Posts tagged business models

If advertising is meant to be aspirational, these ads [in men’s magazines] are presenting a pretty sad version of what American men can aspire to be. And advertisers aren’t selling this hyper-masculine ideal to just any man: They’re specifically targeting the younger, poorer, less-educated guys in the supermarket aisle. In the latest issue of the journal Sex Roles, a trio of psychologists at the University of Manitoba analyzed the advertising images in a slate of magazines targeted at men, from Fortune to Field and Stream. They counted up the ads that depict men as violent, calloused, tough, dangerous, and sexually aggressive—what the researchers call “hyper-masculine”—then indexed them with the magazine’s target demographics. Hyper-masculine images, the researchers found, are more likely to be sold to adolescents, who find higher “peer group support” for manly-man behaviors. They’re also sold to working-class men, who are “embedded in enduring social and economic structures in which they experience powerlessness and lack of access to resources” like political power, social respect, and wealth, and so turn to more widely accessible measures of masculine worth—like “physical strength and aggression.
Amanda Hess, Slate. How Men’s Magazines Sell Masculinity to Young, Low-Income Men.

Are we witnessing the rise of the artisanal magazine?

thepenguinpress:

Jason Diamond writes in Flavorwire: 

Observe The Travel Almanac selling out, and Kindling Quarterly, described as an “exploration of fatherhood through essays, interviews, editorials, art, and photography,” getting written up by The New York Times as examples of this crop of sleek new magazines aimed at niche readerships. David Michael Perez, one of Kindling Quarterly’s founders, told the Times that he believes his magazine (which retails at $14 an issue) is a good business model that he and his business partner, August Heffner, jumpstarted using personal funds. There’s the Canadian menswear magazine Inventory, which retails for $20 in the States, and Babes Quarterly is billed as “a modernized version of the classic 1950’s and 60’s pocket men’s magazine” that is “designed to a creative, babe loving guy in all of us.” These magazines are also thinking of new ways to promote their product, and also new ways of doing business overall. The Portland magazine Kinfolk explicitly states on its website that it is a “collectable print magazine” aimed at growing a “readership of young artists and food enthusiasts by focusing on simple ways to spend time together.” The Chicagoan, a Jazz Age Windy City magazine that was relaunched in 2012 by Stop Smiling publisher J.C. Gabel, says it has “embraced the vintage newsstand as a metaphor to bolster our message of substance and style” by setting up pop-up newsstands throughout the Chicagoland area meant to function “much like food trucks.” The Toronto fashion journal Worn comes out biannually, with a stated mission “[t]o show a wide range of beauty, one that includes diversity of culture, subculture, gender identification, sexuality, size, race, ability, and age,” as well as “To answer, always and above all, to our readers and not our advertisers.”

FJP: The pop-up newsstand food truck idea is brilliant. Could serve sandwiches and coffee too.

RIP EveryBlock EveryBlock, the microlocal news service that incorporated data feeds from government resources and user generated content to create neighborhood news services around the country, has closed its doors. Originally created with a 2007 $1.1 million Knight News Challenge grant, it was purchased by MSNBC in 2009. In an email to Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman, Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and chief digital officer of NBC News, writes : “[EveryBlock] is a wonderful scrappy business but it wasn’t a strategic fit with our growth strategy and — like most hyperlocal businesses — was struggling with the business model.” Visit Poynter for the details.

RIP EveryBlock

EveryBlock, the microlocal news service that incorporated data feeds from government resources and user generated content to create neighborhood news services around the country, has closed its doors.

Originally created with a 2007 $1.1 million Knight News Challenge grant, it was purchased by MSNBC in 2009.

In an email to Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman, Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and chief digital officer of NBC News, writes : “[EveryBlock] is a wonderful scrappy business but it wasn’t a strategic fit with our growth strategy and — like most hyperlocal businesses — was struggling with the business model.”

Visit Poynter for the details.

Newspaper owners, struggling with plunging demand and advertising spending at a six-decade low, are squeezing money out of the assets they do have with rising value: buildings and land.

Nadja Brandt, Bloomberg. Condos Replaces Newsrooms as U.S. Papers Sell Real Estate.

From the article:

Newspaper companies are finding they can save money by renting offices outside of urban areas, said Leo Kulp, a New York-based advertising and publishing analyst at Citigroup Inc.

