HEY, YOU, GET ONTO MY CLOUD
KNIGHTS IN WHITE SPACES
OUTSOURCING THE NEWS
HOW BAD ARE J-SCHOOLS?
COCKTAIL CHATTER – FOR WRITERS
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
HEY, YOU, GET ONTO MY CLOUD: It seems that Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer is singing his own variation of the Mick Jagger hit, along with Yahoo’s Jerry Yang and Google’s Eric Schmidt as they all battle like World War I fighter pilots in the clouds of computing. Once known as grid computing, utility computing or distributed computing, the much sexier sounding “cloud computing” is being heralded as the biggest thing since the Internet started. We’ve talked about it in previous MfM’s, but the difference is that this week Microsoft is jumping into the fray with a vengeance at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. As usual Microsoft is late getting into the field but as always Microsoft is raising the stakes dramatically. Also, next month the first International Cloud Computing Conference will be held in San Jose. Sys-Con, which focuses on i-Technology media and actually produces a cloud computing journal, will host a cloud computing ‘boot camp.’ It probably tells you something that although there is agreement that cloud computing represents “an infrastructural paradigm shift,” there is no agreement on an exact definition. My untutored definition is that all your documents, all your storage, all your software, even all your applications are provided through a massive system of inter-connected servers so that you are no longer restricted by the size or speed of your computer. Amazon has its own version, EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) which provides “resizable compute capacity in the cloud,” making web-scale computing easier for developers. Earlier this year, Intel, Hewlett Packard and Yahoo joined forces with three international research institutions to develop six data centers to test the stability and security of cloud computing. And as noted before, Google is already providing a cloud of apps online which runs on an estimated 100,000 nodes – a fancy term for servers -- although the recent 24-hour outage of Google’s Gmail system has raised questions about just how reliable cloud computing can be.
If you want to follow Microsoft’s foray into the field, go to website microsoftpdc.com; if you want to follow the computing conference, go to cloudcomputingexpo.com. And if you just want to keep up with the concept, go to cloudcomputing.sys-con.com.
KNIGHTS IN WHITE SPACES: Okay, I know I’m pushing my luck with these headline variations of rock and roll hits. But like the knights of olde, TV and Internet groups are jousting over what to do with the so-called “white spaces” which are the unused radio waves in the VHF and UHF band of television transmission. On this issue at least, Microsoft, Google, HP, and Intel are all on the same side. They say they can use the white space to deliver high speed wireless broadband internet access, with speeds anywhere from 10Mbytes to 50 and 100 Mbytes, which is much powerful than the Wi-Fi spectrum. On the other side are all the major networks and the National Association of Broadcasters. They say that the use of the white spaces in the signals will interfere with television broadcasts if unlicensed devices operate in the same spectrum. Both sides have formed groups with cutesy, catchy names. The broadcasters have formed The Association for Maximum Service Television while the Internet groups have formed the Wireless Innovation Alliance. The Federal Communications Commission Office of Engineering and Technology submitted a report a year ago that said the devices did not reliably detect the presence of television transmission and so therefore could not be relied upon. But this month the same office issued another report that “tentatively concludes… that… AWS-3 devices could operate at a power level of up to 23 dBm/MHz equivalent isotropic radiated power (EIRP) and with out-of-band emissions (OOBE) attenuated… without a significant risk of harmful interference.” Don’t you love it when I talk like this? It just goes to show you the level of technical detail that goes into these arguments. It may sound esoteric, but it isn’t. This is going to be the next ‘net neutrality’ debate that you will be hearing more and more about.
Side Note: Another group that you may never have heard of, but that directly affects you (at least it does, if you listen to Internet Radio), is SoundExchange. It collects the fees for the use of the different recording labels’ music. The group had applied to the federal Copyright Royalty Board to set royalty fees at a rate that many Internet radio operations said would put them out of business. Now, Congress has stepped in, passing the Webcaster Settlement Act to allow radio webcasters to negotiate lower royalty fee.
OUTSOURCING THE NEWS: The head of a major American newspaper group, who is also chairman of the Associated Press, says newspaper publishers should look at outsourcing news, possibly overseas. The CEO of Media News Group which publishes 52 newspapers says most of the preproduction work for its newspapers in California is already done in India, but now he says the group is looking at creating one “media desk” for all its newspapers and even possibly locating it “offshore.” As reported in USA Today, CEO Dean Singleton who also chairs the A.P. says no final decision has been made about outsourcing editorial functions, but they were looking at consolidating all editing and design. Regular readers of MfM will remember that an online news operation in California, pasadenanow.com, has outsourced its news, by having people in India write stories based on webcasts of city council meetings and information provided by ‘citizen volunteers.’ The proposal is obviously a response to the troubled economic times, which the former executive editor of The Washington Post says could mean local television news will disappear as fast, or faster, than local newspapers. Talking to the Cronkite News Service, former editor Len Downie Jr. says newspapers may win out on the rapidly growing Web with their growing use of video for the simple reason that newspapers can out-gun local television. For example, the Post has around 100 reporters covering the Washington area while the largest TV station in the market has, at most, a dozen reporters. He says that while newspapers are being squeezed, local television is being squeezed even more.
HOW BAD ARE J-SCHOOLS? Pretty bad if you believe the scoring on media website TVSpy.com. Its offspring newsletter, Shoptalk, ran an article listing the top ten schools based on a poll of its readers. They were: Columbia, Northwestern, UNC-Chapel Hill, Missouri, Syracuse, Indiana, California, Illinois, Maryland (Philip Merrill College), Ohio. Curious I went to the site to see the actual numbers. On a scale of 0 to 100, the top ranked school, Columbia, got a whopping 12. Yes, 12. Number 2, Northwestern, got a 6. Even more interesting, of the 16 schools listed, only four got positive grades; the other 12 were in the negative column. And I thought I was a tough grader! A sampling of others: Syracuse (-1), UNC and the Cronkite School at Arizona (-4), Ohio (-7), California (-8). The lowest scores: Montana (-37), Nevada (-38), and lowest scorer, Michigan (-43), which may be some consolation to football rival Michigan (-15). It’s not much consolation to us at the Grady College/ University of Georgia that football rival Florida also was in the negative column (-18), since we weren’t even on the list. I should note the grades vary daily as people vote, but the overwhelming theme remains the same – three quarters of the schools got negative grades. So, the obvious question is – why. And the reader with the best answer to that question will get a free subscription to Message from Michael. Oh, never mind, it’s already free.
