OLYMPIAN NUMBERS FOR THE OLYMPICS
MARKETING MIND GAMES
MORE TWITTER-PATION
WEBSITE DE JEUR
COCKTAIL CHATTER – INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY
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.
OLYMPIAN NUMBERS FOR THE OLYMPICS: The opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics drew the highest rating for a summer games opening ceremony since 1960 and recorded the highest viewership for an Olympics televised IN the United States but FROM a foreign country. The elaborate and expensive opening ceremony drew an 18.6 national rating (the Rome Olympics in 1960 drew an 18.1) and 34.2 Million U.S. viewers (the 1996 Atlanta opening ceremony drew 39.8 Million U.S. viewers). To add to NBC’s crowing and other networks’ woe-ing (I know that’s silly, but it sounded good), the NBCOlympics.com website had 70 Million page views, according to data supplied by NBC to the New York Times, and that is ten times the traffic generated on the website for the opening ceremony in Athens, Greece, four years ago. And further indication of the many things I don’t know, the Winter Olympics out-perform the Summer Olympics pretty consistently. In fact, according to historical trends data from Nielsen Media, only two Olympics have scored in the top 100 of telecasts: both from the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer.
And, if you want to entertain yourself for a few hours, visit the “Official Website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games” – http://en.beijing2008.cn. This is the One World One Dream website of the Beijing Olympic Committee (BOCOG). The cynics amongst my many MfM readers will find particularly interesting the bulletins/ media section. For example, BOCOG has a letter extending its condolences to the family of the relatives of a U.S. volleyball team coach and their guide who were attacked, one of whom was killed. “At present, investigation into the rare and tragic incident is still under way. Beijing is a safe city, and the police are doing their best to provide a safe environment for all tourists, Chinese and International during their travels in Beijing.” Equally interesting (again, I add, as always – at least to me) the links from the main site to other country’s sites. The U.S. site, of course, goes to NBCOlympics.com. The Australian site though goes to a Yahoo Sports website which has the Olympics as just part of the site, along with Aussie Rules football and Cricket. The India link goes to a YouTube address that, as far as I can tell, has no connection to the Olympics. Same for the Iraq link. Germany had two links to ARD and ZDF, both media groups. The link to China was cctv.com and the link to ‘Chinese Taipei” was the Channel 5 network there. No surprise there, but how about the link to Greece. It came back with a warning of viewing restrictions because it could not confirm that I was viewing the live streaming video portal from “certain European Broadcasting Union (EBU) territories.”
Factoid of the Week: As along as I’m doing the Olympic thing… from the official Chinese Olympic website comes the factoid that there are 1.7 Million Volunteers at the Olympics. Let me repeat that -- 1.7 MILLION.
MARKETING MIND GAMES: Except that they’re not games. They’re dead serious. Two recent news articles have stuck in my head for some time, and although they’re not ‘normal’ MfM material, I realized that if I found them so interesting that I’m still thinking about them a month later, that you might find them equally interesting. The first is about a company called Neurofocus which measures brain waves to determine how engaged people are with a commercial or promotional spot. It ‘measures’ attention levels, emotional reactions, and memory retention to derive gauges of persuasion, awareness and novelty – what the company calls the six critical metrics that determine consumers’ engagement with your brand, with your marketing, your messaging or other content. As reported in a previous MfM, Nielsen has invested in the company. What I found particularly interesting was in the NPR report (one of several news articles about this), CBS research chief David Poltrack noted that when they tested program promos, people might find the promo interesting but then forgot the most basic information – when and where the program was to air. An issue I have found with a lot of promotion. The other article was in the New York Times and dealt with a doctor in Africa who turned to some of the largest multi-national corporations to teach her how to convince people in the developing world to wash their hands with soap – a simple step that could cut deaths through disease and diarrhea in half. The trick, according to the savvy marketers, was to integrate the practice into people’s daily habits or routines. The example given was the introduction by Procter & Gamble of Febreeze. Even though people expressed an interest in having a product that would do away with bad smells (for example, from a coat worn while at a smoke-filled bar), bad smells didn’t happen enough in people’s lives to make Febreeze a part of their lives. So the P&G psychologists had to “create habits for products.” In the case of Febreeze, they needed to find other cues. In this case, spots were created showing people using Febreeze as part of their daily cleaning routine. Habits were created, and Febreeze went from a product that was almost cancelled to one which grosses $650 Million in North America alone. In the case of the good doctor, the trick was to convince people in Ghana that toilets (normally associated with cleanliness in that culture) had to be associated with disgust which would then prompt them to wash their hands with soap. It worked.
MORE TWITTER-PATION: For those readers who found the 140-character Twitter communication strange, get ready for something even stranger. A website that collects twitter communication so you can find “real people who really matter.” Twellow.com sorts through the myriad of messages sent by Twitterers, categorizes those millions of inter-personal messages and then sorts them into different niches so you can find people with common interests, or as the website puts it, sift out people “who can help bring your vision to reality, whatever that vision may be.” The creators of the website say if you have a twitter account, you are probably already listed on twello because twitter messages are ‘publicly available.’ Just go to the website, click on any of the multitude of categories, and find people who are twittering the most in that category, whether it’s atheism, vegetarianism, public relations, news reporting or telecommunications – you name it.
WEBSITE DE JEUR: On a completely un-related note, another search engine has been launched to try and compete with Google. It’s called Cuil and it claims that it searches three times as many websites as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft. It also says that it analyzes the Web rather than the Web user to make it more efficient and more private. And as long as I’m talking about new websites… Beet.tv which actually isn’t that new (founded in 2006) is showing up more and more in my ramblings on the Web. It describes itself as “the first business oriented video blog” focusing on online video and its impact on new media.
FACTOID OF THE WEEK: Yeah, I know I already did one factoid, but I just thought this was interesting enough to add – the number of American adults using online coupons rose 39% to 36 Million between 2005 and 2008, according to a survey by Simmons/ Experian Research and Coupons Inc.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: The New York Times labeled him the international man of mystery. Vivi Nevo is said to be the largest individual shareholder of Time Warner, was once the largest private investor in Goldman Sachs, is engaged to China’s most famous actress (Zhang Ziyi, the star of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), vacations on Rupert Murdoch’s sailboat, attended Madonna’s wedding, and yet nobody knows his background or exactly how he made his fortune, except that he parlayed a modest family inheritance into a fortune through investing in media and Internet companies. “Of all the characters the media business attracts – and creates for that matter,” says the New York Times article, “perhaps no one is more remarked upon, wondered about or marveled at than Mr. Nevo.” The article makes clear that while his media influence is subtle, it’s also pervasive.
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, August 25, 2008
Message From Michael -- August 4, 2008
CHINA BEATS THE U.S.
NOW YOU SEE IT; NOW YOU DON’T
BUYING THE NEWS
PAYING FOR CITIZEN NEWS
NEWS DIRECTOR DIVERSITY
THE INTERNET CANARY
COCKTAIL CHATTER
COMPLIMENTS AND KUDOS
GIVING CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE
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.
CHINA BEATS THE U.S. And, no, I’m not talking about the Olympics although that will be interesting to see. No, it’s the Internet. According to the China Internet Network Information center (CNNIC), the number of ‘netizens’ (as they refer to them) in China reached 253 Million in June. Of that, 214 Million are broadband users, which, the release from the CNNIC says, “tops the world.” And here is an interesting twist to the info, the China domain name – CN – has become the world’s largest country domain name. In case you were wondering, DE, which is the country domain name for Germany used to be the number one country domain name. Nearly a third of the Chinese netizens (28.9%) access the Internet by cell phone with the number of cell phones reaching more than 73 Million. The report also says the “use rate of network news” has reached 81.5% and adds, “the Internet can be said to have become the mainstream media with huge influence and the most development potentiality in the field of mass communication.”
Okay, a little perspective. There are 220 Million Americans online. That represents more than 70% of the U.S. population which, you may remember, recently passed the 300 Million mark. The Chinese numbers are based on a population of 1.3 Billion which, by the way, is one-fifth of the entire world population. Just for a little more perspective, the last figures I could find for India put the Internet population at 46 Million-plus with a population of 1.1 Billion people.
NOW YOU SEE IT; NOW YOU DON’T. That is what’s happening in some TV newscasts as advertisers go for product placement. The example making the rounds centers on Meredith-owned Las Vegas Fox affiliate KVVU where fake cups of McDonald’s iced coffee sit on the anchor desks during the news-and-lifestyle portion of the morning show. Reportedly McDonald’s has also placed products on Chicago’s Fox-owned WFLD, Tribune’s Seattle Fox affiliate KCPQ, and Univision 41 in New York City. Interestingly though I could only find the one article dealing with Las Vegas. It appears the one story from the Las Vegas Sun has been picked up by all the media. KVVU News Director Adam Bradshaw says the product placement is only in the lifestyle portion of the morning show, after 7 a.m.; that he wouldn’t put such products in the hard news shows like the 5pm and 10pm and that the product placement would not affect their coverage of McDonald’s. (Thanks to former anchor turned college teacher turned doctoral candidate Rebecca Coates for this tip.)
As a side note to this, there are groups and websites devoted solely to product placement. Website productplacement.biz, for example, makes the case that the growth in product placement and branded entertainment is a natural result of the increase in media choices available to the consumer. Website iTVX.net even has devised a system to equate the value of a product placement segment to a :30 second commercial. Both sites extol the virtues of product placement.
BUYING THE NEWS. If the journalists amongst you found the product placement upsetting, get ready to be real upset. A survey of senior American marketers found that one in five (19%) say their organizations have bought advertising in return for a news story. The survey on behalf of PRWeek and Manning Selvage & Lee also found that one in ten have had “an implicit/non-verbal agreement’ with a reporter or editor that they would get favorable coverage in exchange for advertising, and one in 12 (8%) said they paid or provided a gift of value to an editor or producer to get their product placed in a news story. The survey authors say the latest results are consistent with previous years. The authors say while some marketers see this as simply an extension of product placement, “any kind of undisclosed paid placement spells trouble for consumers, the media and the marketing industry.”
PAYING FOR CITIZEN NEWS. In the Tampa/ St. Petersburg market, Gannett-owned CBS affiliate WTSP is soliciting so-called citizen journalists to shoot video for them. Okay, that may not sound so new in today’s citizen media world, but the difference is that WTSP is paying $20 a pop for the video and is trying to build a stable of 20 of these citizen correspondents to contribute regularly to their newscasts and webcasts. If the citizen shooter provides ten pieces each quarter, for a year, they get to keep the camera and accessories provided by the station. The posting on the station website has already drawn a wide variety of responses, from it would be great to get the tiny slices of life on air to a paramedic worrying about more amateurs getting in the way of emergency services.
On a related note, locally-owned low-power CBS affiliated KPSP is trying to use teen aged viewers as part of their news gathering resource. Former Clear Channel CEO Don Perry took over as VP/ GM of the little station after leaving the mega-group after the sale of its television properties. The local philanthropist owners wanted the station to “play a vital role in the fabric of the community.” Perry says his goal is to re-invent the station, starting with re-training everybody to run all the equipment so they can “deputize camera operators as needed” on a big story, partnering with the local Gannett owned newspaper, as well as making greater use of consumer generated content such as the teen agers. (Thanks to Peabody Awards director Horace Newcomb for these two tips.)
NEWS DIRECTOR DIVERSITY. Although already reported, worth noting again is the Radio Television News Directors’ Association survey showing there are more women news directors in television than ever before and that the percentage of minority news directors in television has also reached an all-time high. The numbers are still small – 28.3% for women and 15.5% for minorities. The report also notes that the percentage of women GMs at stations with local news ‘edged up’ to 16.3% while the percentage of minority GMs jumped to 9.8%. The percentage of minorities in TV news now stands at one fourth (23.6%) but that’s for ALL TV news. For just non-Hispanic TV news, the number drops slightly to 20.1%. The percentage of minorities in radio rose slightly year to year to reach one in ten (11.8%) while the percentage of minority radio news directors fell (to 5.9%). As a bit of perspective, the percentage of minorities in newspapers stands at 13.5%.
THE INTERNET CANARY. That is one of the descriptions given to Internet website, 4chan.org. Using the Internet lingo, it is a “meme” which Wikipedia defines as the spread of ideas and cultural phenomenon, such as tunes, catch phrases, beliefs, fashion and technology. It is one of those places that is a harbinger of future things on the Internet. Let me warn you though, it can be both odd and off-putting in many ways. (Thanks to KPLC GM Jim Serra for this reminder.)
COCKTAIL CHATTER. This isn’t really cocktail chatter. It’s more like me slipping into blog commentary, but the line used by one of the characters on a recent episode of the NBC show My Name’s Earl is too good not to mention. The pregnant ex-wife of Earl talking to a man threatening to shoot her, warns him that if he were to shoot “a hot blonde with a multi-racial child” that “Nancy Grace will have you convicted before the first commercial break.”
KUDOS AND COMPLIMENTS. Normally, MfM is reserved for media trends and research, but every once in a while, we slip in a kudo or two. Today’s goes to client station KFVS in Cape Girardeau, which GM Mike Smythe notes, has won Medium Market station of the year in Illinois for the sixth straight year. No other station has ever won the award six times, and on top of which KFVS is in Missouri, where it also has won several awards.
GIVE CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE: And the credit goes to the readers of MfM. Oftentimes readers send in recommendations for articles. This past week, there were half a dozen such recommendations. So, thank you. And proper credit is given at the bottom of each article. Also I have to compliment the TV Newsday website which is one of the dozens of places I go for news. It continues to get better and better. Several times this past month, general managers, news directors and others have mentioned stories to me that TV Newsday broke.
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.
NOW YOU SEE IT; NOW YOU DON’T
BUYING THE NEWS
PAYING FOR CITIZEN NEWS
NEWS DIRECTOR DIVERSITY
THE INTERNET CANARY
COCKTAIL CHATTER
COMPLIMENTS AND KUDOS
GIVING CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE
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.
CHINA BEATS THE U.S. And, no, I’m not talking about the Olympics although that will be interesting to see. No, it’s the Internet. According to the China Internet Network Information center (CNNIC), the number of ‘netizens’ (as they refer to them) in China reached 253 Million in June. Of that, 214 Million are broadband users, which, the release from the CNNIC says, “tops the world.” And here is an interesting twist to the info, the China domain name – CN – has become the world’s largest country domain name. In case you were wondering, DE, which is the country domain name for Germany used to be the number one country domain name. Nearly a third of the Chinese netizens (28.9%) access the Internet by cell phone with the number of cell phones reaching more than 73 Million. The report also says the “use rate of network news” has reached 81.5% and adds, “the Internet can be said to have become the mainstream media with huge influence and the most development potentiality in the field of mass communication.”
Okay, a little perspective. There are 220 Million Americans online. That represents more than 70% of the U.S. population which, you may remember, recently passed the 300 Million mark. The Chinese numbers are based on a population of 1.3 Billion which, by the way, is one-fifth of the entire world population. Just for a little more perspective, the last figures I could find for India put the Internet population at 46 Million-plus with a population of 1.1 Billion people.
NOW YOU SEE IT; NOW YOU DON’T. That is what’s happening in some TV newscasts as advertisers go for product placement. The example making the rounds centers on Meredith-owned Las Vegas Fox affiliate KVVU where fake cups of McDonald’s iced coffee sit on the anchor desks during the news-and-lifestyle portion of the morning show. Reportedly McDonald’s has also placed products on Chicago’s Fox-owned WFLD, Tribune’s Seattle Fox affiliate KCPQ, and Univision 41 in New York City. Interestingly though I could only find the one article dealing with Las Vegas. It appears the one story from the Las Vegas Sun has been picked up by all the media. KVVU News Director Adam Bradshaw says the product placement is only in the lifestyle portion of the morning show, after 7 a.m.; that he wouldn’t put such products in the hard news shows like the 5pm and 10pm and that the product placement would not affect their coverage of McDonald’s. (Thanks to former anchor turned college teacher turned doctoral candidate Rebecca Coates for this tip.)
As a side note to this, there are groups and websites devoted solely to product placement. Website productplacement.biz, for example, makes the case that the growth in product placement and branded entertainment is a natural result of the increase in media choices available to the consumer. Website iTVX.net even has devised a system to equate the value of a product placement segment to a :30 second commercial. Both sites extol the virtues of product placement.
BUYING THE NEWS. If the journalists amongst you found the product placement upsetting, get ready to be real upset. A survey of senior American marketers found that one in five (19%) say their organizations have bought advertising in return for a news story. The survey on behalf of PRWeek and Manning Selvage & Lee also found that one in ten have had “an implicit/non-verbal agreement’ with a reporter or editor that they would get favorable coverage in exchange for advertising, and one in 12 (8%) said they paid or provided a gift of value to an editor or producer to get their product placed in a news story. The survey authors say the latest results are consistent with previous years. The authors say while some marketers see this as simply an extension of product placement, “any kind of undisclosed paid placement spells trouble for consumers, the media and the marketing industry.”
PAYING FOR CITIZEN NEWS. In the Tampa/ St. Petersburg market, Gannett-owned CBS affiliate WTSP is soliciting so-called citizen journalists to shoot video for them. Okay, that may not sound so new in today’s citizen media world, but the difference is that WTSP is paying $20 a pop for the video and is trying to build a stable of 20 of these citizen correspondents to contribute regularly to their newscasts and webcasts. If the citizen shooter provides ten pieces each quarter, for a year, they get to keep the camera and accessories provided by the station. The posting on the station website has already drawn a wide variety of responses, from it would be great to get the tiny slices of life on air to a paramedic worrying about more amateurs getting in the way of emergency services.
On a related note, locally-owned low-power CBS affiliated KPSP is trying to use teen aged viewers as part of their news gathering resource. Former Clear Channel CEO Don Perry took over as VP/ GM of the little station after leaving the mega-group after the sale of its television properties. The local philanthropist owners wanted the station to “play a vital role in the fabric of the community.” Perry says his goal is to re-invent the station, starting with re-training everybody to run all the equipment so they can “deputize camera operators as needed” on a big story, partnering with the local Gannett owned newspaper, as well as making greater use of consumer generated content such as the teen agers. (Thanks to Peabody Awards director Horace Newcomb for these two tips.)
NEWS DIRECTOR DIVERSITY. Although already reported, worth noting again is the Radio Television News Directors’ Association survey showing there are more women news directors in television than ever before and that the percentage of minority news directors in television has also reached an all-time high. The numbers are still small – 28.3% for women and 15.5% for minorities. The report also notes that the percentage of women GMs at stations with local news ‘edged up’ to 16.3% while the percentage of minority GMs jumped to 9.8%. The percentage of minorities in TV news now stands at one fourth (23.6%) but that’s for ALL TV news. For just non-Hispanic TV news, the number drops slightly to 20.1%. The percentage of minorities in radio rose slightly year to year to reach one in ten (11.8%) while the percentage of minority radio news directors fell (to 5.9%). As a bit of perspective, the percentage of minorities in newspapers stands at 13.5%.
THE INTERNET CANARY. That is one of the descriptions given to Internet website, 4chan.org. Using the Internet lingo, it is a “meme” which Wikipedia defines as the spread of ideas and cultural phenomenon, such as tunes, catch phrases, beliefs, fashion and technology. It is one of those places that is a harbinger of future things on the Internet. Let me warn you though, it can be both odd and off-putting in many ways. (Thanks to KPLC GM Jim Serra for this reminder.)