“Newspapers aren’t in the central spotlight anymore as they used to be in times past,” he said. “With the rise of online communications you don’t need to be in center of town. You can pay down debt, raise capital and get cheaper real estate in the suburbs.”

FJP: Selling off what’s unnecessary reminds us of this post by Clay Shirky, in which he recounts the time he counted how many people worked at his hometown paper (hint: he didn’t find many actual journalists.)

Best of Kickstarter 2012

With over 2.2 million people in 172 countries backing projects to the tune of $606 per minute, Kickstarter takes a look back at 2012.

Images: Selected stills, Best of Kickstarter 2012. Select to embiggen.

Textbooks, 812% More Expensive Than 1978 With a new semester almost upon us, it’s time to figure out why college textbooks are so absurdly expensive.

Textbooks, 812% More Expensive Than 1978

With a new semester almost upon us, it’s time to figure out why college textbooks are so absurdly expensive.

If this model works, we’ll have proof of principle that a small group of writers and editors can be paid directly by readers, and that an independent site, if tended to diligently, can grow an audience large enough to sustain it indefinitely.

The point of doing this as simply and as purely as possible is precisely to forge a path other smaller blogs and sites can follow. We believe in a bottom-up Internet, which allows a thousand flowers to bloom, rather than a corporate-dominated web where the promise of a free space becomes co-opted by large and powerful institutions and intrusive advertising algorithms. We want to help build a new media environment that is not solely about advertising or profit above everything, but that is dedicated first to content and quality.

Andrew Sullivan, Daily Beast. New Year, New Dish, New Media.

Sullivan, the commentator/founder of the Daily Dish, a blog that has found homes over the years at Time, The Atlantic and The Daily Beast, announces that he and his small staff are going independent.

To support the venture, they’ve set up a subscription plan ($19.99 per year, or pay what you want) through TinyPass, a startup payment platform similar to Press+.

The immediate business model is to convert some of the Dish’s million or so readers into immediate subscribers. Sullivan goes on to write that if that works they hope to get into longer form journalism via a monthly tablet magazine.

#BuhBye

#BuhBye

Dear Users:

You are not our customers, you are the cattle we drive to market and auction off to the highest bidder. Enjoy your feed and keep producing the milk.

Reginald Braithwaite, Translation from legalese and PR-speak to English of selected portions of another overfunded startup’s communications as they “monetize” their service.

The News, via CNET:

Instagram said today that it has the perpetual right to sell users’ photographs without payment or notification, a dramatic policy shift that quickly sparked a public outcry.

The new intellectual property policy, which takes effect on January 16, comes three months after Facebook completed its acquisition of the popular photo-sharing site. Unless Instagram users delete their accounts before the January deadline, they cannot opt out.

Under the new policy, Facebook claims the perpetual right to license all public Instagram photos to companies or any other organization, including for advertising purposes, which would effectively transform the Web site into the world’s largest stock photo agency. One irked Twitter user quipped that “Instagram is now the new iStockPhoto, except they won’t have to pay you anything to use your images.”

Read On: CNET, Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos.

Two years ago, we set out to create a revolutionary product that people would love. The Daily delivered great original reporting, excellent design, and custom interactivity to users every day. Although we have over 100,000 passionate paying subscribers, unfortunately we have not been able to build a big enough audience fast enough to make our business model work.

Memo to staff from The Daily’s editor in chief Jesse Angelo and publisher Greg Clayman.

The News: The two-year-old iPad only newspaper will shut down after releasing its December 15 issue.

The Issue(s): Basically, being locked into the iPad. Yes, the Daily had a hundred thousand subscribers, and yes, it built out a robust social media presence but going iPad only for the meat of its content was too much too soon. There were just too many people locked out (and locked in) for it to thrive.

Another way to put it is this thought from Trevor Butterworth, a former weekly columnist for The Daily:

So, The Daily meets its doom on December 15. The editorial section, et moi, bit the dust over the summer, so not much of a shock. The single biggest failing? You can’t create an entirely new brand and take it behind a paywall after 4 weeks, while limiting its footprint on the Internet, and then expect people to buy it. Where was the marketing?

