Web Readers LESS Fickle?

I have to admit, this story surprised me. According to a new eyetrack study from The Poynter Institute newspaper readers consume more of online stories and they are more likely to finish reading stories online than in print.

When readers chose to read an online story, they usually read an average of 77% of the story, compared to 62% in broadsheets and 57% in tabloids.

In addition, nearly two-thirds of online readers read all of the text of a particular story once they began to read it, the survey revealed. In print, 68% of tabloid readers continued reading a specific story through the jump to another page, while 59% did so in broadsheet reading.

Frankly, this flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that online readers skim and don't read, and that they are constantly itching to jump to a new site. After all, the entire Internet is just a click away when you're reading online, and many of us content creators and packagers spend a lot of time working to offer readers contextual links to other content even as they're reading something else.

I have a couple theories on what might be going on here:

1. Because there are so many choices online, readers are more invested in the stories they actually select to read.

2. It can often be a pain to find the jump page in print. Instead, readers might choose to start another story on the original page.

3. In print, stories compete with much larger and often more colorful ads. By comparison, much less screen real estate is devoted to ads. That adds up to less distraction.

The reality, though, is that I don't really know why this happens. I'd love to hear some online usability experts weigh in on this issue.

Jakob Nielsen, are you listening?

Sex Sells, Even Virtually

My old buddy Mitch Wagner reports in InformationWeek that the "Amsterdam" sex-business area on Second Life has sold on eBay for $50,000.

According to Mitch:

The overwhelming majority of the shops in Second Life's Amsterdam sell sexual merchandise. And avatars posing as streetwalkers hang around near the train station, openly soliciting cybersex-for-pay with any avatar who stands still for a few minutes and many walking through.

Seems that sex sells no matter what. Even if it's a virtual sex site in a virtual world. And even if it costs real money.

My only question is how Mitch knew?

Infoworld Stops Killing Trees

The ongoing saga of how the online revolution affects journalism took an interesting turn yesterday as longtime tech-industry stalwart InfoWorld announced that it will stop publishing a paper edition and become an online only enterprise (plus live events, of course).

In the announcement, Editor-in-Chief Steve Fox bravely contends that InfoWorld "is not dead," and I'm sure he means it. But the history of this kind of thing is not encouranging. Some 5 years ago, CMP stopped publishing InternetWeek's paper edition, and I ended up in charge of carrying on the Web operation. We did so, and I believe continued to publish useful information for many years. But eventually, lack of interest from CMP corporate, a lack of resources, and lack of traffic let the once significant brand fade away. Go to InternetWeek.com today, and you end up on the ebusiness section page of InformationWeek, which retains its print component.

InfoWorld's own Ed Foster addressed the significance of the move, not just for InfoWorld, but for tech publishing in general. There's less money to go around, Foster says, and much of what there is goes to Google and Craigslist and such. So, like his colleagues in the daily newspaper business, Foster wonders where the money's going to come from to create content in the brave new world of the Internet.

As a professional content creator, among other things, I worry too.

(Full disclosure: way back before the Net bubble, I used to write notebook reviews and other stories for InfoWorld, and I still count as friends many of the folks that work there.)

The Giants Score Big

San Francisco likes to think of itself as the capital of the technology world. Maybe that's why even the local baseball team tries to position itself on digital cutting edge.

On top of Wi-Fi access for all patrons, this year the Giants added solar panels to their scenic PacBell/SBC/ATT Park. And now comes an enormous HD video scoreboard.

Even though he's a White Sox fan, The Freditor approves of the technology surge at the ballfield. Heck, he approves of HD almost anywhere. But he's just a tad worried that the Giants' giant screen will merely make it easier to see that Barry Bonds just let a lazy fly ball sail over his and that the team is once again losing 6-2.

(Sorry about writing about myself in the third person, but even thinking about professional athletics can really mess with your sense of ego.)

NewTube?

We may be looking at market segregation in online video sites.

Even as YouTube struggles with Viacom's billion-dollar lawsuit over displaying copyrighted material, heavy media hitters News Corp. and NBC Universal are teaming up to create a new advertiser-supported video site primarily devoted to just that sort of professionally created video.

Due this summer, the as yet unnamed new site will hold movies and TV shows, with "most" content available free (the reports were vague on exactly what that means). Users will also be able to upload their own videos, and the reports were also vague on how copyright control will be handled on those clips. (See TechCrunch's notes on the announcement.)

If the new venture flies, we could be looking at a bifurcation (love that word) in the market. YouTube for loopy, user-generated kareoke videos, and other sites for professional media products. That's probably not good for YouTube owners Google.