COCKTAIL CHATTER. The creator of Harry Potter and the one-time single mother on welfare, J.K. Rowling, is the best paid author in the world with a ‘jaw-dropping’ $300 Million, according to Forbes magazine. The money drops dramatically for second place winner James Patterson but still isn’t too shabby at $50 Million. The ‘king of horror’ Stephen King came in third with $45 Million, followed by the master of the political thriller, Tom Clancy ($35 Million) and the doyenne of romance novels, Danielle Steel ($30 Million.) The rest of the top ten list includes John Grisham and Dean Koontz (both tied at $25 Million) followed by -- as Forbes puts it, thanks to a little Oprah magic -- Ken Follett ($20 Million), Janet Evanovich ($17 Million) and Nicholas Sparks ($16 Million). The winner of this year’s Writer’s Digest Best Writer’s Website is claudialuiz.com, so named of course for its creator, Claudia Luiz, a writer, psychoanalyst, and mother of two who does a column for her hometown newspaper in Norwood, Massachusetts. And as long as I’m on a writing kick, a reminder that NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), in which you have one month to write a complete novel, kicks off November 1st.
Apropos of nothing in particular, except that I found it interesting… the Central Intelligence Agency took out a full-page ad in the New York Times magazine. In a special advertising section on diversity, the agency advertises for people who can “make a world of difference” working for the national clandestine service.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at Michael@MediaConsultant.tv.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Message From Michael -- October 20, 2008
RETURN TO SENDER; ADDRESS UNKNOWN.
WHAT GETS MEASURED GETS DONE
WE HAVE TO INNOVATE OUR WAY OUT OF THIS
COCKTAIL CHATTER -- MILESTONES
OF BRICK WALLS AND HEAD FAKES
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
RETURN TO SENDER. ADDRESS UNKNOWN. The lyrics from the old Elvis Presley song may soon apply to the Internet. In the growing category of things I didn’t know -- In roughly two years time the last Internet address available on the original Internet naming system will be given out. That totals 4.3 Billion numbers. (Internet addresses are, of course, actual numbers.) Just for perspective, there are 6.7 Billion people in the world. Part of the problem, and the solution, according to research by computer scientists at University of Southern California, is the management of the original addressing system. They say there are whole blocks of numbers, maybe as much as half, that are only lightly used. Now you’ve probably heard about ICANN which stands for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. They’re the ones who decide if you get a dot-com, dot-net, or dot-tv domain extension. Well, part of that group is another group – the IANA, which stands for the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. They’re the ones that actually give out the blocks of Internet address numbers. Starting today (Monday, October 20th) they’re all getting together for the Internet Measurement Conference in a seaside resort near Athens, Greece. To further share with you something you probably don’t need to know but that’s interesting to know… the original Internet Protocol number system (IPv4) was ‘deployed’ on January 1, 1983. That’s the one used by all of us and the one that’s about to run out. The next version (IPv6) was ‘deployed’ 16 years later in 1999. It has – get this – 51 Thousand Trillion Trillion addresses. So, there’s obviously more than enough, except that the move to that system is costly and complex. Several groups including the U.S. government have mandated users switch to IPv6, and for good reason. IANA figures that the last block of IPv4 addresses will be given out somewhere between 2010 and 2011.
WHAT GETS MEASURED GETS DONE. You’ve no doubt heard that old management maxim. Advertisers have a variation of that – what gets measured gets sold. The challenge is being able to measure all the various platforms people use. You will recall NBC’s TAMI (Total Audience Measurement Index) launched during the Olympics to measure its cross-platform delivery system. Now a small research firm called Integrated Media Measurement is trying to do that using cell phones. The company has embedded software into the cell phones of 4,900 panelists, to catch the audio from ads on TV, radio or the Internet. The audio is then coded with the company’s database, so that it can tell if a consumer who listened to a movie trailer or an ad for a TV show actually watch that movie or TV show. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the company is now working with a national grocery chain to see if it can use the same technology for shampoos and toothpaste. Meanwhile Federated Media has launched a beta version of its ‘measurement tool box’ to track ‘conversational media campaigns’ – aka, social networking. It pulls together standard metrics such as impressions and click-through-rates along with data points such as whether people post blogs, use widgets, and bookmark sites. Finally, before you jump all over the new forms of advertising, take note of a study by Montreal-based research firm iPerceptions which found that simple text ads work better than rich media ads. A survey found that a quarter (25%) of the 14,000 visitors to leading media sites clicked on text ads while one in five (20%) clicked on display ads on the right side of the page and only one in eight (12%) clicked on the top of the page banners. Rich media ads only snagged between 7% and 11% of the clicks.
WE HAVE TO INNOVATE OUR WAY OUT OF THIS. That’s what a consulting colleague of mine used to say when faced with a client challenge. And it’s what the young people on the M.I.T. Technology Review’s list of 35 innovators under 35 have done and are doing – on everything from the Internet to medicine, from biotechnology to nanotechnology. These are the people whose work is changing our world. So, besides Twitter (whose creator is on the list), be prepared to add to your lexicon -- synths, Drupal, FLOw, SRAM as well as DRAM, Graphene, Instructables and Xobni. That last one is Inbox spelled backwards and is the brain child of Adam Smith who, the Technology Review editors say, is helping to make sense out of “e-mail madness” by scanning every e-mail you receive, extracting information from phone numbers to files exchanged – translating it all into a sort of e-mail social networking display of the most relevant information. Drupal is Dutch for droplet and is the creation of Dries Buytaert. While the idea of publishing on a global scale seems to be inherent with the Internet, in actual fact all you have with the Internet is the ability to distribute globally. Actual publishing is much more and Buytaert has developed a system to do just that. Synths is short hand (I’m semi-assuming) for synthetics and are 3-D renderings of such things as the Rocky Mountains from photos you’ve taken. Creator Blaise Aquera Y Arcas who works for Microsoft created the Photosynth system which allows you to create full scale three dimensional worlds. FLOw is the creation of 26-year-old Jenova Chen who has been, according to the TR editors, playing video games for 20 years. It comes from a psychologist’s theory identifying “a state of focus that people find enjoyable and fulfilling.” The result is a Web-based ZEN game in which players control a sea creature that swims, eats… and evolves. You all know about Blinkx (because you read MfM) but innovator Xiang-Sheng Hua has taken online video search to a whole other level. The TR editors say Hua is “teaching computers” to recognize objects, scenes and elements of digital images using tags provided by experts but also descriptions written by grassroots Internet users which is then put through an automated filter.
Side Observations: Out of the 35 innovators named, three work for Microsoft. Most are associated with universities. Also interesting (as always – at least to me) only four had what you might call westernized or Americanized names. To state the obvious, I have barely touched the range of topics and ideas from these young innovators. I will do updates in later MfM reports. In the meantime, you can see them for yourself at http://www.technologyreview.com/TR35.
A TELEVISION MILESTONE: All right, that may be somewhat of an exaggeration but not if you’re the one doing it. The University Of Georgia’s Research Foundation officially took possession of former Media General-owned WNEG-TV. This will make it one of only three commercial television stations owned and operated by a university. The others are WVUA-TV owned by the University of Alabama and KOMU-TV owned by the University of Missouri-Columbia.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: Another milestone of sorts as Facebook reaches one petabyte of storage space and that’s just for photos alone. That translates into 10 Billion photos. A petabyte is the equivalent of 1000 terabytes and a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes. The latest ‘hot’ device hitting the market is a sort of poor man’s Blackberry called Peek, which does only e-mail, but does it well and does it everywhere. Maybe just to prove it isn’t an old line college, even though it is celebrating the 800th anniversary of its founding next year (makes some of our colleges seem like freshmen, doesn’t it?) the University of Cambridge is offering lectures on history, arts, and business free online at the iTunes store.
