Internet
Google. Valve. Blimey
Google Chrome: that’s no moon
Google’s much-anticipated operating system turns out to be real - but it’s built into a browser.
“Like those yucky strings of poo sometimes seen dangling from goldfish”
A nice contrast to blog evangelism: PC Pro’s Dick Pountain on why he doesn’t blog, and why he thinks blogs are bad for writing.
Publishers, being straightforward capitalists, have a duty to maximise their profits, and one way to do this is to pay writers less or pay fewer writers. To them, the blogosphere is starting to look like a huge open-cast mine of free copy, and the fact that it’s neither researched nor necessarily true is beside the point: that just means they can fire the research department too…
Lacking any quality control mechanism, blogs easily sink into a Hobbesian state of nature - rule by the loudest and the nastiest.
Ubiquity: this could be awesome
Sorry, on deadline just now so this’ll be quick: Mozilla’s Ubiquity could be amazing. More on MetaFilter.
Could shutting down Pandora open Pandora’s box?
An interesting post on Broadstuff about Pandora, the web-radio service whose extremely high royalty payments may force it out of business:
it’s clear that Pandora and its ilk will live - it’s far too good to lose - [so] it will just go to the P2P freenet if this practice continues, thus hurting the Industry even more in the medium term. If ever there is a case study of a short sighted tactic to shoot yourself in the foot strategically, this is it.
The problem is that Pandora doesn’t pay the same royalties as other forms of radio, as the Washington Post reports:
Last year, an obscure federal panel ordered a doubling of the per-song performance royalty that Web radio stations pay to performers and record companies.
Traditional radio, by contrast, pays no such fee. Satellite radio pays a fee but at a less onerous rate, at least by some measures.
Pay-per-click journalism
Last year, I wrote a column for .net about the increasing importance of clicks - that is, judging the success of something not by how good or bad it is, but by how much traffic it generates.
A few weeks ago, the music reviewer from The Herald newspaper went to see My Chemical Romance and, quite rightly, concluded that they were rubbish. Within minutes of the review appearing online, fans of the band took a break from stabbing themselves with scissors and taking squinty pictures for their MySpace profiles and rushed to defend their idols. “No!” they howled. “They’re brilliant! YOU’RE RUBBISH!”
Just think. If the online editor hadn’t enabled comments, the human race would have been denied a crucial bit of information. My Chemical Romance aren’t, as you might believe, rubbish. They are, in fact, brilliant. Thank you, internet!
The commenters didn’t just set the record straight, though. Every time they hit F5 to see one of their fellow fans’ comments, a little “ker-ching!” appeared in the newspaper’s server logs. If they clicked on an ad for Clearasil or razor blades, another “ker-ching!” sounded. And it’s not just teenagers causing ker-chings. It’s the pro- and anti-Israel camps on Comment Is Free, the religious types getting into flame wars with atheists whenever Richard Dawkins writes something, it’s the quacks and the PS3 fanboys and the oh-so-interesting people whose choice of operating system is superior to your choice of operating system.
Every single one of them is shaping the media of the future. I fear the worst.
Which ties in quite nicely with this fascinating post by Chris Green of IT Pro.
Every few months I perform what I call a contributor/traffic analysis. This involves generating a report from the main IT PRO site stats tool that shows the page impressions (PIs) and unique user visits (UUs) generated by author, rather than by article type or section.
I then merge this data with the main contributor expenditure spreadsheet, where we record and track all our freelance spending.
The end result is that we have the traffic generated by an author alongside how much we’ve spent with them over the given period. You divide the amount spent by either the PIs or the UUs and you end up with a cost per PI and a cost per UU, based on a specific author.
…
I honestly believe that in the not too distant future, online publications in all sectors, not just technology, will have to adopt a results-driven approach to freelance commissions in order to maximise revenue and to achieve maximum return from their freelance budgets.
The most likely outcome will be that publications begin paying writers purely on how much traffic an article pulls in. Also likely is that commissioning editors will need to take a more frequent and brutal approach to deciding which freelancers to commission regularly and which to drop from their rotation, based on the kind of metrics I am currently looking at.
I’m sure he’s right. Back to that column.
In print, the blatantly populist stuff finances the more worthy, niche stuff (next month’s cover feature is “Paris Hilton does PHP in her Pants” to draw in the FHM crowd, but we hope they’ll stay to learn a bit of ActionScript). As long as the overall package sells, everybody’s happy. Once you move online, though, things get more interesting – and for magazine junkies like me who spend daft sums on my monthly print fix, more worrying. Metrics mean you can see the readership not just of an entire title, but of each individual component of that title. And if the webmaster can see it, the advertisers will want to see it.
