by Jason Wilk on February 27, 2009
- You know print is dead when the CEO of your publishing company wants to put out an e-Reader to cannibalize business. Such is the case with Hearst Publishing’s CEO due to plummeting ad revenue for newspapers and magazines, and rising costs for paper and delivery. Hearst publishes magazines such as Cosmopolitan & Esquire as well as newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle. According to CNN, Hearst has developed a wireless e-reader with a large-format screen fitted with reading and advertising requirements of newspapers and magazines. Distributing their paper through a wireless device will cut costs of up to 50%.
- When asked about the Kindle, Hearst seemed to think that they wouldn’t be competing heavily. While the Kindle has a 6inch screen, Hearst’s eReader will be the size of a sheet of paper, offering readers a similar experience to reading the paper, and giving advertisers the space and attention they require. The device is set to release late this year. Hearst and its partners plan to sell the e-readers to publishers and to take a cut of the revenue derived from selling magazines and newspapers on these devices. Payment methods and subscription prices will be up to the publisher.
- I commend Hearst for beginning the revolution to save the $300 billion global publishing industry from becoming completely destroyed as it transitions to digital, but a paper sized device does not seem feasible. Just because something doesn’t have a keyboard, and it’s light, doesn’t mean that it is all the sudden different than a laptop. 9-inch netbooks can be purchased for under $400 now. Alternatively, we will see large changes in the laptop/netbook industry offering tablets with a touch screen interface in the next two years. Both offerings will have many consumers questioning why they would ever want two different devices, one which can only deliver the newspaper and the other that can do everything. It just doesn’t make sense. The Kindle is a global distributor for books, a much needed device that replaces the need to lug around multiple books, and is a must-have travel companion. Why I would ever want to find a place to put a paper sized e-reader to fetch the paper, I have no idea. Distribute them for free, I’ll put it on my coffee table and see if I ever turn it on. Sorry guys, let me offer you some free consulting. It’s a dead idea.
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by Jason Wilk on December 20, 2008
- Somehow Business Week got their hands on Digg’s financials and reports that the company had 2007 revenues of $4.8 million and losses of $2.8 million. In its first three quarters of 2008, Digg had revenues of $6.4 million and losses of $4 million. Trend those specs and you’ve got 2008 revenue of $8.5 million, with $5.3 million in losses.
- Many had thought due to a search deal with Microsoft, that Digg was producing around $100 million a year in revenue. Considering they are looking to have 150 employees by the end of the year, you’d think that a majority of those jobs are going towards ad sales or other jobs that bring in the bread. But they aren’t, Digg doesn’t produce any of their own content and they don’t take on their own ad sales. So what does everyone do up there besides manage the community and work on Digg tools?
- Well apparently 80% of the employees are engineers and are working on a stealth advertising system that would let the community vote ads up or down, lowering their cost per click the higher they get in the system (not confirmed). Certainly sounds experimental, not to mention a huge risk of burning through capital for nothing. If Digg weren’t employing as many people (they could operate the company with 15 people or less), they could be fairly profitable.
- But this makes one wonder about the guys running the ship. Its widely known that founders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson cashed in stock during the last round of capital they raised for Digg. Also, Kevin sold Pownce to SixApart recently, giving him another nice pay day. Does this mean that the guys are content with continuing to tweak Digg and burn through money attempting to make it the money machine that it will never be? The two have already turned down an offer for $100 million for the business, which they scoffed at. With revenues like they are putting up, shouldn’t they be the ones getting scoffed?TC
by Jason Wilk on December 3, 2008
- TechMeme is an automated news site that aggregates and ranks breaking tech stories based on incoming link quantity and source power, is changing their ways.
- Founder, Gabe Rivera today in a blog post said that the system isn’t working anymore, at least not for certain topics that he uses his algorithms for, like Celebrity News (WeSmirch)
- To combat the problem, Gabe has hired Megan McCarthy, formerly of Wired to come on board and manually intervene in how stories appear and rank.
- Some think that this is the demise of TechMeme, which could carry over to Google Blog Search and others which use a similar ranking system.
- I think the site does fine for now. Adding someone in to manually intervene may make the system better, but is it cost benficial? Probably not. I don’t think this will help the readership.
- There is one problem I have with TechMeme though that could use some help. I have emailed Gabe and the sales team about 15 times now to be added into the TechMeme feed and have gotten no response. It has become quite frustrating dealing with the slow process and no-replys coming out of the site.
by John Jorgensen on November 19, 2008
- Stan Schroeder at Mashable says that he finds Digg’s recommendation engine more or less useless. I have to agree.
- Digg spent a lot of time hyping the recommendation feature back when they released the beta of the service in June.
- The system attempts to match you up with other Diggers who have similar interests based on the history of things you and others have Dugg in the past.
- The fact is, a large percentage of people using Digg are marketers who will Digg a ton of random stories so that they get Diggs on their own articles in return. This makes the “who-Dugg-what” data useless for recommending anything.
- Back to the drawing board on this one Digg.
Mashable
by Jason Wilk on October 18, 2008
- Bloglines for the past 6 months hasn’t been updating feeds from thousands of blogs, and about 1/3 of every feed is having some problem. The problems have never been remedied despite countless requests.
- Founder, Mark Fletcher is upset with the situation which he has no control over; he sold the company to Ask.com in 2005, a few moths before they were acquired by Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp
- Clearly Barry didn’t see a huge value for the service even though they have about a half a million people using the service every month. In his corner though, IAC stock has been having trouble since the company was broken up into multiple public companies in August. With the economic downturn and their fledgling web properties clearly put BlogLines at the bottom of the “To Do” list.
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