COCKTAIL CHATTER. This isn’t really cocktail chatter. It’s more like me slipping into blog commentary, but the line used by one of the characters on a recent episode of the NBC show My Name’s Earl is too good not to mention. The pregnant ex-wife of Earl talking to a man threatening to shoot her, warns him that if he were to shoot “a hot blonde with a multi-racial child” that “Nancy Grace will have you convicted before the first commercial break.”
KUDOS AND COMPLIMENTS. Normally, MfM is reserved for media trends and research, but every once in a while, we slip in a kudo or two. Today’s goes to client station KFVS in Cape Girardeau, which GM Mike Smythe notes, has won Medium Market station of the year in Illinois for the sixth straight year. No other station has ever won the award six times, and on top of which KFVS is in Missouri, where it also has won several awards.
GIVE CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE: And the credit goes to the readers of MfM. Oftentimes readers send in recommendations for articles. This past week, there were half a dozen such recommendations. So, thank you. And proper credit is given at the bottom of each article. Also I have to compliment the TV Newsday website which is one of the dozens of places I go for news. It continues to get better and better. Several times this past month, general managers, news directors and others have mentioned stories to me that TV Newsday broke.
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 -- July 21, 2008
DIGITAL DROP-OUTS
AND THE WORD IS -- DOOMED
AND THE WINNER IS --- DANG.
AND THE WINNER IS – DEPENDS.
AND THE ONE TO WATCH IS
MEDIA GORILLA FOLLOW-UP
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.
DIGITAL DROP-OUTS: You hear so much about the Web and new media that it’s sometimes easy to think everybody is Internet inclined. Not so, according to a report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The focus of the report was on broadband adoption. Yes, indeed it is up – some 55% of adult Americans now have broadband Internet connections. That’s a 17% increase year to year. And interestingly, monthly broadband bills are actually lower (by 4%) this year than three years ago in 2005. Broadband Internet penetration among upper-income Americans is reaching the “saturation” point at 85%. Low-income Americans actually showed a drop, or were flat, year to year in terms of broadband adoption. Older Americans are adopting broadband at a slightly higher rate than the average. Some of this you may have already heard about. But how about dial-up users. They still make up about 10% of the Internet world. Some don’t have it for economic or access reasons, although nearly two-thirds (60%) say they just aren’t interested in broadband. Then there are the non-Internet users. More than a quarter (27%) of adults in the United States just don’t use the Internet. Age and income are two factors. Still, the report notes that a third (33%) of these non-Internet users simply are not interested with another 9% saying it’s just too difficult or frustrating and another 7% seeing it as “a waste of time.”
As a side note to this, there is a website (digitaldivide.net) that is focused on bridging the divide in digitaldom between the have’s and have not’s – a problem “painstakingly clear” in developing countries but existent also in North America. The organizers of the Digital Divide Network say, “there is a moral imperative to ensure that everyone has equal access to information technology.”
AND THE WORD IS: Doomed, if you don’t start now. That’s the underlying message in a report issued by market research firm Borrell Associates on local web revenues. Although I’ve reported on it before, noting that the report warned that Internet ‘pure-plays’ could “gobble up” local advertising revenue, a second reading proved even scarier. (Yes, I need a life, but it really is worthwhile to review these things a second time sometimes.) The report predicts (or warns, if you prefer) that by 2012, that there will be ‘winners’ in LOCAL online advertising and whoever that winner is, will be “the second or third largest media outlets in their markets in terms of total revenues.” And right now, newspapers have a formidable lead and the biggest head start. Borrell projects total LOCAL (let me emphasize that word again) online ad spending to hit $13.1 Billion this year, up from $8.7 Billion last year. Of that amount, local newspapers will score $3.7 Billion this year, local TV stations $1.2 Billion and local radio stations $255 Million. I know many of my MfM readers are math impaired, so let me point out something. You add up all three sectors and you come up with roughly $5.1 Billion. Subtract that from the $13.1 Billion, and you are $8 Billion short. Guess who’s getting that? You guessed it. The Internet pure plays – Google, Yahoo along with places like Craigslist.
AND THE WINNER IS: Danged if I know. Two separate reports, but both citing data from Hitwise research, show different winners for top U.S. broadcast network sites. One cites PBS.org as the leading site with a quarter of all visits (24.23%). The other cites ABC.com as the winner with a quarter of the visits (26.94%). Interestingly the report citing ABC does not even include PBS in the mix, and that may explain the difference. Plus they are for separate weeks. The reports are consistent in that CBS, NBC and Fox are in a dead heat, with less than a percentage point separating them in both reports. They are also consistent in that the CW gets only a quarter of the visits the other networks get while the MyNetworkTV site gets less than a single percentage point. In the report with the PBS numbers, ABC comes in second (19.35%). That report by Julieanne Smolinski at TVWeek says PBS beat the others in total U.S. visits in part because of video usage online while another report cites the website redesign and a search engine optimization effort.
AND THE WINNER IS: Depends. Month to month, week to week, the honors for top news website will vary among the top three: Yahoo News, CNN, and MSNBC. They all hover around 35 Million unique visitors a month, but CNN usually beats the other two by ten minutes or more in terms of time spent online. Its visitors average a half hour or more at a time. The other two are in the 20-minute-plus range. After the top three, the battle is between AOL and the New York Times, with the number of visitors a month dropping significantly to a little over 20 Million visitors a month. But both do average about half an hour in time spent. Rounding out the top ten in varying order, depending on the week or month, are Tribune group, Gannett, ABC News, Google News, Fox and some times USA Today. Interestingly (as I always say -- at least to me), Yahoo News averages three times as many visitors as Google News (an average of 30-plus Million unique visitors compared to Google’s 11 Million) and usually twice as much time spent by its visitors (an average of 20-plus minutes compared to Google’s 12 minutes.) Considering the previous article, I should note that NPR averages about 3.7 Million unique visitors to its site and they spend an average of six to seven minutes. Lastly, in further proof that I need to get a life, I averaged the amount of time spent online at these various websites. The average time spent was 9 minutes and 49 seconds while the median for time spent was 13 minutes and 30 seconds. I give that, because it gives you something to compare with the time spent on your website.
AND THE ONE TO WATCH IS: Actually there are ten to watch. Ten web startups that Technology Review says are worth watching. In keeping with websites nowadays, they all have some weird names, but not so weird potential. My two favorites help turn everyone into a reporter (not a journalist, just a reporter) on the scene. Qik lets you capture audio and video and stream it in real time to its website and from there to any other platforms. In essence you can broadcast live from your phone. Ushahidi is the Swahili word for “testimony” and is the name of an application developed during Kenya’s chaotic and deadly presidential election last December. It picks up text messages from any mobile phone and displays them on a Google Maps application to track trouble spots. The founder says it can be used in any crisis situation, such as the Katrina disaster, to track problems. A third website is a kind of traffic reporter. Dash Navigation is a two-way Internet-connected traffic network that employs traffic data but then also tracks users’ cars through GPS data to help deal with traffic jams. Others include Pinger which describes itself as “noninterruptive voice mail” – you record a voice message on the Pinger server and it sends out a text message to the recipient telling them they have a message to pick up. Pownce allows you to send and receive large multimedia files to specific people. As the review put it, think Twitter meets Napster. QTech is a sort of electronic post it note which generates reminders about everything from meetings to grocery lists via phone, text message, RSS feed, e-mail or Web interface. 33Across uses self-provided information and Web browsing to find out who are the “viral promoters” who influence the buying of products. Peer39 is a semantic-advertising company whose algorithms help customize advertising messages to a very detailed level based on blogs, social networks, forums and Web page use. Mashery, as its name implies, allows a sort of mash-up of Websites, letting them talk to each other using API’s (application programming interfaces). Anagran uses technology to prescreen data so that it can tell which packets are which (packets are those little bits that all Internet info is broken into); and then it prioritizes their sending.
MEDIA GORILLA FOLLOW-UP: It almost invariably happens. After I send out an MfM, I find new information or information I forgot to put in. In last week’s MfM about TV as the dominant medium, I left out the latest Nielsen numbers on TV viewing, which has hit an all-time high. Americans watch an average of 127 hours and 15 minutes of TV a month. That’s up from 121 hours and 48 minutes last year. Americans also spend 26 hours and 26 minutes a month in front of their computers. Two hours and 19 minutes of that time is spent watching online video.
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.
AND THE WORD IS -- DOOMED
AND THE WINNER IS --- DANG.
AND THE WINNER IS – DEPENDS.
AND THE ONE TO WATCH IS
MEDIA GORILLA FOLLOW-UP
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.
DIGITAL DROP-OUTS: You hear so much about the Web and new media that it’s sometimes easy to think everybody is Internet inclined. Not so, according to a report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The focus of the report was on broadband adoption. Yes, indeed it is up – some 55% of adult Americans now have broadband Internet connections. That’s a 17% increase year to year. And interestingly, monthly broadband bills are actually lower (by 4%) this year than three years ago in 2005. Broadband Internet penetration among upper-income Americans is reaching the “saturation” point at 85%. Low-income Americans actually showed a drop, or were flat, year to year in terms of broadband adoption. Older Americans are adopting broadband at a slightly higher rate than the average. Some of this you may have already heard about. But how about dial-up users. They still make up about 10% of the Internet world. Some don’t have it for economic or access reasons, although nearly two-thirds (60%) say they just aren’t interested in broadband. Then there are the non-Internet users. More than a quarter (27%) of adults in the United States just don’t use the Internet. Age and income are two factors. Still, the report notes that a third (33%) of these non-Internet users simply are not interested with another 9% saying it’s just too difficult or frustrating and another 7% seeing it as “a waste of time.”
As a side note to this, there is a website (digitaldivide.net) that is focused on bridging the divide in digitaldom between the have’s and have not’s – a problem “painstakingly clear” in developing countries but existent also in North America. The organizers of the Digital Divide Network say, “there is a moral imperative to ensure that everyone has equal access to information technology.”
AND THE WORD IS: Doomed, if you don’t start now. That’s the underlying message in a report issued by market research firm Borrell Associates on local web revenues. Although I’ve reported on it before, noting that the report warned that Internet ‘pure-plays’ could “gobble up” local advertising revenue, a second reading proved even scarier. (Yes, I need a life, but it really is worthwhile to review these things a second time sometimes.) The report predicts (or warns, if you prefer) that by 2012, that there will be ‘winners’ in LOCAL online advertising and whoever that winner is, will be “the second or third largest media outlets in their markets in terms of total revenues.” And right now, newspapers have a formidable lead and the biggest head start. Borrell projects total LOCAL (let me emphasize that word again) online ad spending to hit $13.1 Billion this year, up from $8.7 Billion last year. Of that amount, local newspapers will score $3.7 Billion this year, local TV stations $1.2 Billion and local radio stations $255 Million. I know many of my MfM readers are math impaired, so let me point out something. You add up all three sectors and you come up with roughly $5.1 Billion. Subtract that from the $13.1 Billion, and you are $8 Billion short. Guess who’s getting that? You guessed it. The Internet pure plays – Google, Yahoo along with places like Craigslist.
AND THE WINNER IS: Danged if I know. Two separate reports, but both citing data from Hitwise research, show different winners for top U.S. broadcast network sites. One cites PBS.org as the leading site with a quarter of all visits (24.23%). The other cites ABC.com as the winner with a quarter of the visits (26.94%). Interestingly the report citing ABC does not even include PBS in the mix, and that may explain the difference. Plus they are for separate weeks. The reports are consistent in that CBS, NBC and Fox are in a dead heat, with less than a percentage point separating them in both reports. They are also consistent in that the CW gets only a quarter of the visits the other networks get while the MyNetworkTV site gets less than a single percentage point. In the report with the PBS numbers, ABC comes in second (19.35%). That report by Julieanne Smolinski at TVWeek says PBS beat the others in total U.S. visits in part because of video usage online while another report cites the website redesign and a search engine optimization effort.
AND THE WINNER IS: Depends. Month to month, week to week, the honors for top news website will vary among the top three: Yahoo News, CNN, and MSNBC. They all hover around 35 Million unique visitors a month, but CNN usually beats the other two by ten minutes or more in terms of time spent online. Its visitors average a half hour or more at a time. The other two are in the 20-minute-plus range. After the top three, the battle is between AOL and the New York Times, with the number of visitors a month dropping significantly to a little over 20 Million visitors a month. But both do average about half an hour in time spent. Rounding out the top ten in varying order, depending on the week or month, are Tribune group, Gannett, ABC News, Google News, Fox and some times USA Today. Interestingly (as I always say -- at least to me), Yahoo News averages three times as many visitors as Google News (an average of 30-plus Million unique visitors compared to Google’s 11 Million) and usually twice as much time spent by its visitors (an average of 20-plus minutes compared to Google’s 12 minutes.) Considering the previous article, I should note that NPR averages about 3.7 Million unique visitors to its site and they spend an average of six to seven minutes. Lastly, in further proof that I need to get a life, I averaged the amount of time spent online at these various websites. The average time spent was 9 minutes and 49 seconds while the median for time spent was 13 minutes and 30 seconds. I give that, because it gives you something to compare with the time spent on your website.
AND THE ONE TO WATCH IS: Actually there are ten to watch. Ten web startups that Technology Review says are worth watching. In keeping with websites nowadays, they all have some weird names, but not so weird potential. My two favorites help turn everyone into a reporter (not a journalist, just a reporter) on the scene. Qik lets you capture audio and video and stream it in real time to its website and from there to any other platforms. In essence you can broadcast live from your phone. Ushahidi is the Swahili word for “testimony” and is the name of an application developed during Kenya’s chaotic and deadly presidential election last December. It picks up text messages from any mobile phone and displays them on a Google Maps application to track trouble spots. The founder says it can be used in any crisis situation, such as the Katrina disaster, to track problems. A third website is a kind of traffic reporter. Dash Navigation is a two-way Internet-connected traffic network that employs traffic data but then also tracks users’ cars through GPS data to help deal with traffic jams. Others include Pinger which describes itself as “noninterruptive voice mail” – you record a voice message on the Pinger server and it sends out a text message to the recipient telling them they have a message to pick up. Pownce allows you to send and receive large multimedia files to specific people. As the review put it, think Twitter meets Napster. QTech is a sort of electronic post it note which generates reminders about everything from meetings to grocery lists via phone, text message, RSS feed, e-mail or Web interface. 33Across uses self-provided information and Web browsing to find out who are the “viral promoters” who influence the buying of products. Peer39 is a semantic-advertising company whose algorithms help customize advertising messages to a very detailed level based on blogs, social networks, forums and Web page use. Mashery, as its name implies, allows a sort of mash-up of Websites, letting them talk to each other using API’s (application programming interfaces). Anagran uses technology to prescreen data so that it can tell which packets are which (packets are those little bits that all Internet info is broken into); and then it prioritizes their sending.
MEDIA GORILLA FOLLOW-UP: It almost invariably happens. After I send out an MfM, I find new information or information I forgot to put in. In last week’s MfM about TV as the dominant medium, I left out the latest Nielsen numbers on TV viewing, which has hit an all-time high. Americans watch an average of 127 hours and 15 minutes of TV a month. That’s up from 121 hours and 48 minutes last year. Americans also spend 26 hours and 26 minutes a month in front of their computers. Two hours and 19 minutes of that time is spent watching online video.
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 -- July 14, 2008
THE 600-POUND MEDIA GORILLA
VIDEO, VIDEO EVERYWHERE
THE TECHNOLOGICAL SHOTGUN WEDDING
DANGER, WILL ROBINSON
FACTOID OF THE WEEK – VIDEO SHELF LIFE
COCKTAIL CHATTER
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.
THE 600-POUND MEDIA GORILLA: Even without me saying it, you can probably guess what I’m talking about, and if you guessed the Internet, you’re wrong. Half a dozen recent reports that I’ve reviewed came out with the same conclusion – television is and will continue to be for some time the dominant media. First comes the PriceWaterhouseCoopers Global Entertainment and Media Outlook report which says that revenue from traditional media such as television will still dominate the global market. Then there’s the media services firm Magna Global whose director of industry analysis argues that TV’s “convenience, relatively low cost and quality of content” will sustain the traditional viewing and support from big brand advertisers for the foreseeable future. Interestingly The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising based in London (who else but the British would have such a weird name), used the same language as the Magna Global people, referring to television as “the dominant medium.” The Solutions Research Group predicts that TV viewing will stay pretty constant for some time, accounting for nearly half (47%) of the daily “video pie.” Add to that the report by The Media Audit which says adults spend an average 222 minutes a day (that’s 3 hours and 42 minutes) watching television, compared to 122 minutes a day using the Internet. Finally research conducted by The Nielsen Company for the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing which shows the vast majority of adults (94%) who subscribe to cable or satellite prefer to watch on the traditional TV sets.
Of course it’s never that simple. The Media Audit study notes that online usage has jumped 62% in the past year from an average of 2 hours and 2 minutes a day to 3 hours and 17 minutes a day. Television, which while still the larger amount, has actually dropped as a percent of the total media day from 36.5% in 2006 to 32.7% in 2007. The CTAM commissioned study by Nielsen noted similar numbers and percentages, while also noting that a third of broadband users surveyed (35%) said they had turned to the Internet to watch a television show originally shown on TV. The Solutions Research Group makes a similar point, noting that TV’s share has dropped while PC-based, web video and mobile video consumption has continued to rise; but the group says on-demand video and digital video recorders will mean TV will still retain a place in the market. The PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) report says the ballooning over-50 crowd in developed countries (aka America and Europe) is the main support for traditional media even while adopting some of the new media; but that in the developing countries it’s the ballooning under-35 crowd who are setting the stage for change in media consumption. Putting that into PWC-speak, media companies should continue to “extract revenue” from the traditional segments while the emerging technologies “solidify their consumer position.” Brian Weiser with Magna Global says part of the problem with ad spending on new media is that it is labor intensive, but that as ad buying becomes more standardized for these segments along with data crunching (aka measurement), spending will increase. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising warns that increased advertising is driving some people away while the advent of the personal video recorders is helping keep them away.
Side Note #1: A study commissioned by Yahoo titled Engage and Entertain: The Impact of the Internet on your TV Show Brand” found that a third of TV viewers go on-line for details about a TV show BEFORE watching it while two-thirds (68%) of TV viewers say they go online to find about more information about a TV show AFTER watching it.
Side Note #2: The PriceWaterhouseCoopers report says the fastest growth in media will come in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) nations with the group forecasting the media business in those four countries at $250 Billion by 2012 compared to $165 Billion for Japan, $633 Billion for Western Europe and $760 Billion for the U-S which remains the largest but slowest growing market.
VIDEO, VIDEO EVERYWHERE: Several reports say we should get away from thinking about things like TV, DVD’s, DVR’s, Mobile, Film, Movies, Internet video and video games as separate issues but rather as part of a total video universe. The Solutions Research Group, cited above, predicts that by the year 2013, people will spend as much time consuming video as they do sleeping – roughly eight hours a day, up from six hours a day right now and 4.6 hours a day in 1996. The report says the “appetite for video is remarkable” and talks about “ambient video everywhere.” In a similar vein, the Forrester Research group issued a report titled somewhat hyperbolically How Video Will Take Over the World in which it talks about a concept it calls “omnivideo.” It predicts a video explosion with individuals able to watch – and produce – video nearly everywhere on a variety of different devices because, says principal analyst James McQuivey, “video satisfies the brain in a way that other media just cannot.”
