Care Plus Health Group provides complete health care solutions for pharmacy and community care. Helmsley Media is in the process of redeveloping their website, and producing promotional videos for their specialty pharmacy services.

Badminton Life is a social network for badminton players globally. Helmsley Media worked with World Champion Peter Rasmussen to develop this website along with a 2 hour instructional video for the sport which has been sold in over over 30 different countries.

Impact Sports Therapy is an Edmonton based physiotherapy and massage therapy clinic, as well as a fitness studio. Helmsley Media developed Impact Sports Therapy’s website as well as produced a brief promotional video for their website.

Syncamatic is an Edmonton, Canada based company whose service allows Blackberry phone users to sync their contacts, calendar, memopad, tasks and files over the air between their Blackberry, Mac or PC. Helmsley Media consulted Syncamatic in preparation for their product launch.

Mark Cuban thinks this is a genius move on Murdoch’s part. The game changer in his opinion is Twitter, Facebook and similar social media sharing tools because they allow a more organic dissemination of news content than search. I agree, that for real time news content receiving something from your friends via Twitter or Facebook is more likely to pull your interest towards reading that content. However, I don’t think Twitter and Facebook are going to be of much value when the site has a paywall. You are less likely to share content that is behind a paywall, and your friends/contacts are less likely to view it once they realize they have to pay for it. Their first instinct is going to be “is this an affiliate link?” and with all the Twitter and Facebook spam that’s getting passed around now I wouldn’t blame them.

More and more I’m starting to think that online media is starting to merge media with direct response marketing concepts. Advertising revenue is hardly enough if you can only generate a CPM of $2-3! There has to be other ways of monetizing, and paid content could be worth looking at. I think paid content is better suited to niche audiences, but it could be done for a larger audience, especially something like the Wall Street Journal which is targeting a more affluent, business oriented audience who need this information quickly. The challenge is protecting that content. What is to stop a blogger or other publication from paraphrasing your content? You can’t copyright news or ideas, just the specific words that you wrote. I know GigaOM for example recently launched GigaOM Pro with an annual price of $79 for access to their content

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Google doesn’t have to be everything online. Of course they are the dominant company for the time being, but keep in mind they are barely 11 years old and things change very rapidly online. I often think about the internet marketing community and how they manage to thrive oftentimes paying for all of their traffic, and not depending on search traffic at all. If you know your conversion rates and other metrics, buying visitors is a valid option if your customer acquisition costs are lower than your prices. There are all sorts of ways to build your own lists of prospects, and all sorts of ways to make money of of them. The idea of not depending so heavily on Google is potentially a good move on Murdoch’s part, and an even better move if he can get other major media companies to follow suit. It is also of course a very risky move, but as they say fortune favours the bold.

“The National Post Company has never generated a profit and it continues to suffer significant operating losses,” Canwest, which is in bankruptcy protection, said in a court filing. Canwest plans to seek a judge’s permission to transfer the paper to Canwest Ltd. Partnership, which holds Canwest’s other newspaper businesses and isn’t in bankruptcy.

I know that a lot of people talk about the death of the newspaper industry and how much trouble their in etc etc, but let’s be honest here, the business model is not sustainable anymore. It isn’t necessary for news to be communicated through ink and paper, the news industry isn’t dying, just the newsPAPER industry. To complain about it would be like complaining about the demise of the buggy whip industry when the automobile became widely affordable. The business models aren’t quite so clear yet, but that doesn’t mean that the world is going to fall into never ending anarchy. Companies like Canwest rested on their laurels for a long time, content with their position and their fat profits for years. The current times require innovation and adaptation to survive, so get with the times or die.

It’s tough with news content because it’s incredibly easy to paraphrase news content, so protecting your work is more or less impossible, but that shows them they have to differentiate elsewhere. Yes, you need good reporting and storytelling, but you need to focus on community and building a following more than ever. With tools like Twitter available news travels at the speed of thought now. Someone sees something significant happen and as quickly as they can update their Twitter on their iPhone everyone following them knows what they witnessed. The established media (I won’t call them traditional for the time being) need to tap into the power of the zeitgeist, what’s happening now on the minds of their audience, and they need to harness that information. I think provided editorial, and fact checking layers to that stream of consciousness from the masses is valuable for sure, and there will always be a place for that too, but don’t think you can just talk at your audience anymore.

Google is a fantastic tool for organizing the world’s information, and Twitter is a fantastic tool for extracting what is on the minds of the masses. I could definitely see some synergies there, especially from a news perspective since news is all about relevance and timeliness. Twitter could help Google to speed up the pace at which they gather information from the zeitgeist. Anyway, that’s something another post on another day.

