This Sesame Workshop channel offers full episodes of Sesame Street for a price – but ordinary YouTube visitors don’t have access to it.

Some YouTube and Google employees have been quietly testing a number of channels associated with the Sesame Workshop, Cookie Jar TV and the kids cable channel Baby First TV over the last couple of months. None of these channels are available to ordinary YouTube visitors.

YouTube accounts meant to test paid programming and other features on the site have had access to channels like the “Sesame Workshop Package,” which is offering full-length episodes of current and classic Sesame Street episodes, for a few months.

Also part of the tests: Spanish-language programming from Baby First TV.

A test channel for Cookie Jar TV, which has an on-air distribution agreement with CBS, lists shows like Caillou, Inspector Gadget and Sonic Underground. Baby First TV has also tested the distribution of full episodes through YouTube, including Spanish-language programming.

Granted, publishers often experiment with all kinds of distribution and pricing schemes on YouTube. In fact, Sesame Workshop previously tried selling episodes of Sesame Street for $2 a pop for a few months.

However, the listings of episodes associated with the kids programming channels don’t actually feature a per-episode price tag. Instead, they’re just listed with a $ sign. That’s something YouTube only does in one other instance: Videos from Willow.tv, which has been offering subscription-based cricket streams for some time, are listed the same way. Take a look yourself at the screenshots below:

This is how full episodes of one of Sesame Workshop’s test channels were listed on the site, including the paid content price tag indicating a subscription package.

This is how YouTube lists pay-per-epsiode TV content, complete with a specific price tag.

This is how content from Willow.tv, which is only available as part of a subscription package, is listed on the site.

A YouTube spokesperson wasn’t available to comment specifically on these videos, but sent me the following statement via email:

“We have nothing to announce at this time, but we’re looking into creating a subscription platform that could bring even more great content to YouTube for our users to enjoy and provide our partners with another vehicle to generate revenue from their content, beyond the rental and ad-supported models we offer.”

A Sesame Workshop spokesperson declined to comment, and both Cookie Jar TV and Baby First TV didn’t reply to a request for comment.

Of course, it’s still possible that these tests were just that – tests that don’t result in actual commercial offerings. But eegardless of whether these channels are part of YouTube’s first subscription slate, it’s clear that kids programming makes a lot of sense as a premium offering for the service.

Netflix has had overwhelming success with kids content, and went as far as to revamp its entire UI for a dedicated kids experience. Hulu also launched a dedicated kids section last year to cater to young viewers. Offering dedicated channels with full episodes of kids shows could give parents, who at times feel uneasy about their little ones scouring across the entire YouTube catalog, more piece of mind about adding YouTube to their kids’ viewing destinations as well.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG
• Connected consumer third-quarter 2012

This week Tamiz made wave with an appeal against Google, which he was trying to sue over defamatory comments about him made on Blogger posting. In a case that goes back to 2011, Tamiz had argued that Google was effectively the publisher of a series of comments calling him, falsely, a thief and a drug dealer, and should have deleted them as soon as they were made aware of them. Google did delete the comments, but only after a five week gap.

Tamiz is familiar with online controversy: one reason he was a lightning rod for angry comments in the first place was because, he stepped down as a local election candidate in 2011 after calling Margate’s women “sluts” on Facebook. And so, when he did not originally win his case — the first judge ruling that Google was not the publisher of the comments — he appealed to a higher court. There Google’s inaction was found to be troubling, though it did not actually overturn the libel ruling itself.

As the Financial Times reported:

Although Lord Justice Richards and Lord Justice Sullivan agreed with the original ruling that Google was not the primary or secondary publisher of the content it hosted, they said it was “at least arguable that some point after notification Google became liable for continued publication of the material”.

The Lords Justice likened the situation to a 1930s court case in which a golf club was held responsible for defamatory material left on its noticeboard because it failed to remove it after it was notified.