To see where all this is heading, look at the way online advertising has changed over the years. At first, advertisers paid per thousand banner views. Then, they paid per click. Now, they pay per action – per sign-up, say, or per sale. In the past, advertisers knew that 50% of their budgets were wasted, but they didn’t know which 50%. Now, they do.
Advertisers are in the numbers business, not the content business, and the more hits you get the more clicks, sales and sign-ups you’re likely to get. That means Colleen McLoughlin is a better writer than Kurt Vonnegut, and a tutorial that makes your life easier and your clients happier is less important than blatant Digg-bait such as “732 reasons why Ubuntu users should be kicked in the nuts harder than anybody has ever been kicked in the nuts before.”
As the entire internet moves to an ad-funded business model, the democratisation of media means that ker-ching, not content, is king. Some people say it’s brilliant. It isn’t. It’s rubbish.
Of course, I’m deliberately taking an “O NOES” position in the column - that’s my job - but I can’t shake the mental image of online writing becoming a high-tech version of the “SEX! Now that we’ve got your attention, we’re having a kitchen sale!” adverts that used to infest local newspapers. As Paul Stallard notes in his wonderfully titled “Journalism in sex, 911 conspiracy theory, Britney Spears naked and online poker shocker” post:
According to the latest issue of Private Eye, journalists writing articles for the Telegraph website are being actively encouraged to include oft-searched-for-phrases in their copy. So an article about shoe sales among young women would open: “Young women – such as Britney Spears – are buying more shoes than ever”.
Apparently Private Eye was misinformed about that one, but it’s not hard to imagine publishers (or writers, worrying about future commissions) keeping an eye on Google Zeitgeist and crafting stories to suit what’s popular, over-egging stories to maximise hits or pandering to base instincts to attract those eyeballs. Then again, publishing is a business, not a charity. If something isn’t being read, why spend money on it?
On Chris’s blog, Guy Kewney makes a good point:
In publishing terms, perhaps a web site isn’t quite the same “unit” as a magazine title. People really do read just the one story that interests them. But regular visitors will only come if they know that it’s worth browsing your other pages. And some of the less “popular, exciting” sections (maybe, developer stories?) may provide some of your most loyal visitors. How will you judge the value of a low-traffic page - purely on the local hits? or on its contribution to brand image?
Maybe we need a journalistic version of Google’s PageRank.
AOL to AOL bloggers: stop blogging (or at least, don’t expect to be paid)
It seems that AOL’s intrepid army of bloggers has been told to stop posting in order to save money - so some of them are continuing to blog unpaid.
Cory Doctorow on the file sharing crackdown
An interesting and typically inflammatory piece from Mr Doctorow in the Guardian:
The original Napster had a fine proposition: they would charge their users for signing onto their network and write a cheque for as-many-billions-as-you-like to the record industry every quarter… The record industry sued them into a smoking hole instead… [here is] the tried-and-true answer to the problem of copyright-disrupting technology:
* acknowledge that it’s going to happen;
* find a place to collect a toll;
* charge a fee that’s low enough to get buy-in from the majority;
* ignore the penny-ante fee evaders;
* sue the blistering crap out of the big-time fee-evaders.
Four things I learnt on the internet today
“The success of an anti-piracy campaign is measured in the number of hours it buys before the digital dam breaks” and 38 hours is considered a success. The LA Times on attempts to prevent fanboys watching camcorder copies of The Dark Knight.
The crackdown on file sharing may be bad news for people who don’t file share. “…service gets worse as you wait in a queue wondering why your broadband has gone down, while the 50 people in front of you all have perfectly functional internet connections but are wondering if a lawyer is going to show up at their door.” Charles Arthur on the possible consequences of anti-P2P letters.
Apple’s PR strategy is hurting its share price. “Apple, on the other hand, has had stellar financials, huge hit products, and massive growth sales for all its product lines. With those results you would expect Apple to outperform Microsoft.” Comment by Ian Betteridge on Dan Lyons’ post about Apple share prices.
Caffeine is self-regulating and works almost instantly. “Women generally metabolize caffeine faster than men. Smokers process it twice as quickly as nonsmokers do. Women taking birth-control pills metabolize it at perhaps one-third the rate that women not on the Pill do. Asians may do so more slowly than people of other races.” NY Magazine on the wonders of caffeine (via Metafilter).
Ad-supported music can’t work
An interesting post on Silicon Alley Insider about the business model for advertising-funded music:
The basic economics: A song lasts 3.5 minutes. The majors have been asking for a penny each time one gets played. Let’s say the site shows a new ad every time the song changes. To break even the site needs to sell one ad per song at the rate of 1 penny a song, which gives you an effective CPM (’eCPM’) of $10.
A $10 eCPM isn’t feasible. Sites don’t earn that kind of rate with 100% sell-through. And even if it were feasible, it leaves no room for the rest of the business.
…Sites that try to comply with label requests repel users and soon go out of business.