Just because Google is testing the waters of print adverts in the United States doesn’t necessarily mean there’s going to be a resurgence of print advertising in the future. In fact, total spending on print advertising is projected to continue it’s downward spiral in 2012.
According to people who understand the marketing market, the decline in print ad spending in the U.S. is expected to fall $33.8 billion this year while the amount of money funneled into online advertising is expected to seesaw upwards to $39.5 billion. Online adverting spending already grew 23% in 2011 and this year’s speculation would see an additional growth of 23.3%. Actually, barring any paper robot revolution, print ads are looking to remain static from here on out.
If bar graphs aren’t your thing, eMarketer explains:
“Advertisers’ comfort level with integrated marketing is greater than ever, and this is helping more advertisers—and more large brands—put a greater share of dollars online,” said David Hallerman, eMarketer principal analyst.
The growing amount of time consumers spend with digital platforms and advertisers’ view of the internet as a more measurable medium—especially as the soft economy forces businesses to be more accountable with their ad dollars—are both significant contributors to digital’s growing footprint, Hallerman added.
TV advertising spending, however, forecasts sunnier skies if you’re looking to sell some ads. eMarketer estimates that spending on TV advertising is expected to grow 6.8% this year and will continue to generate growth over the next few years.
One reason eMarketer states that TV advertising will continue to grow is “a result of the rapid rise of digital advertising and brands’ continued confidence in television advertising, despite increasingly fragmented viewership and the soft economy.” Duh. The television market will always be a fertile ground to plant ads because people will never stop watching television. Hasn’t anybody ever seen Wall-E?
It used to be when you bought a product, it was yours to keep. There was a time you could buy a video game or movie and you could do whatever you wanted with it. You could let a friend borrow it, watch or play without having to input codes or install intrusive security programs. Ownership equaled ownership. These days, with various restrictions and DRM, ownership of a product has turned into a murky grey area. Louis C.K., a popular stand-up comedian and actor has tackled this grey area in a unique way. By selling his own product, Live at the Beacon Theater, online with zero DRM additions, and no regional restrictions.
This is an outtake from the special:
So, was Louis C.K. able to make his experiment a success or did the dreaded online pirates swoop in and steal the day?
Judging by Louis C.K’s statement to his fans concerning the sales of the special, the experiment was mostly successful.
“The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. 12 hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website. As of Today, we’ve sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again.”
Judging by the statement, it sounds like he’s pleased with the results up to this point. It is interesting to note he would have made more money simply releasing his special the traditional way. Making his special DRM-free does leave his product more susceptible to pirating, so does Louis C.K. have any worries from that aspect? On the purchase page, he makes a statement to those who plan to torrent the video:
To those who might wish to “torrent” this video: look, I don’t really get the whole “torrent” thing. I don’t know enough about it to judge either way. But I’d just like you to consider this: I made this video extremely easy to use against well-informed advice. I was told that it would be easier to torrent the way I made it, but I chose to do it this way anyway, because I want it to be easy for people to watch and enjoy this video in any way they want without “corporate” restrictions.
Please bear in mind that I am not a company or a corporation. I’m just some guy. I paid for the production and posting of this video with my own money. I would like to be able to post more material to the fans in this way, which makes it cheaper for the buyer and more pleasant for me. So, please help me keep this being a good idea. I can’t stop you from torrenting; all I can do is politely ask you to pay your five little dollars, enjoy the video, and let other people find it in the same way.
Sincerely,
Louis C.K.
I’ve been venturing to various torrent sites to see how the response has been, or if there is an actual torrent up for the special. I have found a couple, and there was interesting conversation unfolding on one of them. Users were arguing to have the torrent taken down from the site to support Louis C.K, while others dropped in to say they paid their $5 and were trying to get others to do the same.
“dude… read this (referencing Louis C.K.’s note to torrenters).. and take this torrent down.. you didnt put this up to make people buy it… seriously, lets not fool ourselves.. take it down.. someones trying to do the right thing, and you are stabbing them in the back”
“seriously though people; buy this thing, even if you can get it for free — if Louis can actually generate a profit from this it will encourage other comedians to do the same and it means they won’t have to go through HBO or Comedy Central to do their specials and in the end we will end up getting more frequent releases at cheaper prices…c’mon folks, it’s only $5!”