OF BRICK WALLS AND HEAD FAKES. Here are some thoughts to share: brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want something bad enough. The best way to teach somebody something is to make them think they’re learning something else. (That’s called a head fake.) Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. When you’re screwing up and no-one says anything to you, that means they’ve given up on you. Your critics are the ones telling you they still love you and care for you. Wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you. The best gift an educator can give is to teach students to be self reflective. You don’t know where the bar is, so you do a disservice to students by putting it anywhere.
Okay, this has nothing to do with media, new or old, except that you can find it on YouTube and other video websites. It’s all from The Last Lecture by former Carnegie Mellon University professor Randy Pausch. The lecture was given in September of last year after Pausch had learned he had terminal pancreatic cancer and six months to live. But there is nothing maudlin about the lecture. This is a guy who tells the audience that after he learned of his situation, he did have a death bed conversion – he bought a Macintosh. The lecture is peppered with such jokes, along with witticisms and pointed observations. Normally, I give you a summary of longer reports so you don’t have to read, watch or listen to them. But in this case, do yourself a favor. Get up early one morning -- an hour and sixteen minutes early, to be exact -- and watch the lecture. Actually… there is another media element to this. Pausch was an expert in human-computer interactions and virtual worlds. Pausch who also worked with the Walt Disney Imagineering Team had created the Entertainment Technology Center and was working on an infinitely scalable technology teaching model for virtual worlds titled Alice. As he himself put it, like Moses, he got to see the Promised Land but he never got to set foot in it. He died on July 25, 2008.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at Michael@MediaConsultant.tv.
WHAT GETS MEASURED GETS DONE
WE HAVE TO INNOVATE OUR WAY OUT OF THIS
COCKTAIL CHATTER -- MILESTONES
OF BRICK WALLS AND HEAD FAKES
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
RETURN TO SENDER. ADDRESS UNKNOWN. The lyrics from the old Elvis Presley song may soon apply to the Internet. In the growing category of things I didn’t know -- In roughly two years time the last Internet address available on the original Internet naming system will be given out. That totals 4.3 Billion numbers. (Internet addresses are, of course, actual numbers.) Just for perspective, there are 6.7 Billion people in the world. Part of the problem, and the solution, according to research by computer scientists at University of Southern California, is the management of the original addressing system. They say there are whole blocks of numbers, maybe as much as half, that are only lightly used. Now you’ve probably heard about ICANN which stands for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. They’re the ones who decide if you get a dot-com, dot-net, or dot-tv domain extension. Well, part of that group is another group – the IANA, which stands for the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. They’re the ones that actually give out the blocks of Internet address numbers. Starting today (Monday, October 20th) they’re all getting together for the Internet Measurement Conference in a seaside resort near Athens, Greece. To further share with you something you probably don’t need to know but that’s interesting to know… the original Internet Protocol number system (IPv4) was ‘deployed’ on January 1, 1983. That’s the one used by all of us and the one that’s about to run out. The next version (IPv6) was ‘deployed’ 16 years later in 1999. It has – get this – 51 Thousand Trillion Trillion addresses. So, there’s obviously more than enough, except that the move to that system is costly and complex. Several groups including the U.S. government have mandated users switch to IPv6, and for good reason. IANA figures that the last block of IPv4 addresses will be given out somewhere between 2010 and 2011.
WHAT GETS MEASURED GETS DONE. You’ve no doubt heard that old management maxim. Advertisers have a variation of that – what gets measured gets sold. The challenge is being able to measure all the various platforms people use. You will recall NBC’s TAMI (Total Audience Measurement Index) launched during the Olympics to measure its cross-platform delivery system. Now a small research firm called Integrated Media Measurement is trying to do that using cell phones. The company has embedded software into the cell phones of 4,900 panelists, to catch the audio from ads on TV, radio or the Internet. The audio is then coded with the company’s database, so that it can tell if a consumer who listened to a movie trailer or an ad for a TV show actually watch that movie or TV show. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the company is now working with a national grocery chain to see if it can use the same technology for shampoos and toothpaste. Meanwhile Federated Media has launched a beta version of its ‘measurement tool box’ to track ‘conversational media campaigns’ – aka, social networking. It pulls together standard metrics such as impressions and click-through-rates along with data points such as whether people post blogs, use widgets, and bookmark sites. Finally, before you jump all over the new forms of advertising, take note of a study by Montreal-based research firm iPerceptions which found that simple text ads work better than rich media ads. A survey found that a quarter (25%) of the 14,000 visitors to leading media sites clicked on text ads while one in five (20%) clicked on display ads on the right side of the page and only one in eight (12%) clicked on the top of the page banners. Rich media ads only snagged between 7% and 11% of the clicks.
WE HAVE TO INNOVATE OUR WAY OUT OF THIS. That’s what a consulting colleague of mine used to say when faced with a client challenge. And it’s what the young people on the M.I.T. Technology Review’s list of 35 innovators under 35 have done and are doing – on everything from the Internet to medicine, from biotechnology to nanotechnology. These are the people whose work is changing our world. So, besides Twitter (whose creator is on the list), be prepared to add to your lexicon -- synths, Drupal, FLOw, SRAM as well as DRAM, Graphene, Instructables and Xobni. That last one is Inbox spelled backwards and is the brain child of Adam Smith who, the Technology Review editors say, is helping to make sense out of “e-mail madness” by scanning every e-mail you receive, extracting information from phone numbers to files exchanged – translating it all into a sort of e-mail social networking display of the most relevant information. Drupal is Dutch for droplet and is the creation of Dries Buytaert. While the idea of publishing on a global scale seems to be inherent with the Internet, in actual fact all you have with the Internet is the ability to distribute globally. Actual publishing is much more and Buytaert has developed a system to do just that. Synths is short hand (I’m semi-assuming) for synthetics and are 3-D renderings of such things as the Rocky Mountains from photos you’ve taken. Creator Blaise Aquera Y Arcas who works for Microsoft created the Photosynth system which allows you to create full scale three dimensional worlds. FLOw is the creation of 26-year-old Jenova Chen who has been, according to the TR editors, playing video games for 20 years. It comes from a psychologist’s theory identifying “a state of focus that people find enjoyable and fulfilling.” The result is a Web-based ZEN game in which players control a sea creature that swims, eats… and evolves. You all know about Blinkx (because you read MfM) but innovator Xiang-Sheng Hua has taken online video search to a whole other level. The TR editors say Hua is “teaching computers” to recognize objects, scenes and elements of digital images using tags provided by experts but also descriptions written by grassroots Internet users which is then put through an automated filter.
Side Observations: Out of the 35 innovators named, three work for Microsoft. Most are associated with universities. Also interesting (as always – at least to me) only four had what you might call westernized or Americanized names. To state the obvious, I have barely touched the range of topics and ideas from these young innovators. I will do updates in later MfM reports. In the meantime, you can see them for yourself at http://www.technologyreview.com/TR35.