THE TECHNOLOGICAL SHOTGUN WEDDING: It’s between TV and the PC, and several major groups are working to make sure it happens. Sony has created an Internet video link that plugs into the back of Bravia LCD TV’s and allows you to access sites as diverse as YouTube, AOL, CBS.com and Yahoo! Panasonic’s version is Vieracast on its Viera model TV sets and which accesses YouTube and the Weather Channel. Sharp has a configurable widget on its Aquos Net TV’s to update people on weather, NASDAQ, traffic and comic strips. Comcast is seeking patents, as reported by Cynopsis, for two devices – one that acts as a portable TV and video player and one that ports TV content to PC’s. Of course, Google is in the fray, with its announcement of a Google Media Server which conveys content from the PC to the TV AND even a move to distribute ORIGINAL TV content via AdSense. Finally, there is a device called the ZvBox which lets you watch high definition Internet video on any digital TV in your housing, simply by plugging one end into your Windows PC and the other into an ordinary cable TV wall socket.
DANGER, WILL ROBINSON: That catch phrase from the 1960’s TV series Lost In Space was the first thing that came to mind as I read the Technology Review’s special report on the future of the Web, quoting thirteen of the leading minds in the Internet world. Many of them warned that privacy will be lost in the interconnected world that is the Internet. Richard Stallman who developed the GNU/ Linux system and founded The Free Software Movement warns of the dangers of Big Brother while Mena Trott who cofounded Six Apart sees it as letting people put most of their day online. Jonathan Abrams who founded Socializr and Friendster offers the tongue-in-cheek (or at least I think it’s tongue-in-cheek) prediction that in ten years we will all have chips in our brain which will immediately process all information from others we meet as well as sharing it with others, overloading our brain and “causing frequent nosebleeds and occasional cerebral hemorrhage.” An interestingly different perspective comes from the three futurists who, not coincidentally, all come from the developing regions of India, Africa and the Middle East, with all three seeing the Web as empowering the people of their areas either financially, socially or politically. A good number of the predictors talked about the Internet becoming more mobile so people are not ‘tied’ to a computer at a desk. And, of course, no prediction about the Web would be complete without a statement from Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the Web, who speaks about Linked Open Data. And in a line that only Sir Tim and a few others probably full understands, says, “a mashup sphere will feast on a wealth of Semantic Web data and herald the next wave of progress and creativity on the Web.”
FACTOID OF THE WEEK: According to website, TubeMogul, whose motto is “empowering online video,” the ‘shelf life’ of most video is about two weeks. The website which helps people upload video to multiple websites reports that a quarter (25%) of all views of a video take place in the first four days; half of the views (50%) take place in the first two weeks; three quarters in the first 44 days; and by day 81, nearly all of the viewing (95%) that will take place has taken place.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: Just one, but it’s a beauty. You’ve heard about clothes and fashion outlets opening businesses in the virtual worlds. Now, trend website Springwise reports that the flip side of that is people are taking the clothes worn by their avatars and having them made for real world use. Two websites, Stardoll and Spreadshirt, are already capitalizing on the trend, according to industry website, Virtual Worlds News. Yes, I know, I had the same reaction. There is actually an association or newsletter specifically for virtual worlds. In fact there is going to be a virtual worlds expo in Los Angeles in September. And I would note a previous MfM in which people were getting married in these virtual worlds, or at least their avatars were, even though some of them were married in real life.
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.
VIDEO, VIDEO EVERYWHERE
THE TECHNOLOGICAL SHOTGUN WEDDING
DANGER, WILL ROBINSON
FACTOID OF THE WEEK – VIDEO SHELF LIFE
COCKTAIL CHATTER
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.
THE 600-POUND MEDIA GORILLA: Even without me saying it, you can probably guess what I’m talking about, and if you guessed the Internet, you’re wrong. Half a dozen recent reports that I’ve reviewed came out with the same conclusion – television is and will continue to be for some time the dominant media. First comes the PriceWaterhouseCoopers Global Entertainment and Media Outlook report which says that revenue from traditional media such as television will still dominate the global market. Then there’s the media services firm Magna Global whose director of industry analysis argues that TV’s “convenience, relatively low cost and quality of content” will sustain the traditional viewing and support from big brand advertisers for the foreseeable future. Interestingly The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising based in London (who else but the British would have such a weird name), used the same language as the Magna Global people, referring to television as “the dominant medium.” The Solutions Research Group predicts that TV viewing will stay pretty constant for some time, accounting for nearly half (47%) of the daily “video pie.” Add to that the report by The Media Audit which says adults spend an average 222 minutes a day (that’s 3 hours and 42 minutes) watching television, compared to 122 minutes a day using the Internet. Finally research conducted by The Nielsen Company for the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing which shows the vast majority of adults (94%) who subscribe to cable or satellite prefer to watch on the traditional TV sets.
Of course it’s never that simple. The Media Audit study notes that online usage has jumped 62% in the past year from an average of 2 hours and 2 minutes a day to 3 hours and 17 minutes a day. Television, which while still the larger amount, has actually dropped as a percent of the total media day from 36.5% in 2006 to 32.7% in 2007. The CTAM commissioned study by Nielsen noted similar numbers and percentages, while also noting that a third of broadband users surveyed (35%) said they had turned to the Internet to watch a television show originally shown on TV. The Solutions Research Group makes a similar point, noting that TV’s share has dropped while PC-based, web video and mobile video consumption has continued to rise; but the group says on-demand video and digital video recorders will mean TV will still retain a place in the market. The PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) report says the ballooning over-50 crowd in developed countries (aka America and Europe) is the main support for traditional media even while adopting some of the new media; but that in the developing countries it’s the ballooning under-35 crowd who are setting the stage for change in media consumption. Putting that into PWC-speak, media companies should continue to “extract revenue” from the traditional segments while the emerging technologies “solidify their consumer position.” Brian Weiser with Magna Global says part of the problem with ad spending on new media is that it is labor intensive, but that as ad buying becomes more standardized for these segments along with data crunching (aka measurement), spending will increase. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising warns that increased advertising is driving some people away while the advent of the personal video recorders is helping keep them away.
Side Note #1: A study commissioned by Yahoo titled Engage and Entertain: The Impact of the Internet on your TV Show Brand” found that a third of TV viewers go on-line for details about a TV show BEFORE watching it while two-thirds (68%) of TV viewers say they go online to find about more information about a TV show AFTER watching it.
Side Note #2: The PriceWaterhouseCoopers report says the fastest growth in media will come in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) nations with the group forecasting the media business in those four countries at $250 Billion by 2012 compared to $165 Billion for Japan, $633 Billion for Western Europe and $760 Billion for the U-S which remains the largest but slowest growing market.
VIDEO, VIDEO EVERYWHERE: Several reports say we should get away from thinking about things like TV, DVD’s, DVR’s, Mobile, Film, Movies, Internet video and video games as separate issues but rather as part of a total video universe. The Solutions Research Group, cited above, predicts that by the year 2013, people will spend as much time consuming video as they do sleeping – roughly eight hours a day, up from six hours a day right now and 4.6 hours a day in 1996. The report says the “appetite for video is remarkable” and talks about “ambient video everywhere.” In a similar vein, the Forrester Research group issued a report titled somewhat hyperbolically How Video Will Take Over the World in which it talks about a concept it calls “omnivideo.” It predicts a video explosion with individuals able to watch – and produce – video nearly everywhere on a variety of different devices because, says principal analyst James McQuivey, “video satisfies the brain in a way that other media just cannot.”
THE TECHNOLOGICAL SHOTGUN WEDDING: It’s between TV and the PC, and several major groups are working to make sure it happens. Sony has created an Internet video link that plugs into the back of Bravia LCD TV’s and allows you to access sites as diverse as YouTube, AOL, CBS.com and Yahoo! Panasonic’s version is Vieracast on its Viera model TV sets and which accesses YouTube and the Weather Channel. Sharp has a configurable widget on its Aquos Net TV’s to update people on weather, NASDAQ, traffic and comic strips. Comcast is seeking patents, as reported by Cynopsis, for two devices – one that acts as a portable TV and video player and one that ports TV content to PC’s. Of course, Google is in the fray, with its announcement of a Google Media Server which conveys content from the PC to the TV AND even a move to distribute ORIGINAL TV content via AdSense. Finally, there is a device called the ZvBox which lets you watch high definition Internet video on any digital TV in your housing, simply by plugging one end into your Windows PC and the other into an ordinary cable TV wall socket.
DANGER, WILL ROBINSON: That catch phrase from the 1960’s TV series Lost In Space was the first thing that came to mind as I read the Technology Review’s special report on the future of the Web, quoting thirteen of the leading minds in the Internet world. Many of them warned that privacy will be lost in the interconnected world that is the Internet. Richard Stallman who developed the GNU/ Linux system and founded The Free Software Movement warns of the dangers of Big Brother while Mena Trott who cofounded Six Apart sees it as letting people put most of their day online. Jonathan Abrams who founded Socializr and Friendster offers the tongue-in-cheek (or at least I think it’s tongue-in-cheek) prediction that in ten years we will all have chips in our brain which will immediately process all information from others we meet as well as sharing it with others, overloading our brain and “causing frequent nosebleeds and occasional cerebral hemorrhage.” An interestingly different perspective comes from the three futurists who, not coincidentally, all come from the developing regions of India, Africa and the Middle East, with all three seeing the Web as empowering the people of their areas either financially, socially or politically. A good number of the predictors talked about the Internet becoming more mobile so people are not ‘tied’ to a computer at a desk. And, of course, no prediction about the Web would be complete without a statement from Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the Web, who speaks about Linked Open Data. And in a line that only Sir Tim and a few others probably full understands, says, “a mashup sphere will feast on a wealth of Semantic Web data and herald the next wave of progress and creativity on the Web.”
FACTOID OF THE WEEK: According to website, TubeMogul, whose motto is “empowering online video,” the ‘shelf life’ of most video is about two weeks. The website which helps people upload video to multiple websites reports that a quarter (25%) of all views of a video take place in the first four days; half of the views (50%) take place in the first two weeks; three quarters in the first 44 days; and by day 81, nearly all of the viewing (95%) that will take place has taken place.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: Just one, but it’s a beauty. You’ve heard about clothes and fashion outlets opening businesses in the virtual worlds. Now, trend website Springwise reports that the flip side of that is people are taking the clothes worn by their avatars and having them made for real world use. Two websites, Stardoll and Spreadshirt, are already capitalizing on the trend, according to industry website, Virtual Worlds News. Yes, I know, I had the same reaction. There is actually an association or newsletter specifically for virtual worlds. In fact there is going to be a virtual worlds expo in Los Angeles in September. And I would note a previous MfM in which people were getting married in these virtual worlds, or at least their avatars were, even though some of them were married in real life.
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.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Message from Michael -- July 7, 2008
THE ATLANTA TRAFFIC JAM ON THE INTERNET HIGHWAY
CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION
SHOW ME THE SOCIAL MONEY
IRRIGATING THE VAST WASTELAND
COCKTAIL CHATTER – GLOBAL WARMING, AVATARS AND THE PRINCESS BRIDE
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.
THE ATLANTA TRAFFIC JAM ON THE INTERNET HIGHWAY: That’s as close an analogy as I could come up with, in trying to visualize the amount of Internet traffic hitting the so-called information superhighway around the world. According to the latest report from Internet backbone provider Cisco, global internet traffic in 2012 will be over a thousand times greater than ALL the traffic traversing the U.S. Internet backbone in 2000. More specifically, the company says global IP traffic will increase SIX FOLD, from 7 exabytes per month last year to 44 exabytes by the year 2012. As if that number isn’t enough, let me add a little perspective. According to data cited by the University of California-Berkeley, every word ever spoken by human beings since the dawn of time could be stored in five exabytes of data. The report, with the catchy title of Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast (visual networking is the combination of video and social networking/ collaboration), says Internet growth is slowing, but that is very much a relative term when you consider the projection calls for a 51% growth this year, followed by 44% in 2009 and 40% in 2010. Of course, a substantial amount of that traffic growth is video. And here’s the kicker: the report says “the volumes are so large that sustaining high growth rates becomes increasingly difficult.”
And that is the essence of an article in Technology Review which warns video downloads are “sucking up bandwidth at an unprecedented rate.” Senior Editor Larry Hardesty gives the example of video download The Evolution of Dance (which, BTW, really is cool). The video runs six minutes, but watching it requires 100 times as much data as reading a magazine article of the same length. Or, put another way, the video which has been downloaded 87 Million times (including one by me) has sent the equivalent of 250,000 DVD’s worth of data across the Internet. He says the information superhighway isn’t really a superhighway at all, but more like a four-lane state road with a traffic light every five miles. Those traffic lights are the routers and switchers which control the packets of information. A technical solution has been developed by a Ph.D. student at Yale which basically maps all the computers of all the ISP’s and therefore all the ‘traffic lights’, but the problem is it requires an across-the-board cooperative effort.
And that runs into the issue of net neutrality which runs into the issue of – do you trust the major Internet providers. Cable and Internet provider Comcast was recently cited for controlling the video traffic of BitTorrent. The question to be determined is what controls are necessary technically to make sure those broadband pipes don’t become clogged and which controls represent an attempt by the larger corporate ISP’s to squelch competition. Cable and Internet provider Time Warner, along with Comcast, is looking at capping usage with additional fees for anything above that cap. Officials at Times Warner say 5% of Internet users account for 46% of the bandwidth used, and that usage is doubling every 1.5 years.
Foot Note: A quick lesson in data storage, courtesy of Wikipedia: A kilobyte, as we all know is 1000 bytes. A megabyte is a thousand thousand bytes. From there, it goes to gigabyte, with each increase adding a power of one, so that a gigabyte is 1000/3 (to the power of 3). After that, it’s terabyte, petrabyte and then exabyte which is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. After that it’s zettabyte and then yottabyte. Humorously, at least to me, when I typed the word exabyte the first time, my Word processor highlighted it as an unknown word.
CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION: I vaguely remember the term from one of my economics courses years ago, in which one spends lavishly to display income or wealth. That seems to be some of the drive behind the video clogging, as people talk about the video’s they’ve seen and share with others, according to two separate reports. Forrester Research forecasts a 25% increase in video consumption with per-day video video viewing jumping from four hours a day to five hours a day. Not from more people joining in so much as from people viewing more content online. In a similar vein, ComScore reports that while the web video audience is flat, the actual usage has soared. According to ComScore, the percentage of video viewers dropped slightly from 74% last year to 71% this year, but those folks are viewing more clips (82 this year versus 63 last) and watching them longer (228 minutes this year versus 158 minutes last year.)
SHOW ME THE SOCIAL MONEY: More and more, one hears or reads that journalistic axiom being used when discussing social networking sites. The question is being raised by organizations as diverse as eMarketer and Technology Review. That’s not to say they’re all failing to make it. According to VentureBeat, sites like LinkedIn are making it, using a variety of models to drive revenue. What may be the reason for the disconnect is because of the research indicating a huge growth in the use of social networking sites. Research firm TNS says more than half of the online social network users visit their sites daily, with many logging on several times a day. In a similar vein, advertising giant Universal McCann echoes those numbers in its “Media in Mind” study showing that half of adults rely on social media to communicate with friends, family and colleagues and that 85% of adults 18-34 use “at least one Web 2.0 platform” to stay in touch with their peers. A study by the University of Minnesota says three quarters (77%) of teens aged 16 – 18 have a social networking profile and that social networks “had increased their creativity and their willingness to learn new communication skills.” An analysis by Bryan Urstadt writing for Technology Reviews shows that while Internet ad spending continues to skyrocket, social networks remain a very small percentage of that revenue. Part of the problem may be the unpredictable nature of social networks, he says, with advertisers reluctant to have their ads on the same page where sexually explicit content is provided or where the F-word is used with gay abandon. As a point of reference to this, according to Price Waterhouse Coopers and the Internet Advertising Bureau, first quarter spending on online advertising hit $5.8 Billion, an 18.2% growth and the second highest fiscal quarter.
Side Note: You already know the big social networking sites – MySpace which has more than 60 Million users and is growing at 7% a year; and Facebook which has 26 Million users and is growing at 83% a year. And Maybe you know about Classmates Online (14.3 Million users and a 20% growth) LinkedIn (7.6 Million user and 146% growth); Windows Live Spaces (7.6 Million users but a minus-6% drop); AOL Hometown (6.5 Million users but, again, a drop, this time of 11%); and Flixster (4.8 Million users and a 70% growth). But how about Reunion (7.3 Million users and an 82% growth), or Club Penguin, targeting kids and tweens, 4.4 Million users and 39% growth) or Imeem, focusing on music and bands, (3.1 Million users and a 102% growth rate.)
IRRIGATING THE VAST WASTELAND: That may be a little cutesy of a headline but that is in essence what the University Of Georgia’s Research Foundation and the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication propose to do with the recent offer to purchase the Media General-owned television station in Northeast Georgia. To borrow from the famous speech by Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minnow, the concept is to balance “costs per thousands” with “understanding per millions” by combining a teaching laboratory for journalism students with an innovation incubator in a commercially viable (read – profitable) operation. An obvious disclaimer: I teach at the Grady College and have been involved in the process, along with colleagues David Hazinski, Steve Smith and Brooke Rooks as well as former WNEG General Manager Ben Daniels, along with our fearless leader, Dean Cully Clark. We believe that you can have good television and good ratings, that money and public responsibility can be used in the same sentence, that new media and mainstream media can be a winning combination, and that instead of being a vast wasteland television is a vast opportunity. Some quick details: The station will be an independent with an emphasis on local news and programming, combined with UGA-generated materials supplemented by purchased programming. The station is presently based in Toccoa, Georgia, but the main operations will be migrated to Athens, but with a continued emphasis on all the communities of Northeast Georgia. Eventually it will evolve into a state-wide superstation.
FACTOID(S) OF THE WEEK: Okay, I admit it, I can’t just do one. First off, in an earlier MfM, we reported the prediction that Internet advertising spending would overtake television spending in five years time. A new report by Enders Analysis says Internet advertising will overtake television advertising in England this year. Global media revenue will reach $2.2 Trillion by 2012, with an annual growth rate of 6.6%, according to Price Waterhouse Coopers.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: According to Pew Research, less than half (49%) of Republicans believe there is evidence of global warming. Yet, according to a poll by Harris Interactive, nearly three out of four Americans (72%) believe their personal actions “are significant on the environment” while one in five (22%) believe their actions are not significant. According to lifestyle trends site Springwise, two brothers in Maine are offering consumers the chance to ‘adopt’ a lobster trap for one year for $2,995, and for that they get all the lobsters it catches for a year. Political website Stateline.org reports that Vermont has declared Juneteenth (when slaves in Galveston, Texas, found out that the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed) as a state holiday, making it the 29th state to do so. Somewhat surprising, since I can still remember reporting on it as a new phenomenon, Linden Labs Second Life is actually celebrating its fifth anniversary. Even more surprising (at least to me), teen-oriented online virtual world Habbo (which I admit I’ve never even heard of), celebrated a milestone with its 100 Millionth Avatar. (Think about it – 100 Million.) And my favorite cocktail chatter of all, Worldwide Biggies has created a “narrative adventure game” based on the Rob Reiner classic movie (and one of my all-time favorites) The Princess Bride, in which you get to choose your favorite character to play and are given separate tasks to complete.