Cue the shrill sound of the press screeching into action. “Blogger.com libel case opens door for internet giant being required to monitor users’ posts”, squealed the Daily Mail with barely contained delight. Except, as it outlines in the story, the headline is essentially trolling — Tamiz was denied his libel claim and asked to pay 50 percent of Google’s legal costs: likely to be a tidy sum. And it’s a stretch to suggest, as much commentary does, that this is another step towards internet regulation — asking a company to respond to notices of illegal content may not be popular (just see the DMCA) but it is reasonable to expect them to comply with local jurisdiction.

Still, Tamiz — and the kerfuffle around his case — does show the amount of energy being expended around online libel in Britain right now.

Defamation laws in the U.K. are notoriously harsh, in large part because they lean in favor of the plaintiff and put the burden of proof on the defendant: it’s a case of “prove your comments were true” rather than “prove their comments were false”.

And the precedent for defamation in online publishing stretches back 15 years, to the case of Godfrey v Demon Internet Service, in which a physics lecturer sued an ISP over comments made in a Usenet group it hosted: the ISP settled the case, because a pre-trial ruling intimated that it was potentially culpable since, despite knowledge of the situation, refused to act for 10 days. Although the award was small — just £15,000 in 1997, the equivalent of around $33,000 today — it has laid the groundwork in Britain.

It’s one major reason many media companies employ battalions of comment moderators, and carefully police the comment threads on their own stories.

But remember, we are all media companies now. And that means that we are all open to the same set of rules. There have also been plenty of high-profile cases on Twitter and Facebook against individual users, but so far there has not been much success in taking on platform providers themselves. Just last week a judge in Northern Ireland ruled that while anonymous comments made on Facebook were defamatory, Facebook itself was not liable.

Still, with Godfrey in the background and more and more cases coming along, you can understand why people see Tamiz’s case as another push at a brick in the wall between platforms and publishing.

Yes, everyone’s a media company now: and eventually that will go for Google, Facebook, Twitter and the rest as much as it does you and me.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

There’s an obvious reason they’re concentrating their energies, too. Technology companies are incredibly powerful, which draws a lot of attention, and a lot of anger in many cases. Unfriendly administrations can be powerful enemies: from Microsoft’s drawn-out conflict with European officials — effectively running for 20 years — to the vast fines levied on companies like Intel who break competition rules, conflict with governments can be costly and distracting. So what better way to try and smooth the path than try to head off that conflict earlier in the process?

But lobbying is furtive, and tends to happen behind closed doors: only dragged into the open when big issues emerge, such as the recent furore over American tech companies paying little or no tax in the U.K.. The European Commission does run a transparency register that companies are meant to report for, but the truth is that many — including, for example, Apple — have not signed up. Shouldn’t the extent of lobbying be more visible?

What follows is a short overview to some of the power players working to influence Brussels, or other governments in Europe, on behalf of the world’s big internet and hi-tech companies. It’s not meant to be comprehensive — there are lots of companies missing, and lots of individuals not named. But consider it more of a starting place: If you know more lobbyists, and their roles, then please leave them in the comments. Eventually, maybe, we can produce a map of their activities.

Google

Google has one of the most complex European lobbying operations among Internet companies. It operates a significant team in Brussels, but also has staff in most other major European capitals — including Berlin, where it opened a new office housing seven lobbyists. Their job? To try and influence the German government over issues like privacy and copyright, where it is far stricter than most other nations.

Key players:

Antoine Aubert, head of Google’s Brussels policy team, is listed in the transparency register as the liaison between EU and Mountain View. He is a policy wonk who previously spent three years working for the Commission itself.

Simon Hampton, the company’s director of public policy in Europe, is a former AOL and Time Warner policy chief. He took up the role with Google four years ago, which he describes on his LinkedIn profile like this: “His team of 45 evangelise the economic and social potential of the Internet, and work on the regulatory agenda to help Europe tap the full opportunities of the Internet.” The transparency register claims seven people working at European level.

Annette Kroeber-Riel, European policy counsel, heads up the German lobbying effort, which has built a network of operations, including think tanks and a research institute. Her background includes VeriSign and Jamba! (the company behind Crazy Frog, which was notorious Samwer brothers).

Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel based in Paris, is a long-time hand at the company who works on international policy efforts around data and privacy. Largely operating behind the scenes, Fleischer’s profile was raised when he was one of those named, tried and convicted in an Italian court over a YouTube video of a boy being bullied. (The ruling was overturned just before Christmas.)

Sarah Hunter, head of UK public policy, was a senior policy adviser to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Facebook

Facebook’s rocket-like trajectory in the last few years has rapidly increased its interaction with governments — rarely positive — and it is staffing up its lobbying efforts to reflect that. It seems keen to pick those with inside knowledge of the system gained from active political positions, rather than from the academic or bureaucratic side like most of its peers.

Key players:
Erika Mann, managing director of public policy (pictured) has helped build Facebook’s Belgian lobbying engine since joining in 2011, but knows Europe very well: the German was a Member of the European Parliament for 15 years.

Richard Allan, the director of policy in Europe, also has political ties. He spent eight years as a Member of Parliament in Britain (and then acted as campaign manager for Nick Clegg, the current Deputy Prime Minister) and sits in the House of Lords after being made a Baron in 2010. Before moving to Facebook in 2009, he worked as a lobbyist for Cisco.

Apple

Apple is one of those companies which has no presence in the transparency register, but clearly has a lobbying operation in Brussels. Steve Jobs himself was known to join meetings with European officials, and EC documents show he took part to get regulatory approval of Europe-wide pricing for iTunes. Still, its lobby effort does seem underpowered compared to rivals like Google.

Key players:

Claire Thwaites, director of Apple’s EMEIA government affairs previously helped lead Vodafone lobbying in Brussels and Washington.

Jaymeen Patel, senior government affairs manager (pictured), is another telecoms veteran, with five years at Telefonica.

Amazon

Amazon is one of a number of American technology companies that is lobbying Brussels in order to weaken restrictions on data collection. It is not listed in the joint transparency register. And yet it does have a Brussels presence to help try and secure itself a good deal across the single market.

Key players:

Andrew Cecil (pictured) has been Amazon’s director of public policy in Brussels since 2009, after he jumped from the same role at Yahoo!. Became temporarily notorious for refusing to answer a range of questions when when giving evidence to British MPs over Amazon’s tax avoidance strategies.

Saskia Horsch, the company’s senior public policy manager, previously worked for the European Casino Association.

Microsoft

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft has put a vast amount of effort into Europe over the years. according to the transparency register, it currently has 17 lobbyists working in Brussels, spending at least €4.5 million ($6 million) last year — though experts suggest that few companies accurately report their true lobbying spend.

At a national level, it operates governmental lobbying of various kinds — such as warning the British government over the adoption of open standards. And it has also funneled some of its lobbying effort through Burston Marsteller, the PR consultancy: opposing the purchase of DoubleClick by Google in 2007, for example.

John Vassallo, a former Maltese ambassador to Europe, has been vice president of EU Affairs for more than four years. He also worked in a similar position for General Electric.

Stephen Collins, the head of EU policy, recently gave evidence to British parliament over plans for a new communications bill.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

Here is an overview of how publishers are re-evaluating their approach to apps, followed by three examples of the new app economy in action.

Getting past the love/hate view of apps

To begin, it’s helpful to recall why apps became so contentious in the first place: they were supposed to be a way for publishers to replicate the glory days of print but with a digital twist. The idea was to deliver pretty layouts plus interactive razzle-dazzle to a captive audience who would read the content (and ads!) just like a magazine or newspaper. This promise, though, fell far short as Jason Pontin of MIT’s Tech Review described with anguished honesty in May.

Pontin explained how his publication expended innumerable staff hours plus $124,000 on outside costs to build apps that yielded a grand total of 353 iPad subscriptions. In doing so, he discovered that app building was not a one-off process but a never-ending struggle to stretch and shape the app across different devices, operating systems and updates. Pontin also came to question the basic premise of a publishers’ app. Specifically, why would readers want to read inside a box that cut them off from the “linky-ness” of the rest of the web?

