Currently a huge proportion of Facebook’s theoretical value depends on its solving its ad revenue problem. Can the social network show that socially driven advertising is superior to traditional ad methods? And more important, can it do so before the market loses interest? Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Comedian Louis CK, who made $1 million selling downloads of a show through his website, has sold $4.5-million in tickets to a new tour in 48 hours. He and musician Amanda Palmer show that for content creators, building a community is more important than ever. Read more »
News Corp. billionaire Rupert Murdoch has confirmed that the company is considering splitting itself in two, with the newspaper assets spun off as a separate entity. What would — or could — the digital future look like for that standalone newspaper unit? Here are a few ideas. Read more »
News-aggregation services Flipboard and Pulse have both signed deals this week to distribute content from a mainstream outlet — one the New York Times and the other the Wall Street Journal — but they are taking very different approaches when it comes to monetizing those relationships. Read more »
Facebook’s meteoric rise and multibillion-dollar valuation may have created an incentive for thousands of entrepreneurs and investors, but veteran venture capitalist Bill Davidow says its philosophy of customer exploitation has also helped distort the values that Silicon Valley technology companies used to hold dear. Read more »
Google and Amazon have applied for dozens of new top-level domains — including .blog and .book, as well as .search and .cloud — and many of these will be for the exclusive use of the two companies, which critics say is bad for the web. Read more »
A partnership between the New York Times and Flipboard isn’t just noteworthy because it is a first for the newspaper. It could also be a sign that the NYT‘s philosophical approach toward content in the digital age might be changing for the better. Read more »
Running a business that stores data in the cloud is becoming popular, but many of the security aspects of a large user base are things that companies still want to do on their own. Stormpath, which won the “people’s choice” award during the Launchpad competition at GigaOM’s Structure conference, was founded to solve that problem. Read more »
Yes, mobile devices and social networks can produce a lot of distractions, and resisting that may be difficult — as critics like Joe Kraus point out. But is this really a disaster in the making, or just another social evolution we need to undergo? Read more »
When Vivek Kundra walked into the White House as the first Chief Information Officer for the federal government, his new staff handed him a stack of PDF documents representing more than $27 billion in IT spending projects that were over budget. Kundra, who recently joined Salesforce.com […] Read more »
We’ve grown used to the idea that the internet is vast, with zettabytes of information zipping around on global networks and through our mobile devices, but it is still growing at a phenomenal rate — thanks in large part to streaming video, according to Paul Sagan. […] Read more »
Google is planning to make a significant push into both the consumer market and especially the enterprise market with its Chromebook cloud-based laptops, according to Sundar Pichai. The Chrome VP told GigaOM Structure attendees that Google Apps have opened the door to the cloud. Read more »
Media advocates say Twitter should add a feature that allows users to correct an erroneous tweet by striking through a mistake after the fact, to prevent errors from being retweeted — but is such a thing really necessary, even if Twitter could implement it? Read more »
In the first round of its three-part News Challenge, the Knight Foundation has awarded $1.37 million to six startups who are trying to develop video, mobile and crowdsourced solutions to the problem of filtering the vast ocean of news that washes over us every day. Read more »
Newspapers haven’t really had a monopoly on the news or the advertising market for some time, but they continue to behave as though they do. If they are to survive the transition to a digital future, they will have to learn how to compete for both. Read more »
Huffington Post now looks less like a blog network and more like a traditional media entity, having launched its own weekly digital magazine for the iPad — but is launching a subscription app a smart way of branching out, or a sign of old-media thinking? Read more »
Twitter’s new feature, which shows enhanced content for certain media partners such as the New York Times, is another example of how the service can be both a partner and a competitor for media companies in the ongoing battle for users’ attention. Read more »
That newspaper owners like Advance Publications need to make a transition from print to digital is not in doubt, but so far all we have seen from the company is massive layoffs and anemic websites. Is this what the future looks like? Read more »
Do we really need addresses that end in .beer or .movie or .pizza? ICANN seems to think that we do — the agency that controls the domain system says it wants to increase competition, but it seems more likely to cause unnecessary chaos and upheaval. Read more »
Twitter’s hiring of editorial staff to curate real-time information around news events through “hashtag pages” may not be a direct competitor for media companies, but the areas of overlap are growing — and so is its attractiveness to the advertisers that media entities desperately need. Read more »