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.
CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION
SHOW ME THE SOCIAL MONEY
IRRIGATING THE VAST WASTELAND
COCKTAIL CHATTER – GLOBAL WARMING, AVATARS AND THE PRINCESS BRIDE
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.
THE ATLANTA TRAFFIC JAM ON THE INTERNET HIGHWAY: That’s as close an analogy as I could come up with, in trying to visualize the amount of Internet traffic hitting the so-called information superhighway around the world. According to the latest report from Internet backbone provider Cisco, global internet traffic in 2012 will be over a thousand times greater than ALL the traffic traversing the U.S. Internet backbone in 2000. More specifically, the company says global IP traffic will increase SIX FOLD, from 7 exabytes per month last year to 44 exabytes by the year 2012. As if that number isn’t enough, let me add a little perspective. According to data cited by the University of California-Berkeley, every word ever spoken by human beings since the dawn of time could be stored in five exabytes of data. The report, with the catchy title of Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast (visual networking is the combination of video and social networking/ collaboration), says Internet growth is slowing, but that is very much a relative term when you consider the projection calls for a 51% growth this year, followed by 44% in 2009 and 40% in 2010. Of course, a substantial amount of that traffic growth is video. And here’s the kicker: the report says “the volumes are so large that sustaining high growth rates becomes increasingly difficult.”
And that is the essence of an article in Technology Review which warns video downloads are “sucking up bandwidth at an unprecedented rate.” Senior Editor Larry Hardesty gives the example of video download The Evolution of Dance (which, BTW, really is cool). The video runs six minutes, but watching it requires 100 times as much data as reading a magazine article of the same length. Or, put another way, the video which has been downloaded 87 Million times (including one by me) has sent the equivalent of 250,000 DVD’s worth of data across the Internet. He says the information superhighway isn’t really a superhighway at all, but more like a four-lane state road with a traffic light every five miles. Those traffic lights are the routers and switchers which control the packets of information. A technical solution has been developed by a Ph.D. student at Yale which basically maps all the computers of all the ISP’s and therefore all the ‘traffic lights’, but the problem is it requires an across-the-board cooperative effort.
And that runs into the issue of net neutrality which runs into the issue of – do you trust the major Internet providers. Cable and Internet provider Comcast was recently cited for controlling the video traffic of BitTorrent. The question to be determined is what controls are necessary technically to make sure those broadband pipes don’t become clogged and which controls represent an attempt by the larger corporate ISP’s to squelch competition. Cable and Internet provider Time Warner, along with Comcast, is looking at capping usage with additional fees for anything above that cap. Officials at Times Warner say 5% of Internet users account for 46% of the bandwidth used, and that usage is doubling every 1.5 years.
Foot Note: A quick lesson in data storage, courtesy of Wikipedia: A kilobyte, as we all know is 1000 bytes. A megabyte is a thousand thousand bytes. From there, it goes to gigabyte, with each increase adding a power of one, so that a gigabyte is 1000/3 (to the power of 3). After that, it’s terabyte, petrabyte and then exabyte which is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. After that it’s zettabyte and then yottabyte. Humorously, at least to me, when I typed the word exabyte the first time, my Word processor highlighted it as an unknown word.
CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION: I vaguely remember the term from one of my economics courses years ago, in which one spends lavishly to display income or wealth. That seems to be some of the drive behind the video clogging, as people talk about the video’s they’ve seen and share with others, according to two separate reports. Forrester Research forecasts a 25% increase in video consumption with per-day video video viewing jumping from four hours a day to five hours a day. Not from more people joining in so much as from people viewing more content online. In a similar vein, ComScore reports that while the web video audience is flat, the actual usage has soared. According to ComScore, the percentage of video viewers dropped slightly from 74% last year to 71% this year, but those folks are viewing more clips (82 this year versus 63 last) and watching them longer (228 minutes this year versus 158 minutes last year.)
SHOW ME THE SOCIAL MONEY: More and more, one hears or reads that journalistic axiom being used when discussing social networking sites. The question is being raised by organizations as diverse as eMarketer and Technology Review. That’s not to say they’re all failing to make it. According to VentureBeat, sites like LinkedIn are making it, using a variety of models to drive revenue. What may be the reason for the disconnect is because of the research indicating a huge growth in the use of social networking sites. Research firm TNS says more than half of the online social network users visit their sites daily, with many logging on several times a day. In a similar vein, advertising giant Universal McCann echoes those numbers in its “Media in Mind” study showing that half of adults rely on social media to communicate with friends, family and colleagues and that 85% of adults 18-34 use “at least one Web 2.0 platform” to stay in touch with their peers. A study by the University of Minnesota says three quarters (77%) of teens aged 16 – 18 have a social networking profile and that social networks “had increased their creativity and their willingness to learn new communication skills.” An analysis by Bryan Urstadt writing for Technology Reviews shows that while Internet ad spending continues to skyrocket, social networks remain a very small percentage of that revenue. Part of the problem may be the unpredictable nature of social networks, he says, with advertisers reluctant to have their ads on the same page where sexually explicit content is provided or where the F-word is used with gay abandon. As a point of reference to this, according to Price Waterhouse Coopers and the Internet Advertising Bureau, first quarter spending on online advertising hit $5.8 Billion, an 18.2% growth and the second highest fiscal quarter.
Side Note: You already know the big social networking sites – MySpace which has more than 60 Million users and is growing at 7% a year; and Facebook which has 26 Million users and is growing at 83% a year. And Maybe you know about Classmates Online (14.3 Million users and a 20% growth) LinkedIn (7.6 Million user and 146% growth); Windows Live Spaces (7.6 Million users but a minus-6% drop); AOL Hometown (6.5 Million users but, again, a drop, this time of 11%); and Flixster (4.8 Million users and a 70% growth). But how about Reunion (7.3 Million users and an 82% growth), or Club Penguin, targeting kids and tweens, 4.4 Million users and 39% growth) or Imeem, focusing on music and bands, (3.1 Million users and a 102% growth rate.)
IRRIGATING THE VAST WASTELAND: That may be a little cutesy of a headline but that is in essence what the University Of Georgia’s Research Foundation and the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication propose to do with the recent offer to purchase the Media General-owned television station in Northeast Georgia. To borrow from the famous speech by Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minnow, the concept is to balance “costs per thousands” with “understanding per millions” by combining a teaching laboratory for journalism students with an innovation incubator in a commercially viable (read – profitable) operation. An obvious disclaimer: I teach at the Grady College and have been involved in the process, along with colleagues David Hazinski, Steve Smith and Brooke Rooks as well as former WNEG General Manager Ben Daniels, along with our fearless leader, Dean Cully Clark. We believe that you can have good television and good ratings, that money and public responsibility can be used in the same sentence, that new media and mainstream media can be a winning combination, and that instead of being a vast wasteland television is a vast opportunity. Some quick details: The station will be an independent with an emphasis on local news and programming, combined with UGA-generated materials supplemented by purchased programming. The station is presently based in Toccoa, Georgia, but the main operations will be migrated to Athens, but with a continued emphasis on all the communities of Northeast Georgia. Eventually it will evolve into a state-wide superstation.
FACTOID(S) OF THE WEEK: Okay, I admit it, I can’t just do one. First off, in an earlier MfM, we reported the prediction that Internet advertising spending would overtake television spending in five years time. A new report by Enders Analysis says Internet advertising will overtake television advertising in England this year. Global media revenue will reach $2.2 Trillion by 2012, with an annual growth rate of 6.6%, according to Price Waterhouse Coopers.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: According to Pew Research, less than half (49%) of Republicans believe there is evidence of global warming. Yet, according to a poll by Harris Interactive, nearly three out of four Americans (72%) believe their personal actions “are significant on the environment” while one in five (22%) believe their actions are not significant. According to lifestyle trends site Springwise, two brothers in Maine are offering consumers the chance to ‘adopt’ a lobster trap for one year for $2,995, and for that they get all the lobsters it catches for a year. Political website Stateline.org reports that Vermont has declared Juneteenth (when slaves in Galveston, Texas, found out that the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed) as a state holiday, making it the 29th state to do so. Somewhat surprising, since I can still remember reporting on it as a new phenomenon, Linden Labs Second Life is actually celebrating its fifth anniversary. Even more surprising (at least to me), teen-oriented online virtual world Habbo (which I admit I’ve never even heard of), celebrated a milestone with its 100 Millionth Avatar. (Think about it – 100 Million.) And my favorite cocktail chatter of all, Worldwide Biggies has created a “narrative adventure game” based on the Rob Reiner classic movie (and one of my all-time favorites) The Princess Bride, in which you get to choose your favorite character to play and are given separate tasks to complete.
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 -- June 23, 2008
HOW THE WEB WAS WON
QUOTES – FACTOIDS – THOUGHTS
AND A DISCLAIMER
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.
HOW THE WEB WAS WON: That’s the title of an article in the July issue of Vanity Fair which, among other things… clarifies that former vice president Al Gore never claimed to have “invented the Internet” but could rightfully claim that legislation he sponsored paved the way for the Internet… doesn’t clarify but does spell out the epic battle between Microsoft and Netscape… talks about the “Cro-Magnon” mentality of AT&T which lost out on the chance to get in on the ground floor of the Internet… and talks about when the “Infant Internet took its first breath”… as well as the “Kitty Hawk” moment of the Internet start-up. I highly recommend reading it, but in true MfM tradition, I read it for you. In fact, this week’s whole MfM is devoted to it. As you can tell from some of the quotes, the article is rightfully sub-titled An Oral History of the Internet. The “first breath” took place when Leonard Kleinrock, a professor of computer sciences at U.C.L.A., got his computer and the one at Stanford Research Institute to talk “host to host.” The “Kitty Hawk” moment was the very first International Conference on Computer Communications which demonstrated the potential of what was then known as the ARPAnet. As for the “Cro-Magnon” comment, that comes from Robert Taylor, the third director of ARPA’s computer science division, who developed the concept of “packet switching” which is a critical component of data transfer on the Internet but which the “suits” at AT&T said wouldn’t work. Why? Because it came from someone outside AT&T and so obviously “we didn’t know what we were doing.”
AT&T comes in for a lot of hammering. Robert Metcalfe who worked on Arpanet at M.I.T. and who invented Ethernet says that to this day he will have nothing to do with AT&T when he realized early on “that these sons of bitches were rooting against me.” But AT&T isn’t alone. Vinod Khosla who helped create Sun Microsystems talks about meeting with the C.E.O.’s of the major newspaper companies, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Gannett, Times Mirror and Tribune to propose something called the New Century Network. But the C.E.O.’s “couldn’t convince themselves” that Google, Yahoo or eBay would ever be important. When Microsoft decided to get into the online journalism business with Slate magazine, Editor Michael Kinsley recalls, the company wanted every writer to sign three different documents warranting the accuracy of everything they said and indemnifying Microsoft. Bill Bastone, founder of investigative journalism website The Smoking Gun, pokes fun at himself, noting that he didn’t even have an e-mail address when he started so he had to actually FAX out the press releases announcing the start of his website.
HOW THE WEB WAS WON ‘QUOTES’: From Vint Cerf, formerly with U.C.L.A. and now ‘chief Internet evangelist’ with Google, talking about those early years: “We had some idea of how powerful this was. What we didn’t know was the economics of it.” Rich Karlgaard, of Upside magazine, talks about asking a 25-year-old ‘vice president of business development’ during the dot-com bust period about whether his company is profitable or not, and gets the response, “we’re a pre-revenue company.” Pierre Omidyar says that when he founded online auction site eBay, he founded it on the notion that people are basically good and can be trusted and that “what eBay has shown is that, in fact, you can trust a complete stranger.” Howard Dean, former Presidential candidate known for his use of the Internet in his campaign and now chair of the Democratic National Committee: “The Internet is the most important democratizing invention since the printing press, 500 years ago.” Chuck Todd, political director of NBC News, comparing Internet use in politics to Microsoft updating its Windows applications, says: “Obama basically is Dean 2.0.”
HOW THE WEB WAS WON ‘FACTOIDS’: Let me start with one that I have referred to in previous MfM’s: According to the New York Times, YouTube in 2007 consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in the year 2000. Just about as startling, YouTube founder Chad Hurley is quoted in the article as saying, “every minute on our site we receive over ten hours of video.” The online porn business generates some $2.8 Billion annually with YouPorn, an amateur porn site not connected to YouTube, getting more traffic than CNN.com. In the so-called dot-com bust, between March 10, 2000 and October 20, 2002, the NASDAQ Composite Index, which lists most technology and Internet companies, lost 78% of its value. Yet in that same time, from 2000 all the way to now, the actual usage of the Internet continued to rise dramatically every year. When eBay went public, its filings showed that Beanie Babies accounted for 8% of the site’s entire inventory. The now famous @ sign which is so much a part of our world came about simply because one of the early developers realized it was the least used symbol on keyboards. The global cost of combating unwanted e-mails will reach $140 Billion in 2008, according to technology group Ferris Research. The first person indicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for creating a worm that was the first significant network attack in 1988 was a 20-year-old Cornell University graduate student named Robert Tappan Morris. He is now a professor of computer sciences at M.I.T., and is quoted in the article as saying, “I’d rather not talk about it – Sorry.”
HOW THE WEB WAS WON ‘THOUGHTS’: Elon Musk who helped create the electronic payment service PayPal says he believed the Internet was going to change the very nature of humanity because, “it was like humanity getting a nervous system.” Somewhat less hyperbolic, but no less telling is the point made by Sun Microsystems Vinod Khosla that society is always organized around communication channels. Some 200 years ago, it was rivers, sea lanes and mountain passes. Now it’s the Internet which is the community channel and “communication always changes society.” Gina Bianchini, C-E-O and co-founder of social networking system Ning, argues that it takes a decade or more for people to figure out the “native behavior” of any new medium. For the first 15 years of television, she argues, they were actually filming radio shows. In the same way we are only now discovering the “native behavior” of the Internet – behavior which, she believes, is social and all about two-way communication.
FINALLY: The article makes the point that ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) and therefore ARPAnet was created in the 1950’s in response to national security concerns about the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik. Remember Bob Taylor who had the run-in with AT&T and who created packet switching? He said when he had his “Eureka” moment, he went to the head of ARPA, told him about it, and a budget change was made, switching over a Million dollars from one department to another, all in the space of 20 minutes. That’s because at ARPA, says Leonard Kleinrock, “The culture was one of: you find a good scientist. Fund him. Leave him alone. Don’t over manage.” In “The Last Word” section of the article, writers Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb note that In October of this year the ‘nation’s newest military endeavor,’ the United States Air Force Cyber Command, will start up with 8,000 people, mostly physicists, computer scientists and electrical engineers to protect against cyber-terrorists and cyber-criminals.
DISCLAIMER: As I said, I devoted this week’s edition of MfM to the one article. I thought it was that good. But I would encourage you to carve out the time and read the whole article. Having read the MfM distillation, I believe you will find the article even more interesting. And it is all available online at the website: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/07/internet200807
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.
QUOTES – FACTOIDS – THOUGHTS
AND A DISCLAIMER
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.
HOW THE WEB WAS WON: That’s the title of an article in the July issue of Vanity Fair which, among other things… clarifies that former vice president Al Gore never claimed to have “invented the Internet” but could rightfully claim that legislation he sponsored paved the way for the Internet… doesn’t clarify but does spell out the epic battle between Microsoft and Netscape… talks about the “Cro-Magnon” mentality of AT&T which lost out on the chance to get in on the ground floor of the Internet… and talks about when the “Infant Internet took its first breath”… as well as the “Kitty Hawk” moment of the Internet start-up. I highly recommend reading it, but in true MfM tradition, I read it for you. In fact, this week’s whole MfM is devoted to it. As you can tell from some of the quotes, the article is rightfully sub-titled An Oral History of the Internet. The “first breath” took place when Leonard Kleinrock, a professor of computer sciences at U.C.L.A., got his computer and the one at Stanford Research Institute to talk “host to host.” The “Kitty Hawk” moment was the very first International Conference on Computer Communications which demonstrated the potential of what was then known as the ARPAnet. As for the “Cro-Magnon” comment, that comes from Robert Taylor, the third director of ARPA’s computer science division, who developed the concept of “packet switching” which is a critical component of data transfer on the Internet but which the “suits” at AT&T said wouldn’t work. Why? Because it came from someone outside AT&T and so obviously “we didn’t know what we were doing.”
AT&T comes in for a lot of hammering. Robert Metcalfe who worked on Arpanet at M.I.T. and who invented Ethernet says that to this day he will have nothing to do with AT&T when he realized early on “that these sons of bitches were rooting against me.” But AT&T isn’t alone. Vinod Khosla who helped create Sun Microsystems talks about meeting with the C.E.O.’s of the major newspaper companies, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Gannett, Times Mirror and Tribune to propose something called the New Century Network. But the C.E.O.’s “couldn’t convince themselves” that Google, Yahoo or eBay would ever be important. When Microsoft decided to get into the online journalism business with Slate magazine, Editor Michael Kinsley recalls, the company wanted every writer to sign three different documents warranting the accuracy of everything they said and indemnifying Microsoft. Bill Bastone, founder of investigative journalism website The Smoking Gun, pokes fun at himself, noting that he didn’t even have an e-mail address when he started so he had to actually FAX out the press releases announcing the start of his website.
HOW THE WEB WAS WON ‘QUOTES’: From Vint Cerf, formerly with U.C.L.A. and now ‘chief Internet evangelist’ with Google, talking about those early years: “We had some idea of how powerful this was. What we didn’t know was the economics of it.” Rich Karlgaard, of Upside magazine, talks about asking a 25-year-old ‘vice president of business development’ during the dot-com bust period about whether his company is profitable or not, and gets the response, “we’re a pre-revenue company.” Pierre Omidyar says that when he founded online auction site eBay, he founded it on the notion that people are basically good and can be trusted and that “what eBay has shown is that, in fact, you can trust a complete stranger.” Howard Dean, former Presidential candidate known for his use of the Internet in his campaign and now chair of the Democratic National Committee: “The Internet is the most important democratizing invention since the printing press, 500 years ago.” Chuck Todd, political director of NBC News, comparing Internet use in politics to Microsoft updating its Windows applications, says: “Obama basically is Dean 2.0.”
HOW THE WEB WAS WON ‘FACTOIDS’: Let me start with one that I have referred to in previous MfM’s: According to the New York Times, YouTube in 2007 consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in the year 2000. Just about as startling, YouTube founder Chad Hurley is quoted in the article as saying, “every minute on our site we receive over ten hours of video.” The online porn business generates some $2.8 Billion annually with YouPorn, an amateur porn site not connected to YouTube, getting more traffic than CNN.com. In the so-called dot-com bust, between March 10, 2000 and October 20, 2002, the NASDAQ Composite Index, which lists most technology and Internet companies, lost 78% of its value. Yet in that same time, from 2000 all the way to now, the actual usage of the Internet continued to rise dramatically every year. When eBay went public, its filings showed that Beanie Babies accounted for 8% of the site’s entire inventory. The now famous @ sign which is so much a part of our world came about simply because one of the early developers realized it was the least used symbol on keyboards. The global cost of combating unwanted e-mails will reach $140 Billion in 2008, according to technology group Ferris Research. The first person indicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for creating a worm that was the first significant network attack in 1988 was a 20-year-old Cornell University graduate student named Robert Tappan Morris. He is now a professor of computer sciences at M.I.T., and is quoted in the article as saying, “I’d rather not talk about it – Sorry.”