Pontin, who has since made good on his vow to yank his apps from the Apple store, makes a strong case. So what’s changed since then? A couple of things.

The first is cost. Today, there are a growing number of companies offering off-the-shelf app solutions that let publishers enjoy pretty, serviceable apps on the cheap. These apps are not as “linky” as a web page but do come with the sharing features that are essential in the age of social media. These publishing options mean app-making is no longer the high stress, budget-busting process it was before.

The second, and more profound change, comes in how publishers have come to think about apps in the first place. Today, most publishers accept they need an app. As an Economist executive noted at Business Insider’s Ignition conference this month, his magazine’s strategy is simply to be where the reader is — which includes inside app stores and on the display of a smartphone or tablet. But the choice of what type of app to put there will vary widely depending on the publication.

For news-intense digital publishers that offer lots of links and reader interaction, an app can simply be a proxy for their mobile website. More pensive publications, on the other hand, may decide to invest a little more on a boutique app from a speciality shop. Meanwhile, legacy publishers can turn to app makers to help them slap social or shopping features onto their traditional layouts.

The point is that publishers no longer face the hard choice between betting the farm on expensive apps or risking being left out of the digital future. Instead, apps have become just one more tool of distribution available in an ever-growing number of shapes, sizes and prices.

Example 1: A pretty container for The Awl

The Awl is a literary, cultural and news site whose motto is “be less stupid.” It caters to a young, technophilic audience but is still a shoestring operation with little cash for expensive bells and whistles. But that didn’t stop it from developing a personalized app.

Turning to a New York start-up, 29th Street Publishing, The Awl made an app called the Weekend Companion that delivers five new articles to readers’ iPhone or iPad each week. The app’s appeal is that it curates a small set of articles and presents them in a pretty, immersive layout. The articles download quickly and are ready for reading on a train ride or a rainy morning in bed. While the Awl app has discreet tools to share stories by email or text, the overall idea is not interaction but a reflexive, book-like experience.

“We put content front and center not the app,” said 29th Street Publishing CEO, David Jacobs in a phone interview. The company is working with a dozen or so publishers, including Gothamist, and its pricing models include both fees (one report cites $20,000) and revenue sharing.

Jacobs said apps can provide a better media experience than the web but that he doesn’t perceive conflict between the two platforms; rather, he thinks publishers should be on both. He added that so-called “sub-compact” publishing models like 29th Street and Marco Arment’s The Magazine are best suited for light-weigh text-focused publications.

“You can’t really have a sub-compact fashion magazine,” he noted.

Example 2: Off-the-shelf content shovels for magazines

Sub-compact publishing is a hot topic but it’s not a realistic option for publishers that want an app to mimic the look and feel of a glossy magazine. In the past, these publishers had to build individualized apps at great expense but now they can turn to off-the-shelf solutions.

One popular option is MAZ, a company that provides apps and mobile service for titles like Inc and Bust for $299 a month plus 20 cents per download. According to founder Paul Canetti, MAZ lets editors and reporters take control of the mobile publishing process without having to learn finicky coding techniques. It’s a logical division of labor, in other words.

“I’ve never met a print publisher who made their own layout software or built a printing press — why expect it with apps?” Canetti said in an interview. He added that his clients’ apps were ready the moment Apple introduced its new retina display iPad while the venerable New Yorker struggled to update its house-built app.

MAZ apps also let publishers customize stories with shopping and social buttons. This means readers can buy things they see in an issue or cut out pictures and share them on Pinterest.

The MAZ apps rely on publishers uploading PDF’s so they are best suited to publications that want to reproduce their distinctive print layouts online. Meanwhile, publishers that want a more comprehensive white-label solution may look to companies like Polar Mobile which help sling mobile content across different forums, including apps.

In the long run, the off-the-shelf products may present lock-in risks but, as Canetti notes, the same risk applies to choosing a content manage system. “Publishers trust us not to take advantage of them,” he said.