The way I see lifestyle business is as a means to create leverage for oneself. Looking at someone like Timothy Ferriss from the Four Hour Work Week for example, you see that building a lifestyle business is a great way to create a cash cow that can fund either your grander business aspirations, or it can fund your lifestyle.

The main thing I see separating a lifestyle business from an equity business is that a lifestyle business needs to be profitable very early on. If we don’t have a plan to profit from our very first customers/visitors, then it’s not worthwhile trying. In an equity business we’re more interested in growth of our customer base, in establishing critical mass and market share, then we go looking for a way to tweak things in order to reach profitability. The equity business tactics are certainly much higher risk, but also higher rewards.

I think the term “lifestyle business” is inaccurate. Of course we can provide ourselves with a comfortable lifestyle from this type of business, but I believe a better term would be cash cow. This term also provides something of a shift in our mindset when we look at it this way. Lifestyle business has connotations of sitting back and relaxing, whereas cash cow reminds us that the business is used to fund other activities within our larger operations. For example, we could look at PlentyOfFish.com and say that it is a lifestyle business, but I’m willing to bet that the owner/operator Markus Frind would look at things differently. Sure he can run his site in minutes per day (allegedly), but if you’re generating in excess of $10 million in revenue annually from such a minimal amount of work, you have a lot of options. These numbers are of course unrealistic for most of these types of businesses, but it shows the upside potential.

By applying this type of mentality to the online media business, my plan is to develop a small number of so called lifestyle businesses online. Then I will use the proceeds from these to build something focused more on equity, on building a large user base in spite of no plans for short term profitability. Sure you could do up your business plan, create a few prototypes and go the venture capital route, but then you hand over all control and a huge piece of the pie. Perhaps this is why the VCs look on these “lifestyle businesses” with such disdain, because it shows that they aren’t needed. I’m not saying that VCs are a bad thing, just that they aren’t the only choice if you want to build something big in online media.

Facebook currently generates advertising not by targeting people searching for a particular keyword, but rather based on their demographics and interests. This is a great tool to target people within the Facebook network. At 300 million strong as of September 2009, Facebook can get you exposure to the demographics you want. There has been questions surrounding the effectiveness of ads on social networks, but I can tell from my experience that I have had more success with Facebook ads than Google. That may have more to do with the niche I was promoting, and my skills in developing ad campaigns on Google, but nevertheless Facebook ads have been effective for me.

So how do I propose Facebook is going to dominate Google? Well the company has started providing search results from outside the network, that isn’t likely to hurt Google anytime soon, but it’s definitely a good move. When you use their search feature now they also provide web results, powered by Bing. That could provide some interesting things in the future, but the real killer application I see coming from Facebook is Facebook Connect, and if/when they all online publishers to paste a Google Adsense like advertisement on their website, integrated with Facebook Connect, and therefore serving ads from the Facebook platform. Suddenly Facebook would have the ability to serve ads to billions upon billions more pages, using their demographic data, and they could also integrate contextual ads as well to target the ads even further. I could target viewers within certain demographics, regions, interests and on pages with certain keywords.

Google has their service Orkut, which is apparently still widely popular in places like India and Brazil, but it’s unlikely to be able to unseat Facebook as the North American champion. Although, some would have said the same about MySpace a couple years ago. Google has their Friend Connect which enables publishers to provide some social networking type tools to their users, but it doesn’t currently have the same punch that Facebook Connect can provide. This type of demographic targeting is the type of thing that the traditional media companies would kill for, but would never have the sense to create services that empower their users, instead they restrict them.

While not necessary for all video online, there is a definite lacking of good live video content. For things like sports, or live events, having streaming video is important to a lot of viewers who won’t really care to watch after they know the outcome of the event. Livestream is an excellent service for hosting, and for mixing live video. Imagine being able to run your own cable tv channel without spending a quarter of a billion dollars! Your video can be made available on their website, or you can make it privately available only on your website where you could hide it behind a pay wall if you decided to do so. This means niche markets that were previously unservable do to their small size, can now be served profitably.

Within the video Leo Laporte talks about his experience in the traditional broadcast media world, working as a tv host for a number of different canceled shows, and channels. The point he makes that is the most important for all of this is the ability to target your audience so precisely with the tools available to us now. Previously you were paying $50CPM when only a small majority of that audience was who you really wanted to target, but now he charges a $70CPM and provides his advertisers with an absolutely laser targeted audience. Just imagine the number of different niche markets this could be applied to. I will admit that yes, creating a show that caters to tech enthusiasts is going to do very well online, but this could be repeated for several under served markets, just don’t expect to get $70CPM!

