Making the Web like TV, Part I

Barry Parr

Get ready for more annoying, ineffective, “rich media” ads, says Leslie Walker at the Washington Post. Then there’s this:

As if words could help, the leading trade group for large Web publishers — the Interactive Advertising Bureau — announced a “terminology change” last week. It wants everyone to stop using “streaming media” to describe video and audio transmitted online and instead call it “interactive broadcasting,” mainly because the group thinks “broadcasting” has more appeal to traditional ad buyers than “streaming.”

This seems to completely misunderstand how streaming works and why it’s different from broadcasting.

Internet use is hurting other media

Barry Parr

Gartner confirms that Internet use is diminishing the use of other media. It’s not surprising, but it’s nice to have the number to back it up. The net is clearly affecting communication patterns more than media use:

  • more than half of Internet users said they use postal mail less,
  • A third placed fewer long-distance telephone calls,
  • 20% watch television less,
  • 20% read newspapers less,
  • 18% go to see fewer movies,
  • 15% watch fewer videos, and
  • 15% read magazines less often.

It’s hard to believe these numbers are so low. I suspect the effect is higher than the respondents are reporting.

Europeans aren't paying and won't pay for content

Barry Parr

90% of Europeans have not paid for online content, and 40% say they won’t, according to Jupiter.
Also notable, some 16% said they would pay for news and archives, and of the £140m spent on online content this year, nearly half was on pornography.
I don’t have the figures for online advertising in Europe handy, but it has be to significantly, more than an order of magnitude, more than the £70m they’re spending on nonporn content.

A browser that gets out of the way of the Web

Barry Parr

I’ve switched browers again — from Mozilla, which I liked a lot, to Chimera, which I love. Thanks to Avi Rappaport of Searchtools.com for the excellent recommendation.
There’s not a lot to say about it, because browsers ought to be simple. It doesn’t do email, newsgroups, HTML composition, chat, addresses, or calendaring. It doesn’t have a sidebar for notifications, RSS feeds, related sites or search results. It can’t be skinned and the interface doesn’t have its own programming language.
It blocks popup ads and it has tabbed browsing, just like Mozilla. But it’s really fast, starts up right away, and it looks like a Mac application. If Netscape had introduced something like this in 1996, instead of Netscape Navigator 4.0, they might still be around.

Vin Crosbie's 1% solution

Barry Parr

Vin Crosbie describes how sites that convert from free to paid revenue models are lucky to convert only 1% of their users to subscribers. That sounds about right. It’s roughly the same response rate as a direct mail solicitation. It’s probably not too surprising, considering that in both cases, you’re sellling to a highly-qualified audience — at least if you choose your lists well.
So, if you think you can get $20 per year from a subscriber, you would need $20 rev/sub/year * .01 subs/user = $.20 rev/user/year to make up the difference. You’d only need twenty cents in advertising revenue per user to make this work. The number might even be lower, because your subscribers are likely to come from your heaviest users, who will generate the most ad revenue.
Of course, this assumes you’re able to sell advertising on your site. The irony is that if you’re pretty sure you can sell your content, you probably also have the kind of audience advertisers will pay for: affluent, focused, engaged and motivated.

Internet advertising: still crashing, perhaps not plummeting

Barry Parr

According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, Internet advertising was down 18% in the first quarter.
This is still worse than other media. The IAB says, “According to CMR, 2002 first quarter ad spending was down 13.8 percent from the first quarter of 2001 for cable TV, 9.6 percent for magazines and 8.5 percent for national newspapers. In contrast, Spot Radio and Network TV both reported strong results for the first quarter of 2002, up 9.5 percent and 6.6 percent respectively.”
It’s not clear how much of the decline is due to the improved booking and accounting practices.