The bottom line here is that, as external app solutions become more numerous and versatile, the pressure on publishers to create elaborate apps for themselves will diminish.

Example 3: Apps are just a box for the web

For some types of publishers, the rapid evolution of mobile websites has nearly obviated the need for apps altogether. The most prominent example is the Financial Times which grew fed up with Apple’s pricing practices and pulled out of the app store altogether this summer. The strategy appears to be working.

FT.com’s Managing Director Rob Grimshaw told a Business Insider conference this month that traffic on iOS devices was up 70 percent since the FT left the app store, and suggested company is not looking back.

Should everyone else follow suit? Once it again, it depends on the publication. For publications like GigaOM that embody the hyper-connectedness of the web, a mobile site is the best way to deliver that experience. It is perhaps also telling that popular tech aggregator Techmeme doesn’t have an app at all.

But even for publishers that are betting on the mobile web over apps, it doesn’t hurt to have an app all the same for readers who like the idea of a publication’s icon appearing on their devices. That’s why publishers like the FT and GigaOM offer apps that largely mirror their mobile sites but that require little in the way of development costs.

(Image by Everett Collection via Shutterstock)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Readers weigh in: future prospects for Twitter

Westergren said Thursday that while he respects and admires the product that on-demand music streaming services like Spotify offer, these services are “not fundamentally competitive with radio listening,” emphasizing Pandora’s algorithms and discovery elements as Spotify ramps up the competition.

“Their principal product is on-demand listening,” he said. “If you want to listen to Dark Side of the Moon, they’re great.”

Speaking at the Financial Times conference at Stanford Thursday, Westergren emphasized Pandora’s  superior algorithms that predict what music listeners will prefer, contrasting the service with Spotify’s more on-demand streaming service. However, Pandora isn’t the only company that can develop algorithms, and it’s becoming clear that Spotify wants to improve its discovery system to compete. On Thursday morning in New York, Spotify CEO Daniel Elk announced new features on Spotify including algorithmic suggestions and a new Twitter-like music graph that could challenge Pandora’s dominance.

However, Westergren said he doesn’t see Spotify as a competitor, citing a figure that 80 percent of American music listening occurs on traditional radio — in which he includes Pandora — and only 20 percent comes from paid or on-demand music that the listener specifically selects. Westergren put Spotify in the 20 percent category, and dismissed it as being in the same business.

“It’s a lot harder than it looks,” he said on developing the algorithm that suggests songs users will enjoy based on new music and past listening. “And people have tried and failed to compete with us.”

Westergren said if you looked at a graph of Pandora’s growth, you wouldn’t be able to tell when internet music competitors had launched because they had so little impact on the business. Instead, he said traditional radio is who they hope to compete, and critical to that competition will be legislation up for debate that would lower music licensing for internet radio.

“Internet radio has really been suffocated,” Westergren said.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• The evolution of consumer-media cloud storage
• How social discovery is transforming entertainment

“Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” — The Red Queen, Alice in Wonderland

When it comes to the evolution of newspapers in a digital age, the New York Times is clearly something of a bellwether — and in particular, a sign of whether paywalls can (or can’t) make up for the ongoing dramatic decline in advertising revenue. Unfortunately for anyone in the industry who was hoping for a definitive answer, however, the paper’s latest financial results are a mixed bag. Subscription revenue rose, but both print and (perhaps most disturbingly) digital advertising continued to fall, raising the question of whether the Times will ever be able to close that gap, or whether it will have to become a much smaller and primarily reader-financed business.

The paper has already crossed the crucial point at which revenue from readers — whether through print subscriptions or digital subscriptions — has eclipsed the revenue the paper gets from advertising, a transition that other newspapers such as the Financial Times are also quickly approaching. But as more than one person has noted, there are two ways to reach that point: one is to have your subscription revenue increase, and the other is to have your advertising revenue decrease. Both of those are happening at the Times, and the only question is which one will slow down first.

