There is a conventional wisdom in the media industry that micropayments for online content don’t work, but Greg Golebiewski of Znak It says that this isn’t true, and that media companies need to experiment with the model. Read more at paidContent »
The confluence of better location data and audio-recognition could mean big changes to seemingly static industries such as retail and radio as they learn more about what customers really want. Read more »
Flipboard has become a leading player in the digital news-consumption field, and now it wants to hand the same filtering and curation tools employed by its editors over to users of the app, to create their own magazines. Read more »
In buying Summly, a mobile news-consumption app created by teenaged entrepreneur Nick D’Aloisio, Yahoo gets to inject some much-needed fresh thinking about mobile content, and also shows it is serious about change. Read more »
How can media companies and publishers monetize their content when advertising continues to decline and paywalls are not filling the gap? This is one of the major themes we’re going to explore at paidContent Live on April 17 in New York. Read more at paidContent »
Freelance writer Nate Thayer touched off a debate this week about media outlets wanting to publish content for free — but the reality is that the economics of content have changed forever, and the supply of free content is almost infinite. Read more at paidContent »
A blog post by Nick Carr about the future of the printed book touched off an epic comment debate between the author and media theorist Clay Shirky about whether the book format itself will die out and be replaced. Read more at paidContent »
Media companies are looking for new revenues through selling things. Meanwhile, more commerce sites are starting to publish. Is it easier for content to transform into commerce — or vice versa? Read more »
Prismatic founder Bradford Cross doesn’t come from a traditional media background — he is a data scientist who specializes in machine learning — but what he is doing with content recommendations says a lot about how the media business is evolving and what the future might look like. Read more »
In a bold first-day speech, the BBC’s new boss says the corporation must stop thinking that online innovation means repurposing broadcast content and instead ‘create genuinely digital content for the first time’. Read more at paidContent »
Twitter has argued that it doesn’t own a user’s tweets, but at the same time the company wants to control what users do with their content so that it can monetize the network. There’s an inherent conflict there that is becoming increasingly difficult for Twitter to avoid. Read more »
Twitter’s ongoing evolution from open platform to global media company has all kinds of ramifications for the social-media industry and for businesses, but it also has implications for users. This is my attempt to look at why I have a love-hate relationship with the service. Read more »
As we consume more and more content via real-time streams that come to us through Twitter and Facebook and newer platforms, how does that affect advertising? Everyone wants their ads to look like just another form of content, but that’s a lot harder than it sounds. Read more »
The purchase of the sports-blogging site Bleacher Report by Turner Broadcasting unit fills a content hole for the Time Warner unit, but it is also a validation of the user-generated-content model behind the sports-blogging network, and a sign of the disruptive effects that model can have. Read more »
The Huffington Post has dropped the price of its iPad magazine to zero, and News Corp.’s The Daily has chopped almost a third of its staff — more evidence that the dream many publishers had about the iPad being their savior is still far from reality. Read more »
Though the U.S. travel industry brings in $2 billion a year and employs 100 million people, Rafat Ali says there’s no one website where industry execs and business travelers can go for information. So he’s launching Skift, a website focused on travel news, data and services. Read more at paidContent »
It has become obvious by now that Twitter is building a digital-media business, powered by a rapidly-growing advertising platform. But trying to capture more of its users’ attention is going to bring it into conflict with the media companies who are providing all of its content. Read more »
Publishers may see Next Issue Media’s virtual newsstand as a solution to their digital problems, but it doesn’t fit the way growing numbers of people consume content. For them, the newsstand is already an anachronism, and recreating it in digital form isn’t going to help. 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 »
When we enable innate behaviors online, the result is far more significant than the creation of a new market, says Pearltrees’ Oliver Starr. Starr explains why he believes that today’s curation startups are paving the way for the full and complete democratization of the Web. Read more »
While we in tech land tried to read the tea leaves of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s recent cryptic comments on the future of Apple TV, the media world saw the uncertainty around his statements as, “causing a boatload of angst and anticipation,” according to Variety. Read more »
