This was the BBQ to end all BBQs
Month: August 2005
Cook’s Illustrated: Stirring up synergy to sell online food content
Cook’s Illustrated: Stirring up synergy to sell online food content
80,000 paid subscriptions at $24.94 per year …. $2 million in revenue and subs have doubled in the last year and a half. Given there is no advertising in Cook’s publishing model, there was no alternative.
Call this the Consumer Reports Model of paid content. So now we can add food to the magic triangle of Sex, Sports, and Stocks. Seems like the essential ur list of human needs.
Salon puts The Well on auction block | Tech News on ZDNet
Salon puts The Well on auction block | Tech News on ZDNet
Things were never the same at the WELL after the decline and fall of the "savage user interface", the command-line nav called "Picospan."
Still the best "community" there ever was and will be. Some of the personalities there were epic in their impact … Stewart Brand,
Tom Mandel, Howard Rheingold, Blair Newman, "Hinging," Jay Allison, Tex, David Gans … and then figuring out a fellow Deadhead (John Lang Lorenz) lived only two floors above me in the same Boston apartment building …. The flaming of Philip Elmer-DeWitt at Time for his cyberporn scare story …
Moving to an HTML structure killed the place. Salon kept it propped up for a while, but I hung up on the WELL in 95 and never went back. I wonder if my old handle "dbuck" ever got scooped up.
Another cost-wall bites the dust
Poynter Online – E-Media Tidbits
Lots and lots of noise about paid models. Here Romensko notes the dropping of a paid model to the Atlanta Constitution’s sports section. (the old rule of thumb was only three types of content could thrive behind the cost wall: sports, sex, and stocks). Lots of grumbling among ESPN users about formerly free stuff vanishing behind the sub wall. Doug Kay at ITConversations has a long essay about public radio and the donation-model.
Podcasting VC investments
Colin Crawford notes with some awe the series A investment by Kleiner and Sequoia, the ne plus ultra names in "smart money" in Adam Curry’s PodShow (which is producing Castblaster and putting together a blog ad network). Aggregator and downloader Odeo also getting some money from Charles River — also known for being smart money (and more or less allergic to dot.com frothiness).
I’ve been chipping away at a podcast business plan for CXO — a sponsor model. These are early days in podcast advertising — so far no light bulbs are going off over my head but the marketers seem eager to get aboard.
TechTarget First-half Revenue Increases 58% on Strong Gains Throughout Business
TechTarget First-half Revenue Increases 58% on Strong Gains Throughout Business
Private but reporting results — an offering in the offing?
PrintMedia (8/1/05): CMP Strengthens Its Brands
Online Ad Spend to Climb Through 2010
Online Ad Spend to Climb Through 2010
"Online advertising continues to grow. A forecast from JupiterResearch says online ad spending will reach $18.9 billion in 2010, double 2004’s expenditure.
"Each category of Internet advertising will see growth. Display will increase by seven percent in five years; classifieds will grow about 10 percent to $4.1 billion; and rich and streaming media spending will grow to nearly $4.5 billion by 2010.
"The forecast said search engine advertising will generate more revenue than standard display advertising by 2010. But David Card, VP and research director at JupiterResearch, doesn’t expect advertising in search to rob budgets from other categories. "I think a lot of it is incremental spending, there’s a lot of talk that people are shifting TV budgets, but that’s not search. If anything, it’s coming from direct marketing budgets," said Card. "[Search has] really proven itself as cost effective, measurable direct marketing,"
"Findings from the 2005 Online Advertising Forecast report were presented this week at the Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo 2005."
KnowledgeStorm to Launch Vertical Search[
KnowledgeStorm to Launch Vertical Search
[full disclosure, CXO is a KnowledgeStorm partner]
Lot of discussion over the past two years about vertical search — focusing search on a niche or market — I know of at least one effort to go after the IT search space, IT.com. Now Knowledgestorm and the Maynard Mass. SEO/SEM firm, Inceptor, launch KnowIT.com