Last week, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that over the past few years he’s suffered from Twitter envy, probably focusing a bit too much on the media darling that has changed communications and media sharing, aspects that Facebook itself wanted to own and dominate in the 21st century.
Today, with location-based startups getting all the attention, one would think that Zuckerberg is about to let history repeat itself by worrying too much about how to recalibrate Facebook to clash against upstarts Foursquare, Gowalla and company.
Choosing the Right Battles
That’s not the battle Zuckerberg needs to focus on, at all.
Truth is, while Google is planning to launch Facebook competitor Google Me, Zuckerberg should focus more on online video, in particular the lessons that both YouTube and MySpace learned along their inverse trajectory.
Digg this Blog
Share on Facebook
WatchMojo on Twitter
WatchMojo on YouTube
Add to Favorites
WatchMojo NewsletterAt WatchMojo, our core has been content creation, but we’ve always curated and increasingly aggregated content, too. When people have asked me why, I tell them the main reason and value for curation and aggregation lies in it helping the discovery and recovery of your own content. In other words, curated and aggregated content for the sake of housing more content isn’t sound in the long term.
In fact, with Google admittedly being the lone (and glaring) exception, all ad-supported media companies that focus solely on content curation and aggregation end up suffering, only when you own content do you really have a defensible strategy and equity creation.
From Larry Kramer’s blog C-Scape:
First, we have what may be the biggest news brand in the world, CNN, making a major decision to drop use of the Associated Press, and use the money it spends on that to focus on original content. It is critical for news organizations to give their customers compelling content that is difficult to find elsewhere. Original content becomes even more important when there is virtually no barrier to entry for people to create a news site using the Associated Press to provide the basic story it provides everywhere.
Interesting focus of the letter C, from his About Page:
1) Consumer. The power of the consumer has grown and continues to grow. New technology has enabled the consumer to have much more choice in how and what he or she consumers.
2) Content. Content emerges, yet again, as king. The new digital platforms match buyers and sellers and squeeze everyone in between. The value of owning content rather than just distributing it, has risen.
3) Curation. In a world where all information is available to everyone, the ability to curate that information and value it is paramount. Consumers need guides so they know where to spend their time.
4) Convergence. All content and commerce is converging more and more onto emerging digital platforms. Storytelling is converging into a digitial platform that will enable the use of all forms of media in one story. Sales channels are converging, even layers of relationships are converging.
Read the whole article on CNN’s decision to drop AP and focus on content creation.
The only thing that is in even more disarray than the French football squad these days seem to be French newspapers. Frenchman Frederic Filloux does a good job of covering the situation here. It’s a great read full of eye-popping stats with the usual dose of drama you’d come to expect from European boardrooms:
Le Monde is the textbook example of the evolution of French press over the last years:
- A steady erosion in readership.
- A lack of budget discipline, made worse by loose governance.
- The core newsroom’s reluctance to support the digital strategy
- The collective certainty the “brand” was too beautiful to fail and that a deep-pocketed philanthropist will inevitably show up at the right time to save the company.
- An difficulty to invest into the future, to test new ideas, to built prototypes, to coopt key talent or to invest in decisive technologies.
- A bottomless investment in the heavy-industry part of the supply chain, in costly printing facilities.
- An excessive reliance on public subsidies which account for about 10% of the industry’s entire revenue. Compared to Sweden, French newspapers have 3 times less readers, but each one gets 5 times more subsidies.
To a large extent, these characteristics are shared by most French newspapers. This could explain the dire situation of the Gallic press. As of today, four major properties are on the block, or urgently looking for saviors:
- Le Monde seeks at least €100m (for a first round).
- Le Parisien, a popular daily, is for sale; although quite good from an editorial perspective, it is not profitable and its family ownership wants to refocus on sports-related assets.
- La Tribune, the n°2 business daily, is looking for a majority investor.
- Liberation is also facing a cash stress.
Those are the stats, to find out who French President Sarkozy described as a “peep-show man”, read Filloux’s piece.
If you want to understand why Yahoo! spent $90M on Associated Content and AOL is gunning to position itself as the larger producer of quality content online, look no further than the above table which shows that 47% of people’s time online is spent consuming content.
The Wrap does a good job of outlining how much the portals have lost to Facebook, but I wonder, is a page generated on Facebook as valuable as a page on a portal? Probably not, but I digress.
So this year mark’s O Magazine’s 10th anniversary and in true Oprah fashion, she celebrated by doing something crazy, spontaneous and really really expensive!