A TELEVISION MILESTONE: All right, that may be somewhat of an exaggeration but not if you’re the one doing it. The University Of Georgia’s Research Foundation officially took possession of former Media General-owned WNEG-TV. This will make it one of only three commercial television stations owned and operated by a university. The others are WVUA-TV owned by the University of Alabama and KOMU-TV owned by the University of Missouri-Columbia.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: Another milestone of sorts as Facebook reaches one petabyte of storage space and that’s just for photos alone. That translates into 10 Billion photos. A petabyte is the equivalent of 1000 terabytes and a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes. The latest ‘hot’ device hitting the market is a sort of poor man’s Blackberry called Peek, which does only e-mail, but does it well and does it everywhere. Maybe just to prove it isn’t an old line college, even though it is celebrating the 800th anniversary of its founding next year (makes some of our colleges seem like freshmen, doesn’t it?) the University of Cambridge is offering lectures on history, arts, and business free online at the iTunes store.
OF BRICK WALLS AND HEAD FAKES. Here are some thoughts to share: brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want something bad enough. The best way to teach somebody something is to make them think they’re learning something else. (That’s called a head fake.) Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. When you’re screwing up and no-one says anything to you, that means they’ve given up on you. Your critics are the ones telling you they still love you and care for you. Wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you. The best gift an educator can give is to teach students to be self reflective. You don’t know where the bar is, so you do a disservice to students by putting it anywhere.
Okay, this has nothing to do with media, new or old, except that you can find it on YouTube and other video websites. It’s all from The Last Lecture by former Carnegie Mellon University professor Randy Pausch. The lecture was given in September of last year after Pausch had learned he had terminal pancreatic cancer and six months to live. But there is nothing maudlin about the lecture. This is a guy who tells the audience that after he learned of his situation, he did have a death bed conversion – he bought a Macintosh. The lecture is peppered with such jokes, along with witticisms and pointed observations. Normally, I give you a summary of longer reports so you don’t have to read, watch or listen to them. But in this case, do yourself a favor. Get up early one morning -- an hour and sixteen minutes early, to be exact -- and watch the lecture. Actually… there is another media element to this. Pausch was an expert in human-computer interactions and virtual worlds. Pausch who also worked with the Walt Disney Imagineering Team had created the Entertainment Technology Center and was working on an infinitely scalable technology teaching model for virtual worlds titled Alice. As he himself put it, like Moses, he got to see the Promised Land but he never got to set foot in it. He died on July 25, 2008.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at Michael@MediaConsultant.tv.
Message From Michael -- October 13, 2008
VETTING THE VEXING VIDEO REVOLUTION
ADVENTURES IN VIDEO LAND
THE UNKNOWN INFLUENTIALS
LEADING MEDIA COMPANIES COMPARISON
COCKTAIL CHATTER – RICH AND RICHER
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
VETTING THE VEXING VIDEO REVOLUTION. Whew… you know that headline caused some headaches to create. Anyway, you’ve all heard about the amazing growth in online video. Research firm, ABI Research, notes that while just under a third of online households had watched video streamed through a browser a year ago, now the ratio is more like six out of ten. Even with a recent downward revision, online video ad spending is expected to grow an incredible 55% this year, after jumping 74% last year. Now for a little perspective. That translates to $505 Million a year, and research firm eMarketer predicts that with an annual growth rate of between 50% and 70% that by 2012 online video ad spending will reach $3.4 Billion. Putting that figure into perspective, total Internet advertising is expected to reach $51.1 Billion in 2012, according to market intelligence firm IDC. U.S. Internet advertising will reach $23 Billion this year alone. Another note of perspective, the eMarketer firm notes that the TV market already hovers around $70 Billion a year.
Much of that growth is also dependent on growth in broadband access and broadband speeds. Which brings us to another piece of perspective. Internet network connectivity firm Cisco says that by 2012, Internet video will be – get this -- nearly 400 times the U.S. Internet backbone just eight years ago in 2000. The company says that even now, online video (PC and TV) accounts for a third (32.2%) of all consumer traffic worldwide. And, in a report that received a lot of press, research by Forrest Consulting for Veoh Networks shows heavy users and younger users of video account for much of that use. Consumers between the ages of 13 and 24 account for only 15% of the online population but represent 35% of active online video users. Add to that, says Veoh, consumers who watch more than an hour of video account for 40% of all viewers and three-quarters (75%) of ALL online video viewing. Research firm TeleGeography Research (which has a very cool submarine cable map showing all the under sea connections) says the amount of Internet bandwidth grew more than the Internet demand… at least this year. And a final footnote, Congress has passed the Broadband Data Improvement Act which promises to keep better track of who has access to the Internet and who does not, as well as better track the oft-criticized data standards.
ADVENTURES IN VIDEO LAND. The shoot-out at the Wild Wild Web’s version of the O.K. Corral may well be with video. Just keeping up with the proliferation of choices has produced a proliferation of sites. You know of course about NBC and Fox venture, Hulu, and regular readers will know about Joost which boasts 40,000 titles and a recent upgrade to work around plug-ins. Then there’s the Veoh networks which describes itself as an “Internet TV service” bringing together large TV and film studios with independent producers and user-generated content. But more keep coming: From the people who brought you the Slingbox comes video portal Sling.com. From the venerable TV guide group comes OVGuide, which really has an amazing list of video sites on everything from anime to wine, from Asian films to adult films, from fitness films to videos about pets. Then there’s the video search engine, Blinkx, which says it searches 26 Million hours of videos on everything from world news to travel, and then allows you to email it or embed it.
Then there’s the Holy Grail of PC to TV and vice versa video. The folks at Sling have created Slingcatcher which it describes as a “universal media player” which can access video from your Slingbox, PC or the Internet and put it on your TV. The folks at TiVo meanwhile have teamed up with Nero AG of Germany to actually replicate the TiVo recordable experience onto your PC. Of course, some versions of Microsoft Corp’s Vista operating system already have some of these same capabilities. Meanwhile, the growing user-generated video production capabilities continue to keep growing. There are the established sites like Photobucket. But they’re being joined by both established companies and up-starts. From established company Adobe comes Adobe AIR which allows you to develop rich Internet applications, including video, onto your desktop and across operating systems. From The Participatory Culture Foundation comes makeinternettv.org which provides, along with a Wiki, a simple six-step process to get your video polished and published on the Internet. And, to quote the old song… the beat goes on. There are too many options out there to list them all. So, we’ll have future video updates on MfM.