Second, it simply added more average-reader content to a market saturated with free average-reader content. It didn’t have the courage to be cool, quirky, nerdy, obsessive or snarky. Its demise is a wake-up call for those who confuse cool technology with being cool - and those who think more of the sameness is going to produce a paying customer base for a mainstream media product.

Anthony De Rosa: Why Newsrooms Should Poach Tech and Startup Talent

Anthony De Rosa is Reuters’ Social Media Editor, where he’s also a columnist and host at ReutersTV. We sat down with him to discuss where the tech and news communities meet and, increasingly, overlap.

Being that the news industry has more than a few business problems these days, Anthony suggests hiring outside help. By choosing Craigslist, Groupon and Facebook as examples of places from which to steal employees, De Rosa makes a solid point: go where the success is, and learn from the people that have done smart things in the more turbulent and burgeoning media landscapes.

Anthony also discusses what news life is like at Reuters, which we’ll dive into in more detail over the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

And for more FJP videos, see our new site, theFJP.org.

What Will Rise from Journalism's Ashes?

Over at theFJP.org we’re starting to do longer, “thinkier” pieces. Coming in with the first is Forrester media analyst James McQuivey who writes about what etymology and the concrete industry can teach us about the future of the news:

To see [opportunities] clearly – to understand exactly what will rise from journalism’s ashes – we have to consider carefully what we mean by the word journalism.

Interestingly, journalism stems from a word that we don’t commonly use in English to refer to news or the actual media through which news is delivered. It’s not newspaperism, it’s not broadcastism, it’s not newsmagazineism. This is not merely a cheeky observation. Because buried in the word journalism is this core concept: modern journalism should be format agnostic. While the word’s root – journal – does convey a physical object, the modern use of the word does not require faith in or a commitment to any specific format…

…In English we actually took pains to include the medium, the paper itself, in the word, tying us dangerously close to a concept of the medium that trapped the news — and the revenue model that supported it — in its physical form. In German, their choice of the word Zeitung for newspaper was much more fortuitous. Literally, the word means times, as if every newspaper in the German language could claim to be the paper of record for its community! This allows German journalists to understand instinctively that a newspaper is supposed to be timely as well as a medium for connecting to the times in which we live. In Spanish, whoever chose the word periódico for the newspaper was similarly focused on a benefit of the medium – it was regular or periodic.

Those of us who came up with English are tied to the idea that a newspaper has to honor its roots in wood pulp. This is a ridiculous notion and is the first major casualty of digital disruption in the news business. The trees can now breathe a sigh of relief.

Read through for James’ thoughts on the forms and formats journalism should take next, and how the concrete industry actually provides useful examples.

James McQuivey, The FJP. What Will Rise From Journalism’s Ashes?

Modern Media Revenue Strategies: A Panel From The Columbia Media Conference

Six of the sharpest minds in the business of journalism just sat down to discuss the strategies they’re using now, and where they’re laying bets for the future.

The FJP was in the audience, and has paraphrased the discussion below. 

The Highlights:

  • McKinsey & Co’s Jonathan Dunn saying that ALL of their print clients believe their future is in video.
  • The Awl’s Choire Sicha spilling the beans on which popular advertising unit is a huge waste of money.
  • Buzzfeed’s Jon Steinberg saying that young journalists should be considering making branded content for The New York Times, Huffington Post and everyone else.
  • Buzzfeed’s Jon Steinberg talking about where their traffic comes from.
  • Slate’s Matt Turck talking their multi-pronged revenue model.
  • McKinsey & Co’s Jonathan Dunn saying the tablet and smartphone advertising spend will grow from $1B in 2011 to $4B in 2012.

The Panel 

The conversation started with the panel members discussing the models they think are going to work.

Reminder; what follows paraphrases the conversation, with some omissions.

Matt Turck, publisher of Slate

When we first put a paywall up we had 20,000 people at $20 year at the first try. But that was not enough revenue to run a business.

If we’ve got the right people and ideas we can give the content away and it’s a viable business, that said we’re looking for new revenue; for example we’re in the events space. We syndicate a lot of our content, selling our high quality journalism to other publications at a low cost. We partner with YouTube, and there are a number of other small things; We’re experimenting with creating a membership program so that people who join get free entry to some events, and access to our editors that they wouldn’t get.

Buzzfeed’s president and COO Jon Steinberg.

The question is not how do you create a journalism revenue. It’s how do you create a robust business that can also support journalism. Conde Naste and Hearst have not made the transition to new models.