Print ad revenue still falling, but digital down as well

As my colleague Jeff Roberts reported, overall advertising revenue for the company — which includes The Boston Globe — declined by 8.9 percent to $182 million, with print ads down by almost 11 percent and digital off by over 2 percent. For print, the story was the same as it has been for the past few years: continuing double-digit declines in real estate ads and other key classified categories that used to be bread-and-butter for newspapers. For digital, however, the picture was less clear. A spokesman for the paper said the drop in digital advertising was a result of:

“The challenging economic environment, ongoing secular trends and an increasingly complex and fragmented digital advertising marketplace.”

On the company’s conference call with stock analysts, the company tried to explain what one analyst called the “shockingly bad” advertising numbers, blaming “an abundance of inventory” and “efficient buying methods such as programmatic buying” offered by search engines and large advertising portals like Google and Yahoo. In other words, CPM rates — what advertisers are willing to pay for every thousand viewers of an ad — are continuing to fall, and the New York Times seems unable to shore that up at all (at least so far).

Subscription revenue was a much nicer story, since it rose by 7.4 percent to $235 million, but at least some of that has come from higher prices for the print product as well as an increase in subscribers to the digital product, where the paper now has 566,000 paying readers (although it’s not clear how many of these are subsidized in some way by discounts, etc.) And even though the boost in subscription revenue amounted to about $16 million for the quarter, that was still less than the $18-million or so drop in overall advertising revenue. So one of those factors is still falling faster than the other is rising.

The risk for the Times — and for a growing number of other newspapers that are making a similar bet on paywalls as a solution for their problems — is that advertising revenue could continue to fall, and even pick up speed, but the same probably can’t be said for the rise in subscription revenue. At some point, the number of people who want to subscribe to either print or digital will stop rising so quickly and begin to level off, the only real question is when.

A paywall can also reduce advertising revenue

There’s related risk with a paywall that the NYT and other newspapers face, but it’s one they don’t talk about much, and that is the effect that charging readers — which necessarily involves pushing some readers away — itself has on advertising. The Times has said that the decline in digital readership (and therefore the potential impact on advertising revenue) has been relatively modest, but results from comScore suggest otherwise: the numbers appear to show that pageviews have fallen by about 15 percent and unique visitors by almost 20 percent.

Newspapers like the Times could theoretically argue that each of their visitors or readers is much more valuable because a large proportion of them have paid to view the content, but it’s not clear whether advertisers will buy that argument, or be willing to pay higher rates for the privilege. It could be worse for the New York Times, of course — it could be reporting results like McClatchy, which saw both circulation and advertising revenues decline. But the question of what the NYT does as ad revenues fall and subscription revenues slow remains to be answered.

It’s true that no one is really doing a booming business in digital advertising right now, even Facebook, because the business is in the process of being disrupted. That’s why it would be nice to hear about how the Times is trying to change the way it does advertising as well as resting its hopes on a paywall — which is part of the reason why I think that if a paywall is your only strategy, you are probably doomed to be a much smaller business than you are now.

I’ve argued in the past that a membership model that provides added benefits for valued readers — whether it’s ebooks or live events or some combination of such features — is a better approach than a paywall, and the experience of some publishers such as The Atlantic seem to indicate that this is so. To me, newspapers like the Times would be better off trying to get to know their readers better so that they could offer them advertising or other features, rather than simply hitting them with an undifferentiated paywall.

In the end, newspapers watching the Times have to ask themselves not just whether they can duplicate the short-term revenue success of the paper’s paywall (which some or all of them may be unable to do), but also what happens when that still doesn’t make up for the decline in ad revenue.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users jphilipg and Flickr user Giuseppe Bognanni

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• Putting Big Data to Work: Opportunities for Enterprises

That’s bunk, according to Wired publisher Howard Mittman, who said in a recent interview that apps have proven “incredibly profitable” and touts the publication’s 165,000 tablet subscribers (65,000 of these are pure-digital subs). Mittman adds that Wired readers also spend a significant amount of time with the tablet version and that he “missed the memo” about the failure of apps.

So what’s going on? Is there something special about Wired, or have other publishers simply failed to execute correctly?

