Comcast says email isn't part of the Internet

Barry Parr1 Comment

Comcast say that email is not included in its broadband Internet service, according to this item on Macintouch:

I am involved with the swing dance community, and periodically need to send out between 250 – 1000 emails, to let swing dancers know of upcoming events. I have been doing this for the past five years with no problem until now. I called Comcast, and was told that “..in order to keep their servers from being used for sending spam, all residential accounts were now subject to a 10 message limit.”

Comcast gave no notice of this policy, and it cannot be found on their web site. They also told me that this was not really a change in service since “Comcast has never sold you email service. All we are selling you is connection to the internet. The email service has just been provided for free.”

The customer service person said I could get Comcast Business Service, which is unavailable in my area. Business service costs a minimum of $155. Today I was told that my only option was to buy an “Enhanced Messaging” package, which requires a $50 setup fee and costs $25 per month to be able to send 150 emails at a time.

Comcast classifies email with ten or more recipients as a business service requiring a much larger fee. To make this policy stick, they will have to either deny their users access to POP, or charge extra for it.

This is an excellent example of the kind of tiered service we can expect from the access duopolies if the FCC gets its way and declares Internet access is not a telecommunications service. Fortunately, the Supreme Court has put a temporary stop to Michael Powell’s sophistry.

What have you done about spam today?

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Greg Tingle of Media Man Australia recently asked me, “Do you think that white lists are the answer to spam?”.

I’ve already said that challenge-response email systems aren’t a good solution. White lists in general don’t work, because they assume the only people you want to hear from are the people you already know.

White lists are a bad approach, but fortunately they’re not the only tool. I’ve become convinced that we need multiple solutions to spam; criminal law, civil law, blacklists, voluntary industry standards, Bayesian filters, filtering and tagging by the ISP, local filtering by the user, and other approaches. Used in the context of these other approaches, even white lists can be used to ensure against false positives. That way, if your best friend figures out a way to make money smuggling Viagra out of Nigeria, you won’t miss out.

One single solution isn’t going to work. The idea that there is a single solution allows everyone to say, “The solution is over there, not here.”

How many microtransactions are there in a gigamarket?

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The latest Online Publishers’ Association paid content report has some interesting information about non-subscription payments under $5. [They call them micropayments, I’d call them minipayments and reserve “micropayments” for any payment too small to be economically handled by credit card.]

According to the OPA, payments under $5 are 8% of non-subscription payments, which are 11.5% of the $1.5 billion/yr paid content market. That works out to less than $15 million/yr. Clearly, a large part of that market is owned by the WSJ and NYT, leaving probably less than $10 million to be shared by newspaper archive operations and a few other sites such as Hoover’s and Consumer Reports.

It gets even worse. According to Peter Krasilovsky at Borrell Associates, database vendors keep about half the revenue from newspaper archives.

Both Clay Shirky and Andrew Odlyzko make a persuasive case that micropayments are an economic dead end. I won’t try to summarize either of these essays. Read them for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Consumers are currently spending less than $40 million on (non-business) news and information on the Net, including both subscriptions and minipayments. By comparison, online advertising adds up to more than $6 billion/year.

Even assuming a nearly frictionless and profitable micropayment mechanism, and optimal pricing by publishers, how much larger could the Internet market for news and information be? Can you describe a scenario where it would add up to a billion dollars?

I can’t.

Online personals are advertising, not content

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Online personals aren’t content. People don’t pay to read personals–they pay to post them. Or they buy access to a poster’s contact information.

Clay Shirky calls it communication. I’d call it advertising. But, I suppose paid communication is advertising, isn’t it?

Whatever you do call it, observers increasingly agree that the Online Publishers’ Association shouldn’t count it as paid content. The good news is that the OPA is finding a much more skeptical audience this year than in the past.

Their information is so good and so useful that it’s a shame to see them get use the same dopey definition of content. No doubt they will continue to do so as long as news outlets report their big market size number uncritically.

More skepticism about the OPA's definition of the content market

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Vin Crosbie have taken on the Online Publishing Association’s hype and loose interpretation of the data in their latest online content sales report. Vin was the first to cry foul on the original OPA report’s fast-and-loose definition of “online content” last year.

Rafat Ali ridicules the following hopeful statement in the report: “While slowing growth is indicative of a maturing market, we may also be in the midst of a quiet period during which content providers are readying new premium paid services for an increasingly receptive public.” He also has come around to the conclusion that online dating services don’t belong in the online content market.

We need a new definition of online content sales.

The ITU suggests US broadband penetration is about half what it should be [Free Research]

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With our per capita income, US broadband penetration should be about twice what it is. Take a look at the free executive summary [PDF] of the International Telecommunications Union’s Birth of Broadband report.

There’s a great graph (Figure 3 on page 9 of the executive summary) that shows we’re lagging behind the adoption curve that the rest of the world seems to be riding.

What forces are retarding the implementation of broadband in the US?. Clearly, it’s not content, as the copyright holders would have us believe. There’s more US-developed content than anything else on the Net.

The ITU believes the single most important driver of broadband penetration is competition. It makes you wonder why the FCC thinks eliminating competition is the best way to get the telco’s to deploy fiber optic networks.

