Year: 2005

Adam L. Penenberg in Wired, about the Wall Street Journal being close to invisible in Google.

If you can input the name of your publication into a search engine and not come up with any stories, you must be digitally tone-deaf.

Related article.

The blogosphere is currently abuzz about the entrance of advertising in RSS feeds on a broader scale. The other week, Kanoodle announced they were partnering with Moreover for the launch of BrightAds.

Through BrightAds RSS, Kanoodle’s content-targeted sponsored links will be inserted directly into site owners’ RSS feeds within posts or as individual posts.

As a response Ed Sim at the BeyondVC blog decided to launch a second feed to be able to fool around with the ads. He’s convinced RSS ads will become standard procedure for publishers. Monitor his blog for feedback on the experiment.

First, the fact of consuming RSS feeds will typically reduce traffic at many publishers’ websites giving them less opportunity to monetize their assets. Ads in RSS will help publishers overcome the lower traffic to their sites while still providing their users with up to date content. Secondly, ads embedded in RSS feed gives great targeting opportunities for advertisers and publishers.

In October, Pheedo estimated the number of RSS ad impressions for 2004 to be 77 million, up to 308 Million in 2005 and 1.2 billion in 2006. Now, I don’t know if that’s a lot or not, but it’s fairly safe to predict an increase in feeds that add ads as publishers, both bloggers and traditional media, want to monetize on a large subscriber base. Not everyone can quit their day job to live on donations like Jason Kottke.

InfoWorld.com earlier this year reported that its top RSS feed page on its Web site was receiving more total visits than its home page. How can such a distribution channel remain ad free?

Lawrence Lessig bashes the syndicators of the Bill O’Reilly column who accuse a blog of “unauthorized linking”. But that’s not the only recent case. Not long ago Tulsa World had a somewhat similar approach and sent cease and desist orders to Michael Bates, a blogger who linked to the newspaper’s website and reproduced portions of that content on the blog, an act most possibly considered fair use.

As Rhetorica reports:

This is nonsense, of course. And it’s made worse by the fact that newspapers such as the TW do the same thing every day, i.e. comment on published material.

Tulsa World responds.

Footnote: The pdf that Bates linked to in this post, has been replaced by a pdf with the message “PDF permission denied”.

Update: An article in Bergens Tidene last weekend (in Norwegian only) addresses the topic about legal and illegal linking. Via “thinking with my fingers“.

Hiring PR agency Burson-Marsteller might have cost the Major General Lars Johan Sølvberg, Chief of Staff for the Norwegian Army a new job, VG reports today. He was up for the job as military attaché in Washington D.C., but when it was known he had hired external advisors for a report about the army, the defence leadership changed their minds.

I’m a bit surprised that they considered it a waste of taxpayers’ money to hire an external advisor. If you for some reason don’t have the internal resources or for internal political reasons want an outsider to produce a report, it must be ok. But if the agency has done a poor job, that’s another matter and something you should critize, but not by default rule out the possibility to hire external professionals. Now this is a more doubtful way of spending tax money on PR firms.

In January, Dan Gillmor wrote about the idea that newspapers that currently charge a premium for access to its article archives will open the archives to the public “free of charge but with keyword-based advertising at the margins”. And last year, Adam L. Penenberg in Wired questioned the rationale behind New York Times charging $2.95 for old news while today’s news are free (or at least some articles are free on the web).

When you think about it, the Times may have it backward. It charges $1 for the latest news in print, and offers it free over the Web, but for old material demands $3, which is three times the price of an entire newspaper.

Another example of “creative” pricing of media can be found at the site www.buyandread.com where you can purchase archived copies of primarily Norwegian dailies, but also a few Swedish like Upsala Nya Tidning. Purchasing Upsala Nya Tidning in the store will cost you 12 SEK (€ 1,33) but a PDF of an old copy will set you back 18 SEK (€ 2,00) which is a 50% premium for a product that is:
– old
– already produced
– distributed at a lower cost (close to free)
– has no cost for printing
– competes with the free archive on www.unt.se

The contribution margin for an archived copy should logically be many times higher and allow for a lower price, even at a much smaller volume. It would be interesting to hear what kind of revenues UNT bring in via buyandread.com.

Some links to interesting articles.
* First Monday – The media’s portrayal of hacking, hackers, and hacktivism before and after September 11
* First Monday – New approaches to television archiving
* Newsweek: Not the Queen’s English – Non-native English-speakers now outnumber native ones 3 to 1. And it’s changing the way we communicate.
* Kottke in Newsweek – One of the most popular individual bloggers discusses microcelebrity and his decision to go pro.
* Richard Edelman about the power of “Average Joe” – Co-Creating and the growing power of ‘average person like me’: Nearly 60% of Americans and a comparable percentage of Brazilians, Brits, Canadians, Chinese, French, Germans and Japanese look to their peers for knowledge and advice, up from 20% only two years ago.
* Fast Company: Amazon cry wolf? – The down side of underpromising and overdelivering.