Category: Business
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The economics of letting your audience blog somewhere else
Spotted isolated bits of chatter over the weekend about this piece from Nate Silver, who used the available public data from Quantcast and elsewhere to make some assessments of the Huffington Post’s business model when it comes to unpaid contributors and their blogs. Here’s Nate’s thesis: “Although The Huffington Post does not pay those who…
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Street by street, block by block
Back in the early days of grad school, when questions about the future of online advertising came up, I was bullish about the future of location-based mobile advertising that would by contextually relevant to the content you were viewing and the place you were sitting. I was wrong about a big piece of how this…
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Clay Shirky on micropayments for online news
I am very specifically not enjoying the current wave of handwringing over whether or not some version of micropayments, online subscription, or paywalls could work for typical U.S. news organizations. But here’s Clay Shirky: “The essential thing to understand about small payments is that users don’t like being nickel-and-dimed. We have the phrase ‘nickel-and-dimed’ because…
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Carnival of Journalism: Are we asking the right questions about online revenue models?
As is my habit, I’m running behind on my Carnival of Journalism post this month, set to the timely and tuneful whistles and bangs of talk about whether a newspaper’s online revenue could support the newsroom, how long the newspaper of record will keep the press running, and what a major metro in a failed…
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Dealing with the elephant: Cutting ties to the legacy albatross
[Some time ago, I wrote a series of posts that attempted to address some of the revenue-related issues facing traditional news organizations and suggested some possible solutions to making incremental (and larger) changes that might help them stay profitable. For no good reason, I’m going to carry on the ill-advised, barely meaningful elephant metaphor (or…
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Dealing with the elephant, elsewhere
Paul Bradshaw comes up with a list of 10 ways that ad sales people can save newspapers: “…how about a slot against the ‘most popular’ story of that minute (if it helps, think of it as the equivalent as the front page ad), second most popular, and so on (you could even auction these slots…
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Dealing with the elephant: Build the software you need, then sell it.
This is the fourth post in a short series I’m pretty much done with about the business model for online news before I go back to my usual routine of pointing out the obvious to people wearing dark glasses. The starting point, the givens in the equation, are listed here. Suggest which windmill I should…
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Dealing with the elephant: Hire Web-native salespeople
This is the third post in a short series I’m going to write about the business model for online news before I go back to my usual habit of banging my head up against walls made out of giant rolls of newsprint. The starting point, the givens in the equation, are listed here. Suggest what…
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Dealing with the elephant: Incremental change
This is the second post in a short series I’m going to write about the business model for online news before I go back to my usual divisive blathering about how to avoid bureaucracy and feed trolls. The starting point, the givens in the equation, are listed here. Suggest what I should tackle next using…
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Dealing with the elephant: Build a better business directory
This is the first in a short series I’m going to write about the business model for online news before I go back to my usual harangues at editors and rants at reporters, among others. The starting point, the givens in the equation, are listed here. Suggest what I should tackle next using the Skribit…