“If this torrent was not here , i would have (no) idea that he was doing this deal. We all love our torrents and he knew that it would end up here. Thanks for this torrent am 200% behind you posting it here. I paid my money because of this torrent and for all those who moan its slow , cant you wait an extra 20mins? stop being greedy.”
The support for Louis C.K’s distribution model and the back-and-forth argument over the torrent being available is unlike anything I’ve seen on a torrent site. It goes to show that while people who do pirate material are stealing, they are willing to pay if they aren’t feeling ripped off.
To help make a push for the video, Louis C.K. conducted a reddit interview which yielded some interesting comments from the comedian. In particular, he talks about how this experiment has been all about learning.
Professionally, I’m learning right this minute, a HUGE amount with this web experiment. this live at the beacon thing (available at httlp://www.louisck.com for 5 bucks) is like that thing in the movie “Twisiter” where they send a bunch of little data collecting balls up into a tornado and just download the lovely results. The whole things has been like that. From the moment it went online and i saw the result of every decision i made.
It’s interesting to discover he has so little knowledge of torrenting, online distribution, when this is one of the most genius ideas I’ve seen in quite awhile. It goes to show if you treat people with respect, offer them a quality product at a reasonable price, and don’t handcuff them with restrictions, they’ll respond positively. I’ve bought the special, and if you want to laugh and be amazed for a hour or so then it’s definitely worth the $5.
For those who’ve maintained the idea ecommerce has it’s limits, meet Snack&Munch. This start-up company has been receiving a lot of hype, being featured on both NBC.com and Mashable. The site is quite simple: Choose 24 snacks from a selection of 250, and pay $24 (shipping is included) to have the snacks delivered to you.
The site is well designed, with the snack section divided into a set of categories. They even provide an “International” section, which showcases vending machine snacks I don’t even recognize. You can purchase a one time order, or set up a monthly recurring shipment which will shave off $1.00 per order.
There are a few road blocks to keep Snack&Munch from succeeding. First, the vending machine visit is generally a spontaneous act. You’re sitting in front of your computer screen working, and suddenly you crave a Twix. To order 24 snacks requires a lot of forethought for an act which happens at a moment’s notice.
I’m not sure the prices for vending machines around the country, but $1 seems kind of steep for some of the items on their list. The classic peanut butter cracker six pack is $0.55 in my office’s vending machine. However, it’s the standard $1 on Snack&Munch. They should think about providing a greater variety when it comes to pricing, and making the price tags more competitive with the physical machines.
Snack&Munch, whether it succeeds or fails, demonstrates how the limits of ecommerce are continuing to be pushed in every direction. If something as simple as vending machine purchases can be brought to the online world, what’s next?
While brick-and-mortar sales won’t happen until 5 p.m (eastern time) , the iPad 2 was available to purchase online early this morning. However, it didn’t take long before all the orders available were placed. If you visit the iPad 2 order screen now, you’ll see a 2-3 week waiting period for every version of the device.
Lex Friedman, of Macworld.com, wrote a humorous piece about how his baby woke him up in time to place his iPad 2 order, “After the 4 a.m. (Eastern) diaper change that he demanded early Friday morning, I fired up my laptop to place my online order—mere minutes after Apple began accepting such online requests.” he concludes the story, “As my bleary, sleep-deprived eyes studied the online Apple Store’s iPad selection screen, I saw that it was indicating iPads would begin shipping in 3 to 5 business days.”
At least with the online purchase, you know what you’re getting into. It might not be pleasing to wait 2-3 weeks, or have to wake up at 4 a.m. but it sure beats the onslaught of what is bound to happen at 5 p.m.
Interesting study from Scarborough Research ties the relationship of households with eReader devices to newspaper readership, media website, demographics and Internet usage. Below are some of the highlights from the study:
41 percent of adults who live in E?Reader Households visited a broadcast television website during the past month
41 percent of adults in E?Reader Households visited a newspaper website during the past month, compared to 27 percent of total adults
This consumer group is 125 percent more likely to have watched or downloaded a movie online during the past month
Adults in E?Reader Households are 86 percent more likely than the average adult to spend 20+ hours online weekly
E?Reader Households are almost three times as likely as all adults nationally to be among the highest spenders online (spending $2,500 or more annually)
Demographically, adults in E?Reader Households are more likely than average to be ages 25?54, and married with children. They are in higher income brackets and slightly more likely than all adults to be male
A new eMarketer survey points to a brighter future for online concerts and other forms of long form music videos. “If the first iteration of online video was about silly pet tricks on YouTube, the next wave will be about professionally produced full-length content…” according to Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst. “This shift will be propelled by a combination of technology integration, demographics and a growing comfort level with the idea of watching video hosted on Websites.”