Recommendation: I'm very happy with Dreamhost

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I’m approaching my second anniversary of hosting my sites (including MediaSavvy and Parr.org) at Dreamhost. I bounced from host to host for seven unhappy years until I landed at Dreamhost. They had the right combination of products and services. I can recommend them without reservation.

They’re a small company, but their uptime has been excellent.

Dreamhost’s control panel works really well and does everything I need to manage my account.

They supply all the software support I need (Perl, PHP, cgi, MySQL, and more). I’ve been able to install and use all kinds of CMS and other software on my Dreamhost account without any problems.

Their customer service and tech support have been outstanding.

They’re prices are great. They have surprised me a couple of times by increasing and improving the services I get for what I pay.
Their packaging is simple and I don’t feel like I have to buy any more service than I need to do what I want to do.

Disclaimer and invitation: If you use the link above or the one on my navigation bar to sign up, I get credit against my Dreamhost bill.

OPA's demographic report shows the futility of demographics [Free Research]

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The Online Publishers Association has released a demographic study that compares online content buyers to the Internet users as a whole.

Most of the data show that the demographic differences between content buyers and everyone else are meaningless. They’re the tiniest bit younger, a little more heavily represented among people with incomes over $100,000 (like buyers of everything else), and their households are smaller (probably because they’re younger).

The real difference is behavioral. Internet content buyers spend about twice as much time on the Net and view more than twice as many pages. And they’re a little more likely to have broadband service (about 60% versus 50% for all Internet users).

The most interesting fact is that they spent less on conventional ecommerce ($235/quarter vs. $315/quarter) than the average online buyer.

This data confirms my thesis that demographics are meaningless to Internet marketers. Internet content buyers look like everyone else on the Net. We should be looking at behavior.

OPA's latest content sales report isn't encouraging [Free Research]

Barry Parr1 Comment

The market for online content sales is growing, but contains the seeds of its own destruction. That’s my interpretation of the new online content sales report [PDF] from the Online Publishers Association. The report covers the first half of 2003. Here are the highlights, in my opinion:

  • The core online content market grew a respectable 14% between the first half of 2002 and 2003. The OPA’s definition on “content sales” is still too expansive my taste. They include personals (up 77% since 2002), streaming audio and video, games, credit repair, fantasy sports, and greeting cards. Core online content, in my analysis, includes business content, research, and general news. This market was $255 million in the first half of 2003, or about a third of the OPA’s content market.
  • General news is flat at about $35 million/year.
  • Online advertising is an order of magnitude larger than online content. The Interactive Advertising Bureau hasn’t released their numbers for the first half of 2003 yet, but it’s likely to be more than $3 billion.
  • Subscriptions dominate the online content market. About 88% of the market was subscription-based. Because the OPA doesn’t break this out by category, it’s hard to know how this applies to the core content market.
  • Single payments under $5 are less than $15 million/year (8% of total single payments which are 11.5% of the approximately $1.5 billion/year market). The OPA calls these “micropayments”. I’d call them “minipayments”.
  • Revenue per content buyer has been stalled at just under $25 for nearly two years. All growth in revenue comes from the conversion of Internet users into content buyers. This isn’t too surprising. It’s more than they pay for the daily newspaper. It’s about what most people pay for Internet access. It’s about half what they pay for local telephone, long distance, cable, broadband, or mobile service. Does anyone think that it will ever be greater than any of these?
  • The average content buyer spent $.25 on single payment content in the first half of 2003.

Conclusions: The market for online content will stagnate if content sellers can’t continue to find new buyers. Publishers of general news and information are misguided if they think that selling subscriptions or archives will ever be a serious business. Meanwhile they risk conceding their core markets to free, advertising-financed competitors if they pursue it.

Choosing a CMS: so far, pMachine looks like the right tool for my project

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I’ve been looking for a content management system for a new community project I’m working on.

My requirements were simple. It had to be easy to set up and maintain. It had to be template-driven and the templates had to be editable by someone more proficient at HTML than Perl, PHP, or Python. It had to use either a weblog or Slashdot-style structure, but be flexible enough to accommodate changes in the structure and menus. I had to be able to use it on a virtual host where I didn’t have access to the http server. The software also needed to support registration and posting by users, without a lot of intervention from the administrator. It needed to be a finished product with good documentation and an active community of users. Finally, I had to be able to find the software, install it, create a prototype, and set up my site without using a lot of time.

Movable Type would have been ideal. It’s what I use for MediaSavvy and my family sites, but it doesn’t support user registration and posting.

I spent a lot of time examining open source CMS’s, but none seemed to be both broadly-supported and really simple. But it’s really hard to tell sometimes. There is still not enough information available on open source CMS’s.

I looked at wikis, but that was a frustrating experience. I never found one that was both easy to install and able to support more than minimal design improvements.

I looked at Scoop, which I liked a lot. I went so far as to get an account on a Scoop host, create a prototype site, and modify the templates to use CSS. But it didn’t work with my virtual host and required too much Perl to make the modifications I needed. It became clear I would need to hire a Perl wizard to maintain my site.

Postnuke looked great and has the best installer of any package I’ve used. But its formatting wasn’t flexible enough. That’s too bad, because it’s a great piece of software in many ways.

I installed pMachine this morning, and I think it’s what I’m looking for. It’s not open source, but at $45 for a noncommercial license it’s hard to beat. It’s as impressive as Movable Type in its power and ease of use. Plus, it has much better support for multiple authors.