My company Advanced Human Technologies has recently launched the website Future of Sex (futureofsex.net), which explores the intersection of technology and human sexuality.
A few people have been surprised to see us launch this site, as it is a little different from the topics we usually cover. Here is the background and reasons why we’ve launched the site.
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Nate Silver, the political statistician extraordinaire, has turned his attention to publishing. His interest is honed by the fact that his blog is now hosted on the New York Times, which is currently implementing a paywall.
He has done an analysis of the most influential publications, consisting of a simple review of how frequently publications’ names appear in Google News and Google Blogs followed by the word “reported”, to give a representative sample of how often publications are quoted by others.
The full list of the top 242 is below.
A few quick comments:
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Earlier today ‘satirical’ website DawnWires published a story titled Saudi King to buy Facebook for $150 billion to end the revolt: Goldman Sachs to advise. The article was published in the LoLNews category, and the bottom of it says “Sunday Humor… (Sunday Humor article at Dawnwires.com are meant to humor our readers. They may or may not be the truth.)”
The article was taken up by a number of mainstream news sites in the Middle East, including Tehran Times (quoting “inside sources”) and Egyptian media, as noted by Google exec Wael Ghonim. The original story on DawnWires shows almost 30,000 Facebook shares and over 30,000 shares on other channels, suggesting a lot of people have seen this now.
When we launched our Newspaper Extinction Timeline I noted that tablets similar to the iPad of today will cost less than $10 and given away for free by the end of the decade, a prediction that interviewers have frequently questioned me on since.
I have since realized that tablets are likely to be given away far earlier than this, probably first bundled with content subscriptions. However it is not just publishers who would consider subsidizing the cost of a free tablet. Marketers may find it less expensive than traditional advertising to reach the right audience by giving them tablets which embed carefully presented messages. Consumer services companies such as banks could provide handy interfaces within tablets to embed and broaden relationships with select customers.
The following chart comes from John Walkenbach’s blog via Kevin Kelly, suggesting that Kindles will be given away for free by November 2011.
Source: John Walkenbach
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The lovely pace of change in the media world isn’t slowing down any…
One day after Apple launched its long-expected subscription service, Google announced its One Pass content payment system. Here is a quick comparison.
– What they are
They are both payment and delivery platforms for content sales and subscriptions.
– Delivery platforms
Apple’s platform is for content delivered to apps that are sold in the Apple iTunes store, so only to iPad, iPhone and iTouch products.
Google OnePass works on any web or mobile platform (not just Android) as long as it is permitted in the terms (i.e. it cannot be used on Apple devices)
A couple of months ago I contributed to Ketchum’s Global Media Network meeting in New York, giving the opening keynote on the Future of Global Media, and participating in the follow-up panel on how to work with media in Brazil, Russia, India, and China, titled “Breaking Through BRIC: Understanding These Influential Global Media Landscapes”.
Ketchum representatives from the first three of these countries presented on their markets, however since the Ketchum China team was committed to client work and unable to get to the meeting, I was invited to speak about China, given my experience in the region.
I wrote up my key points about the 5 central facets of media and PR in China.
Here is an edited video of the key points made on the media markets in each of the BRIC economies – there are some interesting insights on their diversity.
The panellists were:
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I have always been wary of the phrase ‘content is king’ and the kinds of people who say that, usually in self-aggrandisement.
The rise of Apple iTunes has, with all the grace and elegance of a sledgehammer, amply demonstrated that it ain’t necessarily so.
In an article on CNBC titled The New King: Context!, Nicholas Scibetta of Ketchum has reviewed the shift from the dominance of content to the prominence of context, including a reference to my recent article on the rise of contextual search.
Scibetta’s focus is the impact on brands. He writes:
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Last November I gave the keynote at Ketchum’s Global Media Network meeting in New York.
Here is an edited video pulling out some of the key points I made during the keynote.
The internet can be characterized very simply. Billions of people are looking for interesting and useful information, and millions of companies are trying to make money by people finding their content, through search engines and increasingly on social media.
This has led to the rise of companies such as Demand Media, which last week listed on New York Stock Exchange to be valued at $1.5 billion, more than the New York Times. Demand Media and its peers such as Associated Content, now owned by Yahoo!, use low-cost writers and sophisticated algorithms to create massive amounts of content tailored to generate revenue from search traffic.
There are also many writing brokers such as TextBroker and The Content Authority that help smaller companies that need web content to improve their search rankings to get copy written, at rates as low as 1.2 cents a word.
I have written about the proliferation of crap content and how search is evolving to deal with the rise of low-quality content. The latest iteration in Google’s search algorithms explicitly address duplicate content. The quest for original content to feed the search engines continues.
The obvious next step is to automate copywriting, further improving the cost-revenue equation for those seeking to attract search traffic.
We see the nexus of the rise of tablets and the transformation of media as one of the most fascinating and important topics today. It continues to be a key focus for us in our client work and own projects.
This week International Newspaper Marketing Association (INMA) released its Tablet Opportunities for News Publishers report, which is free to members and $295 for others. In the report, “dozens of leading news industry executives reveal their up-to-the-minute thinking“.
I was quoted throughout the report, and they also included our iPad Media Strategy Framework, as below, to encapsulate the key themes.
Click on image for full-size pdf
Here are some of my quotes and thoughts included in the report:
