This is the third installment in my ongoing “Media Metrics” series, which aims to evaluate the true state of America’s media marketplace. [See Part 1 for a complete description of the project and the analytical framework I use to research media trends and developments. Part 2 discussed household access to various media technologies]. In this installment, I want to take a look at how various media sectors stack up against each other in terms of advertising support.
You don’t need to have a PhD in media economics to understand the importance of advertising to media companies. “Advertising is the mother’s milk of all the mass media,” Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg has noted. And Harold L. Vogel, author of Entertainment Industry Economics, the definitive textbook for media market analysts, has noted that, “Advertising is the key common ingredient in the tactics and strategies of all entertainment and media company business models. Indeed, it might further be said that advertising has substantively subsidized the production and delivery or news and entertainment throughout the last century.” Mossberg agrees, noting that, “Without ads, most editorial products and other programming would be either unavailable or prohibitively expensive.”
Should Internet service providers block copyrighted material from their networks if “fingerprinting” technology allows them to easily identify it?
Bits, the New York Times’ technology blog, has an excellent copyright discussion featuring Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu and the general counsel of NBC Universal, Rick Cotton. One of the questions is whether ISPs should block copyrighted works? Wu makes a good point,
“Technologies designed to examine what kind of content is passing the network are technologies of censorship. Tolerating the routine inspection of all content, in the search for “forbidden” content, is a fast road to a private police state.”
But I think Wu is glossing over an important point here, i.e., there is a vast difference between a “private police state” and a real police state: Private entities are vassals of the state; the state answers to no one.
Via The 463, you’ve gotta hand it to Consumer Electronics Association head Gary Shapiro. He’ll go to the most inhospitable climates and do the most disgusting things. To wit, “debating” free trade with Lou Dobbs on his show.
I celebrated the traditional way also, by attending last night’s party. It was typically Googley, with good food, drinks in glowing glasses with curly straws, etc.
Happily, late in the evening, I got a chance to talk to a Googler very high in the food chain, and delivered (eloquently, I’m sure) the same message I delivered at Wednesday’s AFF forum: If Google wants not to be evil, it should openly and strongly oppose the government’s claimed authority to issue “National Security Letters.”
NSLs are alien to our constitution, of course, but Google has a business interest in ending them as well. Its office strategy is not viable while the government can credibly claim a right to unilaterally access data.
Its interesting, the faraway look people get in their eyes when you tell them what they should do, they know you’re right, and they’re not going to do it.
I spend a lot of time here pondering media industry business models, and I’m particularly interested in how traditional media providers are trying to reinvent their business models in response to new marketplace developments. One of the more interesting models I’ve been waiting to see rolled out is called “MagHound–The Magazine Lover’s Best Friend.” Time Inc. is the creator. I am a magazine lover–my house is practically wallpapered with magazines–and MagHound offers folks like me an intriguing business proposition: Instead of an annual subscription to a magazine, just pay MagHound a small monthly fee and then pick-and-choose which magazines you want each month. Essentially, it’s “Netflix for magazines,” as severalotherbloggers have already noted.
Unfortunately, the service has just been vaporware for the past few years. A website has been up and running for awhile now, but it doesn’t provide many details. There’s a small blurb about the service on the Time Inc. press releases website that says the service will launched in the second half of 2008 with over 200 magazines being offered. Pricing details were not offered there, but a recent Ad Agearticle said that the users will get 3 magazines for $4.95 a month, $7.95 a month for five, or $9.95 a month for seven. Again, people can mix and match online according to taste.
Will it work? I’m skeptical that 200 magazines will be enough to draw in a big enough audience to sustain the service. What makes Netflix so great is not just the convenience factor–no need to drive to video stores anymore–but also the huge selection they offer. Every once and awhile I will search for an obscure movie on Netflix and come up empty. But that’s fairly rare. Netflix still has a massive back catalog for movie buffs like me.
