but not the media). It turns out that my problem isn’t so much with the definition of “content”, but with the definition of “content sales”

More on that later.

Pipe companies shouldn’t be allowed to own the content that runs on their pipes.

I’ve been saying all along that it’s bad business and that pipe company shareholders are ill-served by their ventures into the content business. But it’s beginning to interfere with the proper operation of the first amendment.

A bunch of really big companies, including Amazon, Microsoft and Disney, are petitioning the FCC not to change the rules that govern cable and DSL access monopolies. They’re afraid these monopolies are going to limit what equipment can be used to connect to the Internet and what content we can see. There is already plenty of evidence that the telcos want a share of Internet content for no other reason than consumers go through their networks to get to it.

Independent producers (and Democratic FCC commissioners) want to keep the FCC from making it easier for distribution oligopolies to squeeze them out. Lawrence Lessig shows us that the squeeze has been going on for a couple of decades already.

Comcast, the largest cable company in the US, won’t permit competitors like DSL companies to advertise on their systems.

In the eighties, the cable monopolies used their clout to get a controlling share of every new cable channel they agreed to carry. The deadening sameness of cable programming isn’t surprising. All the creative decisions were made to please an industry whose core competencies are political payoffs and digging holes in the ground.

Lessig points to an excellent interview with Barry Diller, where Barry says that the guys that own the pipes into our homes are going to end up owning all the content. If the FCC permits pipe companies to discriminate against content in the name of competition, there will be a lot less competition in the content business ten years from now.

Apple has built a great music store, but it’s not enough to get me to switch.

For the cost of a “CD” from Apple’s music store, I can by a real CD from Amazon.

Apple’s CD has DRM built in. A real CD isn’t copy protected (yet).

Apple’s CD doesn’t come with liner notes and lyrics. A real CD has all its information.

Apple’s CD uses 128bit lossy compression. A real CD sounds better.

Apple’s CD can only be played back on iPods. A real CD can be made to play back on all MP3 players, including iPods.

A lot of Apple CD’s don’t have all the tracks. A real CD has all the tracks of the original (and sometimes more).

David Galbraith is right that Apple’s music store hasn’t changed the economics of the music business. It may be a big step forward, but until the business itself is changed, consumers are still going to take it in the neck. In the meantime, I intend to insist on physical CD’s without DRM.

Google is a search company. “Duh!” you say. But, The idea has been going around that Google is becoming an advertising company:

Google is an advertising company. Search is a fairly finite field in computing – and Google’s research team is now bigger than any University’s – they have this area sewn up. What they don’t have sewn up is the technology and services required for advertising, and this is how Google makes its money.

That’s wrong. Google is a search company. Overture is an advertising company. The difference is obvious when you look at what they deliver to their users. Overture delivers ads, Google delivers search results.

The idea that Google is an ad company stems from a misunderstanding of the content business. While a content company may get most or even all of its revenue from advertising, it never forgets that its user loyalty flows from its quality of service and content. And no one knows better than Google how quickly that loyalty can shift to someone else.

That doesn’t mean that Google won’t be working hard to advance that state of the art in online advertising. But the meme “You’re not a X company, you’re a Y company.” is one of those things that have given management consultants a bad name.

Sterling Hughes is right. The Web is becoming too complicated for its own good. I have a long list of new technologies I have to learn if I’m going to understand how to build “modern” web pages.

One big reason for the triumph of the Web is that it was so easy to build sites with HTML. New standards and theoretical purity are beginning to stand in opposition to the beauty and simplicity of “good enough”. The good news is that “good enough” usually wins in the end.

Sterling’s post inspired Jeremy Zawodny’s praise of Moveable Type for its simplicity and hackability. It’s difficult to think of a single piece of software that is as loved as MT. Certainly there are no other content management systems are as loved by their users.

I love CSS because it has simplified my site design, markup, and therefore maintenance immeasurably and has inspired me to play around with site design and structure. I felt the same way about tables for a month, but eventually changing table-based designs made my head hurt.

Steve Yelvington says that unless readers are willing to accept Javascript, they’re unwelcome on most newspaper Web sites:

Another common complaint is “it doesn’t work with Javascript turned off.” Well, here’s a wake-up call: Since we often use Javascript to deliver advertising, users with Javascript disabled aren’t particularly welcome. They’re not participating in the fundamental free trade that enables news sites to exist: Your attention (which I can sell to my advertisers) in exchange for my content.

Why turn away readers?

Steve says it’s a limitation of Open AdStream, which is used by most newspaper sites. It seems to me that this is not the users’ problem to fix by welcoming Javascript. It’s the publishers’ problem to fix by figuring out a way to serve ads to users to who choose not to let you run programs on their computers.

I love Dave Winer’s site and I believe he’s major force for good and progress on the Web, but Jeffrey Zeldman is right, Dave’s sniping at cascading style sheets is baffling and unhelpful:

In his latest anti-CSS mini-rant, published this morning, Mr Winer gripes about being locked in a trunk with people who want to smear ketchup on his tie. We have no idea what that means or why Mr Winer, who is first and foremost a programmer, has such trouble grasping the benefits of a lean, cache-able, standardized visual formatting language for the web.

Dave’s tremendously influential and Userland is one of the largest distributors of Web site templates. He also rails against what he (appropriately) calls “stop energy“. He’s a big generator of stop energy when it comes to CSS

Mobile carriers apparently take “almost 50-60 percent of any mobile content/data sold” on the networks, reports Rafat Ali of PaidContent.org from the “Making M-Commerce a Reality” conference in London. Presumably, he’s talking about European carriers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were the starting point in the US as well.

If you want to use their networks and their handsets and their customers, you’ll pay them well for the privilege. Rafat Ali reports one participant saying, “Each partner you talk to, they don’t see the entire value chain…all they want to take their chunk out of the business.” Partners? Actually, it’s an insult to the Mob to call these kinds of charges vigorish — the operation’s of an illegal bet. The vig is seldom more than 5%

Alan Reiter rants about the greed of the carriers on his site:

The dolts who make these decisions think they understand the dynamics of the Internet. The cellular industry for years has studied the Internet and have been desperately trying to copy what has been successful in order to transfer the successes to wireless data. But it boggles the mind how clueless cellular data executives truly are.

It certainly is possible to create a model where the cellular operator receives revenues from preferred applications vendors while, at the same time, allowing subscribers to download any application.

He points to the too-closed for my taste I-mode system, where content and applications companies pay to be listed on the phone, but not to participate in the network.

If you listen hard, you can hear the broadband internet access duopolies muttering about these kinds of “partnerships”.