Harper’s Magazine, Vice President for Public Relations Jason Chupick

Any and all brand extensions that play off our tradition (which goes back to Mark Twain and Herman Melville) are on the table. Whereas a lot of people are focussed on short, quick journalism, we’re looking at going more towards long form. To re-invent what we have now would be extraordinarily hard, but we don’t need to be a big organization, we’re a non-profit.

Columbia Journalism School’s Dean of Academic Affairs Bill Grueskin.

(He said that despite having been the Managing Editor Online and Deputy Managing Editor of News for the Wall Street Journal, which had a very successful paywall, he said he didn’t believe that paywalls are a good solution for most publications) 

The WSJ now has more than 1,000,000 subscribers, paying between $75 & $150/year, but even when I was there we realized that the subscription model was a problem for advertisers, and this is the WSJ. Therefore we opened up so that google, email, social traffic could get in for free, and provide the amount of traffic that would be attractive to advertisers.

Paywalls are a defensive move, to protect the print products that represent 70-80% of revenue, but it’s time to go from defense to offense (actually it was about 5 years ago). 

McKinsey & Co’s Associate Principal, Media & Entertainment Practice, Jonathan Dunn

There are two big trends in the space: Video and the importance of data. 

Advertising revenue is breaking into two segments; premium (when you know you’ve got a audience with a particular ) and ‘remnant’, the low-end of not-particularly targeted. 

We don’t have a single print client who doesn’t see their future as video-based because the advertising on video is much more valuable. 

Regarding the importance of data; you must know in deatil who your audience is so you can effectively advertise them, and find relevant new opportunities. These days potential investors in media businesses don’t even want to talk to founders, the only thing they want to see is the analytics of the audience.

The AWL’s Founder and Editor In Chief Choire Sicha.

As a small independently-owned company, how big can we get? We aren’t expecting to scale. But that’s OK; The business models of each publication are intrinsically linked to their backgrounds and missions.

Buzzfeed’s  Jon Steinberg: 

Even in the glory days of magazines, most publications were never bigger than a mid-sized, but scale isn’t necessarily the key. For a recent advertising contract, Buzzfeed was competing with Awl, a much smaller site. But Awl still won contracts off the bigger buzz feed because their creative and audience was more attractive. Awl had enough inventory to fulfill that advertiser’s needs, because unless the client is the size of McDonalds, and is aiming to reach huge broad audiences, mid-sized audiences at OK.

Slate’s Matt Turck.

The unique solution that you build for your advertising partners is the key.  

Buzzfeed’s Jon Steinberg

The reason that there’s a debate about whether banners are good is that they’re crap. If a product is good there’s no debate.

At this point, the conversation moved on to whether tablets are a real opportunity.

Harper’s Jason Chupick

We’re on zinio, but it’s a stop-gap for most magazines, the PDF-like experience isn’t good enough. Tablets are the place to be if you’re a long-form magazine. Interactive firms need to hire better content creators. Making high quality interactive experiences is going to get cheaper. [Cited The Atavist, a tablet and smartphone-native publishing platform]

You’re going to have to show growth across all platforms for advertisers to be interested.

McKinsey & Co’s Jonathan Dunn

Our best guess is that $1B of advertising went to tablet or smartphone advertising in 2011, which is basically ad agencies’ experimental budget, but in 2012 we calculate that figure will be $4B, and in 2013 it’ll be $5B-$8B.

Buzzfeed’s Jon Steinberg

I don’t think the app thing is worthwhile. 40% of our site traffic is from mobile. Having a mobile strategy is like having a laptop strategy five years ago.

When asked about apps, ‘there are a lot of things people think that aren’t based on data’.

If people looked at the data which says no-one remembers the welcome screen advertisers, they’d be a lot better off.

The Awl’s Choire Sicha

No-one ever sees the advertisements at the top of a webpage. We’ve seen the research that shows everyone immediately scrolls down a little bit when they visit a page for the first time [to hide the top banner ads].

Columbia Journalism School’s Bill Grueskin

One of the big problems from the newspaper industry is that they’ve asked how they can repurpose their print content, but most newspaper content doesn’t work well and it stymies them from developing new content that is native to the new platforms.