On Tuesday, Oprah paid a visit to Hearst headquarters, where O Mag is published, to celebrate the momentous occasion with her beloved staff. Little did they know, they would be receiving a lavish loot bag for all their dedication and hard work over the years. And even if you were only hired last week, you still got one too!
Now what was in this loot bag you might wonder???
Well I’ll tell you…. An iPad and a check for $10,000.00!!!
Now if that’s not an employee loyalty retention program, then I don’t know what is… I’ll bet there’s a lot of O employee hoping the mag makes it to 50!
Hey Ash only 5 and a half years till WatchMojo turns 10 wink wink!
I must admit that my eyes popped out of my head, a bit, when I saw the new unibody Mac Mini.
The Mac what?
I don’t blame you if you don’t know what a Mac Mini is. No one would. It’s the Mac that time, and the company, forgot. Apple has put a kajillion dollars into creating and marketing its MacBooks, iPhones, iPods and iPads and about seventeen bucks on the Mac Mini since its inception. And no one really noticed because it’s considered the redheaded stepchild in the Mac family, and ignored accordingly.
Well, signs point to people noticing now.
The new Mac Mini is gorgeous to look at, and is quite affordable. In fact, this piece in Wired cleverly explains that for the $1200 or so you’d spend on a new MacBook pro you could buy a new Unibody Mac Mini and an iPad (if you have a monitor you can plug into the Mini.) And considering this little bugger’s got “an SD-card slot, an HDMI port for true media-center integration, faster NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics hardware (up from the old 9400M graphics) … FireWire 800, Mini-DVI, four USB ports and Ethernet” there’s definitely a case to be made that it’s the smarter, sharper buy no matter what.
Sure, maybe it’s not the kind of thing that’ll help you pick up a hipster chick in a Moldy Peaches t-shirt in some Williamsburg coffee shop, but it’s a damn fine piece of machinery.
Food for thought.
The past five years saw a wave of investment in all types of video companies. Now expect to see a lot of consolidation in the months and year to come. In my latest MediaPost article, we look at the trends driving consolidation in three of the key segments of online video:
a) Content Producers
b) Advertising Creation, Management and Networks
c) Content Aggregation, File Hosting, Sharing and Distribution
Ha you thought I was gonna say BP right?
Wrong!
Turns out most people would still rather fill their tank up with BP petrol than buy stock from a Goldman Sachs broker. Although a few more days of black gold gushing into the Gulf should see the award for most evil corporation in the world go from Goldman (responsible for the recession) to BP (Responsible for the largest oil disaster in American history).
This one comes to us courtesy of the Business Insider Clusterstock Chart of the Day:
Side note: Toyota on the upswing. But if I had a choice, I’d still rather fill up my Toyota’s gas tank with BP petrol than actually have to drive it…
According to IPG’s Mediabrands’ Magna Global, global online advertising will continue to outpace traditional advertising revenues this year, here are the growth rates:
- online advertising will climb 12.4% in 2010 to $61.0 billion and another 11.7% in 2011,
- it will then grow 64% from there to over $100 billion in five years, or an average rate of 11.0% through 2015.
Overall, worldwide advertising estimates have been pegged at low- to-mid-single-digit gains in 2010.
Geographically:
- North America will see a 12.3% rise in online advertising to $27.2 billion in 2010, hitting $45.2 billion in 2015.
- Latin America will continue to be the fastest-growing region reaching $3.5 billion of total supplier advertising revenue in 2015, on an average rate of 13.3% growth over the next five years.
- The biggest specific markets — China and Russia — will experience the greatest gains.
A few years ago, I came across a breakdown of what people actually did with their time online:
- a whopping 47% of time spent online is spent consuming content
- admittedly, more time doesn’t mean more valuable, as search only accounts for 3% of time spent but garners 40% of the lion’s share of online advertising (similar metric: time people spend pumping up at the gas station is tiny…)
But the point is, as online media becomes more mature and dollars continue to flow online, it’s inevitable that content becomes more valuable.
As such, it’s no wonder that Yahoo! is rumored to want to acquire Huffington Post, just a month after it shelled out $90M for Associated Content. NY Post argues the reason for all of this shopaholic behavior is to counter Yahoo!’s slide in time spent on their site: 25% since Carol Bartz took over the company.
Interestingly, the HuffPo is more curation than creation, lending further credence to my argument that right now, how you produce content is more important than the content you actually produce… (and not necessarily than “mediocrity is king“).
But whatever the reason, the content wars are escalating folks.
