Salon bets on ecommerce for Black Friday and the future
As media sites around the internet contemplate erecting paywalls to make up for lost revenue, Salon.com is moving in the opposite direction. Long a proponent of the subscription model, the politics and culture site today announced a redesigned website that backs off of its subscription model in favor of more engaged advertising and shorter content. The company is hoping to increase its readership with shorter, faster posts and make up for lost revenues in a new place: ecommerce.
Starting the day after Thanksgiving, Salon will launch a permanent online store that sells retail items the publisher thinks will dovetail with its readers' interests. While it's not clear that Salon will be able to counter recent revenue losses, the move represents a step that many media companies are likely to make: revenue diversification.
Q&A: Silence Media's Lee Henshaw on CPE v CPM
Silence Media is an agency which launched earlier this year, offering video banner advertising for the music industry, on a cost per engagement (CPE) basis.
I've been talking to Silence Media founder Lee Henshaw about why he thinks that all banner advertising will use this CPE model within the next two years...
Will Netflix throw its customers under the bus for higher profits?
Imagine for a moment that you're the CEO of Netflix. The movie studios don't really like you. They think low-cost rental services like Netflix are cutting into DVD sales, which have declined. So they come up with a plan to block rentals of new releases for a short time, perhaps a month.
The question: do you oppose this plan or do you look to negotiate with the studios for some sort of benefit?
FOX plants its digital flag with Strategy Room
The cable companies may be hard at work planning their transition to online video with TV Everywhere, but Fox News has another method of bridging the gap between television and online — developing talent and shows in real time.
Every week day, over eight hours of programming are streamed online from Strategy Room, Fox News' web video "network." The online-only program operates out of a small corner of News Corp.'s New York office, and may not be getting insane traffic, but it's been a proving ground for Fox talent. And it appears to be working.
Mobile news sites: best practice tips
Most of the UK's newspapers now have mobile versions of their websites, but many could provide a better range of content and user experience.
Here are some best practice tips for mobile newspaper sites...
Sh*t My Dad Says: from Twitter to television in less than five months
Want to break into Hollywood? Try breaking into Twitter first. Just ask 28 year-old Justin Halpern and he'll tell you: Twitter can be your golden ticket.
On August 3, Halpern set up an account, @shitmydadsays. The purpose: share some of his 73 year-old dad's wisdom with the world. You see, Halpern had just moved back in with the folks and figured that some of the things his dad told him might be worth rebroadcasting on Twitter. Turns out he was right: @shitmydadsays now has over 700,000 followers.
A book with a view: Andrew Sullivan's crowdsourced book pricing scheme
Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog may be best known for political content, but its most popular feature is party agnostic and user generated. Over the last three years, readers have submitted photos of scenes snapped from their windows, for a weekly featured titled "The View From Your Window."
Amid hundreds of photos and growing interest, The Atlantic has now chosen 200 of those images and produced a coffee table book. The front and back images have been crowd sourced. But that's not as interesting as the price tag, which depends on how many people purchase the book.
Q&A: Julian Sambles on the Telegraph's social media strategy
Julian Sambles is Head of Audience Development at the Telegraph, responsible for digital audience growth, engagement and page yield.
He is speaking at our Online Marketing Masterclasses event next week to discuss how the newspaper uses search engines to acquire traffic, so I thought I'd ask him a few questions in advance about the Telegraph's social media strategy.
Murdoch: Google? We don't need no stinkin' Google
Rupert Murdoch is a media mogul who hasn't shied away from revealing his true feelings towards Google. The best way to sum them up? If Google didn't exist, he would be all the happier.
Earlier this year, Murdoch asked cable industry execs "Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?" His response: media execs should be saying "Thanks, but no thanks" to Google.
The Guardian makes its comments search engine friendly
The Guardian has introduced some welcome updates to its comments system, with comments now handled server-side instead of client side.
This means that the newspaper is not using javascript to display comments anymore, which brings with it a number of benefits, as pointed out by Malcolm Coles:
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
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Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