In related news, Viacom is being sued over telling YouTube to remove a Colbert report parody called Stop The Falsiness. The clip is still up...

And Reuters has a story on Kongregate.com, the YouTube for video games.

Lazarus Responds To Critics

San Francisco columnist Dan Lazarus has responded to bloggers comments about his column calling for newspapers to band together to charge for their online content.

Apparently The Freditor and MediaShift weren't the only ones to take him to task. In fact, he doesn't mention us directly.

More to the point, he still doesn't get it.

For one thing, newspapers' print business is supported by advertising, not by charging for the paper itself. Many newspapers are now distributed free, and even when they do charge they still lose more money on paper distribution then they do on online distribution.

Here's the thing: Online distribution is vastly cheaper and more efficient than chopping down trees, printing up thousands of copies, and delivering them to houses and newsstands. So if the Chronicle thinks it's enough better than the free San Francisco Examiner to charge $.50 a copy, that's fine. If the Chron thinks it's that much better online, too, then it can try and charge there too. If people think it's worth it, then they will pay.

But asking for anti-trust exemption to allow collusion and price fixing is both pathetic and nasty. What's next, forcing Craigslist to charge for its personal ads?

Oh, and here's the best take on the issue, from the Chronicle's consistently hilarious Don Assmussen's Bad Reporter comic.

David Byrne Talks Sense To The Record Industry

It's no secret that I'm no fan of the record industry. But I am a big fan of former Talking Heads leader David Byrne.

So I was thrilled with this Reuters story about Mr. Byrne railing against the greedy record companies and Digital Rights Management (DRM).

For the greed factor, Byrne notes that the companies pay the same artist royalties for sales over iTunes as they do for CD sales, even though there are only minimal manufacturing/distribution costs. And he admits that he downloads music "illegally" rather than put up with iTunes' DRM restrictions.

Byrne's sensible suggestions?

1. Have artists work independently of the industry establishment.
2. Use music as a loss leader for tours and merchandise revenue.
3. For promotion, do-it-yourself on YouTube and the like instead of paying millions to make videos for MTV and the like.

Now that's starting to make sense.

Oh, and if you want to take a stand, join Gizmodo's RIAA Boycott for the month of March.

More On Online Newspapers

I've posted a lot recently about the controversy over the future of newspapers in the online era. But I'm not the only one. My old friend and former basketball buddy Mark Glaser takes on the issue in his excellent MediaShift blog for PBS.

In his latest post, Mark also takes the SF Chronicle's David Lazarus to task, but ends with a much more positive position, that the Web offers newspapers, and the news industry new opportunities as well as new challenges:

My argument is not that investigative journalism will jump from newspapers to the web. My argument is that investigative journalism will take place in many mediums, from the web to cable TV to network TV to blogs to any place where people congregate to ask important questions and team up to find answers.

I think he's right in many ways. But I am still worried about the money question. Where is the cash going to come from to pay for this. The new media, as a whole, are not yet bringing in anywhere the bucks that print does (did?). And I don't think they ever will. And that will lead to unforeseen implications for journalism.

Mac vs. PC: The Other Side Of The Story

I love Apple's Mac vs PC commercials. This latest one about Windows Vista may be my all-time favorite.

But these four parodies by Laurie McGuinness are also priceless.

Thanks to Angela Gunn at USA Today's Tech_Space for finding these.

Sinbad Is Not Dead

Apparently, Wikipedia had erroneously reported the demise of actor/comedian Sinbad due to a heart attack.

He's still among the living, though, according to the AP.

I'm happy for Mr. David Adkins (Sinbad's real moniker) that he's not dead, but this kind of boo-boo puts Wikipedia's user-generated content in a bad light. Of course, the "legitimate" media gets things wrong sometimes, too.

So let's all just rejoice in the fact that this major, major talent was not snatched away from us prematurely.

SF Chronicle Obsesses Over Viacom/YouTube Tussle

Earlier this week, I lambasted San Francisco Chronicle writer David Lazarus for his column proposing that since newspapers couldn't seem to charge for online content on their own, they should band together to do so.

Lazarus wrote his column based on the Viacom/Google lawsuit, and today his colleagues at the Chron are weighing in on the subject of content ownership, copyright, and all that jazz.

Columnist Jon Carroll -- known for writing about his cats as much as anything else -- agreed with my take, pretty much, although he was much nicer about it.

TV columnist John Goodman had a different take. Falling back on the "content is king" idea, he claims that "Hollywood" will rule until Google starts creating content of its own. I'm not so sure. People do care about some user-generated content, the famous Macaca clip, for example. And delivery systems do matter. Just ask the record companies if "owning" the content is doing them much good these days. (They may be too busy suing music lovers to answer, though.)