It appears Apple is working on a device with a screen size larger than an iPhone, yet smaller than an iPad. Many have also been waiting in anticipation for what could be the next big thing in television. But what if these stories are all related? Read more »
The pitched war between content owners and technology companies doesn’t have to persist if media companies would acknowledge and adapt to the new realities of digital distribution, famed venture capitalist Fred Wilson told attendees at paidContent 2012. Read more at paidContent »
There’s been a lot of criticism of Readability for collecting money from readers who use its ad-stripping service. But its approach is actually better than some others — and that desire on the part of readers is something publishers need to figure out how to accommodate. Read more »
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham is right when he says that the continued push for legislation like SOPA and PIPA is a result of a failure to adapt to the changing environment the internet has created when it comes to intellectual property and the content industries. Read more »
While Hulu was formed primarily as a way for content owners to distribute and monetize content online that would otherwise be pirated, CEO Jason Kilar said Tuesday that there’s more reason for the company to exist now than there was four-and-a-half years ago. Read more »
YouTube’s announced new viewership milestone today, with more than 4 billion video views daily. That’s impressive, and more importantly, shows how YouTube could serve as a blueprint for other technology companies that wish to create an alternative to the existing media industry. Read more »
Apps just might be the next action figures, and iPad accessories the new Tickle-Me-Elmo. Judging by interest from kids and content partners, Apple won’t just be the device-maker of the future; it’ll be a toy-maker on par with the likes of Hasbro and Mattel, too. Read more »
Apple’s iPad makes up 65 percent of customer demand for tablets, according to a new survey. But for the first time, another competitor has emerged to catch a very healthy percentage of attention: the Kindle Fire. Still, here’s how Apple can win back total market dominance. Read more »
New laws such as the Stop Online Piracy Act threaten to give new powers to Congress and to content companies, and have serious implications for the web — they make it clear that content companies are in many ways fundamentally opposed to the way the internet works. Read more »
Apple’s television plans are the subject of plenty of recent speculation, and are raising a lot of questions in consumer minds. From the questions I’ve heard about the rumored iTV, here’s a list of five things Apple needs to do to shake up the space. Read more »
Any lingering fantasies of the web as a no-man’s land where content is free from the restraints of geographical boundaries probably should be put to rest. Google released a treasure trove of data relating to content-takedown requests, showing that requests are up and Google often complies. Read more »
Amazon’s new browser-based version of its Kindle e-book app is designed to get around Apple’s restrictions on in-app purchasing, but it is also a great example of how media companies should be looking beyond the world of apps to the future of the browser-based web. Read more »
Small- to mid-sized companies need the ability to edit, share and collaborate on files while keeping teams updated with the latest versions. Alfresco Team is an open-source, professional tool for content collaboration that offers enterprise-oriented social and security features not found in some Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products. Read more »
Trap.it is a new personalized search app that originally came out of a $200 million DARPA artificial intelligence project called CALO or Cognitive Assistant That Learns and Organizes. The app aims to take personalized search to new heights to become your “Pandora for content.” Read more »
Google chairman Eric Schmidt has been taking some flak from global media and content companies for comments he made about copyright while in Britain, but he’s right, and Britain and Schmidt’s critics are wrong. Copyright is changing, whether they like it or not. Read more »
Yes, the New York Times pay plan is confusing — but the biggest problem with the subscription idea is that it is fundamentally backward-looking. It feels like a defensive move to buy some time while the paper figures out what it wants to be. Read more »
This week Apple caused a storm by announcing their new iOS App Store terms and conditions for publishers. In a nutshell; long-awaited in-app subscriptions are here, and publishers are worried about their bottom lines. But maybe what they should be thinking about is content. Read more »
Yojimbo, the personal organizer for the Mac, has been updated this week alongside the introduction of a new companion app, Yojimbo for iPad. Yojimbo now lets you sync over Wi-Fi with the app for iPad, so you can view all your Yojimbo items on the go. Read more »
Primal, which launched at the DEMO conference today, thinks its content-publication service has something extra: Its semantic tools allow publishers to create an entire site of inter-related webpages around a topic automatically. Unfortunately, this could be very useful for spammers as well as regular content publishers. Read more »
