Category: Analysis

Working too hard to preserve our existing margins can lead us to ignore longer-term opportunities.
Between 20 and 100 additional online users are needed for every print reader lost by a newspaper, according to an article in today’s UK Guardian. This is because print has a much greater revenue per reader. The article is based on the work of Vin Crosbie, for whom I have a lot of respect.
However, this assumes that print revenue per user will remain at its current high levels. With the newspaper industry already managing its own decline, it’s time to acknowledge that current revenue per reader figures are pretty meaningless in the long run. Revenue per print reader is the result of an unstable dynamic system of print circulation figures, the cost of newsprint, a declining base of classified and retail revenue, the lower cost of printing a smaller paper, newsroom cuts, and massive capital infrastructure. It might be impossible to model, but it’s a safe bet that revenue per reader in long-term decline.
Meanwhile, we’ve only begun the transition of our audiences from print (or TV) to online and to tap the revenue potential of each of those new readers we’ve acquired.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

As a general rule, the correct strategy for most publishers, and other content producers, is to give away their content on the Web in order to make money from advertising. Of course, there are exceptions to that rule. It may not make sense for monthly magazine publishers, who have serious cannibalization issues, and who may not want to make their print content available free to nonsubscribers. There is an analogy in public radio.
I was on a panel titled “Following the Online Money” at a public broadcasting Integrated Media Association conference in Seattle last week. In preparing for that meeting, I came to the conclusion that for public radio stations, it probably doesn’t make economic sense to make their live streams available to nonmembers for free.
Membership revenue is the lifeblood of public broadcasting. They’re membership organizations. And their live streams are of interest only to their members and people who should be members. As I told one attendee, “If you could bill everyone who listens to your station, you would. And online, you can require membership to listen to a live stream.”
I say, “Make ’em pay.”
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

XM Satellite Radio has posted much greater than expected losses as its cost per new listener rose 40% over last year in an effort to counter Sirius’s Howard Stern blitz with more marketing. The current cost of $140 per gross new subscriber is almost exactly one year’s revenue on a subscription that can be cancelled at any time.
XM says that its CPGA (cost per gross addition) will drop again after the Stern wave has passed. But XM’s marketing cost rose much faster than its subscriber numbers in this period, indicating that there is a natural limit on how quickly satellite radio can grow while keeping costs in line. This is consistent with the cautions I raised in US Satellite Radio Subscriber Revenue Forecast, 2005 to 2010:

Satellite radio providers must achieve this growth rate while keeping marketing costs per subscription down and without increasing churn rate.

One of XM’s directors has resigned in a dispute related to escalated marketing costs.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

Giving cable consumers the opportunity to buy cable channels a la carte is insufficient, as long as the cable operators are stocking the cart.
Elsewhere, Todd Chanko makes the case that we need a more edited selection of cable programming. And that the editors should be the dealmakers at the big cable companies. I think we can do better.
We’re rapidly approaching a point where real a al carte–fine-grained Internet-style a la carte–is a real possibility for television. And consumers should be given the option of buying directly from the programmers, with the cable companies providing source-neutral common carrier access to all programming. We should be paying our cable companies a monthly fee for the one area where they add value to the transaction, which is a speedy and reliable connection to the entertainment and information we want from the vendors we choose.
The variety and quality of choices we’d have in that world would make the current cable programming lineup look like the Soviet supermarket it is.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

Small dailies, such as the Bismarck Tribune, are not being hit by the same virus that’s attacking larger papers, according to yesterday’s WSJ. You’ll have to search for it, because I can’t find a URL for this story that I can reliably link to.
The story suggests that their circulation and margins are healthy because Internet penetration in the rural areas of the country isn’t there yet. But if you read between the lines, it’s clear that these are community papers that are focused on what’s happening in their towns. The front pages of the papers shown in the story make no pretense to covering national and international news.
That kind of orientation should not only make the Bismarck Tribune Internet-proof, it enhance their with Bismarck residents who are using the Internet every day.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

Jason Kottke has taken a nice analytical approach to the competition between mainstream media (especially the NY Times) and bloggers for the attention of the public.
Googling the top eight stories of 2005, he shows that blogs and citizen media often top the mainstream media. His analysis is dead-on: citizen media is winning the race, one reason this is happening is that their stories are persistent and designed to be linked from the get-go, the NY Times is squandering its Google credit (a PageRank of 10!), and citizen media are becoming indistinguishable from the “professional” media.
His discovery that CNN (with a PageRank of a mere 9) routinely trounces the Times on Google is yet another indication of why subscription barriers and archives in paid databases may generate more cash in the short term, but can be bad strategy in networked media.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

Microsoft is ending its exclusive deal with MSNBC for local and non-US news. Jupiter found in our Future of News report that MSNBC.com is the breakaway leader in US national and international news, and clearly a big part of the reason for this is the distribution that Microsoft is able to give it.
There are a couple of lessons here. One is the continuing primacy of distribution over content on the net in general and the Web in particular. Content is still staggeringly important, but there are still precious few outlets with the distribution to provide the the economies of scale necessary for worldwide news coverage. Call it the “small head” of the long-tailed market.
The second lesson is that there is little synergy between content and distribution. It’s better to the able to shop for the best deal on content than it is to be bound to a news-collection network. Remember: Wal-Mart doesn’t make anything. They use their distibution power to shop around and force their prospective suppliers to figure out how to cut costs. I’m not arguing that content producers wouldn’t like to own their distribution, but that if you separate the content and the distribution, the value of the parts will be greater than that of the merged business.
The third lesson is that we will see fewer comprehensive sources of national and international news over time. Headline news is increasingly a commodity, and in the future MSNBC.com will continue to need Microsoft more than Microsoft needs MSNBC.com.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

David Card asks if tagging is “the new, new thing or meme that runs out of steam in 6 months?“. I agree that tagging is moving against the tide of the net. The informal creation of metadata through linking is one of the great unsung assets of the Web, at least among its primary beneficiaries in the publishing business. But it works because it’s in the linker’s self-interest to create meaningful links.
In a game of tag, no one wants to be the one doing the tagging. Tagging requires a little extra unnecessary effort that most folks are not only unwilling to make, but aren’t prepared to learn. The net depends on the altruism of the few and the indifference of the many.
But I’m really going to miss those cool-looking, pointless, tag clouds.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

After two years of experimentation, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is no longer changing the layout of its pages depending on the day. They called it “dayparting”, borrowing a term from TV advertising. This was perhaps not the best pool in which to fish for metaphors.

Good theory, and we saw some gains in traffic early on. But, two years of hard-won experience made it clear that we can’t be all things to all people all the time. People might want to play games or shop or read celebrity gossip, but they weren’t coming to our site for that (well, maybe for the gossip).
SeattlePI.com is, first and foremost, a news site.

Terry Heaton has a good analysis why this doesn’t work, focusing on the fact that readers don’t come in via the home page any more, an idea I explored in our Future of News report.
The big aha! in the story is their realization that they’re a news site. But they’ve only implicitly acknowledged the real lesson in their conclusion.

Meanwhile, we’ll stick with the news-oriented layout that we’ve been using between midnight and 1 p.m. on weekdays. We’ve redesigned it a bit for the Seattle Seahawks’ history-making playoff run (which, hopefully, will last beyond tomorrow). Interest in the team is at an all-time high — at least, among our users — and we wanted to make it easier for people to find all of our Seahawks content when they come to the site.

They are, first and foremost, a local news site.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.