The connection: Samsung has purchased 1 million copies of Jay-Z’s coming album, entitled “Magna Carta Holy Grail,” slated for release July 4, and plans to give them to Samsung Galaxy smartphone users for free – 72 hours ahead of the release. The users are to receive the music through an app they’ll receive later this month. (Recipients won’t be able to share it until the official release date.)

Samsung paid $5 apiece for the albums, according to a person familiar with the matter. It wasn’t immediately clear if Nielsen SoundScan will count Samsung’s purchases in its sales tallies.

via Jay-Z’s New Album ‘Magna Carta Holy Grail’ Due July 4; Samsung to Give Away 1 Million Copies (Watch the Video) – Speakeasy – WSJ.

#contentmarketing

Chartbeat’s data shows that most readers scroll to about the 50 percent mark, or the 1,000th pixel, in Slate stories. That’s not very far at all. I looked at a number of recent pieces to see how much you’d get out of a story if you only made it to the 1,000th pixel.

via How people read online: Why you won’t finish this article. – Slate Magazine.

Like a responsively designed Web site, the “adaptive” ads automatically rearrange their content based on the size of the screen they’re being viewed on. The same ad that stretches the width of a 27-inch desktop monitor will contract and adapt to be viewed on an iPhone screen, for example. The idea is that one piece of creative can deliver the same ad experience on mobile and tablet devices as it does on desktop ones. Further, Say can charge the same amount for them as a result.

via More Publishers Tap Responsive Ads | Digiday.

It shows that for a number of years—from 2009 until late 2012—Apple’s users were valued (implicitly by the stock market) as likely to create a net present value of about $1200 in earnings. The current value is about a third of that, or $440 in earnings.

via What’s an Apple user worth? | asymco.

Continues:

Although the rate of spending of each customer is decreasing, the number of new customers is increasing more rapidly. As this is happening the company’s equity is being priced such that an Apple user is considered less than half as valuable as she used to be—from 3.2x revenues to 1.5x revenues.

What’s surprising is that this is the product lifecycle trend you see when a product goes from the enthusiast to mainstream market.  Well, one can ask, aren’t iPhones already mainstream?  It may seem like that in the US today but in the broader global market, the definition of mainstream is very different.

I very much believe that this market will follow the traditional pattern of product lifecycles and the durations will be a lot more compressed that for other tech products.  In other words, iOS’ reign will be shorter (measured in years) than Windows reign on desktop.

#productlifecycle

So the next time you hear a startup founder talking about achieving “scale,” or delighting users, or making a really cool product — and who then dodges the question about how they’re going to make money with some blather about being backed by “patient capital” — note that this is a founder who is a rung or two below where he or she needs to be.

via The Tech World’s Immature Hostility To Advertising – Business Insider.

The fundamental issue here is that ad monetization vs user experience is zero sum.  If you can make it not be zero sum, then this issue becomes moot and you’re probably onto something innovative but you’re not done yet– you still need to figure out how to make it scale.

Line charges companies a one-time fee of over $6,000 just to create an account on the service.

It then charges the companies for messaging their followers directly. Prices start at around $5,000 to send 15 messages a month to 100,000 fans and range all the way up to almost $17,000 each month for 30 messages to 500,000 fans.

The company also offers one-off plans for companies that want to do short bursts of messaging rather than for months at a time.

As a way to help companies gather fans on its service, Line charges over $33,000 to let companies offer cute branded “stickers” that users can place on their profiles.

via Asian Startup Making Money Off Of Chat – Business Insider.

So why is a cookie-less consumer a good thing? My favorite answer is that it enables us to think hard about marketing in the greater context of a multi-device consumer.

via Why Cookie-less Consumers Are A Good Thing – Business Insider.

I’ve talked a lot on this blog about 2013 being the year that multi-screen starts trending in our industry.  This article above is evidence of that.

The other options listed in the article are known solutions.  The most interesting yet non innovative in terms of tech are the cookie co-ops.  I wonder if someone can herd enough cats to create an entity with compelling size.

#multiscreen

The world in which marketers had no targeting access to Facebook users’ email addresses is a thing of the past that ended in September 2012 with the advent of “Custom Audiences.” The tool allows marketers to link Facebook marketing to emails, phone numbers, and Facebook UIDs of users who already established a relationship with specific companies off the social network.

via Facebook Once Said No Targeting Users’ Emails – Business Insider.

Nieman Journalism Lab’s Joshua Benton has a fascinating post about what he thinks is the one of the most significant attributes of OS X Mavericks: The ability for websites to send push notifications.

via Push notifications: Not just for apps anymore | PandoDaily.

via Web Display Ads Often Not Visible – Suzanne Vranica – Media – AllThingsD.