Much of the growth in long form video viewing comes from the growth of Hulu and the increasing integration of the internet and television sets. In fact, In-Stat expects US shipments of Web-enabled devices that support TV applications to increase from 14.6 million this year to 83.4 million by 2014.
But overall video viewing is growing too, so don’t expect the the quick pleasure of short form music videos to go away anytime soon.
Online Video Growth Stats
The highest penetration of online video viewing is among 18- to 24-year-olds, with 25- to 34-year-olds and teens not far behind. Retrevo found that 29% of under-25s get all or most of their TV online, compared with 8% of the video viewing population as a whole.
An often quoted stat about the new reality we lives in today points out that 20 years ago the average American had less than 25 friends. Today the average American has more than 200. Of course, we all realize on some level that this blossoming of friendship doesn’t equate to having 200 best friends. In fact, the ties we have to the outer fringes of our social network may be very thin indeed. That’s the subject that an interesting campaign launched by Verizon is trying to explore.
Rather than trying to get you to "defriend" the people you don’t think you know, the campaign asks a much more interesting question. If you had the chance to meet your online friends in real life, would you learn they were really your friends, or little more than strangers? To find out, the company found a girl named Rosa and decided to send her on a journey across the US to connect with her online friends in real life. They armed her with a KIN, a new phone which seems to be either made by Verizon, Sharp or Windows (they don’t really say) and recorded video of her travels.
It’s a marketing campaign that fits squarely in between the concept of a documentary and a social experiment, but it works because you want to know what Rosa will discover. Not only for her, but because it has some meaning for each of us who keep these virtual relationships and wonder what they really mean. It’s not that often that a marketing effort can turn the lens back onto a cultural phenomenon that we are all living through right now. This succeeds brilliantly at that and is worth watching.
From a marketing point of view, however, the campaign equally brilliantly demonstrates how a lack of connection can make life confusing for a consumer. Details like the KIN Studio or the KIN Spot are features that sound important, but are shared on Facebook without any real explanation of what they are or why someone should care. Ultimately the Facebook page relies on product imagery and placement to make you aware of the product and make you want one.
The connection to how the phone might actually help you better filter your network or find out who your real friends are (both things the campaign focuses on) are missing to connect the phone to the bigger message they are sharing. What this leads to is that the campaign may stay in people’s mind for the questions it raised and the story it focused on telling, but the phone (and company behind it) will be easily forgotten – like a subtle product placement in a TV series that you might notice, but never really makes much of a difference.
comScore today released January 2010 data from the comScore Video Metrix service showing that nearly 173 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during the month. Highlights from the report below:
The top video ad networks in terms of their actual reach delivered were: BrightRoll Video Network with 27.2 percent penetration of online video viewers, SpotXchange Video Ad Network with 19.8 percent, and Tremor Media Video Network with 16.6 percent.
135.4 million viewers watched 12.7 billion videos on YouTube.com (93.4 videos per viewer).
The average Hulu viewer watched 23.5 videos, totaling 2.3 hours of videos per viewer.
The duration of the average online video was 4.1 minutes.
Top U.S. Online Video Content Properties* by Videos Viewed January 2010 Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore Video Metrix
The model will allow users to access a certain number of articles free each month. After the set viewing threshold, users will be required to pay. Print subscribers will have free access online. Says the Times:
This will enable NYTimes.com to create a second revenue stream and preserve its robust advertising business. It will also provide the necessary flexibility to keep an appropriate ratio between free and paid content and stay connected to a search-driven Web.
Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman and publisher of the New York Times, said, “Our audiences are very loyal and we believe that our readers will pay for our award-winning digital content and services.” According to Nielsen Online, the Times is the #1 newspaper site in the world, so they may just have enough support to do this.
Romenesko also has posted a memo to the Times staff on the upcoming change (via). In the memo, Sulzberger acknowledges that this move will be lauded by some and criticized by others, just as the management debated it. Ultimately, he says, this move will be judged by its implementation, which is why they’re giving themselves so long to run up to the process. In the meantime, they will also work on improving the site, its users’ experience and its stickiness.