HOW THE WEB WAS WON ‘THOUGHTS’: Elon Musk who helped create the electronic payment service PayPal says he believed the Internet was going to change the very nature of humanity because, “it was like humanity getting a nervous system.” Somewhat less hyperbolic, but no less telling is the point made by Sun Microsystems Vinod Khosla that society is always organized around communication channels. Some 200 years ago, it was rivers, sea lanes and mountain passes. Now it’s the Internet which is the community channel and “communication always changes society.” Gina Bianchini, C-E-O and co-founder of social networking system Ning, argues that it takes a decade or more for people to figure out the “native behavior” of any new medium. For the first 15 years of television, she argues, they were actually filming radio shows. In the same way we are only now discovering the “native behavior” of the Internet – behavior which, she believes, is social and all about two-way communication.
FINALLY: The article makes the point that ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) and therefore ARPAnet was created in the 1950’s in response to national security concerns about the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik. Remember Bob Taylor who had the run-in with AT&T and who created packet switching? He said when he had his “Eureka” moment, he went to the head of ARPA, told him about it, and a budget change was made, switching over a Million dollars from one department to another, all in the space of 20 minutes. That’s because at ARPA, says Leonard Kleinrock, “The culture was one of: you find a good scientist. Fund him. Leave him alone. Don’t over manage.” In “The Last Word” section of the article, writers Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb note that In October of this year the ‘nation’s newest military endeavor,’ the United States Air Force Cyber Command, will start up with 8,000 people, mostly physicists, computer scientists and electrical engineers to protect against cyber-terrorists and cyber-criminals.
DISCLAIMER: As I said, I devoted this week’s edition of MfM to the one article. I thought it was that good. But I would encourage you to carve out the time and read the whole article. Having read the MfM distillation, I believe you will find the article even more interesting. And it is all available online at the website: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/07/internet200807
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 -- June 16,2008
THE RACE FOR THE MONEY
THE PROOF IS IN THE PUDDING
MORE TV IS LESS TV
MORE TV IS MORE TV ONLINE
AMERICAN I-O-U’S
COCKTAIL CHATTER
DISCLAIMER
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.
THE RACE FOR THE MONEY: If projections and data provided by market research firm IDC are correct, the Internet is the hare about to beat the tortoise of Broadcast TV. In five years time, the Internet will go from the #5 medium in terms of advertising dollars to the #2 medium – second only to direct marketing but ahead of newspapers, cable TV and broadcast TV. The folks at IDC say overall Internet advertising revenue will double from $25.5 Billion last year to $51.1 Billion by 2012. Leading that growth will be video advertising which the firm projects to have a compound annual growth rate of 49.4% -- much of it at the expense of broadcast and cable TV. Of course that translates into video advertising going from a relatively meager half a Billion dollars last year to $3.8 Billion by 2012. The biggest driver of online advertising will continue to be search advertising though, which the company says in its news release “means that for any media company, search must be a key part of its strategy.” I should note a couple of number disclaimers. The Internet Advertising Bureau pegged the amount of online advertising last year at $21 Billion – considerably less than the $25.5 Billion cited by IDC. Also, the last figures I saw would put the revenue for broadcast advertising higher than the $51.1 Billion projected for the Internet by IDC.
As consolation, a report by Borrell Associates says that while Internet pure-plays “continue to gobble up” most of the local online ad revenue pie, local media websites are starting to share in the local online ad revenue which Borrell puts at $13.1 Billion. Newspapers sites, in particular, “have gone on the attack” but other media are moving more dramatically into the online market.
THE PROOF IS IN THE PUDDING: Sorry to use one of the old English sayings from my Australian days, but it may be appropriate since my next article deals with the growth of the Internet in Europe. According to the Internet Advertising Bureau/ Europe, online ad revenues there were up 40%, compared to 25% in the U.S. That came to $17.4 Billion last year. The IAB says if those rates of growth continue the European online ad revenues will surpass the U.S. by 2010. Most of those online ad dollars are being spent in the U.K., Germany and France, as more companies move their advertising budgets online for the first time. Several of the smaller countries are seeing strong online growth as well, including Greece (90%), Spain (55%) and Slovenia (49%).
MORE TV IS LESS TV: It seems like a recurring theme, but yet another report shows Americans are getting more TV but watching less. Nielsen Media says the ‘average’ household receives 118.6 channels, but only watches 16 of them for any length of time (the standard being at least 10 minutes per week). I should note here that other research I’ve been involved in, shows that number to be pretty consistent over the years -- meaning, it seems to me, no matter how many channels the American public has available, there are only so many they deem worth watching or can track. To put a little more perspective on the number of channels available, more than half of American homes (58%) receive 100-plus channels while another quarter (26%) receive between 60 and 99 channels. And that ‘average’ U.S. TV home has 2.5 people and 2.8 television sets.
And to continue on that ‘adding perspective’ theme, that average TV household watches an average of 8 hours and 43 minutes of TV DAILY, according to Nielsen’s TV at a glance summary. Hispanic households watch slightly more (9 hours daily) while African American households, on average, watch nearly two hours more (11 hours and 24 minutes to be exact). The average per person is just under five hours (4 hours and 55 minutes, again, to be exact) and again African Americans watch considerably more, averaging another two hours more of TV daily. Just under two-thirds of American homes (61%) have ‘wired cable hook-ups (a figure that is done from the high of 68% in 2000) while satellite or ‘specialized antenna systems’ use is up (27% versus 19% in 2005).
And I don’t know why I find this interesting, but I do. There were no ‘suspense mystery’ programs in prime time this past season and only three programs that Nielsen classified as Adventure, SciFi or Western. Most of it was ‘general drama’ (92), followed by the generic label Variety (56) and situation comedies (33). And continuing the theme of things I found interesting in the Nielsen data, Sunday is the most watched night of prime time (126.8 Million viewers) followed by Tuesday (120 Million viewers), Monday (117.7 Million), Wednesday (116.8M), Thursday (115.5M), Friday (106.7M) and last, Saturday (102.7M).
MORE TV IS MORE TV ONLINE: As long as I’m on a kind of broadcast kick, Nielsen Online figures for “online TV viewership” shows NBC-News Corp co-venture Hulu topped the chart for network-owned portals in April with 63.2 Million video streams and 2.4 Million unique viewers. In second place was ABC.com with 60.8 Million streams but 5.9 Million unique viewers, followed by NBC.com (51.6M streams and 2.3M unique viewers), Fox Broadcasting (21.9M streams and 4M viewers) and finally CBS Television (18.5M streams and 3.3M viewers.) However, before anybody at the network goes ecstatic, a little perspective: YouTube averaged 4 BILLION video streams in the same month with 73.5 Million unique viewers.
In terms of top 10 brands, Fox Interactive came in second with 329 Million streams and 21 Million unique viewers, followed by Yahoo (221M streams and 22M viewers), Nick Kids & Family (151M streams and 6M viewers), MSN/ Windows Live (149M streams and 10M viewers), ESPN (125M streams, 5M viewers), Disney Online (93M streams and 7M viewers), CNN Digital Network (85M streams and 6M viewers), Turner Entertainment (81M streams and 6M viewers) with Hulu rounding out the top ten list.
AMERICAN I-O-U’S: In a previous MfM, we focused on Billionaire financier Warren Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders. In it Buffett also expounds on the U.S. trade deficit, noting that America ships about $2 Billion of I-O-U’s and assets EVERY DAY to the world. What he points out that is particularly disturbing is that ‘normally’ when a currency falls (as the U.S. dollar has), it cures the trade deficit because our products become cheaper for foreigners to buy and their products become more expensive for U.S. citizens to buy. Unfortunately, he says, citing figures from Germany and Canada, that hasn’t happened – their currency is worth more and the trade deficit is still in their favor. He says the increase in foreign countries buying American businesses and the weakening currency is not the ‘fault’ of any other country but simply the result of other countries being “force-fed” dollars that they have to spend in the U.S. Despite the problems and despite his concerns about the failure of Congress to act, Buffett believes America will continue to prosper because of its “rule of law, market-responsive economic system and belief in meritocracy.”
COCKTAIL CHATTER: According to the book Bite Politics, the length of the soundbites aired from the presidential candidates has dropped steadily from an average of 40 seconds in 1968 to less than eight seconds in the 2004 race. A poll by the Pew Research Center finds that more than a third (37%) of the American public believe news organizations had been biased in favor of Barrack Obama compared to less than one in ten (8%) who believed the news media had favored Hillary Clinton. Another 40% though said the media had shown no bias. Even that though is not such a good number because, Pew researchers say, the percentage of people who believed the coverage was good or excellent dropped from February (55%) to June (43%).
DISCLAIMER: The Message from Michael was on a brief hiatus while I was in India (yes, India, not Indiana) on a consulting trip. I don’t believe there was any wailing and gnashing of teeth over its absence. And I should note that over the slow summer news months, the MfM will be a little less regular.
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 PROOF IS IN THE PUDDING
MORE TV IS LESS TV
MORE TV IS MORE TV ONLINE
AMERICAN I-O-U’S
COCKTAIL CHATTER
DISCLAIMER
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.
THE RACE FOR THE MONEY: If projections and data provided by market research firm IDC are correct, the Internet is the hare about to beat the tortoise of Broadcast TV. In five years time, the Internet will go from the #5 medium in terms of advertising dollars to the #2 medium – second only to direct marketing but ahead of newspapers, cable TV and broadcast TV. The folks at IDC say overall Internet advertising revenue will double from $25.5 Billion last year to $51.1 Billion by 2012. Leading that growth will be video advertising which the firm projects to have a compound annual growth rate of 49.4% -- much of it at the expense of broadcast and cable TV. Of course that translates into video advertising going from a relatively meager half a Billion dollars last year to $3.8 Billion by 2012. The biggest driver of online advertising will continue to be search advertising though, which the company says in its news release “means that for any media company, search must be a key part of its strategy.” I should note a couple of number disclaimers. The Internet Advertising Bureau pegged the amount of online advertising last year at $21 Billion – considerably less than the $25.5 Billion cited by IDC. Also, the last figures I saw would put the revenue for broadcast advertising higher than the $51.1 Billion projected for the Internet by IDC.
As consolation, a report by Borrell Associates says that while Internet pure-plays “continue to gobble up” most of the local online ad revenue pie, local media websites are starting to share in the local online ad revenue which Borrell puts at $13.1 Billion. Newspapers sites, in particular, “have gone on the attack” but other media are moving more dramatically into the online market.
THE PROOF IS IN THE PUDDING: Sorry to use one of the old English sayings from my Australian days, but it may be appropriate since my next article deals with the growth of the Internet in Europe. According to the Internet Advertising Bureau/ Europe, online ad revenues there were up 40%, compared to 25% in the U.S. That came to $17.4 Billion last year. The IAB says if those rates of growth continue the European online ad revenues will surpass the U.S. by 2010. Most of those online ad dollars are being spent in the U.K., Germany and France, as more companies move their advertising budgets online for the first time. Several of the smaller countries are seeing strong online growth as well, including Greece (90%), Spain (55%) and Slovenia (49%).
MORE TV IS LESS TV: It seems like a recurring theme, but yet another report shows Americans are getting more TV but watching less. Nielsen Media says the ‘average’ household receives 118.6 channels, but only watches 16 of them for any length of time (the standard being at least 10 minutes per week). I should note here that other research I’ve been involved in, shows that number to be pretty consistent over the years -- meaning, it seems to me, no matter how many channels the American public has available, there are only so many they deem worth watching or can track. To put a little more perspective on the number of channels available, more than half of American homes (58%) receive 100-plus channels while another quarter (26%) receive between 60 and 99 channels. And that ‘average’ U.S. TV home has 2.5 people and 2.8 television sets.
And to continue on that ‘adding perspective’ theme, that average TV household watches an average of 8 hours and 43 minutes of TV DAILY, according to Nielsen’s TV at a glance summary. Hispanic households watch slightly more (9 hours daily) while African American households, on average, watch nearly two hours more (11 hours and 24 minutes to be exact). The average per person is just under five hours (4 hours and 55 minutes, again, to be exact) and again African Americans watch considerably more, averaging another two hours more of TV daily. Just under two-thirds of American homes (61%) have ‘wired cable hook-ups (a figure that is done from the high of 68% in 2000) while satellite or ‘specialized antenna systems’ use is up (27% versus 19% in 2005).
And I don’t know why I find this interesting, but I do. There were no ‘suspense mystery’ programs in prime time this past season and only three programs that Nielsen classified as Adventure, SciFi or Western. Most of it was ‘general drama’ (92), followed by the generic label Variety (56) and situation comedies (33). And continuing the theme of things I found interesting in the Nielsen data, Sunday is the most watched night of prime time (126.8 Million viewers) followed by Tuesday (120 Million viewers), Monday (117.7 Million), Wednesday (116.8M), Thursday (115.5M), Friday (106.7M) and last, Saturday (102.7M).
MORE TV IS MORE TV ONLINE: As long as I’m on a kind of broadcast kick, Nielsen Online figures for “online TV viewership” shows NBC-News Corp co-venture Hulu topped the chart for network-owned portals in April with 63.2 Million video streams and 2.4 Million unique viewers. In second place was ABC.com with 60.8 Million streams but 5.9 Million unique viewers, followed by NBC.com (51.6M streams and 2.3M unique viewers), Fox Broadcasting (21.9M streams and 4M viewers) and finally CBS Television (18.5M streams and 3.3M viewers.) However, before anybody at the network goes ecstatic, a little perspective: YouTube averaged 4 BILLION video streams in the same month with 73.5 Million unique viewers.
In terms of top 10 brands, Fox Interactive came in second with 329 Million streams and 21 Million unique viewers, followed by Yahoo (221M streams and 22M viewers), Nick Kids & Family (151M streams and 6M viewers), MSN/ Windows Live (149M streams and 10M viewers), ESPN (125M streams, 5M viewers), Disney Online (93M streams and 7M viewers), CNN Digital Network (85M streams and 6M viewers), Turner Entertainment (81M streams and 6M viewers) with Hulu rounding out the top ten list.
AMERICAN I-O-U’S: In a previous MfM, we focused on Billionaire financier Warren Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders. In it Buffett also expounds on the U.S. trade deficit, noting that America ships about $2 Billion of I-O-U’s and assets EVERY DAY to the world. What he points out that is particularly disturbing is that ‘normally’ when a currency falls (as the U.S. dollar has), it cures the trade deficit because our products become cheaper for foreigners to buy and their products become more expensive for U.S. citizens to buy. Unfortunately, he says, citing figures from Germany and Canada, that hasn’t happened – their currency is worth more and the trade deficit is still in their favor. He says the increase in foreign countries buying American businesses and the weakening currency is not the ‘fault’ of any other country but simply the result of other countries being “force-fed” dollars that they have to spend in the U.S. Despite the problems and despite his concerns about the failure of Congress to act, Buffett believes America will continue to prosper because of its “rule of law, market-responsive economic system and belief in meritocracy.”
COCKTAIL CHATTER: According to the book Bite Politics, the length of the soundbites aired from the presidential candidates has dropped steadily from an average of 40 seconds in 1968 to less than eight seconds in the 2004 race. A poll by the Pew Research Center finds that more than a third (37%) of the American public believe news organizations had been biased in favor of Barrack Obama compared to less than one in ten (8%) who believed the news media had favored Hillary Clinton. Another 40% though said the media had shown no bias. Even that though is not such a good number because, Pew researchers say, the percentage of people who believed the coverage was good or excellent dropped from February (55%) to June (43%).
DISCLAIMER: The Message from Michael was on a brief hiatus while I was in India (yes, India, not Indiana) on a consulting trip. I don’t believe there was any wailing and gnashing of teeth over its absence. And I should note that over the slow summer news months, the MfM will be a little less regular.
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 -- May 19, 2008
SWEEPS
HOW DEEP IS YOUR MOAT
AMERICAN I-O-U’S
IT PAYS TO ADVERTISE
USER GENERATED DOLLARS
MORE TWITTER-PATION
SOCIAL NETWORKS VS. TV NETWORKS
FACTOID OF THE WEEK
AMERICAN IDOL FACTOIDS
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.
SWEEPS: It’s almost over. The most critical sweeps period of the year. The one that could make or break you. The one your sales department will rely on for more than half the year. The one that… Oh, never mind. You get it. It’s important. But don’t feel any pressure.
HOW DEEP IS YOUR MOAT: According to superinvestor Warren Buffett, that is one of the key questions he asks in deciding on whether to buy or invest in a company. And he knows a bit about investing. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, has interests in everything from, as he put it, “lollipops to motor homes” -– from insurance giant GEICO to candy-maker See’s Chocolates, from FlightSafety which trains more than half of the U.S. corporate jet pilots to BoatUS, which is sort of the AAA of boating. In his latest annual letter to shareholders, Buffett says the good moat is “a metaphor for the superiorities that make life difficult for their competitors.” It is a barrier that protects the company “castle” from the assault of competitors. For example, he says, GEICO and Costco have captured the low-cost producer niche while Coca Cola and American Express possess powerful world-wide brands. He says business history is filled with “Roman Candles” whose moats “proved illusory and were soon crossed.”
IT PAYS TO ADVERTISE: Insurance giant GEICO has one of the best growth records among auto insurers in the country. It now controls 7.2% of the auto insurance market, on sales of $12 Billion, up from 2.5% when Berkshire Hathaway acquired it in 1995. Buffett notes in his letter that, “not coincidentally,” ANNUAL ad expenditures have risen from $31 Million to $751 Million.
QUOTABLE QUOTES: Talking about the idea of buying controlling interest in a mediocre business versus investing in a great business, Buffett writes, “it’s better to have a part interest in the Hope Diamond than own all of a rhinestone.” Talking about how the airline industry is a bad investment, Buffett writes, “if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.” He compares the use of money from one company to invest in another to Adam and Eve who “kick started an activity that led to six billion humans.” Buffett also quotes others in his report. Talking about how he made a mistake in not buying the NBC station in Dallas-Fort Worth, he compares himself to a politician described by columnist Molly Ivins who, “if his I.Q. was any lower, you would have to water him twice a day.” And he says he will continue to make mistakes, explaining that acquiring companies is like the line from a Bobby Bare country song: “I’ve never gone to bed with an ugly woman, but I’ve sure woke up with a few.” John Stumpf, CEO of Wells Fargo, talking about the recent behavior of many lenders: “it is interesting that the industry has invented new ways to lose money when the old ways seemed to work just fine.”
THE RICHEST MAN YOU DON’T KNOW: Everybody has heard of Warren Buffett, but few have heard of his partner – Charlie Munger. Not because Buffett hogs the limelight… he actually talks about Munger a lot. Quite frankly I don’t know why. And although Buffett is known for his sharp writing wit, Munger is no slouch. For some idea of his thoughts, you can read (and/or purchase his book) at poorcharliesalmanack.com.