The Awl’s Choire Sicha

There is no right answer about whether to put print content online for free; it depends entirely on the product and category.

The conversation turned to social media.

Buzzfeed’s Jon Steinberg

We get double the traffic from Facebook than we do from google, and that’s the same throughout our network.

Google’s algorithm is too unpredictable. So Facebook, which is real human beings sharing your content is a much more sustainable way of building audience.

Slate’s Matt Turck

 We’ve got 450,000 followers on twitter, 250,000 on Facebook. We’re having more and more conversations with readers on Facebook, our editor gets questions from the Facebook audience for his interviews.

At this point, the conversation moved on to the skills young journalists should get themselves.

Columbia Journalism School’s Bill Grueskin

You still need to know how to get information, verify it, present it in a compelling way, and understand what your audience needs.

I’m not a fan of the swiss army knife journalist who can do a hundred things, but none of them well.

Being able to engage readers on social media, not just as a distribution process, but to help you understand what your audience needs and what your community knows about the story you’re working on.

If you can do all of that you can go to a news organization and make a compelling case about why you should be hired.

Buzzfeed’s Jon Steinberg

There are a whole lot of journos, (Nate Silver, Ben Smith) who have become little industries in themselves.

Advertising is an amazing industry, that you can love and be inspired by.

If you read the advertising titans’ books you’ll be inspired.

There’s a massive need for journalists to make branded content. If you can do that, you can go to everyone, Huffpo, NYT, Buzzfeed who will need your ability.

Slate’s Matt Turck

Now more than ever before the individuals have become brands. If you can build a following, there’s not a publication out there who won’t take a look at you.

You’ve got to keep changing so fast with the industry. Embrace Change.

Buzzfeed’s Jon Steinberg 

Going back to the branded content topic; you need to have a solid wall between branded content and the rest. At Buzzfeed we have an absolute separation, between the two sides of our business, both in the organization and on the site. Every day we put content up on our sites that will annoy our advertisers.

As noted above, this paraphrases the discussion and omits some of the conversation. If you can add, or refine the article, please email Fergus Pitt.

Disclosure: Bill Grueskin is the author’s masters thesis supervisor.

Over the last couple years, reddit traffic and usage have continued to grow by leaps and bounds — in October 2012 alone we were up to over 3.8B pageviews and more than 46 million unique visitors. Our server costs also continue to grow, so we have a choice to make: we can start running a bunch more ads, or we can give you, the community, more reasons to support the site with your own money through reddit gold.

Reddit CEO Yishan Wong, blog.reddit.com. Now is the Time… to Invest in Gold.

Avoiding overt commercialization because you’re afraid of alienating your online community is honorable, but it will eventually lead to a big question — where, then, do you make money?

Wong, as Mathew Ingram pointed out earlier today, has subtly reminded users about Reddit Gold, a paid membership that comes with perks. Wong also told readers that, no, they are not a very profitable site. They need help, and so they’re asking members to pay if they can.

Ingram thinks it may work, and that it could even work for news sites:

There’s no question that being a community already gives Reddit a better chance of success with this kind of thing, but it is a model that I think more media companies could implement as well, instead of just putting up a blanket paywall around all of their content. This is the idea behind what Wall Street Journal managing editor Raju Narisetti and author Jeff Jarvis have both called a “reverse paywall” — which provides benefits to loyal users and readers instead of charging them — and it seems like a much better fit if what you want to do is build a relationship with your community.

The key is to build and maintain a community where users are able to build reputations for themselves, either through loyal interaction with content, or continued contribution to the community. Think karma. 

It may also be that the community needs a strong membership within its large population. Members with Reddit Gold, however, are no such group. But one user has the right idea — noting that some members occasionally see their own artwork posted without attribution, it was suggested that there be a “creddit” button which links to and gives points, perks, etc. to the members that created the shared work.

As Ingram points out, other robust communities have disappeared after the owner of the site tried to profit from them:

Those kinds of decisions, along with other design-related moves that Digg made, arguably poisoned the site’s relationship with its community to the point where many core users left — in many cases for Reddit — and the site’s long slide into irrelevance began.

How can Reddit and similar sites (and even news sites) make money, then? Well if it’s all hinged on their community, it doesn’t hurt to have a strong one that’s filled with, as Clay Shirky has put it, love — members who continue coming back to have conversations, share content and create.