THE UNKNOWN INFLUENTIALS. A list compiled by BusinessWeek of the most influential people on the Web is a round-up of the usual suspects – Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker, Craig Newmark, Steve Jobs, Jerry Yang and Jimmy Wales. You might even have picked Jon Stewart or Arianna Huffington. But how about Jonathan Kaplan, Maria Thomas, Loic Le Meur, Gabe Rivera or Jack Ma. Kaplan is the mastermind behind the Flip camera; Le Meur created Seesmic.com, a sort of video Twitter; Rivera created Techmeme, ‘the tech news source of record’; Thomas created Etsy, a site that buys and sells homemade arts and crafts but who is probably better known for her NPR connections; Ma is the CEO of China’s premier e-commerce player Alibaba. And then there are the ones you want to know – Joi Ito, an entrepreneur and angel investor in operations like Flickr and Six Apart who works with Creative Commons; or Peter Thiel, a PayPal alum whose The Founders Fund has helped startups Slide and Yammer.
LEADING MEDIA COMPANIES COMPARISON. The #1 media company, based on ‘total net U.S. media revenue’, is Time Warner with $35.6 Billion. Following up in second place is Comcast Corp with $26.9 Billion, Walt Disney Co. with $17.5 Billion, followed by News Corp. with $15.7 Billion and DirecTV Group at #5 with $15.5 Billion. No great surprises. You can check the list out for yourself by searching Advertising Age’s site. What is somewhat surprising is the number of companies that reach the top 100 list simply on the basis of search. Aside from Google and Yahoo, there’s Idearc (which oddly lists its home base as DFW Airport) and is the backer of Switchboard.com and Localsearch.com; Donnelley Corp which has a $2.7 Billion revenue stream based on yellow pages; and Yellow Book whose $2 Billion revenue is based on the obvious. Also somewhat surprising is the number of companies I’ve never heard of – Vallassis which has $2.3 Billion in revenue based primarily on newspaper inserts; or Bonnier, a Stockholm-based magazine company which made its foray into the U.S. after buying 18 magazine titles from Time Warner. Then there are the other surprises – like Major League Baseball which makes it into the top 100 media list based on $400 Million in net revenue.
But, for me at least, the surprise is the difference in revenue generated by some firms between their U.S. and their worldwide operations. For example, based on worldwide revenues, AT&T would be far and away the number one media company with a whopping $118.9 Billion. Second place would go to Sony Corp (which, interestingly, bills its address as both Tokyo and New York) with $75.2 Billion, and third would go to Microsoft Corp., with $60.4 Billion in worldwide revenue. And this is what I found particularly surprising. Of that $60 Billion, ‘only’ $1.9 Billion comes from its U.S. operations. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? In a similar, but somewhat less surprising vein, of number 12 Google’s $16.6 Billion in worldwide revenue, a mere $6 Billion comes from the U.S., while number 20 Yahoo gets ‘only’ $3.8 Billion from the U.S. of its $6.9 Billion in worldwide revenue. Both Disney and News Corp earn the same amount of revenue overseas as they do in the U.S. Even QVC/Expedia/DirecTV-owning Liberty Media Corp. made most of its money worldwide ($9.4 Billion) with the U.S. part accounting for ‘only’ $1.3 Billion.
COCKTAIL CHATTER. Okay, I’ll admit I’m on some kick about lists, but anyway, to carry on -- The richest member of Congress is Sen. John Kerry whose fortune of $231 Million includes his wife’s claim to the Heinz ketchup fortune and which Roll Call magazine says is probably under-stated. The magazine says the second wealthiest member of Congress is Democratic representative Jane Harman of California whose $226 Million in declared wealth comes from those JBL, Infinity and AKG Acoustics you buy. Third is Republican representative Darrell Issa of California whose $161 Million declared net worth is based on car alarms. And fourth at $81 Million is Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California comes in 8th at $52 Million and Senator Edward Kennedy comes in 9th at $47 Million. Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain comes in 13th at $20 Million. At 17th is Democratic representative Nancy Pelosi at $19 Million. New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton came in 29th at $10 Million. The Roll Call article only named the top 50 and did not include Sen. Barack Obama. On a semi-related note, thirty of America’s richest CEO’s lost more money in two minutes than most people earn in a year ($50,000), according to Forbes.com. And that was before the latest stock market free-fall. For example, News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett lost $63.38 a second last year. Of course that still left them with a net worth of $50 Billion for Buffett and $6.8 Billion for Murdoch.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at Michael@MediaConsultant.tv.
ADVENTURES IN VIDEO LAND
THE UNKNOWN INFLUENTIALS
LEADING MEDIA COMPANIES COMPARISON
COCKTAIL CHATTER – RICH AND RICHER
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
VETTING THE VEXING VIDEO REVOLUTION. Whew… you know that headline caused some headaches to create. Anyway, you’ve all heard about the amazing growth in online video. Research firm, ABI Research, notes that while just under a third of online households had watched video streamed through a browser a year ago, now the ratio is more like six out of ten. Even with a recent downward revision, online video ad spending is expected to grow an incredible 55% this year, after jumping 74% last year. Now for a little perspective. That translates to $505 Million a year, and research firm eMarketer predicts that with an annual growth rate of between 50% and 70% that by 2012 online video ad spending will reach $3.4 Billion. Putting that figure into perspective, total Internet advertising is expected to reach $51.1 Billion in 2012, according to market intelligence firm IDC. U.S. Internet advertising will reach $23 Billion this year alone. Another note of perspective, the eMarketer firm notes that the TV market already hovers around $70 Billion a year.
Much of that growth is also dependent on growth in broadband access and broadband speeds. Which brings us to another piece of perspective. Internet network connectivity firm Cisco says that by 2012, Internet video will be – get this -- nearly 400 times the U.S. Internet backbone just eight years ago in 2000. The company says that even now, online video (PC and TV) accounts for a third (32.2%) of all consumer traffic worldwide. And, in a report that received a lot of press, research by Forrest Consulting for Veoh Networks shows heavy users and younger users of video account for much of that use. Consumers between the ages of 13 and 24 account for only 15% of the online population but represent 35% of active online video users. Add to that, says Veoh, consumers who watch more than an hour of video account for 40% of all viewers and three-quarters (75%) of ALL online video viewing. Research firm TeleGeography Research (which has a very cool submarine cable map showing all the under sea connections) says the amount of Internet bandwidth grew more than the Internet demand… at least this year. And a final footnote, Congress has passed the Broadband Data Improvement Act which promises to keep better track of who has access to the Internet and who does not, as well as better track the oft-criticized data standards.
ADVENTURES IN VIDEO LAND. The shoot-out at the Wild Wild Web’s version of the O.K. Corral may well be with video. Just keeping up with the proliferation of choices has produced a proliferation of sites. You know of course about NBC and Fox venture, Hulu, and regular readers will know about Joost which boasts 40,000 titles and a recent upgrade to work around plug-ins. Then there’s the Veoh networks which describes itself as an “Internet TV service” bringing together large TV and film studios with independent producers and user-generated content. But more keep coming: From the people who brought you the Slingbox comes video portal Sling.com. From the venerable TV guide group comes OVGuide, which really has an amazing list of video sites on everything from anime to wine, from Asian films to adult films, from fitness films to videos about pets. Then there’s the video search engine, Blinkx, which says it searches 26 Million hours of videos on everything from world news to travel, and then allows you to email it or embed it.