BUFFETT FACTOIDS: The net income of Berkshire Hathaway in 2007 was $2.353 Billion. When Buffett sold the company’s share in PetroChina, it paid $1.2 Billion to the I-R-S – or, as Buffett points out, enough to pay for all of the costs of the U.S. government – defense, social security, you name it – for about four hours. Since Buffett took over the Berkshire Hathaway company in 1965, the book value of a share of Class A stock has risen from $19 a share to $78,008 a share.
USER GENERATED DOLLARS: Research firm In-State predicts that the revenue from User Generated Video is expected to top $1.19 Billion worldwide by the year 2012. The firm says that will translate into 160 Billion videos that year. The company chalks up the growth in part to the proliferation of cheap HD cameras. Meanwhile, a group has formed to provide ‘pre-screened’ User Generated Content to television stations. The website, icnewstv.com, has so-called ‘citizen journalists’ shooting and producing material, ranging from breaking news such as brush fires to features about bees. The site appears to be an outgrowth of a British news website, icnews.co.uk.
MORE TWITTER-PATION: In MfM two weeks ago, I talked about how people are getting twitterpated over micro-blogging site Twitter. Now add to the list of the ‘twitterpated’ – the Society for New Communication Research, Global Voices, The Poynter Institute, Business Week, ClickZ and Graeme Newell of 602 Communications. From Poynter Online, writer Fons Tuinstra found out more through Twitter about the earthquake in China than many people in China in just a few hours. Several others echoed that sentiment. Blogger Matthew Ingram says Twitter provided ‘the first draft of history’ on the China earthquake. Tech geek blogger Robert Scobble was at the ‘epicenter’ of the earthquake information dispersal, ‘twittering’ with links to stories and early videos and photos. Global Voices, a project of the Harvard Law Schools’ Berkman Center for Internet and Society, provides a detailed look at the earthquake twitter. Presidential candidate Barack Obama has nearly 30,000 people following him through Twitter. BusinessWeek says ‘devotees’ of the Twitter microblogging site believe it has the potential to rival Facebook and MySpace even though its audience is ‘small’ by Web standards with half a million to a million regular users. BusinessWeek writer Stephen Baker used Twitter to ‘crowd source’ his article on Twitter. Marketing guru Graeme Newell talks about the same ‘wisdom of crowds’ value of Twitter in finding the best options to solve problems, and talks about reporters using it and other social networks because it “exponentially amplifies the rolodex of every person in the newsroom.” Add to that, the Society for New Communication Research has released a report titled “Twitter: Best Practices for Business Use” which provides a ‘Tip Sheet” for increasing sales, listening to and interacting with customers, conducting an instant, informal focus group, building a community and brainstorming ideas.
SOCIAL MEDIA MELANGE: Those same social media methods are a critical factor in how people decide on a product, according to a survey by the Society for New Communications Research. More than half (59.1%) of those surveyed say they use social media to “vent” about a customer care experience and nearly three quarters (72.2%) research customer care online before buying a product or service. The survey indicates that the use of social media to research how companies treat their customers is particularly prevalent among a very powerful and highly desirable group – 25 to 55 year old, college-educated people earning $100,000+. As you would expect, the study shows people rely heavily on search engines to do this type of research while micro-blogging sites like Twitter or Pownce are rated of no value by a substantial number (39%) as are YouTube (27%) and MySpace (22%). Members of the study group warned that the research should serve as a wake-up call to companies to “listen, respond and improve” because “the customer’s voice is louder and travels further than ever before.”
SOCIAL NETWORKS VS. TV NETWORKS: In a sidebar piece to an article questioning why the soaring social networks have failed to turn into raging revenue generators, writer Jon Swartz of USA Today draws an interesting analogy between social networks and TV networks. He argues that behemoths MySpace and Facebook will assume the role of the major networks (ABC, CBX, Fox and NBC) as advertising vehicles. Second tier sites like LinkedIn, Bebo and Ning will fill the role of cableTV networks like CNN, MTV, USA Network. And vertical sites like Xing and Global Grind will fulfill the role of niche TV properties like Food Network and SciFi Channel.
FACTOID OF THE WEEK: Search giant Google accounted for two-thirds (67.9%) of ALL searches in the U.S. in the month of April. And as a side note to this week’s factoid, Billionaire entrepreneur and Yahoo investor and invader Mark Cuban raises the idea of companies ‘recusing’ themselves from the Google Index, of common search items. In other words, you or your company wouldn’t appear in a Google search of key items. Cuban says it would cost a Microsoft or Yahoo upwards of $1 Billion to do this, but he says it would slow down the ‘juggernaut’ known as Google.
AMERICAN IDOL FACTOIDS: Despite the youth image of the program, the largest demographic group watching is actually the 35-49 year olds who comprise nearly a third (29%) of the total audience. Further, according to Nielsen, the average fan using mobile text messaging voted 38 times in April. Last year, there were 4,349 instances of product placement while this year there has been 3,291 occurrences BUT that was just in the first quarter of the year.
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.
HOW DEEP IS YOUR MOAT
AMERICAN I-O-U’S
IT PAYS TO ADVERTISE
USER GENERATED DOLLARS
MORE TWITTER-PATION
SOCIAL NETWORKS VS. TV NETWORKS
FACTOID OF THE WEEK
AMERICAN IDOL FACTOIDS
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.
SWEEPS: It’s almost over. The most critical sweeps period of the year. The one that could make or break you. The one your sales department will rely on for more than half the year. The one that… Oh, never mind. You get it. It’s important. But don’t feel any pressure.
HOW DEEP IS YOUR MOAT: According to superinvestor Warren Buffett, that is one of the key questions he asks in deciding on whether to buy or invest in a company. And he knows a bit about investing. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, has interests in everything from, as he put it, “lollipops to motor homes” -– from insurance giant GEICO to candy-maker See’s Chocolates, from FlightSafety which trains more than half of the U.S. corporate jet pilots to BoatUS, which is sort of the AAA of boating. In his latest annual letter to shareholders, Buffett says the good moat is “a metaphor for the superiorities that make life difficult for their competitors.” It is a barrier that protects the company “castle” from the assault of competitors. For example, he says, GEICO and Costco have captured the low-cost producer niche while Coca Cola and American Express possess powerful world-wide brands. He says business history is filled with “Roman Candles” whose moats “proved illusory and were soon crossed.”
IT PAYS TO ADVERTISE: Insurance giant GEICO has one of the best growth records among auto insurers in the country. It now controls 7.2% of the auto insurance market, on sales of $12 Billion, up from 2.5% when Berkshire Hathaway acquired it in 1995. Buffett notes in his letter that, “not coincidentally,” ANNUAL ad expenditures have risen from $31 Million to $751 Million.
QUOTABLE QUOTES: Talking about the idea of buying controlling interest in a mediocre business versus investing in a great business, Buffett writes, “it’s better to have a part interest in the Hope Diamond than own all of a rhinestone.” Talking about how the airline industry is a bad investment, Buffett writes, “if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.” He compares the use of money from one company to invest in another to Adam and Eve who “kick started an activity that led to six billion humans.” Buffett also quotes others in his report. Talking about how he made a mistake in not buying the NBC station in Dallas-Fort Worth, he compares himself to a politician described by columnist Molly Ivins who, “if his I.Q. was any lower, you would have to water him twice a day.” And he says he will continue to make mistakes, explaining that acquiring companies is like the line from a Bobby Bare country song: “I’ve never gone to bed with an ugly woman, but I’ve sure woke up with a few.” John Stumpf, CEO of Wells Fargo, talking about the recent behavior of many lenders: “it is interesting that the industry has invented new ways to lose money when the old ways seemed to work just fine.”
THE RICHEST MAN YOU DON’T KNOW: Everybody has heard of Warren Buffett, but few have heard of his partner – Charlie Munger. Not because Buffett hogs the limelight… he actually talks about Munger a lot. Quite frankly I don’t know why. And although Buffett is known for his sharp writing wit, Munger is no slouch. For some idea of his thoughts, you can read (and/or purchase his book) at poorcharliesalmanack.com.
BUFFETT FACTOIDS: The net income of Berkshire Hathaway in 2007 was $2.353 Billion. When Buffett sold the company’s share in PetroChina, it paid $1.2 Billion to the I-R-S – or, as Buffett points out, enough to pay for all of the costs of the U.S. government – defense, social security, you name it – for about four hours. Since Buffett took over the Berkshire Hathaway company in 1965, the book value of a share of Class A stock has risen from $19 a share to $78,008 a share.
USER GENERATED DOLLARS: Research firm In-State predicts that the revenue from User Generated Video is expected to top $1.19 Billion worldwide by the year 2012. The firm says that will translate into 160 Billion videos that year. The company chalks up the growth in part to the proliferation of cheap HD cameras. Meanwhile, a group has formed to provide ‘pre-screened’ User Generated Content to television stations. The website, icnewstv.com, has so-called ‘citizen journalists’ shooting and producing material, ranging from breaking news such as brush fires to features about bees. The site appears to be an outgrowth of a British news website, icnews.co.uk.
MORE TWITTER-PATION: In MfM two weeks ago, I talked about how people are getting twitterpated over micro-blogging site Twitter. Now add to the list of the ‘twitterpated’ – the Society for New Communication Research, Global Voices, The Poynter Institute, Business Week, ClickZ and Graeme Newell of 602 Communications. From Poynter Online, writer Fons Tuinstra found out more through Twitter about the earthquake in China than many people in China in just a few hours. Several others echoed that sentiment. Blogger Matthew Ingram says Twitter provided ‘the first draft of history’ on the China earthquake. Tech geek blogger Robert Scobble was at the ‘epicenter’ of the earthquake information dispersal, ‘twittering’ with links to stories and early videos and photos. Global Voices, a project of the Harvard Law Schools’ Berkman Center for Internet and Society, provides a detailed look at the earthquake twitter. Presidential candidate Barack Obama has nearly 30,000 people following him through Twitter. BusinessWeek says ‘devotees’ of the Twitter microblogging site believe it has the potential to rival Facebook and MySpace even though its audience is ‘small’ by Web standards with half a million to a million regular users. BusinessWeek writer Stephen Baker used Twitter to ‘crowd source’ his article on Twitter. Marketing guru Graeme Newell talks about the same ‘wisdom of crowds’ value of Twitter in finding the best options to solve problems, and talks about reporters using it and other social networks because it “exponentially amplifies the rolodex of every person in the newsroom.” Add to that, the Society for New Communication Research has released a report titled “Twitter: Best Practices for Business Use” which provides a ‘Tip Sheet” for increasing sales, listening to and interacting with customers, conducting an instant, informal focus group, building a community and brainstorming ideas.
SOCIAL MEDIA MELANGE: Those same social media methods are a critical factor in how people decide on a product, according to a survey by the Society for New Communications Research. More than half (59.1%) of those surveyed say they use social media to “vent” about a customer care experience and nearly three quarters (72.2%) research customer care online before buying a product or service. The survey indicates that the use of social media to research how companies treat their customers is particularly prevalent among a very powerful and highly desirable group – 25 to 55 year old, college-educated people earning $100,000+. As you would expect, the study shows people rely heavily on search engines to do this type of research while micro-blogging sites like Twitter or Pownce are rated of no value by a substantial number (39%) as are YouTube (27%) and MySpace (22%). Members of the study group warned that the research should serve as a wake-up call to companies to “listen, respond and improve” because “the customer’s voice is louder and travels further than ever before.”
SOCIAL NETWORKS VS. TV NETWORKS: In a sidebar piece to an article questioning why the soaring social networks have failed to turn into raging revenue generators, writer Jon Swartz of USA Today draws an interesting analogy between social networks and TV networks. He argues that behemoths MySpace and Facebook will assume the role of the major networks (ABC, CBX, Fox and NBC) as advertising vehicles. Second tier sites like LinkedIn, Bebo and Ning will fill the role of cableTV networks like CNN, MTV, USA Network. And vertical sites like Xing and Global Grind will fulfill the role of niche TV properties like Food Network and SciFi Channel.
FACTOID OF THE WEEK: Search giant Google accounted for two-thirds (67.9%) of ALL searches in the U.S. in the month of April. And as a side note to this week’s factoid, Billionaire entrepreneur and Yahoo investor and invader Mark Cuban raises the idea of companies ‘recusing’ themselves from the Google Index, of common search items. In other words, you or your company wouldn’t appear in a Google search of key items. Cuban says it would cost a Microsoft or Yahoo upwards of $1 Billion to do this, but he says it would slow down the ‘juggernaut’ known as Google.
AMERICAN IDOL FACTOIDS: Despite the youth image of the program, the largest demographic group watching is actually the 35-49 year olds who comprise nearly a third (29%) of the total audience. Further, according to Nielsen, the average fan using mobile text messaging voted 38 times in April. Last year, there were 4,349 instances of product placement while this year there has been 3,291 occurrences BUT that was just in the first quarter of the year.
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 -- May 12, 2008
IT’S A TELEVISION WORLD AFTER ALL
AN INTERNET WORLD OF HOPE AND FEAR
THE NEWS WORLD
THE WEBBY WORLD
DIGITAL VERSUS TRADITIONAL
NIKO BELLIC VERSUS INDIANA JONES
DIGITAL GUINEA PIGS
AN OBJECT LESSON QUOTE
COCKTAIL CHATTER
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.
IT’S A TELEVISION WORLD AFTER ALL: A recently released study says television is the most influential… authoritative… exciting… persuasive medium and the one people are most likely to use for news, weather and traffic information as well as the one where people are most likely to learn about products or brands. Says who? Well, the Television Bureau of Advertising (TVB), that’s who. Before you dismiss the study for that reason, consider that another study affirmed some of those same key points – that TV advertising is by far the most effective in impacting consumers’ product awareness, product familiarity and intent to purchase and is the best at either launching a brand or maintaining a brand. You want to know who says so this time? Okay, well, it’s Fox which commissioned a review by research firm Marketing Evolution of 40 previous “return on marketing objectives” studies it did for advertisers. Still, there is some cross-affirmation and validation that can’t be dismissed.
The Fox network did the review as part of its effort to counter the swelling migration of advertising from the TV world to the digital world. And that is where you find some interesting data from the TVB study – when you compare the Internet to TV, newspapers, radio and magazines.
AN INTERNET WORLD OF HOPE AND FEAR: The report does indeed show television’s dominance in so many ways, but that dominance is clearly weaker in the younger age groups. For example, nine out of ten adults (90.2%) over the age of 18 reported spending time with TV “yesterday” compared to two-thirds (65.6%) who said they had spent time with the Internet “yesterday.” Radio actually came in second (73.4%) with newspapers (63.8%) slightly behind the Internet but ahead of magazines (50.1%). The margin changes significantly when the study focuses on the 18-34 age group with television dropping slightly (87.3%) while the Internet increases (72.5%). Women spend more time with TV (253.7 Minutes) than men (218.7) but men spend more time with the Internet (114 minutes) than women (83.7). The average adult, 18-plus, spends 236.6 minutes a day with TV. The Internet and Radio are basically tied, with an average 98 minutes, compared to newspapers (26.7 minutes) and magazines (16.7). But when you look at the 18-34 group, again the margin changes significantly with the average time spent with TV dropping (206 minutes) while the average time spent with the Internet increases (145.4).
THE NEWS WORLD: When it comes to choosing their ‘primary news source,’ broadcast television (39.1%) scores double what cable television scores (19.9%) and triple what the Internet scores (11.5%), according to the TVB figures. But again those numbers change significantly when the focus is on the 18-34 crowd. Broadcast TV pretty well retains its dominance (38.7%) but the Internet jumps significantly (21.8%), actually beating out cable television (14.6%) and way ahead of radio (11.1%) and newspapers (8.4%). When it comes to local weather, traffic and sports, broadcast television is the hands down winner (51.2%), beating out the second place Internet by a wide margin (18.2%) while cable television comes in an even more distant third (11.3%), followed by radio (7.4%), and public television (6.1%) which actually beat newspapers (5.7%). Again, in the 18-34 group, the margins change significantly with broadcast television dropping (46.8%) while the Internet increases (25.7%). Only public television shows an increase in this age group (7.7%) while cable television drops (9%) along with radio (6.5%) and newspapers (4.4%). Lastly in the area of breaking news which one might assume cable news would show significant numbers, broadcast television still wins (52%), doubling cable (26.2%) and nearly five times the Internet (10.8%) – at least in the overall Adults 18-plus. Again, though, when the numbers are shown for the 18-34 age group, broadcast television still retains its lead (48.9%) while cable television drops significantly (21.9%) and the Internet increases significantly (18.6%).
THE WEBBY WORLD: The winners of this increasingly prestigious award ceremony were announced with The New York Times (8 awards), The Onion News Network (7 awards) coming out on top, followed by Apple, National Geographic and PostSecret, a ‘user-confession’ site each garnering four awards each. Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert won recognition as “Webby Person of the Year” for his viral campaign – Greatest Living American. The Webbyawards.com site has a cool interactive design to show you the winners which provides an interesting insight into the Internet, but ironically I couldn’t get the static list of Webby award winners to come up.
DIGITAL VERSUS TRADITIONAL: Another wrinkle in the on-going digital debate is a survey of ad executives by consulting firm Accenture which shows that half of them believe digital ads will replace traditional advertising within five years. Social media and user-generated content are considered ‘high-growth opportunities’ but the largest group (38%) cited short-form video as the genre with the most potential, followed by online portal/publishing (23%) and video games (18%). Nearly two thirds (62%) see advertising-supported business models as the leading business model in five years, compared with a quarter (25%) who cited subscription-based services and a tenth (11%) who cited pay-per-play services.
NIKO BELLIC VERSUS INDIANA JONES: That was the headline on a New York Times article about video games. And if you don’t know who Niko Bellic is… well, don’t feel bad. He is one of the characters in the video game Grand Theft Auto, the latest version of which is expected to gross $1 Billion worldwide, $600 Million of that in the U.S. and Canada. An article in The New York Times says that would put it ahead of all but 16 of the biggest box office films, including Raiders of the Lost Ark. Meanwhile the Federal Trade Commission conducted its own undercover operation to see if tweens (ages 13 – 16) could buy such violent video games along with R-rated movie tickets and DVD’s. The operation found undercover kids were turned down more than ever with only a fifth (20%) able to buy what is called ‘mature-rated video games’ – a big improvement over two years ago when two out of five (42%) of the kids were able to buy such games.
RELATED FACTOIDS: From last week’s MfM on the Morgan Stanley report on Internet use: Since Facebook opened its platform to third-party developers, more than 20,000 applications have been added, representing 859 Million installations and 34 Million usages PER DAY – which the report calls “an unprecedented ramp.” Most popular ap’s are Rock You’s Super Wall, Likeness and Hug Me and Slide’s Top Friends, FunWall and SuperPoke.
DIGITAL GUINEA PIGS: Broadcasters in the Wilmington, North Carolina, market have agreed to be the digital guinea pigs for the rest of the broadcast industry. On September 8th, five months before the official switch-over date, the stations will switch off their analog signals and switch on their digital signals. The test concocted by the Federal Communications Commission will, in the words of one commissioner, give the FCC ‘real-world experience.’ Meanwhile, eleven stations in the Orlando/ Central Florida market are running their own version of an early warning system – a series of one-minute tests starting on June 25th in which they will turn off their analog signal to, in the words of one writer, “flush out viewers who are not technologically prepared” for the switch-over. (A sort of disclaimer: WECT-TV in Wilmington is a client.)