Twit.tv however does not use Livestream’s service, they use something called BitGravity, which from the looks of it provides a similar service, but does not give as much information on their website regarding how they work exactly. Livestream seems like it is geared towards a broader market with their free service, whereas BitGravity from what I can make of it, seems geared towards the higher end producers.

The next step necessary for online media is to start providing more high quality content. Of course silly YouTube videos are fun, and they get a lot of views, they don’t have the same power over users like high quality content about stuff their interested in does. If you are a badminton fan, like I am, you know that there is very little available for us. No cable channel, limited broadcast coverage (none if you live in the Americas), and not much online either. If someone were to produce half decent quality video content online for badminton fans, they would dominate the market. They would be able to aggregate all of the world’s badminton fans to their website, and not the people who just kinda like it, but the hardcore fans who will buy the stuff you try to sell them. Tools like Livestream has provided will make this so much easier for us content producers to start providing higher quality live and on-demand video.

There are of course some issues I’ve seen with Livestream. The most obvious is the quality of some of the streams. I was excited to see a tennis channel, but was immediately disappointed by both the streaming quality, and the production quality. These are issues that will be sorted out over time as bandwidth improves and as the producers learn how to create better quality productions, however something that really concerns me is the idea of relying so heavily in a start up company. If a company like Amazon, or Akamai was running this service, I wouldn’t be quite as hesitant to sign on, but with a new company like this the concern is that they won’t be around as long as you are, and then what are you going to do when you have built a business that relies on this service.

In spite of the aforementioned concerns, I would bet money on this service, and I probably will. The possibilities that are being presented to us with new services like this are very exciting. The clutter of new media is starting to take us in a direction that seems to be making some sense, and should make traditional media companies more and more nervous. Check out the video below, Leo Laporte is definitely something of a trailblazer in this new media world.

Taking a look at the Facebook home screen (I’ve removed personal information pertaining to my friends) you’ll notice that they actually do nothing that immediately makes them any money here. No advertisements whatsoever. Everything on this page is about making your connections within the site deeper. They want your online social life as it were, to be dominated by your Facebook interactions. The whole page is designed to get you clicking on links pertaining to your friends’ activities, the pictures and videos they post, and their status updates.

Advertising Placements

Further into the site we start seeing ads on the right hand side of the content. The same ad placement applies across most of the site, whether it is on profile pages, or photos/videos that you or your friends have posted on the site. You’ll notice in the image below that some of the ads are not in English, this is because I am currently in Denmark, and as a result I am being targeted as though I were living in Denmark.

Advertising Targeting

Advertising in a newspaper, or on a billboard we can get broad exposure, which is great for branding purposes (I suppose), but it’s not very effective at driving sales immediately. With Facebook and other social networking sites we have the ability to do some very specific targeting that traditional forms of media cannot. Let’s say for example that we ran an ecommerce store selling camping equipment and we wanted to drive more sales to our website. Using Facebook we can target people based on their geographic location, age, gender, and many more characteristics. In the picture below we have made a sample advertisement targeting people living in the United States, over the age of 21, who have listed “camping” as one of their interests. The result of this targeting is a pool of 1,725,280 Facebook users for us to target.

Advertising Pricing

After targeting our prospective customers, and receiving numbers as to how many there are on the network, we can get some approximate price quotes from Facebook. This is automated, and only an approximate. You will never pay more than your max bid, or max daily budget, but if people are clicking on your add more often then your per click cost will go down. You can also target based on number of exposures which is apparently a great way to keep your costs down if you know how to get your click thru rates up.

This model is quite similar to Google’s Adwords advertising service, but instead of targeting based on people’s search terms, you are targeting based on very specific demographics (including interests). In fact if you read up on Google’s development and their history it is strikingly similar to Facebook’s. They took quite some time to build up their Adwords service, and to get to the point where they are now. They are making money through long tail economics. Because it is so simple for them to make money on the narrowest of niche’s at essentially no extra cost, they can become a viable advertising tool for almost any business regardless of scale. What makes Google and Facebook so valuable is that they make other businesses lots of money, even though they don’t directly charge 99.99% of people who use their website and services. Give your users increasingly more reasons to stay on your site, and interact with the different elements within it, and you increase the lifetime value of each visitor/user/customer.