Then there’s the Holy Grail of PC to TV and vice versa video. The folks at Sling have created Slingcatcher which it describes as a “universal media player” which can access video from your Slingbox, PC or the Internet and put it on your TV. The folks at TiVo meanwhile have teamed up with Nero AG of Germany to actually replicate the TiVo recordable experience onto your PC. Of course, some versions of Microsoft Corp’s Vista operating system already have some of these same capabilities. Meanwhile, the growing user-generated video production capabilities continue to keep growing. There are the established sites like Photobucket. But they’re being joined by both established companies and up-starts. From established company Adobe comes Adobe AIR which allows you to develop rich Internet applications, including video, onto your desktop and across operating systems. From The Participatory Culture Foundation comes makeinternettv.org which provides, along with a Wiki, a simple six-step process to get your video polished and published on the Internet. And, to quote the old song… the beat goes on. There are too many options out there to list them all. So, we’ll have future video updates on MfM.
THE UNKNOWN INFLUENTIALS. A list compiled by BusinessWeek of the most influential people on the Web is a round-up of the usual suspects – Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker, Craig Newmark, Steve Jobs, Jerry Yang and Jimmy Wales. You might even have picked Jon Stewart or Arianna Huffington. But how about Jonathan Kaplan, Maria Thomas, Loic Le Meur, Gabe Rivera or Jack Ma. Kaplan is the mastermind behind the Flip camera; Le Meur created Seesmic.com, a sort of video Twitter; Rivera created Techmeme, ‘the tech news source of record’; Thomas created Etsy, a site that buys and sells homemade arts and crafts but who is probably better known for her NPR connections; Ma is the CEO of China’s premier e-commerce player Alibaba. And then there are the ones you want to know – Joi Ito, an entrepreneur and angel investor in operations like Flickr and Six Apart who works with Creative Commons; or Peter Thiel, a PayPal alum whose The Founders Fund has helped startups Slide and Yammer.
LEADING MEDIA COMPANIES COMPARISON. The #1 media company, based on ‘total net U.S. media revenue’, is Time Warner with $35.6 Billion. Following up in second place is Comcast Corp with $26.9 Billion, Walt Disney Co. with $17.5 Billion, followed by News Corp. with $15.7 Billion and DirecTV Group at #5 with $15.5 Billion. No great surprises. You can check the list out for yourself by searching Advertising Age’s site. What is somewhat surprising is the number of companies that reach the top 100 list simply on the basis of search. Aside from Google and Yahoo, there’s Idearc (which oddly lists its home base as DFW Airport) and is the backer of Switchboard.com and Localsearch.com; Donnelley Corp which has a $2.7 Billion revenue stream based on yellow pages; and Yellow Book whose $2 Billion revenue is based on the obvious. Also somewhat surprising is the number of companies I’ve never heard of – Vallassis which has $2.3 Billion in revenue based primarily on newspaper inserts; or Bonnier, a Stockholm-based magazine company which made its foray into the U.S. after buying 18 magazine titles from Time Warner. Then there are the other surprises – like Major League Baseball which makes it into the top 100 media list based on $400 Million in net revenue.
But, for me at least, the surprise is the difference in revenue generated by some firms between their U.S. and their worldwide operations. For example, based on worldwide revenues, AT&T would be far and away the number one media company with a whopping $118.9 Billion. Second place would go to Sony Corp (which, interestingly, bills its address as both Tokyo and New York) with $75.2 Billion, and third would go to Microsoft Corp., with $60.4 Billion in worldwide revenue. And this is what I found particularly surprising. Of that $60 Billion, ‘only’ $1.9 Billion comes from its U.S. operations. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? In a similar, but somewhat less surprising vein, of number 12 Google’s $16.6 Billion in worldwide revenue, a mere $6 Billion comes from the U.S., while number 20 Yahoo gets ‘only’ $3.8 Billion from the U.S. of its $6.9 Billion in worldwide revenue. Both Disney and News Corp earn the same amount of revenue overseas as they do in the U.S. Even QVC/Expedia/DirecTV-owning Liberty Media Corp. made most of its money worldwide ($9.4 Billion) with the U.S. part accounting for ‘only’ $1.3 Billion.
COCKTAIL CHATTER. Okay, I’ll admit I’m on some kick about lists, but anyway, to carry on -- The richest member of Congress is Sen. John Kerry whose fortune of $231 Million includes his wife’s claim to the Heinz ketchup fortune and which Roll Call magazine says is probably under-stated. The magazine says the second wealthiest member of Congress is Democratic representative Jane Harman of California whose $226 Million in declared wealth comes from those JBL, Infinity and AKG Acoustics you buy. Third is Republican representative Darrell Issa of California whose $161 Million declared net worth is based on car alarms. And fourth at $81 Million is Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California comes in 8th at $52 Million and Senator Edward Kennedy comes in 9th at $47 Million. Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain comes in 13th at $20 Million. At 17th is Democratic representative Nancy Pelosi at $19 Million. New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton came in 29th at $10 Million. The Roll Call article only named the top 50 and did not include Sen. Barack Obama. On a semi-related note, thirty of America’s richest CEO’s lost more money in two minutes than most people earn in a year ($50,000), according to Forbes.com. And that was before the latest stock market free-fall. For example, News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett lost $63.38 a second last year. Of course that still left them with a net worth of $50 Billion for Buffett and $6.8 Billion for Murdoch.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at Michael@MediaConsultant.tv.
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
Message from Michael -- October 6, 2008
IS THE MEDIA CUP HALF SEEN OR HALF HEARD
THE GRAND-DADDY OF MULTI MEDIA STUDIES
THE RICH ARE DIFFERENT FROM US
THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD
IT’S EVERYWHERE; IT’S EVERYWHERE
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
IS THE MEDIA CUP HALF SEEN OR HALF HEARD. That seems to be the question raised by the latest research from MRI (Media Research and Intelligence). As opposed to so many reports on people’s multi-tasking media habits, the MRI study says “much media consumption occurs individually.” The study emphasizes that half of at-home media usage is exclusive – meaning that the consumer is using only that medium. For example: newspaper reading (55%), Internet usage (53.8%), magazine reading (53.6%) and TV viewing (49.4%). Regular readers of MfM will remember an earlier BIGresearch report on simultaneous media usage which emphasized that “the only way for people to keep up with the deluge of media options is to multi-task with other media.” That report released earlier this year said simultaneous media consumption was up from its previous year’s report by anywhere from 1% to 35% depending on the medium. How do you reconcile the two reports? The answer is I can’t, or at least not fully. For example: The MRI study says 15.3% of at-home newspaper reading is done while watching TV. The BIGresearch study says the figure is double that with 30% of the consumers saying they watch TV while reading the newspaper. Another example: The MRI study says the number one non-media activity that consumers engage in while using media is chores. The BIGresearch report says the number one non-media activity engaged in while using media is eating.
