Newspaper Digital Editions - future or futile?

Posted on February 23, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Copyright, Digitisation, Future, Newspapers, Paid Content | 1 Comment

Following on from the Roy Greenslade post on newspaper Digital Editions - “Is PDF an acronym for Pretty Damn Futile?”

Digital Editions are indeed an easy leap for old word print editors / execs to make - amazing that they are still going for it with such enthusiasm really.  Half an hour of research would tell them that it simply isn’t going to meet their objectives - if  those objectives include significant subscription or ad revenues.

It ticks the “digital” box, but in reality doesn’t really do much else in terms of value for the regular user.  Any demand there is comes from those that need to keep a record of how the paper actually looked when it was published - ad agencies, media monitoring companies and there also tends to be a small market for certain types of reader who are out of circulation area.  Even if they were available for free most users would never use them - they will go to the newspaper web site or use Google or Google News to find current or older articles. 

Last time I reviewed uptake of digital editions among newspaper titles (to be honest it was some time ago now) it varied between 0.2% and 1% of actual newspaper circulation - at this rate it was always going to be a struggle to get revenue to justify the cost of production.  Even the NYT who invested in their digital edition provider - NewsStand - and were therefore more incentivised than most to make it work, could only make it to the higher end of this range. It could be that uptake has changed for these services - but I doubt it.  Anyone got any stats on this other than the recent report analysis on Norwegian titles?

One area that does seems to work a bit better is specialist publications and magazines where readers like to hold on to copies for reference purposes and build their own archive. 

As more newspapers digitise their historical material there will at least be some justification for the cost of production as the process of turning the newspaper into a Digital Edition can also populate a Digital Archive - allowing users to search from the first edition of the newspaper to the most recent from a single user interface. 

Even this justification will be short-lived as the goal will be to eventually populate the Digital Archive directly from the newspaper / web site production system - The Guardian and Observer already do this for their Digital Editions.

This is quite old but good overview of the key suppliers and issues from J.D. Lassica in OJR from June 2004 - “Are Digital Newspaper Editions More Than Smoke and Mirrors?“

Media syndication startup Mochila gets $8M funding

Posted on January 4, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Copyright, Journalism, Newspapers, Paid Content, Technology | Leave a Comment

Red Herring reports on the new funding for Mochila.  They have an interesting model that combines good return for publishers on their licensed material when it is syndicated (70%) and a resonable 30% on any ad revenue generated from free material (40% goes to rights owner) - in both cases Mochila keeps 30%.

“The barriers into the media business are now very low. They’ve taken away the barriers of being a buyer of media,” Charles River Ventures partner Austin Westerling said. “What they’re basically doing there is creating an ad network on top of already high-quality content. I think there’s quite an interesting opportunity.” 

 

News aggregation and copyright in Europe and China

Posted on January 4, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Copyright, Journalism, Newspapers, Search, Technology | Leave a Comment

Good item from IHT on changes that are likely to reign in rampant “piracy” by Chinese web sites re-purposing content from newspaper sites and in Europe an overview of the ongoing court case by AFP against Google News.

According to one recent academic study, newspaper readership in China has declined sharply in the past three years, with the proportion of people who say they read a newspaper at least once a week falling to 22 percent from 26 percent since 2003.

A major presumed cause for the decline is that big Internet content providers, or portals, have become one- stop sources for all manner of information, from news and entertainment to blogs. Until recently, for most portals the general practice involved lifting news and other information directly from other sources, sometimes crediting the original source and sometimes not, but rarely paying for it. 

 

Decline and fall of a music empire

Posted on January 4, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Broadband, Copyright, Digitisation, Entertainment, Future, Music, Newspapers, Paid Content, Technology, Trends | Leave a Comment

The FT reports on MusicZone’s slide into administration.  There is upside for the industry in terms of the growth of digital revenues but this growth is no where near enough to cover the dramatic decline in the revenue from physical formats. This will all sound very familiar to newspaper executives.

The downward trend has been clear for five years but recent figures suggest that the decline in CDs and DVDs has accelerated. The IFPI, the music trade association, reported a 10 per cent slide in physical format sales in the first half of the year around the world.

Ged Doherty, the head of Sony BMG’s UK operations, predicted two months ago that CD sales would halve over the next three years.

“We predict digital growth of 25 per cent per year but it is not enough to replace the loss from falling CD sales.”

Mr Doherty warned that, if current trends continued, by 2010 the industry’s total revenues could be 30 per cent lower than they are now. He said: “We have to reinvent.”

Start-up will seek out content being used without permission

Posted on December 19, 2006
Filed Under Copyright, Digitisation, Future, Newspapers, Paid Content, Search, User Generated, Weblogs | Leave a Comment

Start-up founded by ex-Yahoo and Verisign execs will help content owners work out if there material is being used withlout permission. Might not be welcomed by social networking / blooging sites:

Attributor analyzes the content of clients, who could range from individuals to big media companies, using a technique known as “digital fingerprinting,” which determines unique and identifying characteristics of content. It uses these digital fingerprints to search its index of the Web for the content. The company claims to be able to spot a customer’s content based on the appearance of as little as a few sentences of text or a few seconds of audio or video. It will provide customers with alerts and a dashboard of identified uses of their content on the Web and the context in which it is used.

And.

Its co-founders, former Yahoo Inc. executive Jim Brock, and Jim Pitkow, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has sold companies to Google and VeriSign Inc., claim to have cracked the thorny computer-science problem of scouring the entire Web by using undisclosed technology to efficiently process and comb through chunks of content. The company says it will have over 10 billion Web pages in its index before the end of this month.

Microsoft enshrines blogging code/Do Google “do evil”

Posted on February 6, 2006
Filed Under Copyright, Search, Technology | Leave a Comment

Jonathan Loades-Carter on whether Google can still stand by their “don’t do evil” motto given recent developments in China and given the invasive nature of their cookie policy/search tracking.  Also covers Microsoft and their response to recent criticism on censorship.

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