AN OBJECT LESSON QUOTE: Buried in a story in The New York Times about a meeting between London mayor Boris Johnson and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is a quote which says volumes (disclaimer: in my opinion) about journalism and media manipulation. Bloomberg advises Johnson on how to handle the press: “You don’t have to match your answers to their questions. If you don’t give the right answers to their questions, they asked the wrong questions.”
COCKTAIL CHATTER: Just one this time, but it’s an interesting one -- two out of every three women aged 50-64 says today’s mothers are doing a worse job as parents than mothers did 20 or 30 years ago, according to a survey by the Pew Research Group. Younger women (under 30) were less critical with less than half (41%) echoing those sentiments while more than half (56%) of the women 30-49 were critical but less than half (48%) of women 65 and older believed that.
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.
AN INTERNET WORLD OF HOPE AND FEAR
THE NEWS WORLD
THE WEBBY WORLD
DIGITAL VERSUS TRADITIONAL
NIKO BELLIC VERSUS INDIANA JONES
DIGITAL GUINEA PIGS
AN OBJECT LESSON QUOTE
COCKTAIL CHATTER
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.
IT’S A TELEVISION WORLD AFTER ALL: A recently released study says television is the most influential… authoritative… exciting… persuasive medium and the one people are most likely to use for news, weather and traffic information as well as the one where people are most likely to learn about products or brands. Says who? Well, the Television Bureau of Advertising (TVB), that’s who. Before you dismiss the study for that reason, consider that another study affirmed some of those same key points – that TV advertising is by far the most effective in impacting consumers’ product awareness, product familiarity and intent to purchase and is the best at either launching a brand or maintaining a brand. You want to know who says so this time? Okay, well, it’s Fox which commissioned a review by research firm Marketing Evolution of 40 previous “return on marketing objectives” studies it did for advertisers. Still, there is some cross-affirmation and validation that can’t be dismissed.
The Fox network did the review as part of its effort to counter the swelling migration of advertising from the TV world to the digital world. And that is where you find some interesting data from the TVB study – when you compare the Internet to TV, newspapers, radio and magazines.
AN INTERNET WORLD OF HOPE AND FEAR: The report does indeed show television’s dominance in so many ways, but that dominance is clearly weaker in the younger age groups. For example, nine out of ten adults (90.2%) over the age of 18 reported spending time with TV “yesterday” compared to two-thirds (65.6%) who said they had spent time with the Internet “yesterday.” Radio actually came in second (73.4%) with newspapers (63.8%) slightly behind the Internet but ahead of magazines (50.1%). The margin changes significantly when the study focuses on the 18-34 age group with television dropping slightly (87.3%) while the Internet increases (72.5%). Women spend more time with TV (253.7 Minutes) than men (218.7) but men spend more time with the Internet (114 minutes) than women (83.7). The average adult, 18-plus, spends 236.6 minutes a day with TV. The Internet and Radio are basically tied, with an average 98 minutes, compared to newspapers (26.7 minutes) and magazines (16.7). But when you look at the 18-34 group, again the margin changes significantly with the average time spent with TV dropping (206 minutes) while the average time spent with the Internet increases (145.4).
THE NEWS WORLD: When it comes to choosing their ‘primary news source,’ broadcast television (39.1%) scores double what cable television scores (19.9%) and triple what the Internet scores (11.5%), according to the TVB figures. But again those numbers change significantly when the focus is on the 18-34 crowd. Broadcast TV pretty well retains its dominance (38.7%) but the Internet jumps significantly (21.8%), actually beating out cable television (14.6%) and way ahead of radio (11.1%) and newspapers (8.4%). When it comes to local weather, traffic and sports, broadcast television is the hands down winner (51.2%), beating out the second place Internet by a wide margin (18.2%) while cable television comes in an even more distant third (11.3%), followed by radio (7.4%), and public television (6.1%) which actually beat newspapers (5.7%). Again, in the 18-34 group, the margins change significantly with broadcast television dropping (46.8%) while the Internet increases (25.7%). Only public television shows an increase in this age group (7.7%) while cable television drops (9%) along with radio (6.5%) and newspapers (4.4%). Lastly in the area of breaking news which one might assume cable news would show significant numbers, broadcast television still wins (52%), doubling cable (26.2%) and nearly five times the Internet (10.8%) – at least in the overall Adults 18-plus. Again, though, when the numbers are shown for the 18-34 age group, broadcast television still retains its lead (48.9%) while cable television drops significantly (21.9%) and the Internet increases significantly (18.6%).
THE WEBBY WORLD: The winners of this increasingly prestigious award ceremony were announced with The New York Times (8 awards), The Onion News Network (7 awards) coming out on top, followed by Apple, National Geographic and PostSecret, a ‘user-confession’ site each garnering four awards each. Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert won recognition as “Webby Person of the Year” for his viral campaign – Greatest Living American. The Webbyawards.com site has a cool interactive design to show you the winners which provides an interesting insight into the Internet, but ironically I couldn’t get the static list of Webby award winners to come up.
DIGITAL VERSUS TRADITIONAL: Another wrinkle in the on-going digital debate is a survey of ad executives by consulting firm Accenture which shows that half of them believe digital ads will replace traditional advertising within five years. Social media and user-generated content are considered ‘high-growth opportunities’ but the largest group (38%) cited short-form video as the genre with the most potential, followed by online portal/publishing (23%) and video games (18%). Nearly two thirds (62%) see advertising-supported business models as the leading business model in five years, compared with a quarter (25%) who cited subscription-based services and a tenth (11%) who cited pay-per-play services.
NIKO BELLIC VERSUS INDIANA JONES: That was the headline on a New York Times article about video games. And if you don’t know who Niko Bellic is… well, don’t feel bad. He is one of the characters in the video game Grand Theft Auto, the latest version of which is expected to gross $1 Billion worldwide, $600 Million of that in the U.S. and Canada. An article in The New York Times says that would put it ahead of all but 16 of the biggest box office films, including Raiders of the Lost Ark. Meanwhile the Federal Trade Commission conducted its own undercover operation to see if tweens (ages 13 – 16) could buy such violent video games along with R-rated movie tickets and DVD’s. The operation found undercover kids were turned down more than ever with only a fifth (20%) able to buy what is called ‘mature-rated video games’ – a big improvement over two years ago when two out of five (42%) of the kids were able to buy such games.
RELATED FACTOIDS: From last week’s MfM on the Morgan Stanley report on Internet use: Since Facebook opened its platform to third-party developers, more than 20,000 applications have been added, representing 859 Million installations and 34 Million usages PER DAY – which the report calls “an unprecedented ramp.” Most popular ap’s are Rock You’s Super Wall, Likeness and Hug Me and Slide’s Top Friends, FunWall and SuperPoke.
DIGITAL GUINEA PIGS: Broadcasters in the Wilmington, North Carolina, market have agreed to be the digital guinea pigs for the rest of the broadcast industry. On September 8th, five months before the official switch-over date, the stations will switch off their analog signals and switch on their digital signals. The test concocted by the Federal Communications Commission will, in the words of one commissioner, give the FCC ‘real-world experience.’ Meanwhile, eleven stations in the Orlando/ Central Florida market are running their own version of an early warning system – a series of one-minute tests starting on June 25th in which they will turn off their analog signal to, in the words of one writer, “flush out viewers who are not technologically prepared” for the switch-over. (A sort of disclaimer: WECT-TV in Wilmington is a client.)
AN OBJECT LESSON QUOTE: Buried in a story in The New York Times about a meeting between London mayor Boris Johnson and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is a quote which says volumes (disclaimer: in my opinion) about journalism and media manipulation. Bloomberg advises Johnson on how to handle the press: “You don’t have to match your answers to their questions. If you don’t give the right answers to their questions, they asked the wrong questions.”
COCKTAIL CHATTER: Just one this time, but it’s an interesting one -- two out of every three women aged 50-64 says today’s mothers are doing a worse job as parents than mothers did 20 or 30 years ago, according to a survey by the Pew Research Group. Younger women (under 30) were less critical with less than half (41%) echoing those sentiments while more than half (56%) of the women 30-49 were critical but less than half (48%) of women 65 and older believed that.
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 -- May 5, 2008
MARCHSWEEPS
UNIVERSAL MCCANN
COCKTAIL CHATTER
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.
MARCH SWEEPS: No, that’s not a mis-type on my part. You probably have heard that Nielsen is moving its February, 2009, sweeps to March because of the DTV transition taking place February 17, 2009, and normally we don’t report ‘old’ news in MfM. But this is so indicative of the concern surrounding DTV that we thought it was worth repeating. As we said in last week’s MfM, the switchover is the Y2K of broadcasting. As newsletter Cynopsis put it, the Nielsen move was made to avoid the “potential mayhem” surrounding the switchover. According to the National Telecommunication and Information Administration, some 5.3 Million U.S. households have requested 10 million $40 coupons for the digital converter boxes.
Side Note: There are numerous sites devoted to the DTV transition. Let me share a few that you may want to look at: The FCC’s dtv.gov which says it will tell you “what you need to know” about DTV; dtvtransition.com which is sponsored by a group calling itself the digital television transition coalition made up of various ‘business, trade and industry groups’; coalition member NAB’s dtvanswers.com which also says it will tell you ‘what you need to know’ about the transition; digitaltvtrainer.com which bills itself as a service of ‘your local television broadcasters’ which is somewhat disturbing since repeated searches for local DTV information came back with ‘presently we have no information on stations in that state’ and then directs you to its national DTV site; Consumer Reports says it provides a “consumer voice for communications choice” through its website hearusnow.org site.
SOCIAL NETWORKING PHENOMENON: More evidence that social networking is taking over the Internet is the report that online giant Yahoo! has joined the list of other online giants such as MySpace, Facebook and Google in making over its website to make it “more social”, allowing its 500 Million users greater flexibility in customizing the website. Meanwhile research firm Hitwise reports that social networks and search engines account for an equal amount of referrals (28%) to online video sites, although that number is actually a decrease for social networks and an increase for search engines. Financial services company Morgan Stanley says social network is changing how people connect, accounting for 16% of all online time worldwide, which is pretty remarkable since, the report notes, the category of social network didn’t even exist three years ago. (And in case you’re wondering what Morgan Stanley is doing studying the Internet – which I also wondered about – the company is the financial advisor to Microsoft in its now-defunct bid to buy Yahoo!) The company, which seems to have a penchant for the word “presence” -- as in establishing a presence in Saudi Arabia, or India or China -- says social networking is a way for people to establish a “presence” because it combines the two most important sources of information – the Internet and Personal Sources. Advertising agency Universal McCann also notes the ‘sudden’ appearance of social networking, as noted by Morgan Stanley, with significant growth over the past three years. More than half of the Internet users surveyed by Universal McCann (57%) have joined a social network, making it the number one platform for creating and sharing content. The agency defines the key social platforms as blogging, micro blogging, RSS, Widgets, social networking, chat rooms, message boards, podcasts, video sharing and photo sharing. The company says ‘social media’ is a much better way to describe the changes in the Internet, than Web 2.0 which is says “was always a touch crude.”
The report which is Wave 3 of Internet studies by Universal McCann says blogs are now part of the ‘mainstream media’ worldwide and -- ‘as a collective’ -- rival traditional media and that people worldwide are becoming more active in social networking activities such as photo sharing and video watching. BUT the U.S. isn’t taking part in these trends as much as one would have thought, or at least not taking part to the same degree. For example, while three quarters (77%) of ‘active Internet users’ worldwide read blogs, less than two-thirds (60%) do so in the U.S. – a percentage has been pretty consistently the same for the past three years. Compare that to South Korea (92.1%), China (88.1%) and India (85%). The U.S. is also on the low end of the totem pole when it comes to creating blogs as well, with only a quarter (26.4%) doing so, compared to the global average of nearly half (44.8%). Again, compare that to South Korea (71.7%), Taiwan (70.9%), China (70.3%), Brazil (50.1%) and India (49%). And when it comes to creating a profile on a social network, the U.S. (at 42.5%) is far behind the global average (57.5%) of Internet users. When it comes to watching videos online, the grouping gets tighter with three-quarters (74.2%) of U.S. ‘active Internet users’ watching, which is only slightly below the global average (82.8%) The agency admonishes companies that social media impacts their brand’s reputation with a third (34%) of the Internet users posting opinions about products and brands on their blog and a third (36%) saying they think “more positively” about companies that have blogs. And it warns, “in a world of social media, honesty is the only policy.”
Other interesting factoids from the Universal McCann report: Countries with ‘high emigration’ lead the way in terms of social networking, ‘connecting people globally.’ Although MySpace and Facebook dominate the American market, globally the report says “it’s far from a two-horse race” with QQ, Cyworld and Mixi dominating in Asia, Baidu in China, and Orkut number one in Brazil. The report notes the emergence of niche social networks such as dogster.com for dog owners or doppir.com for frequent business travelers; do-it-yourself social networks such as ning.com or onsite.com; reputation management social networks such as wink.com or peekyou.com as people realize “the implications of having every drunken photo online for the world to see.”
Other interesting factoids from the Hitwise report: Time spent online at video websites has increased almost a full minute over the past year from 15 minutes and 14 seconds last year to 16 minutes and 12 seconds this year. The firm also reports that nearly half of the social network population (47%) is under the age of 35, but analyst Heather Dougherty adds that social networks are “no longer only the playground of the young.”
Other interesting factoids from the Morgan Stanley report: The amount of CONSUMER IP traffic is expected to surpass the amount of BUSINESS IP traffic worldwide for the first time this year. While only 13% of the Top 15 Online Retailers are what is called Internet Pure-Plays (meaning no stores), the biggest money maker in terms of growth is Amazon.com which had a 26% Y2Y growth rate. While North America has 16% of the world’s Internet users, it has only 8% of the world’s mobile users. In 1995, China had only one percent of the world’s Internet users; last year, in 2007, its Internet population represented 16% of the world Internet users.
IT’S A BRIC HOUSE: Okay, this is my own warped version of The Commodores hit song. All the references above to global trends reminded me of several references I’ve seen to the so-called BRIC economies. These are the four countries that are the fastest growing, emerging economies in the world – Brazil, Russia, India and China.
TWITTERPATED OVER TWITTER: When Bambi fell in love in the Disney classic movie, his friend Thumper said he’d become ‘twitterpated.’ Based on several recent postings I’ve read, marketers have become ‘twitterpated’ over Twitter, the social-network-website-instant-messaging service in which people tell each other what they’re doing minute by minute in great minutiae. It is what was referred to, above, as ‘micro-blogging’ which is blogging 140 characters. Let me emphasize that last point – CHARACTERS, 140 Characters, NOT words, which is less than this paragraph. Columnist Rob Pegoraro of Wahingtonpost.com noted the growth of Twittering. The campaign staff of presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both ‘twitter.’ Website ReadWriteWeb argues that Twitter can be “wildly useful” for some writers penning larger pieces. WebProNews argues that Twitter with its stats on who is being followed and who is following is “one of the great democratizing forces.” And as noted before, Twitter was used to organize the protest march in San Francisco marking the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: Market research firm Unity Marketing, citing figures supplied by the U.S. Census Bureau, says ‘affluent households’ (defined as those with incomes over $100,000 a year) is the fastest growing segment in the U.S. economy, rising 13% from 19.7 Million in 2005 to 22.2 Million in 2006. One in 50 households in America (2%) report an adjusted gross income to the Internal Revenue Service of more than $250,000 a year, according to figures supplied to Factcheck.org by the Tax Policy Center. These folks will earn 24.1% of all income and will pay 43.6% of all personal income tax. According to BigResearch’s American Pulse Survey, two-thirds of Americans (61.7%) are dining out less while more than half (57.3%) are driving less and less than half (47.4%) are attending fewer movies. The survey also shows that more Americans are haggling over prices than before and that despite all this “honesty still prevails” with more than half (58.3%) of Americans saying they would return $100,000 if they found it on the street.
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 my website MediaConsultant.tv.
UNIVERSAL MCCANN
COCKTAIL CHATTER
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.
MARCH SWEEPS: No, that’s not a mis-type on my part. You probably have heard that Nielsen is moving its February, 2009, sweeps to March because of the DTV transition taking place February 17, 2009, and normally we don’t report ‘old’ news in MfM. But this is so indicative of the concern surrounding DTV that we thought it was worth repeating. As we said in last week’s MfM, the switchover is the Y2K of broadcasting. As newsletter Cynopsis put it, the Nielsen move was made to avoid the “potential mayhem” surrounding the switchover. According to the National Telecommunication and Information Administration, some 5.3 Million U.S. households have requested 10 million $40 coupons for the digital converter boxes.
Side Note: There are numerous sites devoted to the DTV transition. Let me share a few that you may want to look at: The FCC’s dtv.gov which says it will tell you “what you need to know” about DTV; dtvtransition.com which is sponsored by a group calling itself the digital television transition coalition made up of various ‘business, trade and industry groups’; coalition member NAB’s dtvanswers.com which also says it will tell you ‘what you need to know’ about the transition; digitaltvtrainer.com which bills itself as a service of ‘your local television broadcasters’ which is somewhat disturbing since repeated searches for local DTV information came back with ‘presently we have no information on stations in that state’ and then directs you to its national DTV site; Consumer Reports says it provides a “consumer voice for communications choice” through its website hearusnow.org site.
SOCIAL NETWORKING PHENOMENON: More evidence that social networking is taking over the Internet is the report that online giant Yahoo! has joined the list of other online giants such as MySpace, Facebook and Google in making over its website to make it “more social”, allowing its 500 Million users greater flexibility in customizing the website. Meanwhile research firm Hitwise reports that social networks and search engines account for an equal amount of referrals (28%) to online video sites, although that number is actually a decrease for social networks and an increase for search engines. Financial services company Morgan Stanley says social network is changing how people connect, accounting for 16% of all online time worldwide, which is pretty remarkable since, the report notes, the category of social network didn’t even exist three years ago. (And in case you’re wondering what Morgan Stanley is doing studying the Internet – which I also wondered about – the company is the financial advisor to Microsoft in its now-defunct bid to buy Yahoo!) The company, which seems to have a penchant for the word “presence” -- as in establishing a presence in Saudi Arabia, or India or China -- says social networking is a way for people to establish a “presence” because it combines the two most important sources of information – the Internet and Personal Sources. Advertising agency Universal McCann also notes the ‘sudden’ appearance of social networking, as noted by Morgan Stanley, with significant growth over the past three years. More than half of the Internet users surveyed by Universal McCann (57%) have joined a social network, making it the number one platform for creating and sharing content. The agency defines the key social platforms as blogging, micro blogging, RSS, Widgets, social networking, chat rooms, message boards, podcasts, video sharing and photo sharing. The company says ‘social media’ is a much better way to describe the changes in the Internet, than Web 2.0 which is says “was always a touch crude.”