That doesn’t mean the reports are completely contradictory. For example, both reports point to television as the dominant medium. The BIGresearch study says that when more than one medium is used in the home, it is typically television and another medium, a fact echoed by the MRI study; The MRI study also goes on to say that television is used by four out of five people (83.6%) followed by radio (63.2%) newspapers (55.6%), the Internet (52.6%) and magazines (37.6%). And both reports raise questions about television’s influence. The BIGresearch report says its study shows TV’s influence on consumers to purchase products has declined while new media options have increased. The MRI report says the percentage of people saying they were “very focused” when using television is significantly lower than for all other medium, except radio. Only a third (34.7%) of TV viewers report being “very focused” which is double radio (16.5%) but lower than magazines (41.8%), newspapers (50%) and especially the Internet (54.6%).
Both reports have some interesting, although somewhat expected, insights. For example: The MRI study shows a dramatic drop in exclusive media usage for Television and the Internet in out-of-home usage. The Internet drops from a half (53.8%) in usage in home to a fifth (20.4%) out of home (mainly because it is used in conjunction with work – remember the word exclusive.) Television drops to a third (32.6%) from a half (49.4%) while magazines drop only four points to 49% and newspaper exclusive use remains the same in home and out of home at 55%. Only radio increases slight (from 28.6% to 34.6%). The BIGresearch report shows channel surfing as the #1 activity during TV commercials (41.2%) followed by talking with others by phone or in the room (33.5%) and my favorite – mentally tuning out (30.2%).
THE GRAND-DADDY OF MULTI-MEDIA STUDIES. Regular and long-time readers of MfM will remember the Middletown Media Studies by Ball State University which in 2004 raised the consciousness of just how pervasive multi-media use is. That report said that if you summed up all media use in a day, it came to a staggering 15.4 hours a day, but that if you took into account multi-media use it dropped, but to a still huge average of 11.7 hours a day. The ‘most active’ person spent more than 17 hours a day – virtually every waking moment – with the media; the ‘least active’ person spent a still sizable 5.25 hours a day with the media. That study showed that people spend double the amount of time with media than they think they do. That may be because the Middletown study used observational data instead of either diary or telephone surveys.
THE RICH ARE DIFFERENT FROM US. So said F. Scott Fitzgerald. To which Ernest Hemingway is purported to have said, “yes, they have more money.” Well, depending on how you look at it, they’re both right, according to a report by Ipsos/ Mendelsohn dubbed the Affluent Survey. According to the study, there are 23.3 Million households with an annual income of more than $100,000; 2.5 Million with an annual income of more than $250,000; and 2.67 Million households with liquid assets of more than $1 Million. Shock of shocks, the study reports that the affluent fly more frequently and stay at hotels more often, and when they vacation they are more likely to go to Aspen, Martha’s Vineyard or Maui. And when they play sports, they’re more likely to go sailing, play tennis, go snow skiing or play golf. (I suspect they don’t take part in a lot of pick-up basketball games, but that wasn’t included.) But, semi-serious shock of shocks, when they shop, they are more likely to go to Target (84.9%) or Wal-Mart (80.2%), than Saks Fifth Avenue (12.6%) or Nieman Marcus (13.5%).
When it comes to media, the use of television and radio by the affluent has declined steadily over the past five years while magazine readership has held steady. They watch the four networks in greater numbers (an average of 32 Million of them) than PBS (an average of 18 Million); more will watch CNN (26 Million) than Fox (17 Million). Their favorite non-news cable network (as I read the numbers) is Discovery (with 25.4 Million affluent viewers), followed by ESPN (22 Million), The Weather Channel and A&E (with roughly 21 Million each) and The Food Network (20 Million). The most popular magazine is…. drum roll please… People magazine (with 7.1 Million affluent heads of household), followed by National Geographic/ Traveler (6.8 Million), followed by (the one surprise) Pace Airline Media (5.6 Million) (and, no, I’ve never heard of it.). And, as has been reported elsewhere, the affluent spend more time online (an average of 23.4 hours a week) and make greater use of cell phones – 40% use hand-held devices to access the Internet and 10% make Internet purchases using their mobiles.
THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD: Or possibly I could have headlined this, the giant slayer. The little known India-based company Zoho has launched a suite of services to take on behemoths Google and Microsoft – everything from e-mail to word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations to project management, database applications and customer relationship management. All online in a cloud computing environment that reviewers (such as websites WebGuild.org and ReadWriteWeb.com) have given good marks. Such good marks, in fact, that General Electric (a behemoth in its own right) has picked Zoho as its strategic partner for its 400,000 desktops. Zoho was the winner of webguild’s best web 2.0 apps content, and website readwriteweb (interestingly and coincidentally) used the same headline I did in referring to Zoho. And here’s the kicker: As if the fact that Zoho is competing successfully with Google et al is not enough, Zoho’s team of developers are straight out of school – NOT College… School. Zoho pays the young developers the equivalent of one year of college. At the end of that year, many stay on; some actually go on to college.
IT’S EVERYWHERE; IT’S EVERYWHERE. If radio series crime fighter Chickenman were around today, that’s what he would be saying about the blogosphere. According to the annual state of the blogosphere report by Technorati, blogs attract 77 Million unique visitors in the U.S. alone. That’s more than either MySpace (75 Million) or Facebook (41 Million), and that is out of a total of nearly 189 Million in the total Internet audience. Since 2002, Technorati has indexed 133 Million blogs. Of that number, 7.4 Million blogs were posted in the last 120 days, 1.5 Million blogs in the last week, and 900,000 blogs in the past 24 hours. The company tracks blogs in 81 languages across 66 countries and six continents. North America accounts for nearly half (48%) of all bloggers, followed by Europe (27%) and Asia (13%). South America only accounts for 7% while little Australia accounts for 3% and Africa has one percent. Despite the come-and-go nature of blogs, the average blogger has been at it an average of three years. Blogs are profitable, too, with most people investing $1,800 and the mean annual revenue hitting $6,000. (So, what’s wrong with my blog, I wonder.) Three out of four U.S. bloggers are college graduates with nearly half (42%) having attended graduate school. Two-thirds are male with half between the ages of 18 and 34. And although the highest concentration of bloggers is in the San Francisco Bay area, followed by New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles, the folks at Technorati say the majority of bloggers do NOT live near the largest metropolitan areas.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at Michael@MediaConsultant.tv.
THE GRAND-DADDY OF MULTI MEDIA STUDIES
THE RICH ARE DIFFERENT FROM US
THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD
IT’S EVERYWHERE; IT’S EVERYWHERE
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
IS THE MEDIA CUP HALF SEEN OR HALF HEARD. That seems to be the question raised by the latest research from MRI (Media Research and Intelligence). As opposed to so many reports on people’s multi-tasking media habits, the MRI study says “much media consumption occurs individually.” The study emphasizes that half of at-home media usage is exclusive – meaning that the consumer is using only that medium. For example: newspaper reading (55%), Internet usage (53.8%), magazine reading (53.6%) and TV viewing (49.4%). Regular readers of MfM will remember an earlier BIGresearch report on simultaneous media usage which emphasized that “the only way for people to keep up with the deluge of media options is to multi-task with other media.” That report released earlier this year said simultaneous media consumption was up from its previous year’s report by anywhere from 1% to 35% depending on the medium. How do you reconcile the two reports? The answer is I can’t, or at least not fully. For example: The MRI study says 15.3% of at-home newspaper reading is done while watching TV. The BIGresearch study says the figure is double that with 30% of the consumers saying they watch TV while reading the newspaper. Another example: The MRI study says the number one non-media activity that consumers engage in while using media is chores. The BIGresearch report says the number one non-media activity engaged in while using media is eating.