To understand, it’s useful to consider the key complaints set out by Technology Review’s Jason Pontin in his influential “Why Publishers Don’t like Apps” essay from early May, including:

• expensive developer costs
• difficulty quantifying subscribers
• an unnatural, walled garden reader experience.

Pontin also decried the vulturous 30 percent bite that Apple took from many sales, a figure that exceeded publishers’ own margins. He concluded that he would toss the apps and instead follow the Financial Times’ example by using HTML5 technology to provide an easy cross-platform reader experience. (The FT this week told pC2012 that it didn’t need a marketing boost from the iTunes Store.)

Wired’s Mittman, however, says that Pontin simply “chose one path that didn’t work out” and that “trail-blazing is not for everyone.” He believes that HTML5 will just be part of a “larger app experience” in which an app is a storefront or gateway for readers to have deeper interactions with publishing brands.

One upshot of this may be that publishers need to try harder to make apps work, but it’s also possible that unique factors make Wired an outlier. These include a techy readership combined with corporate and editorial support for a development team that has been building apps longer than most. Condé Nast, its deep-pocketed parent, may also be betting big in the hopes that Wired’s success can be replicated at its other publications.

Mittman’s bullish stance on apps may also be in keeping with Wired’s famous “Web is dead” cover of two years ago that described how browsers were being supplemented by other types of viewing platforms.

The proof will ultimately be in the revenue pudding, of course. Based on a $20-a-year subscription price, Wired is set to earn $1.3 million on its digital only subscribers (minus any Apple cut). This is hardly earth-shaking but, after just two years, it may be big enough to keep Condé Nast in the app game for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, it seems likely other publishers will continue to join instead the “good enough revolution” (a Wired term, by the way) offered by HTML5.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Development strategies for the app-developer community
• Mobile 2012 and beyond

Ongo was founded by former eBay and PayPal exec Alex Kazim and aimed to aggregate news while charging for some content from big newspapers. NYTco’s Martin Nisenholtz described Ongo as a “Hulu of news.” But as Nieman explains, the pricing scheme was confusing:

A basic Ongo subscription gave you access to content from The Washington Post and USA Today — but only “Top Stories” from Reuters, “Selected Content” from the Financial Times, and “Picks” from The New York Times. If you wanted to add more publications beyond the core offerings, those came at significantly varied prices — 99 cents a month for Slate, Salon, or Engadget; $3.99 for the Christian Science Monitor; $9.99 for the Chicago Tribune or The Miami Herald; either 99 cents or $14.99 a month for The Worcester Telegram & Gazette, depending on how much of it you wanted; and so on.

Some of the content that Ongo charged for was free on the publisher site. And to further complicate things, the New York Times launched its own paywall in March 2011, just a couple months after Ongo opened for business. At launch, Ongo charged $6.99 per month for a subscription; that cost was later lowered to $1.99, but it wasn’t enough to save the site.

Ongo’s closure leaves RR Donnelley’s Press+ as the largest standing paywall solution, with around 350 publications using the service. Press+ cofounder Gordon Crovitz recently proclaimed to the Wrap, “Paywalls won’t save news publishing by themselves, but…it’s the single biggest new source of revenue for papers.” But Ongo’s failure suggests paywall implementation may be best left to individual papers — and that readers don’t want to pay for an aggregation site.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Building a better paywall: strategies for monetizing news content
• Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure
• How consumer media will change in 2013

According to two new surveys, not quite. Americans may be far less optimistic than they were in other, cheerier historical periods, but this recent evidence suggests they are starting to cope with the challenges.

Adecco recently polled 1,014 Americans for its annual Workplace Insights survey, asking them for their outlook on everything from their jobs to the coming presidential election. The results show a shift in U.S. workers’ views on career instability in general and temporary and contract work in particular. Adecco reports:

• Temporary jobs are more favorably viewed today than in the past. Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of Americans say they view temporary jobs more positively than they did last year. That might be a result of a huge majority (86 percent) of Americans believing a temporary job is a good career option for people looking to gain valuable work experience.
• Americans are also more likely to work in different fields than they were in 2011. Sixty-eight percent of Americans would be more willing to take a job in a field outside of their degree or study today than they would have been last year.
• Women may be more flexible when it comes to finding a job than men. Seventy-two percent of women would be more willing today to take a job outside of their field of study compared to 64 percent of men.