Heck, I don't know how this is going to play out, but I suspect that it's going to be messy and difficult and uncomfortable for everyone.

Cisco Meets With WebEx For $3.2 Billion

Cisco's big-bucks buyout of online meeting service WebEx seems a bit spendy, but continues the networking giant's trend of buying companies that will drive additional network usage -- and thus demand for Cisco products.

If Cisco hopes to use the acquisition to spur growth in new markets -- as CNET News.com's Marguerite Reardon supposes -- it may have overpaid. WebEx reported just $380 million in revenue last year, and a paltry $49 million of net income.

Frankly, I don't see this a watershed event for anyone except WebEx stockholders, who made out like bandits.

Google Promises To Protect Privacy: Yawn

I don't know about everyone else, but I use Google for all sorts of things. Email, most of my searches, and this blog, for instance.

The services work, and I like the price. I pay nothing to Google.

And nothing is just about the value I put on Google's announcement that it plans to improve its privacy practices. According to the AP, the company says it will make it more difficult to connect online search requests with the people making them by removing key pieces of identifying information from its system every 18 to 24 months. (According to Tom Clayburn at InformationWeek, one reason may be to save some $$$ on storage.)

But Google acknowledges that it will retain lots of data about users, and no matter what the company says, it's prudent to assume that they will track everything you do. If not to roll-over and give it to the government, then to use it to try and sell you something.

As noted earlier in an earlier post, I'm sure they're tracking usage of Google Apps. Heck, they're probably even tracking travel patterns on their employee bus service!

Forget Anti-Trust: Should ALL Newspapers Charge For Online Content?

The SF Chronicle's normally insightful David Lazarus has come up with the cockamamie idea that the newspaper industry should apply for anti-trust exemption so all papers can start charging for online content at the same time. He also seems to want to charge sites who link to newspaper content.

Whew! There are so many things wrong with these ideas that I don't know where to start.

Lazarus smartly hooked his idea to the Viacom / Google lawsuit, but it's really more about the State of the News Media report. As that report makes clear, newspapers do have a problem with online revenue growth not keeping up with erosion on the print side.

And maybe charging for content will help make those figures tally better. But calling for the industry to unite and do it together is simply silly. As Lazarus notes, beyond the anti-trust implications it would require a level of cooperation previously unknown in the notoriously cutthroat newspaper business. (Whee! I always wanted to use the phrase "notoriously cutthroat.")

Not going to happen -- short of a single company owning all the journalism outlets. Oops, that could happen!

As for Lazarus' other suggestion -- that "newspapers should insist that a licensing fee be paid for aggregators to have access to their content" -- I'm not sure I understand what he's saying. If he means that sites can't reproduce articles wholesale, fine. As he points out, that's already against the rules, and in my experience as a site editor, sites big enough to matter typically stick to Fair Use excerpts, and almost everyone will stop when asked.

But if he's saying sites should have to pay to link to newspaper content, he's making another big mistake. The Web is built on linking. Linking is what sends the people to the site in the first place. Take away linking and newspapers may quickly find that their online readers don't come 'round so much anymore.

Like many others, Mr. Lazarus seems to be wishing for a gentler, simpler time. I don't blame him. The effects of Internet can be very disruptive. I know first hand. But I still believe the Net is a good thing, and in the end it will create far more than it destroys.

Viacom Vs. YouTube

I'm tempted to say that Viacom's $1B lawsuit over "massive" and "intentional" copyright violations on Google's YouTube is a battle for the soul of the Internet.

And it is, but it's only the latest in the unending series of tussles between the technologists (Google in this case, previously Napster and BitTorrent) and the "owners" of content (Viacom, but previously the RIAA and the MPAA).

In my opinion, the suit has the ability to destroy YouTube-as-we-know-it, which is no big deal to me personally. It also has the ability to seriously slow the Web's development as the place to go for video -- see my earlier post. If Viacom succeeds, the Web could become nothing more than Cable TV with more channels. To paraphrase Bruce Springsteen, "infinite channels and nothing on."

As a content creator myself, I certainly understand Viacom's desire to protect its ability to make money. They're scared, and they're lashing out.

But lawsuits are not the way. Over and over again, the Content Industry is fighting the wrong battles. Instead of fighting to protect the money they used to make, they should be scrambling to figure out how to add value in the new world.

For some ideas that might work better than lawsuits, they might want to check out the State of the News Media report I posted on earlier this week.