Oh man if the newspaper industry gets a bailout, I will throw a fit. Now don’t get me wrong, I love newspapers, and I love newspaper people, I just don’t respect 99% of the businesses they run. Why don’t I respect their businesses? Well they refuse to adapt and evolve. Its like if I told you your car was stuck on the tracks and a train was coming, and instead of moving your car, you decided to build a cement wall around it…
The latest ridiculousness is the report by the API, highlighted on techcrunch, suggesting that google is to blame and that they need to piece back together their shit to the same structure it was before. If it didn’t work before, why would you waste billions trying to force it to work now? Why not spend millions and make it what people want? The report argues that hyperlinking and other “new” technologies are killing them. Oh wow, people only want to read what they are interested in? They don’t want to pay for all of your day’s content when all they want is one article? I wonder why? (if you are calling the shots at a newspaper, let me clarify, that was sarcasm in case you didn’t understand).
Lets examine the facts a bit. Previously newspapers made money selling you all their content at once in one transaction. This transaction delivered not only all of their content for the issue, but all of the ads at the same time. If you are an advertiser, that isn’t the most effective means of advertising, especially in an age where you can target and track all your ads online. Advertisers had no idea if their ads were ever being read, so its money down the drain. Newspapers profited from this fact that their main revenue stream was an unmeasurable interruption marketing scheme.
Newspapers need to realize that they are in the content business and the ad sales business. You know what, I just realized I’m wasting your time and more importantly MY time writing about this. I think this hits my quota for the quarter on posts about how the newspaper industry is dead. Why bother yammering about a sinking ship if no one on the boat wants to save it. No sense beating a dead horse. I’m gonna go read a blog or watch cnn.
So you just slashed your operating costs by a bunch and shored up a ton of capital from the real-estate sales. What next? Look at your money makers: classifieds and local advertising. These are two fields no one can compete with you on, so time to invest money in revamping them. First off, build a self-service ad system akin to google adwords that has display ads built in. Start selling your own contextual ads across all of your content. Note this won't be as profitable on a per cpm basis as it is for google as people aren't reading your content to find stuff, ... Continue reading
Here is my modest proposal for revitalizing this country’s economy. Mind you I am not an economist (though I do sometimes wish I were one, more on that later), aside from reading Keynes and Smith, a few of their more modern counterparts, and taking 2 semesters of Econ in college, I have no economic training. I have however been an entrepreneur for half my life, which entitles me to a perspective on things that seems to be lacking from the Federal Reserve these days. My plan as you’ll see is very simple, and could definitely use some refinement, which I encourage you to su ... Continue reading
I've had a long fascination with observing trends people follow. Fads and trends intrigue me. Not sure why, probably has some sociological reasoning behind it. However there is something inherently valuable about being able to spot a trend before it becomes a fad. This insight is something not too many people understand.
One of my favorite professors at "The University" was an economics professor ... Continue reading
Yahoo started in this ad game in the mid 90s, before there was a critical mass on the internet as far as consumers and corporations. So Y! started by targeting the large ad buys on their properties. It only made sense to do it this way from Y! perspective, as they had the largest inventory, and didn’t have any other reasonable way of selling that inventory in a cost effective manner. So Yahoo focused on doing a couple hundred or thousand really big ad buys every year for big brand advertisers, Coke, Toyota, Nike, etc. These ... Continue reading
What intrigues me about Ikea isn't the low prices or design aesthetics (despite liking minimalist design), its the sheer enormity of their stores. Ikea appeals to the more predominant business side of me more than anything. The store is 300,000 freakin square feet! Any company that can manage to stock, and manage a store that size (and almost 300 of them) impresses me. They carry a bajillion products that they manufacture themselves (Q: is there a factory in the US?), and seem to have made amazing efficiencies everywhere imagina ... Continue reading
One magazine which I originally had qualms about paying for, Harvard Business Review, turned out to be worth its hefty subscription price ($99!!!) with just one article in its last issue (I was THIS close to not renewing as most of it is kind of dry). In the latest issue, there is an interview with Jeff Bezos and he puts out the single best piece of advice I have seen in ages. He suggests that it is foolish to focus on the things that will constantly change (technology, products, etc.) ... Continue reading