That doesn’t mean the reports are completely contradictory. For example, both reports point to television as the dominant medium. The BIGresearch study says that when more than one medium is used in the home, it is typically television and another medium, a fact echoed by the MRI study; The MRI study also goes on to say that television is used by four out of five people (83.6%) followed by radio (63.2%) newspapers (55.6%), the Internet (52.6%) and magazines (37.6%). And both reports raise questions about television’s influence. The BIGresearch report says its study shows TV’s influence on consumers to purchase products has declined while new media options have increased. The MRI report says the percentage of people saying they were “very focused” when using television is significantly lower than for all other medium, except radio. Only a third (34.7%) of TV viewers report being “very focused” which is double radio (16.5%) but lower than magazines (41.8%), newspapers (50%) and especially the Internet (54.6%).
Both reports have some interesting, although somewhat expected, insights. For example: The MRI study shows a dramatic drop in exclusive media usage for Television and the Internet in out-of-home usage. The Internet drops from a half (53.8%) in usage in home to a fifth (20.4%) out of home (mainly because it is used in conjunction with work – remember the word exclusive.) Television drops to a third (32.6%) from a half (49.4%) while magazines drop only four points to 49% and newspaper exclusive use remains the same in home and out of home at 55%. Only radio increases slight (from 28.6% to 34.6%). The BIGresearch report shows channel surfing as the #1 activity during TV commercials (41.2%) followed by talking with others by phone or in the room (33.5%) and my favorite – mentally tuning out (30.2%).
THE GRAND-DADDY OF MULTI-MEDIA STUDIES. Regular and long-time readers of MfM will remember the Middletown Media Studies by Ball State University which in 2004 raised the consciousness of just how pervasive multi-media use is. That report said that if you summed up all media use in a day, it came to a staggering 15.4 hours a day, but that if you took into account multi-media use it dropped, but to a still huge average of 11.7 hours a day. The ‘most active’ person spent more than 17 hours a day – virtually every waking moment – with the media; the ‘least active’ person spent a still sizable 5.25 hours a day with the media. That study showed that people spend double the amount of time with media than they think they do. That may be because the Middletown study used observational data instead of either diary or telephone surveys.
THE RICH ARE DIFFERENT FROM US. So said F. Scott Fitzgerald. To which Ernest Hemingway is purported to have said, “yes, they have more money.” Well, depending on how you look at it, they’re both right, according to a report by Ipsos/ Mendelsohn dubbed the Affluent Survey. According to the study, there are 23.3 Million households with an annual income of more than $100,000; 2.5 Million with an annual income of more than $250,000; and 2.67 Million households with liquid assets of more than $1 Million. Shock of shocks, the study reports that the affluent fly more frequently and stay at hotels more often, and when they vacation they are more likely to go to Aspen, Martha’s Vineyard or Maui. And when they play sports, they’re more likely to go sailing, play tennis, go snow skiing or play golf. (I suspect they don’t take part in a lot of pick-up basketball games, but that wasn’t included.) But, semi-serious shock of shocks, when they shop, they are more likely to go to Target (84.9%) or Wal-Mart (80.2%), than Saks Fifth Avenue (12.6%) or Nieman Marcus (13.5%).
When it comes to media, the use of television and radio by the affluent has declined steadily over the past five years while magazine readership has held steady. They watch the four networks in greater numbers (an average of 32 Million of them) than PBS (an average of 18 Million); more will watch CNN (26 Million) than Fox (17 Million). Their favorite non-news cable network (as I read the numbers) is Discovery (with 25.4 Million affluent viewers), followed by ESPN (22 Million), The Weather Channel and A&E (with roughly 21 Million each) and The Food Network (20 Million). The most popular magazine is…. drum roll please… People magazine (with 7.1 Million affluent heads of household), followed by National Geographic/ Traveler (6.8 Million), followed by (the one surprise) Pace Airline Media (5.6 Million) (and, no, I’ve never heard of it.). And, as has been reported elsewhere, the affluent spend more time online (an average of 23.4 hours a week) and make greater use of cell phones – 40% use hand-held devices to access the Internet and 10% make Internet purchases using their mobiles.
THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD: Or possibly I could have headlined this, the giant slayer. The little known India-based company Zoho has launched a suite of services to take on behemoths Google and Microsoft – everything from e-mail to word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations to project management, database applications and customer relationship management. All online in a cloud computing environment that reviewers (such as websites WebGuild.org and ReadWriteWeb.com) have given good marks. Such good marks, in fact, that General Electric (a behemoth in its own right) has picked Zoho as its strategic partner for its 400,000 desktops. Zoho was the winner of webguild’s best web 2.0 apps content, and website readwriteweb (interestingly and coincidentally) used the same headline I did in referring to Zoho. And here’s the kicker: As if the fact that Zoho is competing successfully with Google et al is not enough, Zoho’s team of developers are straight out of school – NOT College… School. Zoho pays the young developers the equivalent of one year of college. At the end of that year, many stay on; some actually go on to college.
IT’S EVERYWHERE; IT’S EVERYWHERE. If radio series crime fighter Chickenman were around today, that’s what he would be saying about the blogosphere. According to the annual state of the blogosphere report by Technorati, blogs attract 77 Million unique visitors in the U.S. alone. That’s more than either MySpace (75 Million) or Facebook (41 Million), and that is out of a total of nearly 189 Million in the total Internet audience. Since 2002, Technorati has indexed 133 Million blogs. Of that number, 7.4 Million blogs were posted in the last 120 days, 1.5 Million blogs in the last week, and 900,000 blogs in the past 24 hours. The company tracks blogs in 81 languages across 66 countries and six continents. North America accounts for nearly half (48%) of all bloggers, followed by Europe (27%) and Asia (13%). South America only accounts for 7% while little Australia accounts for 3% and Africa has one percent. Despite the come-and-go nature of blogs, the average blogger has been at it an average of three years. Blogs are profitable, too, with most people investing $1,800 and the mean annual revenue hitting $6,000. (So, what’s wrong with my blog, I wonder.) Three out of four U.S. bloggers are college graduates with nearly half (42%) having attended graduate school. Two-thirds are male with half between the ages of 18 and 34. And although the highest concentration of bloggers is in the San Francisco Bay area, followed by New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles, the folks at Technorati say the majority of bloggers do NOT live near the largest metropolitan areas.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at Michael@MediaConsultant.tv.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
