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Facebook increasingly seen as competitor to content companies

I have seen two comments in the last couple of days making the point that whilst content companies of all flavours are happy for the traffic they get from Facebook they are increasingly conscious that time spent on Facebook is time not spent on their own properties, and hence generating ad revenues for Facebook [...]

Details of the NYT scheme suggest paywalls won’t save the news industry (on their own)

The New York Times released details of their paywall last week and they are a) complicated, and b) full of holes that people can exploit to avoid payment.  I’ve been saying for a long time that paywalls aren’t the answer and the fact that after a year of work the NYT have come [...]

The New York Times adopts gaming monetisation strategy–exploit the whales

My friend and co-author Nicholas Lovell regularly sets out his belief that the future of digital media is a tiered business model where the majority of users get the content for free and heavy users pay, with very heavy users paying heavily.  The games industry has made this model work with free to play [...]

Business Insider announces results – shows small(er) news companies are the future

Henry Blodget’s Business Insider network of news blogs revealed yesterday that their 2010 revenues were $4.8m and they made a small profit.  Their revenues came from advertising on their sites and a conference that they ran.  Most were from advertising.

I’ve been saying for a long time that their model of free news supported [...]

More problems with closed systems – newspapers warn Apple

Last week we had the news that Apple blocked Sony’s book application from the App Store and now today the BBC is running a story describing how newspaper publishers are complaining about Apple interfering with their business models.  They want to be able to offer free electronic versions of their papers to print subscribers [...]

AOL and Huffington post – models for big news media in the digital age?

By now you may well have heard that AOL has acquired Huffington Post for $315m.  Looking at HuffPo and now AOL there are three elements which show how large news businesses might look in the digital age:

HuffPo has achieved revenue scale (forecast $60m this year, up from $31m in 2010) They have combined [...]

Why content will free and newspaper brands must change

There is a good piece in the Guardian today on why the iPad might not save newspapers (thanks to Paul Miller for the pointer).  This passage from near the end of the article is perhaps the best description of modern attitudes to news that I’ve seen:

It’s … easy to jump from one news [...]

Google's Hal Varian on newspaper economics

Google Chief Economist Hal Varian gave a presentation on Newspaper Economics back in March.  It makes grim reading if you are in the dead-tree-news business and bears out many of the things we have been saying on this blog over the last couple of years.

Here are a couple of the best charts.

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The Times and Sunday Times to conduct paywall experiment

Reported on the BBC today the Times and Sunday Times will start charging for online access to their content from June.  Finally we get to see a paywall experiment from a major newspaper!  It will be interesting to see how it goes, to say the least.

The charge will be £1 per day or [...]

News will be commoditised, comment less so, but still hard to charge for

My friend Paul Carr put a post up on Techcrunch yesterday which contains perhaps the best explanation I’ve seen of why the news industry has little option but to adopt a ‘free’ business model (you can find this nugget about halfway down the article):

The future of news is online, but that future brings [...]