A comScore study of consumer behavior following exposure to marketing messages on Facebook shows that both fans and friends of fans are more likely to buy things after they see such messages, data that Facebook badly needs to prove the value of its social platform. Read more »
Sceptics have raised concerns recently about Facebook’s ability to show continued revenue growth, particularly in the mobile market, but the social networking giant just got a big boost in that area from Apple, which has integrated Facebook’s features into the new version of its operating systems. Read more »
While some mainstream newspaper companies are being dragged toward a digital future whether they like it or not, the Daily Emerald at the University of Oregon has decided to remake itself for a digital and mobile world before it is forced to do so. Read more »
The latest criticism of Google as an unfair monopoly, which comes from the CEO of a comparison shopping site called Nextag, is riddled with flawed logic — but the search giant has also invited this kind of charge with some of its recent behavior. Read more »
The deal that Twitter announced on Thursday with NASCAR will see an editor employed by the network curating and highlighting tweets and other content, a deal that takes Twitter even further into the realm of being a media entity. Should traditional media players be concerned? Read more »
How have blogs and Twitter and other forms of social media changed the nature of the political process and the media reporting of that process? At paidContent 2012, I talked with Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Vivian Schiller of NBC News about that question. Read more at paidContent »
Newspaper companies are trying to cut costs by shutting down the printing presses and laying off staff, but unless they have a strategy for managing the transition from print to digital, all they are doing is liquidating the goodwill of a generation of readers and advertisers. Read more »
Ray Bradbury’s landmark novel Fahrenheit 451 is usually seen as a protest against government censorship, but the author said it was about how television and other media were making people less interested in ideas. What would Bradbury think of the world we live in now? Read more »
Wattpad, which describes itself as the world’s largest online community of readers and writers, has raised $17 million from a group of venture funds led by Khosla Ventures. Khosla partner Andrew Chung says he thinks Wattpad can do for writing what YouTube has done for video. Read more »
As more newspapers confront the same reality as the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and have to stop printing and go digital only to cut costs, what happens to the public role that a newspaper plays in a community? Can a digital-only media entity fulfil the same purpose? Read more »
Paul Graham of Y Combinator has warned startups they have to be more cautious in the wake of the lackluster Facebook IPO. But did Facebook really pop a venture-financing bubble, or did it just allow some of the steam to escape from an overheated market? Read more »
In an interview with GigaOM, the editor of MIT’s venerable Technology Review talks about why he has decided to take a “digital first” approach to publishing the magazine, why he doesn’t plan to implement a paywall — and what he sees as an alternative. Read more »
Facebook is said to be working on new features that would allow children under 13 to access the network. Is this a way of helping parents encourage their children to develop better online skills, or does it open kids up to privacy problems and other issues? Read more »
Journalism professor Tim McGuire, a long-time newspaper editor and Pulitzer Prize judge, says there is much upheaval in the media industry but a lot of potential as well — provided media entities give up their gatekeeper role and learn to serve their readers better. Read more »
A single chart from a presentation by internet analyst Mary Meeker illustrates why the decision to move away from print is such a difficult one for traditional media companies to make — and also why it so important that they do so. Read more »
An arm of the United Nations says that because the Internet is a global entity, it should be controlled and managed by the UN. But critics say turning over control to the agency could put the openness and freedom of the Internet in jeopardy. Read more »
In an interview at paidContent 2012 in New York, venture capitalist Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures said he has stayed away from media investments, and believes that the future for content providers lies in connecting directly with consumers through platforms like Kickstarter. Read more »
Many media outlets still think of the story or the article as the atomic unit of journalism — but with so many competing sources of information and the real-time nature of the social web, is that still the case? And if not, what replaces it? Read more »
Forbes has been reinventing itself ever since it acquired Lewis DVorkin’s media startup in 2010 — and while there have been some stumbles, the magazine has shown how a traditional media entity can take advantage of the social web and the way that content works online. Read more »
Is Warren Buffett’s recent acquisition of the Media General chain a brilliant gamble, or an indication of his faith in the long-term prospects of newspapers? Clay Shirky argues it is neither — he says Buffett misunderstands some fundamental things about the business he has bought. Read more »
