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.
IAB: Media companies need to make a "triple play" for digital business
Everyone online is trying to shift business online. But there are more than a few reasons why the digital shift has hit speed bumps. According to a new study by the Internet Advertising Bureau and Bain & Company, media companies need to offer a true triple-play service model — from direct response to awareness to high impact brand engagement — if they want to earn and keep digital business.
How can companies go about achieving that? Well, there are a few options.
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?
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Despite the naysayers claiming email marketing is on the way out thanks to the snowballing impact of social networking and new forms of communication, the facts are very different. Email continues to play a vital role in both business and customer communication.
According to Epsilon, email is used more regularly than social networking for personal communication, while 30% of organisations in Econsultancy’s Email Marketing Industry Census claimed an ROI from email in excess of 500%.
Google: expect a Caffeine jolt after the holidays
Google's Caffeine update is coming. Billed by Google as "the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions", Caffeine is not your regular Google update.
When Caffeine was announced, Google did something it had never done before: it offered up a sandbox so that the public could preview search results with Caffeine and provide Google with feedback. While that sandbox is no longer available, you won't have to wait long for your Caffeine jolt: according to Google's Matt Cutts, Caffeine is coming after the holidays.
YouTube introduces "skippable" video ads. Uh oh.
Well it was good while it lasted. While television networks and advertisers morned the introduction of commercial fast forwarding on television, they have found solace online, where consumers have consigned themselves to sitting through pre-rolls and interstitials if it means streaming high quality video content.
YouTube is trying to change all that. The video giant today announced today that it is launching "skippable" pre-roll ads on some of its videos. The move will help YouTube create better ads, charge better rates for the ads that are seen and improve its ad model. It could also lead to further erosion of video ad views overall, which networks won't be happy about.
The good news: networks won't have to worry about that for a while.
Is online video destined to look like television programming?
Terrestrial television has been gutted by commercial fast-forwarding, but online that is not an option. And as much as people complain about pre-roll ads, they are increasingly watch them. As Brian Stelter notes in The New York Times today: "News Web sites are starting to look a lot less like newspapers and a lot more like television."
Can the networks reproduce the success of their old business model online by creating a limited quantity of quality video programming? Yes and no.
Is this Listia ad on TechCrunch a 'scam' offer?
The other day, I was checking the latest posts on TechCrunch and came across a promotion promising a free pack of MySpace branded playing cards. I love free things and I clicked, hoping that my next game of poker would have a MySpace theme.
Instead I was greeted by a charity auction on a service called Listia. To bid, I needed 'credits'. The parallels to the scam offers controversy I wrote about on Monday started to became apparent.
What customers want: a benevolent Big Brother?
In the movie What Women Want, Nick Marshall (played by Mel Gibson) has an accident and finds himself able to hear what the women around him are really thinking. At first he uses it to his advantage selfishly before he falls in love.
Chances are you're not going to suffer from an accident that gives you Nick Marshall-like abilities, but fortunately when it comes to finding out what customers want, market research can tackle the challenge.
Google Go: was the name already taken?
Yesterday Google announced that it was releasing Go, a new open source programming language that's designed to aid in rapid development while at the same time supporting the latest technologies, like multi-processor CPUs.
There's only one problem: there's apparently already a programming language named 'Go'.
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