When I stumbled across John Gilmore’s argument against the heavy-handed tactics of the anti-spam cabal a while back, I was surprised to find it pretty compelling. My years as a sysadmin had drilled into my head that Open Relays Are Bad, but this is an awfully good point:
What’s the difference between an “open router” and an “open relay”? An open router takes any packet that you send it, and forwards it toward its destination. An open relay takes any email that you send it, and forwards it toward its destination. They’re the same thing, just operating at different levels of the protocol stack. Should we outlaw open routers? Look at all these evil guys on the Internet backbone, all over companies and campuses, and even in private homes! They’re routing packets without authenticating who sent each one! They’ll accept packets from ANYWHERE ON THE INTERNET, and just send them onward, even if they contain spam or viruses! There oughta be a law!!! If we just shut down all those guys with their big Cisco spam tools, then we wouldn’t get any spam any more. Let’s all black-hole every packet that comes from any ISP that doesn’t authenticate every packet. We have perfectly good standards for authenticating packets (IPSEC — I even funded the free Linux implementation, called FreeS/WAN.) so lack of standards is no excuse. Come on guys, if we apply your rationale about open relays just two levels down in the protocol stack, we ought to shut down the entire Internet. What makes the application-level email service on port 25 so special? (Both sarcasm and logical argument are probably lost on this audience, but I’ll give it a try.)
I’m going to be on the road a lot in March and April speaking at or attending some exciting technology-related events. I thought I’d just mention one today since they recently updated their speakers list.
The 2nd annual “Tech Policy Summit” is taking place March 26-28 at the Renaissance hotel in Hollywood. (Here’s a short overview / preview). The list of speakers is very impressive (and not just because I’m on it!) I’ll be speaking on a panel about online child safety issues that features MySpace chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam.
Art Brodsky’s 4,789-word article about Connect Kentucky and its offspring Connected Nation has been the talk of telecom circles over the past week.
Connected Nation is a non-profit entity that has become one of biggest players in the currently topical field of broadband data. Using their work in Kentucky as a model for mapping out broadband availability nation-wide, the group has become a driving force behind legislation that would provide grants for other states to duplicate these efforts.
Examples of legislation following the Connect Kentucky model are the Senate version of the current farm bill, H.R. 4212, which includes Illinois Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin’s “Connect the Nation Act,” S. 1190. Durbin’s bill would authorize $40 million a year, for five years, to state efforts to map out broadband inventory on the census block level.
The “Broadband Data Improvement Act,” S. 1492, by Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, takes a similar approach. The goal is, in the identical language of both bills, to “identify and track the availability and adoption of broadband services within each State.”
In the first installment in this series, I outlined the new project “Media Metrics” project I have undertaken to evaluate the true state of America’s media marketplace. To reiterate: I want to use solid evidence to assess where we stand today relative to the past in terms of media choice, competition, and diversity.
In this brief second installment, I want to provide a quick snapshot of where we stand in terms of household access to various media and communications technologies. Some critics like to wax nostalgic about a mythical golden age of media in the past when the citizenry was supposedly far better informed and more engaged in deliberative democracy.
It’s all poppycock. The fact is that we are better informed as a society today than all of our ancestors were combined. To the extent there ever was a Golden Age of Media, it is now; we are living in it. Richard Saul Wurman, author of Information Anxiety, has noted that “A weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England.” And a 1987 report by Susan Hubbard (Information Skills for an Information Society: A Review of Research) estimated that more new information has been produced within the last 30 years than in the last 5,000. And did you know that in 1900, the average newspaper had only 8 pages, according to Benjamin Compaine, co-author of Who Owns the Media? In the year 2000, by contrast, according to the Encarta encyclopedia, “Daily general-circulation newspapers average[d] about 65 pages during the week and more than 200 pages in the weekend edition.” I could go on all day with stats and comparisons like this.
Part of the reason we are better informed, quite obviously, is simply because we have access to more media services and technologies with each passing year. Exhibit 1 illustrates that fact.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.