The report which is Wave 3 of Internet studies by Universal McCann says blogs are now part of the ‘mainstream media’ worldwide and -- ‘as a collective’ -- rival traditional media and that people worldwide are becoming more active in social networking activities such as photo sharing and video watching. BUT the U.S. isn’t taking part in these trends as much as one would have thought, or at least not taking part to the same degree. For example, while three quarters (77%) of ‘active Internet users’ worldwide read blogs, less than two-thirds (60%) do so in the U.S. – a percentage has been pretty consistently the same for the past three years. Compare that to South Korea (92.1%), China (88.1%) and India (85%). The U.S. is also on the low end of the totem pole when it comes to creating blogs as well, with only a quarter (26.4%) doing so, compared to the global average of nearly half (44.8%). Again, compare that to South Korea (71.7%), Taiwan (70.9%), China (70.3%), Brazil (50.1%) and India (49%). And when it comes to creating a profile on a social network, the U.S. (at 42.5%) is far behind the global average (57.5%) of Internet users. When it comes to watching videos online, the grouping gets tighter with three-quarters (74.2%) of U.S. ‘active Internet users’ watching, which is only slightly below the global average (82.8%) The agency admonishes companies that social media impacts their brand’s reputation with a third (34%) of the Internet users posting opinions about products and brands on their blog and a third (36%) saying they think “more positively” about companies that have blogs. And it warns, “in a world of social media, honesty is the only policy.”
Other interesting factoids from the Universal McCann report: Countries with ‘high emigration’ lead the way in terms of social networking, ‘connecting people globally.’ Although MySpace and Facebook dominate the American market, globally the report says “it’s far from a two-horse race” with QQ, Cyworld and Mixi dominating in Asia, Baidu in China, and Orkut number one in Brazil. The report notes the emergence of niche social networks such as dogster.com for dog owners or doppir.com for frequent business travelers; do-it-yourself social networks such as ning.com or onsite.com; reputation management social networks such as wink.com or peekyou.com as people realize “the implications of having every drunken photo online for the world to see.”
Other interesting factoids from the Hitwise report: Time spent online at video websites has increased almost a full minute over the past year from 15 minutes and 14 seconds last year to 16 minutes and 12 seconds this year. The firm also reports that nearly half of the social network population (47%) is under the age of 35, but analyst Heather Dougherty adds that social networks are “no longer only the playground of the young.”
Other interesting factoids from the Morgan Stanley report: The amount of CONSUMER IP traffic is expected to surpass the amount of BUSINESS IP traffic worldwide for the first time this year. While only 13% of the Top 15 Online Retailers are what is called Internet Pure-Plays (meaning no stores), the biggest money maker in terms of growth is Amazon.com which had a 26% Y2Y growth rate. While North America has 16% of the world’s Internet users, it has only 8% of the world’s mobile users. In 1995, China had only one percent of the world’s Internet users; last year, in 2007, its Internet population represented 16% of the world Internet users.
IT’S A BRIC HOUSE: Okay, this is my own warped version of The Commodores hit song. All the references above to global trends reminded me of several references I’ve seen to the so-called BRIC economies. These are the four countries that are the fastest growing, emerging economies in the world – Brazil, Russia, India and China.
TWITTERPATED OVER TWITTER: When Bambi fell in love in the Disney classic movie, his friend Thumper said he’d become ‘twitterpated.’ Based on several recent postings I’ve read, marketers have become ‘twitterpated’ over Twitter, the social-network-website-instant-messaging service in which people tell each other what they’re doing minute by minute in great minutiae. It is what was referred to, above, as ‘micro-blogging’ which is blogging 140 characters. Let me emphasize that last point – CHARACTERS, 140 Characters, NOT words, which is less than this paragraph. Columnist Rob Pegoraro of Wahingtonpost.com noted the growth of Twittering. The campaign staff of presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both ‘twitter.’ Website ReadWriteWeb argues that Twitter can be “wildly useful” for some writers penning larger pieces. WebProNews argues that Twitter with its stats on who is being followed and who is following is “one of the great democratizing forces.” And as noted before, Twitter was used to organize the protest march in San Francisco marking the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: Market research firm Unity Marketing, citing figures supplied by the U.S. Census Bureau, says ‘affluent households’ (defined as those with incomes over $100,000 a year) is the fastest growing segment in the U.S. economy, rising 13% from 19.7 Million in 2005 to 22.2 Million in 2006. One in 50 households in America (2%) report an adjusted gross income to the Internal Revenue Service of more than $250,000 a year, according to figures supplied to Factcheck.org by the Tax Policy Center. These folks will earn 24.1% of all income and will pay 43.6% of all personal income tax. According to BigResearch’s American Pulse Survey, two-thirds of Americans (61.7%) are dining out less while more than half (57.3%) are driving less and less than half (47.4%) are attending fewer movies. The survey also shows that more Americans are haggling over prices than before and that despite all this “honesty still prevails” with more than half (58.3%) of Americans saying they would return $100,000 if they found it on the street.
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 my website MediaConsultant.tv.
Message from Michael -- April 28, 2008
SWEEPS
THE Y2K OF BROADCASTING
BACK TO THE FUTURE
AMERICA VERUS CHINA
VOYEURS VERSUS CREATORS
THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY
THE TEEN PARADOX
THANK YOU
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.
SWEEPS: Week one of sweeps. Do you know where your ratings are? Do you have all your special reports done? Do you know what your network is planning? All questions that inquiring minds want to know. And with the writers’ strike over, ratings are expected to be up. So, check for your network’s season finales. They’ll be big nights for you. Fox’s American Idol phenomenon has its two-hour season finale on Wednesday, May 21st. NBC’s Law & Order, SVU has its 9th season finale Tuesday, May13th. CBS’s 14th season finale of ER is on Thursday, May 15th. ABC has a special two-hour fourth season finale of Desperate Housewives on Sunday, May 18th. And the list goes on and on. And look out for specials and network stunting. For example, for race car fans, the Darlington 500 is on Fox Saturday night, May 10th. A good resource for all these is: http://television.aol.com/feature/may-sweeps/schedule .
THE Y2K OF BROADCASTING: That’s the way I have described to clients the coming DTV Transition set for February 17, 2009, at 11:59:59 p.m. Remember Y2K? That was when the clocks on computers everywhere clicked over to January 1, 2000 – the new millennium – again at 11:59:59 p.m. Predictions ranged from computers crashing and gas pumps stopping to you name it. But aside from a few burps, nothing catastrophic happened. Observers are hoping the same thing proves true for the DTV transition, but it’s all reaching a level of “high anxiety” with a number of agencies, organizations and groups, including the Federal Communications Commission, expressing concern. The National Association of Broadcasters says at least 19.6 Million Households receive over-the-air signals exclusively in their homes and 14.9 Million Households have secondary over-the-air TV sets in their bedrooms or kitchens. Nielsen Media recently warned that one out of every ten households in the U.S. would lose access to most TV signals if the transition happened today, with minority groups hit particularly hard. (What has been little reported is that Nielsen also expressed some concerns, but phrased in hopeful terms, about measuring the digital signal.) Consumer Reports says its survey shows 15% of Americans live in households that rely exclusively on over-the-air programming. IF these people don’t do something (switch to cable or satellite or buy a converter box), that would translate into 11% of American adults, or 23 Million people unable to watch TV.
Everybody agrees that broadcasters need to educate the public about the DTV transition, but what they don’t agree on is how well that is going. The NAB says public awareness of the DTV transition has doubled from 38% at the beginning of last year to 79% in January of this year. Consumer Reports says that of those TV viewers who have at least one TV affected by the transition (meaning primarily over the air) two-thirds (61%) do not know they are affected or are completely unaware of the transition. And one third (33%) of Americans in households that will have no functioning television after the February deadline were completely unaware the transition is happening. One interesting statistic cited by Consumer Reports was that the federal government had allocated $6.5 Million for education about the digital transition while the British government plans to spend $400 Million, although of course that is a government dominated broadcast situation with the BBC. A further interesting side note is the NAB’s letter to the National Telecommunication and Information Administration warning that seniors living in nursing homes may be excluded from getting the government coupons to help pay for converter boxes because of the definition of household.
Even with all this, it gets worse, with market research firm Centris says there are “serious gaps” in digital TV signals across the country so that even if people do know what’s going on, they still may not get a TV signal after the transition date. Obviously, much more to come on this topic in future MfM editions. In fact we are looking at producing our own special White Paper on DTV. As we used to say in the old days… stay tuned.
Footnote: Well known, no doubt, to all those smart people who read MfM, HD and DTV are related but not related issues. Even given that, a recent Webinar arranged by TV Newsday titled How To Go HD Without Going Nuts is worth the hour of time. While all the panelists were strong advocates of the value of HDTV, each had some valid points to consider: KYW/ Philadelphia chief engineer Rich Paleski emphasized the need for a clearly written workflow; WLEX/ Lexington news director (and I’m happy to say, MfM reader) Bruce Carter emphasized the need for training, training and more training and warned that whatever you budget, add 20%; Thomson Grass Valley’s John Naylor emphasized the importance of Meta Data inputs to make the video more usable; Thompson Grass Valley’s Ed Casaccia emphasized that HDTV is, as he put it, “magnetic to viewers.”
BACK TO THE FUTURE: The Federal Communications Commission has proposed a new set of rules that revive some old requirements for local television stations to renew their licenses. Stations that do not air a specified amount of local programming would automatically have their renewal application reviewed, not at the bureau level, but by the commissioners themselves – a move the NAB says is similar to the process in place in the 1970’s. The FCC is also proposing that stations establish permanent advisory boards consisting of local officials and other community leaders, that radio and TV stations be physically manned during all hours of operation and that a stations’ main studio be located within its community of license so the station would be accessible to the local community – a requirement the NAB says was liberalized in 1987 and 1998 to allow stations to operate more efficiently. Several station groups have filed comments calling the moves “blunt and burdensome” and a group of 20 small stations say the move would harm localism rather than helping it. In case you wanted to comment – sorry, the deadline was yesterday.
AMERICA VERSUS CHINA: It’s not yet official, but China is expected to overtake the U.S. as the country with the largest Internet population. The latest report from the Chinese government’s China Internet Network Information Center puts the Internet population at 221 Million, tied with the U.S., but the Chinese figures are from the beginning of the year while the U.S. figures are from March. When the latest figures are released, China is expected to overtake the U.S., according to reports from the Associated Press and the Xinhua News Agency. Even though China’s Internet penetration is low (16%), its web growth is faster than the U.S., where Internet penetration is so high that growth is slower. By the year 2012, the Chinese web population is expected to reach 490 Million – a number larger than the entire U.S. population.
VOYEURS VERSUS CREATORS: In another variation of the U.S. versus the rest of the world theme, massive ad agency Universal McCann says its study of social media worldwide shows that despite all the hullabaloo about user generated content, the U.S. is actually a “country of voyeurs” who are more likely to consume content compared to China which is a “country of creators” who actually produce online content. For example, in the U.S. a little more than 60% of Internet users say they read blogs but only 26% had created one. In China, 88% say they read blogs while 70% say they actually blog; similarly in South Korea, 92% read blogs but 70% of them actually create blogs as well.
IMITATION IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY: Reading the Universal McCann Social Media Wave 3 report, I was struck by a remarkable similarity. In last week’s MfM, you may recall, we cited a white paper by the Interactive Advertising Bureau about social networking and in particular a quote: “In 2008, if you’re not on a social networking site, you’re not on the Internet.” In the Universal McCann report, it notes that social media is a ‘global phenomenon happening in all markets regardless of wider economic, social and cultural development’ and says, quote, “if you are online you are using social media.” In any case, the Universal McCann report is so extensive, we will have a part two version in next week’s MfM.
THE TEEN PARADOX: As if there weren’t enough already… the Pew Internet and American Life Project says teens are writing more but writing less. They’re writing more in terms of writing emails, texting, IM’ing and posting on social networks, but even the teenagers say this doesn’t count as “real” writing. They also don’t think the technology has negatively influenced their writing although many admit they use the more informal tech style of writing, including shortcuts and emoticons, in their formal writing. And at the same time, to continue the paradox, the vast majority of teenagers (86%) believe good writing is important to success in life – slightly more than the percentage of parents (83%).
THANK YOU: To all those who took part in the online survey by the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication that I shamelessly pushed in previous Messages.
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 my website MediaConsultant.tv.
THE Y2K OF BROADCASTING
BACK TO THE FUTURE
AMERICA VERUS CHINA
VOYEURS VERSUS CREATORS
THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY
THE TEEN PARADOX
THANK YOU
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.
SWEEPS: Week one of sweeps. Do you know where your ratings are? Do you have all your special reports done? Do you know what your network is planning? All questions that inquiring minds want to know. And with the writers’ strike over, ratings are expected to be up. So, check for your network’s season finales. They’ll be big nights for you. Fox’s American Idol phenomenon has its two-hour season finale on Wednesday, May 21st. NBC’s Law & Order, SVU has its 9th season finale Tuesday, May13th. CBS’s 14th season finale of ER is on Thursday, May 15th. ABC has a special two-hour fourth season finale of Desperate Housewives on Sunday, May 18th. And the list goes on and on. And look out for specials and network stunting. For example, for race car fans, the Darlington 500 is on Fox Saturday night, May 10th. A good resource for all these is: http://television.aol.com/feature/may-sweeps/schedule .
THE Y2K OF BROADCASTING: That’s the way I have described to clients the coming DTV Transition set for February 17, 2009, at 11:59:59 p.m. Remember Y2K? That was when the clocks on computers everywhere clicked over to January 1, 2000 – the new millennium – again at 11:59:59 p.m. Predictions ranged from computers crashing and gas pumps stopping to you name it. But aside from a few burps, nothing catastrophic happened. Observers are hoping the same thing proves true for the DTV transition, but it’s all reaching a level of “high anxiety” with a number of agencies, organizations and groups, including the Federal Communications Commission, expressing concern. The National Association of Broadcasters says at least 19.6 Million Households receive over-the-air signals exclusively in their homes and 14.9 Million Households have secondary over-the-air TV sets in their bedrooms or kitchens. Nielsen Media recently warned that one out of every ten households in the U.S. would lose access to most TV signals if the transition happened today, with minority groups hit particularly hard. (What has been little reported is that Nielsen also expressed some concerns, but phrased in hopeful terms, about measuring the digital signal.) Consumer Reports says its survey shows 15% of Americans live in households that rely exclusively on over-the-air programming. IF these people don’t do something (switch to cable or satellite or buy a converter box), that would translate into 11% of American adults, or 23 Million people unable to watch TV.
Everybody agrees that broadcasters need to educate the public about the DTV transition, but what they don’t agree on is how well that is going. The NAB says public awareness of the DTV transition has doubled from 38% at the beginning of last year to 79% in January of this year. Consumer Reports says that of those TV viewers who have at least one TV affected by the transition (meaning primarily over the air) two-thirds (61%) do not know they are affected or are completely unaware of the transition. And one third (33%) of Americans in households that will have no functioning television after the February deadline were completely unaware the transition is happening. One interesting statistic cited by Consumer Reports was that the federal government had allocated $6.5 Million for education about the digital transition while the British government plans to spend $400 Million, although of course that is a government dominated broadcast situation with the BBC. A further interesting side note is the NAB’s letter to the National Telecommunication and Information Administration warning that seniors living in nursing homes may be excluded from getting the government coupons to help pay for converter boxes because of the definition of household.
Even with all this, it gets worse, with market research firm Centris says there are “serious gaps” in digital TV signals across the country so that even if people do know what’s going on, they still may not get a TV signal after the transition date. Obviously, much more to come on this topic in future MfM editions. In fact we are looking at producing our own special White Paper on DTV. As we used to say in the old days… stay tuned.
Footnote: Well known, no doubt, to all those smart people who read MfM, HD and DTV are related but not related issues. Even given that, a recent Webinar arranged by TV Newsday titled How To Go HD Without Going Nuts is worth the hour of time. While all the panelists were strong advocates of the value of HDTV, each had some valid points to consider: KYW/ Philadelphia chief engineer Rich Paleski emphasized the need for a clearly written workflow; WLEX/ Lexington news director (and I’m happy to say, MfM reader) Bruce Carter emphasized the need for training, training and more training and warned that whatever you budget, add 20%; Thomson Grass Valley’s John Naylor emphasized the importance of Meta Data inputs to make the video more usable; Thompson Grass Valley’s Ed Casaccia emphasized that HDTV is, as he put it, “magnetic to viewers.”
BACK TO THE FUTURE: The Federal Communications Commission has proposed a new set of rules that revive some old requirements for local television stations to renew their licenses. Stations that do not air a specified amount of local programming would automatically have their renewal application reviewed, not at the bureau level, but by the commissioners themselves – a move the NAB says is similar to the process in place in the 1970’s. The FCC is also proposing that stations establish permanent advisory boards consisting of local officials and other community leaders, that radio and TV stations be physically manned during all hours of operation and that a stations’ main studio be located within its community of license so the station would be accessible to the local community – a requirement the NAB says was liberalized in 1987 and 1998 to allow stations to operate more efficiently. Several station groups have filed comments calling the moves “blunt and burdensome” and a group of 20 small stations say the move would harm localism rather than helping it. In case you wanted to comment – sorry, the deadline was yesterday.
AMERICA VERSUS CHINA: It’s not yet official, but China is expected to overtake the U.S. as the country with the largest Internet population. The latest report from the Chinese government’s China Internet Network Information Center puts the Internet population at 221 Million, tied with the U.S., but the Chinese figures are from the beginning of the year while the U.S. figures are from March. When the latest figures are released, China is expected to overtake the U.S., according to reports from the Associated Press and the Xinhua News Agency. Even though China’s Internet penetration is low (16%), its web growth is faster than the U.S., where Internet penetration is so high that growth is slower. By the year 2012, the Chinese web population is expected to reach 490 Million – a number larger than the entire U.S. population.
VOYEURS VERSUS CREATORS: In another variation of the U.S. versus the rest of the world theme, massive ad agency Universal McCann says its study of social media worldwide shows that despite all the hullabaloo about user generated content, the U.S. is actually a “country of voyeurs” who are more likely to consume content compared to China which is a “country of creators” who actually produce online content. For example, in the U.S. a little more than 60% of Internet users say they read blogs but only 26% had created one. In China, 88% say they read blogs while 70% say they actually blog; similarly in South Korea, 92% read blogs but 70% of them actually create blogs as well.
IMITATION IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY: Reading the Universal McCann Social Media Wave 3 report, I was struck by a remarkable similarity. In last week’s MfM, you may recall, we cited a white paper by the Interactive Advertising Bureau about social networking and in particular a quote: “In 2008, if you’re not on a social networking site, you’re not on the Internet.” In the Universal McCann report, it notes that social media is a ‘global phenomenon happening in all markets regardless of wider economic, social and cultural development’ and says, quote, “if you are online you are using social media.” In any case, the Universal McCann report is so extensive, we will have a part two version in next week’s MfM.
THE TEEN PARADOX: As if there weren’t enough already… the Pew Internet and American Life Project says teens are writing more but writing less. They’re writing more in terms of writing emails, texting, IM’ing and posting on social networks, but even the teenagers say this doesn’t count as “real” writing. They also don’t think the technology has negatively influenced their writing although many admit they use the more informal tech style of writing, including shortcuts and emoticons, in their formal writing. And at the same time, to continue the paradox, the vast majority of teenagers (86%) believe good writing is important to success in life – slightly more than the percentage of parents (83%).
THANK YOU: To all those who took part in the online survey by the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication that I shamelessly pushed in previous Messages.
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 my website MediaConsultant.tv.
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