Sulzberger explains their reasoning behind this pay model choice, echoing some of the press release wording:
We also selected the metered model because it offers a number of important virtues from a financial and growth perspective. It allows NYTimes.com to remain a vibrant part of the search-driven Web, which has proven to be an integral reason for why we have become an industry leader in display advertising. This flexibility enables us to create a proper ratio between free and paid content and to aggressively build on our very successful digital advertising business.
He also says the Times will not join a consortium.
I’m glad they’ll keep some of their content free—I’m hoping that such features as their blogs will remain free without counting toward the article limit. The Times is a valuable, venerated resource.
But personally, I won’t be paying for a subscription, or using the site enough to incur use fees the vast majority of the time. Will you?
Twitter…the final frontier. These are the voyages of game-maker Atari. Its 2-month mission: to explore strange new social networks, to seek out new geeks and new game players, to boldly go where no ad campaign has gone before!
[Cue intro]
If you’re a Trekkie, you’re probably already well aware of the pending February 2nd launch of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) "Star Trek Online." Well, according to ClickZ, its creator, Atari Inc., has decided to reach those that don’t quite go as far as greeting each other with "Live Long and Prosper," by launching a number of social media initiatives to promote the game.
YouTube, Facebook, and secret access codes on game sites, have all been part of Atari’s marketing efforts, but my favorite has to be its Twitter strategy:
For Twitter, the New York-based company has created a microsite-app combo, dubbed "Tweet in Klingon," that allows viewers to type English phrases and have them tweeted in fictional Klingon language.
And you thought Foursquare updates were annoying. Wait ’til people realize they can start tweeting in Klingon. Better yet, they start updating their Foursquare status in Klingon. Race ya to become the Mayor of Adigeon Prime!
New York magazine is reporting that the New York Times could be announcing its own move to a paid subscription model as early as this week. If this is the case, we may see more of the dominoes fall in this tenuous conversation. It seems that whenever anyone discusses even the threat of paid content online, a hush comes over the room and people start to whisper like they do when your creepy uncle shows up at the family reunion. Well, whether this is the time or not, this could be the year where content makes a break from the free world to either save itself or crash and burn in spectacular fashion for all to watch.
New York Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. appears close to announcing that the paper will begin charging for access to its website, according to people familiar with internal deliberations. After a year of sometimes fraught debate inside the paper, the choice for some time has been between a Wall Street Journal-type pay wall and the metered system adopted by the Financial Times, in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. The Times seems to have settled on the metered system.
There are a wide variety of thoughts on the actual time that the announcement and then the service would happen so suffice it to say, it could be this week and it could be in a few months. The point is that there is pretty good chance that this will happen. When it does there will be plenty of interested parties looking on to help them determine what might be next. Apparently this has not been an easy discussion for the Times and they have looked at several options.
The Times has considered three types of pay strategies. One option was a more traditional pay wall along the lines of The Wall Street Journal, in which some parts of the site are free and some subscription-only. For example, editors and business-side executives discussed a premium version of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s DealBook section. Another option was the metered system. The third choice, an NPR-style membership model, was abandoned last fall, two sources explained. The thinking was that it would be too expensive and cumbersome to maintain because subscribers would have to receive privileges (think WNYC tote bags and travel mugs, access to Times events and seminars).
Now, the article in New York does examine how difficult this process is for the Times because in reality, they are trying to assess what their worth is to the English speaking world from a journalistic and reporting standpoint. Some feel that they could be the last one standing as others go away as a result of online media. If that were the case, the NY Times could garner plenty of ad revenue if they could hold on in the near term. Others are just watching the paper bleed money and feel that there may never be enough ad revenue in the new media world to support the level of reporting etc that they are used to promoting.
I am not sure where I am on this one. I would like to see news outlets like the New York Times survive. We need to pay people to cover stories and do the necessary digging to hopefully get somewhere near the truth. The trouble comes in whether the truth is ever the issue or not. Honestly, it doesn’t matter if a publication is on the left or the right of the political spectrum because the real concern is the bias that exists in many of these big publications. Everything that is reported is spun and often those who get to the position of being a Times reporter use that position as a power base. As a result reporting is out the window. It’s more like opinion and agenda with a few facts thrown in here and there. Sounds a lot like bloggers actually!
Anyway, here’s the easy question for our readers. Would you pay to get the New York Times content online? Yes or no. Oh and since we are a blog please let us hear your opinions as well.
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