Of course, these results are hardly proof of some definitive move towards contentment with gig-based careers. As Consumerist points out, it’s not that respondents are happy with a future of piecemeal work; it’s that they’re hoping (perhaps out of desperation) these sorts of jobs will  lead to an old-style full-time position:

Americans are growing more amenable to taking temporary employment, changing their viewpoint from the glass-half-empty opinion of ‘it’s a job without permanence’ to ‘it’s a job that may lead to something permanent one day.’

But even if workers aren’t thrilled with bouncing between jobs, there’s other evidence they’re starting to come to terms with a less stable future of work. The American Psychological Association regularly asks Americans if they’re feeling stressed, and perhaps surprisingly given the lack of cheerful news, they’re increasingly answering no. The Financial Times reports:

Although 22 per cent of Americans described themselves as “very stressed”, this figure was slightly down on the previous year, when it was 24 per cent – and well below 2007, when it was 32 per cent. Indeed, the measured levels of stress have been dropping steadily over the past five years since the APA started its survey. In 2007, for example, the mean stress level was 6.2 per cent, whereas this year it was “only” 5.2 per cent.

“After five long years of financial turmoil, Americans might – just possibly – be getting used to shocks,” speculates the paper, continuing, “five years of watching ‘black swan’ type events, bad government policies and bizarre economic twists might have made shocks less unsettling. People are slowly adapting to a more unstable world.”

While these are only crumbs of data that certainly do not prove Americans have completely and happily adjusted to new career and economic realities, they do suggest we can’t and won’t look backward forever. Among the understandable fear of change and pining for more stable times, it’s easy to imagine we’ll never get our heads around new realities. These studies at least suggest it’s possible.

Do you think Americans are starting to give up the dream of returning to older realities and starting to figure out how to deal with the future of work?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Juan M. Gatica.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• Social first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• 11 steps for scaling a startup

The book Stevens created, an archive of a month’s worth of installments from his weekday comic strip, was first hosted on Dropbox, but demand caused the public folder he was using to be shut down. Once Stevens moved the file to his own server, he saw almost 8,000 downloads, leading him to surmise that at least 10,000 in total managed to get a hold of the iBooks Author-created tome.

Stevens called that performance “not bad for a file created by software which has only been out for a week on a single platform,” and we agree. Consider, for example, that the Financial Times‘ How to Spend It, a lifestyle magazine app from a world-class publication, took 10 days to reach 10,000 downloads last September.

Response to the format has been “overwhelmingly positive,” Stevens said in a blog post, but there are some downsides. First, he says bandwidth required to provide the downloads is a problem, which could be overcome by selling the via the iBookstore, but that entails additional costs and operating within the confines of Apple’s marketplace. Stevens says this isn’t palatable since he “[doesn't] like the idea of readers being geographically or economically restricted from downloading [his] comics.”

Apple adds this to every page in PDFs generated in iBooks Author.

The other problem is with how iBooks Author writes to PDF, since Stevens wants to offer the collections to anyone, regardless of platform. Apple adds branding to its iBooks Author PDF output, which Stevens says is understandable since it’s a free tool. He would have to spend additional time, then, creating a second version without said branding.

Stevens’ concerns echo some of those brought up by Vook’s Matthew Cavnar during a recent interview, but the webcomic creator seems excited about the potential of iBooks Author despite its limitations. We should see soon enough if Apple’s tools result in a flood of new iPad-tailored content from other independent creators in the months to follow. I predict it will, because despite the fact that iBooks Author may be tied strongly to only one platform, that platform also happens to be the best venue for digital comics consumption available today.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?
• A clouded view of Google Music
• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook