MediaFlect

On #AppleWatch and Media

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 19:31:00 +0000

My latest post on The MediaThon blog, explores media creation and devices as game changers. Waht will

I Bet @Raju Will Agree On This Media Data Point

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 17:04:00 +0000

One crucial thing I would add to an @Oracle list of how data is useful for publishers:

Optimization. Data gives publishers the information they can use to optimize their content (topic choices, content display, wording, etc.) and structure (taxonomies, navigation, etc.) to better encourage engagement metrics such as PV/visit and loyalty (repeat visits, visits/user/month, etc.)

The Oracle blog post, which included their list:

With this deep understanding of the customer in place, it becomes much simpler to automate a whole range of incredibly valuable business activities that simultaneously create a vastly-improved customer experience, and drive increased revenues through better targeting and engagement, such as:

Highly-targeted marketing – based on a precise understanding of which customer micro-segments will be most interested in a new piece of content or subscription offer – all joined up across former business silos

Increasing acquisition and retention – understanding why people subscribe and why people churn and reacting with effective product and promotion strategies

Content acquisition strategy – what content will be most popular with the most profitable customer segments?

Programmatic advertising – increasing digital CPMs by offering precise and detailed customer segments to advertising networks and exchanges

After I posted my column on how publishers can use data for the Newspaper Association of America mediaXchange conference, where I also moderated a panel on data, an MBA student in my Digital Media Management class pointed out the Oracle post.

Data is Gold: Panel from NAA MediaXChange

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 16:08:00 +0000

Images Form a New Language - New Challenges, Too.

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 15:42:00 +0000

Photos, once slices of a moment in the past ... are fast becoming an entirely new type of dialogue - Disruptions: Social Media Images Form a New Language Online - NYTimes.com

Yep. And I've said for years that what's possible for text is increasingly possible for images and, eventually audio and video. Cutting, pasting, sharing, even searching, measuring and mashing up. It's all data, and the ability to parse it improves, to detect it increases, to process it becomes more powerful with less overhead. Meaning:

As we can now mark, cut and paste a piece of text to a page, and link back to it (sometimes a forced "include" via the browser through a little piece of .js, as with Tynt), so too, for images, perhaps video. Cut, paste, in whole or in part.

As we can search for sections of text buried within reams of information, so, too, can machines increasingly detect the meaning and inferences behind both still and moving images (and audio). We will move beyond the need for transcripts and tagging to enable search.

As semantic analysis can parse, organize and process text (in part to aid with search), so too, will an analog to NLP come to be common parlance for images and video, and automated mashups, creation and more of content be able to include those media as well.

As we can measure views, A/B and multivariate test, and more, so too for the different aspects of images and videos.

As copy protection and detecting violations of same become both harder and, respectively, easier, so, too, for video and audio.

Talking Revenues at Newspaper Conference (#NAAmxc)

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 19:50:00 +0000

Real vs. Imagined: Reconsidering @USAToday vs. @WSJ

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 20:01:00 +0000

Earlier today, I tweeted a photo, showing how the pile of newspapers at a Hyatt hotel indicated more guests were grabbing USA Today.

Same pattern each day at Boston area hotel: @usatoday depleted faster than @wsj cc: @lkramer twitpic.com/cgqcrz
— Dorian Benkoil (@dbenk) April 3, 2013

It would be easy to simply say, "well, that shows that USA Today is more popular than the Wall Street Journal," and extrapolate from there to think the former is in better shape. What else would I consider, though, to reach a more realistic inference? First of all, who says that guests of the Hyatt Hotel in Medford, MA (where I was on a visit to the Boston area), are the types of people who read The Wall Street Journal or who want to? Who says the WSJ is even targeted to the same profile of reader?

Or, perhaps, WSJ is farther ahead in adoption of its app. I already subscribe to the Journal, for example, and therefore can consume the paper on my digital devices without having to pick up a "paper." Last night, I looked at USA Today on their nifty HTML5-optimized site, on my iPad. So, no paper for me -- though I did grab one to read by the pool and another to help with a little cleanup (please don't make me explain).

Also, simple numbers of readers don't always tell the story. Even if WSJ has less mass appeal, that doesn't mean they're doing worse. I haven't looked into real ad rates for WSJ in a couple of years, but I would guess they are, on a per-unit average throughout the paper and website, higher than those at USA Today. Overall revenue may be higher even if there is a smaller number of readers. Said another way, a smaller number of more highly valued users can mean better business.

Finally, most obviously, no matter how many hotels I personally see this happen at in my seemingly random travels, it's far from a random sample. We can't really draw inferences about the overall health or desirability of a newspaper by looking at piles of them on the front desk of a hotel Dorian happens to visit.

So, good Tweet, but not far from foregone conclusion.

ROI of Social Media (#ROISM) Roundup - Social Media Weekend (#SMWKND)

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 21:43:00 +0000

Here, below, is a Storify roundup of the panel I helped assemble and moderated for Social Media Weekend (#smwknd), titled "Social Media and the Bottom Line". It was, in a way, dropping the other shoe on a talk I gave the previous two #SMwknds titled "The ROI of Social Media" (presentation here), which covered ways you can figure out if you're making as much from social media as you spend executing it.

It's important to sometimes do some hard-headed analysis and figure out if, amid the buzz and excitement, the cost ~~really~~ really justifies the effort and expense. (I try to apply both right- and left-brain, creativity and analysis, to my work.) This year, I thought, it would be good to invite folks who -- like most of my clients -- have to justify the expense.

We were very fortunate (in large part thanks to Columbia U's @sree, a longtime colleague and friend) to have Eason Jordan, head of Now This News, Jonathan Perelman of Buzzfeed and Zach Seward of Quartz -- who did abashedly note he is really an editorial, not business guy, but had a great managerial and operational view, as did all the panelists.

What jumped out to me as a common theme was that these new news organizations (two of which -- NTN and Quartz -- launched last fall) had social so imbued into their thinking and processes, that it was not even a question of whether they could cost-justify social media, but rather that if they didn't succeed in social, they would not be a success. These three, at least, get it -- get that they are not homepage-first media, that people discover and consume media (or "content" if you prefer) when, where and how they want: on whatever screens, through whatever feeds, via whatever social or other mechanisms make the most sense to them. That for all their communities, a recommendation or referral from a friend or connection is often what makes it valuable enough to look at, and share further. Jonathan even shared a graphic (we can ask if it's ok to publish it) of how much virality they can measure on a piece, how much added traffic social sharing can get them beyond any publishing they do.

I've peppered the below with comments and observations that I hope elucidate the Tweets. Reading them, you'll get a good sense of what was covered.

View the story "#ROISM Social Media ROI from #SMWKND" on Storify #ROISM Social Media ROI from #SMWKND A roundup of Tweets tagged #roiSM ("The ROI of Social Media" -- or looking at social media for journalism and media -- from a business perspective). Moderated by @dbenk w/ @easonjordan @zseward @jperelman Storified by Dorian Benkoil· Tue, Feb 19 2013 13:30:48 #1 #smwknd takeaway: "There is no social media editor" - in new media orgs every employee expected to engage in social. #roismBrett Essler RT @esills: "Great content finds its audience. And it's not always who you think it is." —@jperelman #ROIsm #smwkndvo1ceproject @NowThisNews spends ad budget on promoting posts, etc., to increase audience reach says @EasonJordan #smwkndMeena Thiruvengadam I prompted this one -- saying I usually find myself, when I having a marketing budget these days -- shading toward social media; meaning I spend the money on spreading the word through social, organically, rather than through paid ads. Eason said they tend to spend on promoted Facebook posts, so they get exposed to all their followers there, rather than the 18% (I believe) whom he said will typically see the post, otherwise. RT @dccothran: #smwknd it's not digital vs traditional or new vs old its all going to be social soon #roismShauna Stuart #smwknd #roism there is still a place for long form content on the webDara Cothran RT @dccothran: #smwknd it's not digital vs traditional or new vs old its all going to be social soon #roismQanta Ahmed #smwknd it's not digital vs traditional or new vs old its all going to be social soon #roismDara Cothran .@NowThisNews found a market in syndication. Major media outlets don't have enough video to sell against. —@easonjordan #ROIsm #smwkndEugenie Sills RT @esills: "Great content finds its audience. And it's not always who you think it is." —@jperelman #ROIsm #smwkndAndrew S. Pollard #smwknd @EasonJordan: Social Media is Critical to @nowthisnews -One rule for his staff (& everyone) Don't do stupid stuff #ROISMDonna Vislocky "Great content finds its audience. And it's not always who you think it is." —@jperelman #ROIsm #smwkndEugenie Sills RT @MediaLabRat: .@NowThisNews embraces the concept of what it means to be a "Social Enterprise" #smwknd cc @easonjordanStephanie~ RT @MediaLabRat: We don't hire people that aren't social media saavy -@easonjordan #smwknd Neither do we!Stephanie~ @NowThisNews sells video to outlets that sell pre-roll ads, then share revenue, something that's working well, says @EasonJordan #smwkndMeena Thiruvengadam Q: What does social media advertising mean? A from @easonjordan: Videos, clearly labeled and tagged, meant to be shared. #smwknd ROI panelLauren Reddy .@NowThisNews found a market in syndication. Major media outlets don't have enough video to sell against. —@easonjordan #ROIsm #smwkndEugenie Sills Agreed. I've found this to be the case in a white paper I'm working on for a video advertising exchange. There's more money than content right now -- as opposed to the (perceived) glut in textual content. (I say "perceived," because -- as @johnbattelle has pointed out -- there's not a glut of the best content.) #smwknd @EasonJordan: Social Media is Critical to @nowthisnews -One rule for his staff (& everyone) Don't do stupid stuff #ROISMDonna Vislocky RT @JessHullinger: "We operate under the assumption that NOBODY is coming from our homepage." -@zseward #smwkndLauran Berta RT @jeremycaplan: At #smwknd @EasonJordan says @nowthisnews has made 50 6sec @vineapp vids; @sree shares 15sec @Tout vids [Also try @lightt]Mike Street RT @KStruckMPT: Way to "get out of the gate quickly," says @easonjordan #smwknd @columbiajourn is hire people with big social following. Thoughts?Qanta Ahmed .@NowThisNews embraces the concept of what it means to be a "Social Enterprise" #smwknd cc @easonjordanRobert Moore People who are clearly influencers on social get preferential treatment in the hiring process. - @easonjordan #smwkndbrenna cammeron I had asked, "so, all else being equal, if a person has 130,000 Facebook followers they'll get a better shot at a position than someone with, say, 2,000?" ... @zseward then said it's important to NOT look purely at the numbers, that a lot of those 130,000 are chimeras. they don't really amount to much, and may have followed that person because, say, you used to work for the @WSJ, but they may have no idea who you are. See the tweet below from @amanda2581 (and now I wonder why 2581!), and @ctanowitz RT @Meena_Thiru: When it comes to followers, its not just quantity. Quality is important, too, says @zseward. #smwkndAmanda Downing Warns @zseward on follower numbers "take them with an entire box of salt." Look for engaged followers #smwknd.Chuck Tanowitz Didn't know about this RT @wordwhacker: NYT had whole section sponsored by Russia: Made @zseward feel more comfortable about model. #smwkndMeena Thiruvengadam .@Zseward: Focus much more on content itself, rather than distribution tricks; @jperelman: good content finds an audience #smwkndJoshCornfield Best tip so far #smwknd from @easonjordan at @nowthisnews "Don't be an idiot" when sharing lol #roism http://ow.ly/i/1xn6yCarlos Macias Social media and the bottom line > @dbenk @easonjordan @zseward @jperelman #smwknd http://pic.twitter.com/Cpj6JcWhJoanna Belbey from Left: eason, jonathan, dorian (me) , zach NowThisNews: we die if we fail on social, says @easonjordan. #smwkndAnjanette Delgado Social Media and ROI panel at #smwknd w/ @jperelman @dbenk @easonjordan @jseward http://pic.twitter.com/KT2WPkNoRobert Moore RT @zseward: TWO separate references to hybrid animals today at #smwknd (as metaphor for and actual example of “converged media”) http://www.buzzfeed.com/toyota/the-20-coolest-hybrid-animals-3d8xEnrique Lavin SL .@zseward from @Quartz: ppl run advertising because they have a strong brand. #smwkndLinda Bernstein .@steverubel mentions @zseward + @quartznews as part of future of media presentation #smwkndSana Bég RT @JessHullinger: "It is a fallacy to say long form content doesn't do well on the web." -@zseward #smwkndbrenna cammeron RT @NickKellet: Social Media is everyone's responsibility @zseward (although now hiring a social media editor) #smwkndshauna rempel "We operate under the assumption that NOBODY is coming from our homepage." -@zseward #smwkndJessica Hullinger Almost half of @WSJ traffic comes from home page, former social media editor @zseward. #smwkndMeena Thiruvengadam Curious, and unusual these days -- then again, @WSJ is one of the few pubs that from the start has been successful by charging for access. Never mind trading print dollars for digital dimes, those dimes might become pennies via @zseward #smwkndKelly Fincham RT @ctanowitz: Distribution tricks matter less than content quality when it comes to social sharing says @zseward. #smwkndJessica Hullinger Want to go viral? Focus on content,not distribution tricks. Organic sharing plays larger role than size of your following. @zseward #smwkndLauren Reddy Advertisers care about raw numbers of your social following. But quality of following is far far more important. @zseward. #smwkndLauren Reddy Still, follower numbers matter to advertisers says @zseward. #smwknd.Chuck Tanowitz #SMWKND @quartznews makes $ from "magazine-style" ads, advertorial bulletins and soon, events, says @zsewardshauna rempel By "magazine-style ads," it seemed Zach meant ads that are insterstitials, will "interrupt" you as you page through, as a magazine ad might be in the middle of an article, in between pages you are reading or looking at. @JPerelman totally saw the red socks at #smwknd and was wondering. But I get it now. Cool look for speaking at events. Live it up!Casey Waltz RT @carlazanoni: .@Buzzfeed doesn't have a social media department. "Everything we do is social." ~ @JPerelman #SMWKNDDavid Williams RT @MissReddy: Key to getting hired at @buzzfeed: understand how news spreads on the social web. @jperelman #smwkndNick Kellet RT @jeremycaplan: 13 Ways to Make Something Go Viral = @Peretti of @Buzzfeed's tips noted by @JPerelman at #smwknd http://shrd.by/XXBEqTChaim Haas Yes it is! RT: “@dabeard: The way to make money in mobile is 'native advertising' - @buzzfeed's @jperelman #smwknd”Jonathan Perelman RT @JessHullinger: "It would be silly to have a mobile-only strategy today." - @BuzzFeed's @jperelman #smwkndodile Jonathan was talking about how people consume on multiple screens. I made the analogy to having -- 15 years ago -- a "Netscape"-only strategy. Then, the browsers were fairly different, and at some point you did have to decide which ones you'd support and even recode for. But you wanted to support any one that had enough users who were in your potential community. good news. @BuzzFeed has "a definite sep. of church & state" when it comes to the "creative" & editorial sides of house- @JPerelman #smwkndLisa Hope King I didn't get into this on the panel, but I have written a column in MediaShift where I argue that church and state have to know what each is doing, and support each other -- while not going over the line into impropriety. (I took a lot of flack but believe what I said is right.) Buzzfeed, in part, was a model for what I was talking about. MT @kellyfincham: Advertisers need to move out of 'I only want to reach moms,' because that excludes sharing potential @jperelman #smwkndJoel Christopher Jonathan, as an example, talked about how he shared information about certain food with his wife, even though he had no particular interest in that food. So, an advertiser who'd reached him could also potentially reach his wife. Good point: Advertisers need to move out of 'I only want to reach moms,' because that will exclude sharing potential @jperelman #smwkndKelly Fincham Sharing well targeted content is a gift @jperelman (targeting does not think of of peers of your target) #smwkndNick Kellet The way to make money in mobile is 'native advertising' - @buzzfeed's @jperelman #smwkndDavid Beard Perfect analogy! @brennacammeron: Social media networks = train tracks, content providers = trains, content = cargo: @jperelman #smwkndRBaker Gotta love a metaphor MT @brennacammeron: SM networks are train tracks, content providers are trains, content is cargo. - @jperelman #smwkndshauna rempel RT @esills: Our content can take longer to get to Pinterest, but then it can live there for 2-3 wks. —@Buzzfeed's @jperelman #ROIsm #smwkndshauna rempel

Twitter Allows Ads From Others -- For How Long?

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 20:36:00 +0000

As GigaOm's PaidContent reports:

The Associated Press is running sponsored tweets as part of a deal with Samsung during the Consumer Electronics Show. While this is allowed under Twitter’s rules, it also clearly threatens the network’s future as an advertising medium. How long will it allow this to continue?

I have sold ads into a media property's Twitter stream, and have wondered when the day could come when Twitter taps us on the shoulder. My hope is that they're smart enough to make it a win-win, so that we can continue to place the ads, and Twitter takes a small proportion, rather than shutting it down and forcing the client to go to them. That would not only hurt us , but also potentially our client (whose needs we understand) and Twitter (which might just lose the potential revenue, as well as fostering the development of "conversational advertising").

Cross-Media Measurement: Sort Of

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 17:45:00 +0000

This one from @FredWilson caught my eye. At first I got excited, then discouraged, then had a mixed (and more nuanced, I hope) reaction. I got excited because I thought media measurement firm comScore was finally going solve the holy grail of measurement across platforms -- meaning not just digital, but everything: TV, Web, radio, etc. I've been working on a sponsored white paper (early chapters here), during which it's become clear to me that while TV is the big kahuna, digital would get more ad revenue if it could better quantify a) unduplicated audience/community and b) cross-platform impact across media. Yes, OPA and others have done individual studies, but we lack a continued consistent metric that provides, say, a trailing average over time.

comScore, according to Fred, is measuring across computer and mobile screens only, alas. Well, it's beginning. Correlating the two, we get a sense of what media/tech properties are up, down, rising and falling in each, and can put them in relative context. We see, for example, that Google is the 800-lb gorilla. Period. Though there is a lot of duplication of users, their mobile strategy seems to have made them dominant into the future.

The real measurement, though, would look not at computer screens vs. an insufficient lumping together of mobile, but rather at experience, which is really more relevant for media consumption (and, by extension, commercial effect). Let's say we could, within the bounds of protecting privacy, tell not just on what platform someone is consuming but how. Watching on a TV in the living room is from the smaller older screen in the kitchen. An hour-long show on Hulu or Netflix is different from clips YouTube, regardless the screen. And so on.

Plus, we in media have to acknowledge that no matter how good we get at this stuff, perfection is infinitely far away: You can get closer by halving the distance, but you'll never arrive. No matter the measurement you really can't tell exactly what's going on, especially in the ever-important long tail that in aggregate can be a big swathe of consumption.

Let me use my media consumption for the past 24 hours as an example that I hope makes a larger point. Last night, I wanted to catch up on The Daily Show, so I logged on via their iPad app, which informed me there'd been an interview with Warren Buffett and a financial journalist but which the app didn't offer. Using the Splashtop app on the iPad, I accessed my desktop computer and through the iPad watched the interview on The Daily Show website. comSscore might have registered that as a computer view, but it was really on mobile. I use Splashtop much the same way on Kindle Fire which is about half the size of iPad and yet another experience. I have even set up my bedroom's VCR (yep, I still have one) to tape future episodes of the show and will now be able to (untracked) watch at my leisure and fast forward through parts that may not interest me, including any commercials. I'll also be able to grab that cassette and play it at my mom's house (with less hassle than if I created an mp4 from my Mac's DVR), or trying to deal with DRM issues if I bought it.

While I'm probably an outlier in my habits, I'm normal in the broader view. If something is unavailable one way (for example, via an app), people will find another (as Wilson demonstrated during the blackout of Knick games by Time Warner cable when he went to an illicit German site). People will find ways to sling media, too. What may be registered as a view on one screen is actually consumption on another, perhaps time-shifted. Much is untrackable, not to mention various logons, cookie deletion and tracking blockers, and so on. Measuring the aggregate helps but it misses a significant part of the picture in our multi-device, multi-habit tech-laden world. New forms of ad targeting (such as explored in that white paper), demand much finer detail.

This is not to in any way call into doubt the utility of what Comscore, Nielsen and some others are trying to do in trying to measure across media and platforms. It is, though, important to understand the limits and that the experience of how media are consumed can be quite different from the ways in which they are measured. There are challenges here which also spell opportunity for entrepreneurs.

= = = = =

The top of Fred's original post:

A VC: Media Metrix Multi PlatformcomScore is announcing something today that I am quite excited about. It is called Media Metrix Multi Platform and comScore describes it this way in their announcement: "Media Metrix Multi Platform offers unduplicated accounting of audience size and demographics that reflects today’s multi-platform digital media environment, which includes websites, apps and video content accessed from multiple devices."
This "multi platform" environment is the reality of most online properties today. We access them on the desktop/web, the mobile web, and on iOS and Android apps (and some other ways as well). But it has been impossible to get an aggregated and, importantly, an unduplicated view of the audience across all of these devices.

Magazines: Can We Include Digital? Please?

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 19:27:00 +0000

All the coverage of the decline in newsstand magazine sales so far this year misses the full picture. We need to see what else the mags are doing, where other revenues are coming from. We need to include not just digital replica and app editions -- the only parts of digital publishing counted by auditors and are a small part of the pie -- but also everything from YouTube channels to events and services (as Hearst chief David Carey likes to tout), all the "touchpoints" of the brand. And how about data sales, and e-commerce and whatever else?

While magazines still consider their print editions as flagships, most understand that they are really media brands of which print is only a part.

We also need to see circulation figures. For most magazines, newsstand sales -- as opposed to the more even and booked "pre-revenue" of subscriptions -- were always an indicator, but only a sliver. "Staffers at magazines love to say that newsstand sales aren’t an accurate way to portray a title’s health anymore," says Fishbowl NY (which I once managed), "but these numbers have got to raise some concern." Concern. OK. It's true that all the rest suffers if the flagship is, well, flagging; fewer people picking it up, fewer chances to drive people to all those other goodies. Still, Carey says, at Hearst print accounts for 40% of revenues, while digital accounts for 40% and services 20%.

Today's headlines give an incomplete portrayal.

Twitter Owns its API and Can Change the Rules

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 18:12:00 +0000

The beauty of spreading what you have via an API is that others can use that API to build stuff that feeds into and spreads your service. They get value from your data and functionality, you get the benefit of that functionality and can then incorporate it into your main platform, identify great talent, learn new ways off using your service you may not have considered, get more data about usage and patterns and on and on.

And: You own it, the API. You can set the rules, change the rules, decide some level of data is no longer available, or only under certain constraints, or for a fee.

For a company using the API to build on, it can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand you get all that data, get to incorporate it, enhance your platform, do more stuff. Many media companies have built upon Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and more to let them handle everything from commenting logons to location-based services. That's great -- especially when they carry the freight. But as we saw with Twitter's decision to disallow LinkedIn to use Twitter data in its stream, there are risks that what you're using may not always be available. There, too, can be risks that the one providing the API learns more about your users and patterns than you have and use it in the future in ways that may not benefit your users, something I wrote about previously.

What I would recommend for media, then, is by all means, use the APIs and functionality of a Twitter, Foursquare, etc. But be aware that they are gathering data on your users that you may not have access to, and also that they plug may someday be pulled. Be ready for that eventuality, and know how you think you'll handle it in the event that one day you find yourself, like LinkedIn, unable to use what you had previously in the same way. For LinkedIn, it's surely not a fatal blow, perhaps a scratch or scuff -- though we don't know how much they were getting out of the Twitter feeds, and how much they'll lose if people end up having to go to Twitter.com or Twitter-centric apps where before they just lived within LinkedIn.

For you, if you're a media company, how much will you lose if, say, you can no longer let people log onto your comments via Twitter or Facebook can't share your feeds on those services as easily or at no cost. If you have to pay, what's it worth? What is your ROI of social media? How much is each one of your clickthroughs, mentions, pass-alongs worth?

For Twitter, they are balancing their desire to grow and be omnipresent vs. their perception of what their brand is as it becomes more prevalent, and they exercise more control and have more literal and figurative bandwidth to handle more and more themselves, rather than rely on the good graces of an open developer community.

Here's a bit from CBS' coverage of Twitter's cutoff of its feed to LinkedIn, and more than a flinch of developer anger:

The new requirements are meant to encourage developers to build apps on Twitter's website. The company said it would "more thoroughly enforce" its Developer Rules of the Road. Twitter wants to ensure its branding is consistent across the Internet, whether tweets are read on the site or a third-party client.

While the company is cracking down on inconsistency, developers are struggling with the narrowing constraints of integrating with Twitter.

In a March 2011 note to developers, Twitter platform team member, Ryan Sarver said, "developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no."

The challenges of building a program that doesn't mimic Twitter while ensuring consistency across all platforms has raised the ire of developers - some feeling jilted by the company. Their concern is that they have invested time and resources into developing apps for Twitter, only to have the company change the rules of the game.

The Morning Nora Ephron Captivated Me

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 13:26:00 +0000

At an event run by Syracuse University's Newhouse school of communications, Nora Ephron, who passed away last night at the age of 71, sat on stage with New Yorker writer Ken Auletta, actress Anne Hathaway, and an executive from, I believe, Sony pictures.

Auletta is eloquent and charming, Hathaway is wonderful and stunning, but it was Ephron whose charisma, charm, humor and biting but not cruel wit held the room. Every time she opened her mouth to speak, I found myself leaning forward, smiling, nodding, completely engaged by how she could be so frank and poetic at once. One line that sticks in my head: referring to the absurdity she found in the lavish lifestyles of Hollywood execs, she talked of them living "like pashas." (And this from someone who earned much of her living through the graces of those execs.)

The The New Yorker (with which I have no affiliation -- though I am a friendly acquaintance of Auletta) has the audio here.

Digital Media Management

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 22:16:00 +0000

I've teach graduate students a course in Digital Media Management at the Baruch Zicklin School of Business (City University of New York). I constructed the course, continually refine it, and am proud of the ways I've revised my presentation of the "Content Value Chain" and its aspects.

I've also, always, got plenty to learn. Which is one reason I'm excited to be taking the IESE (a European biz school) course on Advanced Digital Media Management for the next three days.

An Open Letter to Michael Kinsley (from 2002)

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 19:28:00 +0000

It's a bit surprising to me that people are still, two decades since the popularization of the Web, grappling with and fretting over how and whether to do "long-form" journalism in digital media. I put "long-form" in quotes, because each medium has its own systems and constraints, and long-form doesn't necessarily mean text. A documentary is long-form journalism for broadcast media. And, perhaps, we need to rethink the idea of "long-form" for the Web. Which brings me to a piece I wrote on Poynter.org in 2002 on the ideas of long-form, answering journalist and editor Michael Kinsley. (And my apologies for older links that don't work. If you find archived versions, please let me know.)

= = = = =

By Dorian Benkoil

Published Aug. 21, 2002 5:20 pm

Dear Michael,

I’ve heard you in a couple of places recently, expounding on what you’ve learned about doing journalism on the Web after many years as top editor at Slate.

Generally you were right on, but I sensed one important blind spot: You spoke as if the Web were print. For example, you repeatedly lamented how hard it is to sustain the sort of long-form journalism a print magazine might do.

“Publishing long New Yorker/Atlantic-type pieces,” you said in one interview for NPR’s “On the Media,” may well be “a type of journalism that is not suitable to the Web.”

But that’s like a filmmaker bemoaning the ways he has to condense a novel to squeeze it into a feature film, or a TV journalist complaining that the words of his evening news broadcast wouldn’t fill the front page of a broadsheet newspaper.

The Web, like TV and film, is a different medium than print — one that can convey just as much, and perhaps more. And I would argue that in doing so, Web journalists must present their pieces differently than when writing for, sayThe New York Times Magazine, of which you also spoke well.

Horizontal, Not Vertical

I think of the Web as a “horizontal” rather than “vertical” medium. People reading on a computer tend to get impatient, to skip from one thing to another. Rather than scroll down — vertically — they’ll jump (or “click”) to a “new” page — horizontally — even when that new page is a continuation or tangent of what they’re already consuming.

Web-based publications, from your competitor Salon.com to The New York Times Magazine, capitalize on this tendency in the simplest of ways: breaking up articles onto multiple, cross-linked pages.

More sophisticated methods of engaging Web users include one you mentioned: having a journalist keep a kind of professional journal that elicits the story as it’s reported, in small chunks day-by-day, or your nifty trick of using the “voice of e-mail.”

Even more sophisticated, I would argue, is using more of the medium’s potential by not confining yourself to print.

Take, for example, a hypothetical New York Times Magazine piece on the Middle East. Let’s make it 5,000 words. Then let’s adapt it for the Web, giving users a fun and enjoyable ride rather than a slog through page after page of screen-based text:

What’s the main point, the “nut” of the story? Can we convey it, with a reasonable amount of color and depth, but without digressions or asides, in, say, 1,200 words — which means, maybe two “Page Down” clicks, “vertically”?
Can we take a digression from the piece and make it a 400-word sidebar on a different page?
How about some visual elements described in an attached photo slideshow, with clever and creative captions that tell more of the story, as The New York Times did last week here with a fun walk-through illustrating its piece on virtual TV news?
Maybe a bit of audio of some interview subjects, conveying not only the words they spoke, but also the added context of their tone of voice and, for video, facial expressions, as MSNBC consistently does with its audio-visual presentations, as here on its coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks and the war on terror.
How about an interactive graphic giving insight into the geography, history or other background behind the piece so someone can flesh out their understanding, as ABCNEWS.com, my employer, does consistently, such as on this primer on the Middle East. [[NOTE: ABCNews.com is blocking access to this story as of April 12, 2012.]]

It is, to be sure, a lot of work, but once done gives a rich Web-centric presentation of the same material that might total more words, be enjoyable to enter at any of numerous points, and convey as much information and more emotion than the Times Magazine piece.

Even such print-oriented sites as The International Herald Tribune‘s, with its “horizontal” presentation of individual stories and a Web-based “clippings” file, are trying to present their material in a way that’s attractive to Web-based readers.

I’d be the first to acknowledge that the above techniques are not perfected. This is, after all, an evolving medium whose technology changes many times a year. But it’s just not right to say that it’s not possible to do long-form journalism on the Web.

Knowing the Numbers

Michael, you also spoke of the double-edged sword of knowing the numbers, of how Web technology allows you to know exactly how many people look at every piece for exactly how long. You noted how that can tend to denigrate the less-viewed material.

Yet, in print, editors don’t know how many people actually read their articles, or who, or how far into them they go. How many times have you stopped reading a piece in the middle and turned the page? At least on the Web, you can presume someone who’s accessed a story has a certain level of interest, and perhaps is more engaged, than the casual magazine or newspaper reader.

I have learned over five years of working in Web journalism — after many more years in magazines, radio, TV, film, a wire service and more — that each medium has its tedium, but each can also borrow from the others while playing to its greatest strengths.

As I said, you were mainly spot-on in talking of everything from the wonderful ways to play with the medium to the excitement of building it from scratch and how the wealth of figures generated by users’ “clicks” can ultimately be misleading. Thank you, too, for many wonderful stories and revelations in Slate and for sharing your observations.

And, if you’ve read this far down, thanks for reading mine.

– Dorian Benkoil

Dorian Benkoil is a managing producer at ABCNEWS.com. He previously spent about a decade at The Associated Press and Newsweek. This piece reflects his personal views, not those of his employer.

Collaborating in Person to Support the Virtual

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 02:04:00 +0000

Collaboration has been growing in journalism (and media in general), and I'll be attending two collaboration events in the Bay Area. One, Collab/Space, is part of the launch of Collaboration Central on our client PBS MediaShift, and is happening at U.C. Berkeley's Bowman Center. (The hashtag: #collabspace ?) Luminaries such as investigative journalist and Berkeley educator Lowell Bergman, U of Arizona's Dan Gillmor and MediaShift's Mark Glaser will also be there.

The other event, TechRaking (#techraking) is at Google's headquarters on Thursday, in Mountain View, CA. It's being run in part by Spot.us founder David Cohn and will apparently focus more on the technology that has facilitated so much of the collaborative work that is possible today.

Mashable to CNN For $200 Million? Really?

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:42:00 +0000

I can't find any sourcing, even on supposedly "reliable" sources like Reuters, for the $200 million figure that CNN is supposedly considering paying for Mashable. While the idea of the acquisition is plausible, I find the figure hard to believe. Simply put, with 40-50 employees, and about 50,000,000 pageviews per month, the math doesn't work, unless there's some magic I'm missing that CNN greatly values.

When AOL agreed to pay a reported $350 million for The Huffington Post last winter, it got a general interest news powerhouse, with multiple properties covering everything from lifestyle to business, and, of course, politics; no small matter as we move into a tough election year, with politicians ready to spend millions on political ads. And it also got Arianna Huffington, whose PR value is worth a considerable amount, and HuffPo's ability to drive traffic to tons of AOL properties across a wide spectrum. As of last October, they had a BILLION monthly pageviews, 20 times more than Mashable.

Mashable is a powerhouse in the tech and social media worlds, and they've got a brilliant strategy of spreading their material, generating pageviews and engagement, are masters at SEO, especially through their many evergreen "best of" or lists of 5-10 things you need for whatever digital/social/tech you're involved in. They've got a strong hold on the niche, which is a large niche, but a niche, nevertheless. Can they really be worth well more than half of HuffPo?

I've done some quick calculating (the spreadsheet is here), and even if Mashable, with all their revenue streams, has a very healthy $20 average revenue per 1,000 pages served, and they get a 10x multiple on that, that's still "only" a $120 million acquisition price. If we say 50 employees at $200,000 revenue per employee -- a high number for a media venture -- the numbers are even less.

I may be wrong. It wouldn't be the first time. I made the mistake once of thinking that a highly nimble editorial operation would be valued at well more than its traffic justified, and learned last month when PaidContent was acquired from the Guardian group by GigaOm that the actual price Guardian originally paid was a fraction of the rumored $30 million at the time.

Either way, congrats to Mashable chief Pete Cashmore for brilliantly executing an editorial strategy that perfectly fits the times. If his site is acquired, he stands to make a justified killing. This time, though, I'm erring on the side of caution.

Remembering Anthony Shadid

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:52:00 +0000

After the death of my friend and New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid, I put up a Facebook page where I, and a few others, remembered him. If you have remembrances of Anthony, or a comment on how he or his work affected you or got your notice, you're welcome to contribute.

Amazon Earnings Up, But Revenue Down

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 02:50:00 +0000

Everyone expected lower profits (aka earnings) from Amazon. But the lower revenues seem a surprise. Still I would not count them out. Far from it.

The Associated Press: Amazon 4Q results, outlook sends stock lower

BGC Financial analyst Colin Gillis said the company "didn't really give a good answer" as to why its revenue fell short of expectations. And while its earnings were stronger than expected, he said the company has been "more revenue driven than earnings driven." That explains why investors focused on the company's sales growth. With a stock valued as high as Amazon's, they are looking for any sign of a slowdown as an excuse to sell.

Google's Had Privacy Issue for 5 Years

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:49:00 +0000

With all the hubbub about Google's new privacy policy and how they're tying data together from their various sources to give better search results and ads, I thought I'd take a look at a piece I wrote more than five years ago on the topic of "Google's Looming Threat" -- which was privacy. Even then, in June of 2007, I wrote, Google faced a "burgeoning challenge".

Is there any other company that knows more about individuals - their preferences, their desires, their habits, their friends, their purchases, even the documents on their computers? And is there anything preventing Google from using that information?.... Now imagine aggregating all that information on an individual, then cross-referencing it with any searches the person has done, any books they've looked at online in Google Books, any videos they've looked at in or uploaded to Google's YouTube, or any documents Google Desktop has found on their hard drive. For Google's engineers, it would be a technically trivial exercise.

You can read the whole piece on Google's Looming Privacy Threat at the site of my company, Teeming Media.

ROI of Social Media #smwknd

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 21:09:00 +0000

Thanks to the many supportive people who attended and gave great questions, feedback and praise for my "ROI of Social Media" talk at Columbia University's "Social Media Weekend." You can find the presentation slides here, and a "Storify" of many of the Tweets below.

Social Media Weekend: ROI and @FredWilson

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:28:00 +0000

I'll will be introducing VC extraodinaire Fred Wilson, for his keynote address on Friday evening to kick off Social Media Weekend in NY, and presenting on “The ROI of Social Media” on Saturday. It's great to have one of the highest-profile investors around talk at the Columbia J-school about what makes it all work. (Sorry, no seats available for tonight, though there are spots for the rest of the festivities.)

Saturday will be on how can you measure whether what you’re doing to be part of the Twitter, Facebook and every other “conversation” is actually worth what it’s costing you.

Investors, Look for the Mocked - Fred Wilson

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 16:22:00 +0000

I like VC investor @fredwilson's contrarian yet wise view of a key to investing. Look for the good or service that is "mocked and misunderstood. For some reason, that correlates highly with the biggest breakout successes."

Things that do well, but are on the cutting edge, and move us, at least a little, out of our comfort zone, get mocked. People do that thing, but are uncomfortable on some level with doing so, and perhaps have a "should" feeling they shouldn't be consuming or doing whatever the thing is. (It's more complicated than pure guilt, I'd posit.)

Fred points to Twitter as a prime example of a mocked service, and Kickstarter as another up-and-comer that was mocked the other night on NBC's evening news. That brings him comfort.

Comedians, especially satirists, and many artists also point out the thing that's absurd or unsure, or not the majority opinion. They offer new paths and ways of thinking. They can be pointing out paths to greater sanity and satisfaction. But that moment of discomfort, mixed with realization, gets the laugh or the "aha" nod.

When I see ads that say "4 out of 5 people surveyed" like this gum or that detergent, I usually think about the 5th one, and often I'm that person. Or I think of the ways that, even if I'm in the majority, that thing I like could be improved. Of course, going with the one out of five is not a sure-fire way to spell success in business.

But, risk-taking -- as any investor tells you -- gets the higher rewards and, as Fred says, not doing "the obvious" produces the best outcomes. He's always looking for an edge in mitigating risk, and this is an intriguing method.

A VC: Mocked And Misunderstood

Business Case for Amazon "Silk" Fire

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 21:00:00 +0000

I noted when first hearing of it that the Amazon Silk browser seemed big from a tech standpoint, and couldn't resist a quip. Business Insider makes the case that the browser is revolutionary from a business standpoint: Not only does it make web browsing on Kindle much faster, it:

will give Amazon exceptional insight into what consumers are interested in, how they use the mobile Internet, and what they want to buy
makes the Android operating system, the platform upon which the Kindle Fire runs, much less relevant (and, therefore, much less powerful).
is Amazon's browser that will control the consumer's interface and data—and search window—not the operating system. Google's software, in other words, has basically become a device-driver.

So BI says. And the argument is persuasive, and why media types need to pay big attention not just to the distribution channel, but also the technology.

MediaShift/ONA Mixer in Boston

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 21:15:00 +0000

Come meet Dorian Benkoil and Mark Glaser, founder and editorial director of PBS MediaShift, on Wednesday, September 21, in Boston, to help kick off the Online News Association's annual conference. The first round is on Media Shift, just find the guy in the hat! Click here for more information.

Wednesday, September 21 · 7pm - 9pm
Location:
Storyville (formerly The Saint)
90 Exeter St.
Boston, MA 02116
(617) 236-1134

This mixer, co-hosted by MediaShift and the ONA, is sponsored by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
Please RSVP for the event with this form.
(Note: You don't have to be registered for the #ONA11 conference to attend the mixer.)

Amazon as the Biggest Media Company? (UPDATED)

noreply@blogger.com (Dorian Benkoil) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 02:22:00 +0000

This post has been UPDATED to add content and edit with further thoughts, facts and observations. (Marked with **)

= = = =
This is quite an assertion from Wired.com:

Amazon has swiftly become the most disruptive company in the media and technology industries. Its potential in this space is simply off the charts: bigger than Apple’s, bigger than Google’s or Microsoft’s. It’s becoming a purer version of all three.

OK, well, maybe. Yes, Amazon is huge and hugely influential. But c'mon. The Wired story looks at all the things Amazon "could" do, asserting they will do them. Amazon can become a true media producer, can become a platform on which others build -- can do a lot of things.

So can Google or Apple (or maybe even Microsoft). But it's not a foregone conclusion they'll succeed. Or that they, by launching various ventures, will find them profitable. Or even that they can produce reams of great content -- something they have tried, pulled back from, and are trying to do again. They execute their Web commerce business like a charm. Their Kindle was a first-to-market leader that has, **if not created a category, made it truly viable, as Apple did for MP3 players with its iPod.

But let's not forget that Kindle lost significant market share after the iPad came out and offered not only a seamless way to buy and read books with great functionality, but also -- perhaps most importantly -- worked with publishers on pricing in a way Kindle never had. And let's not forget how the iPhone lost market share after Google's Android took hold.**

The story makes the case that Amazon will eliminate the middleman. That's something they've done for years -- exploiting inefficiencies, using technologies, gathering data, squeezing more. They're adept and disruptive in the way all great Web companies are. I like but don't love the Kindle (which you'll see on this blog) because it was (and is) a closed platform that makes it hard to do a lot of the things one can on the open Web, and that requires you to license a book the use of which is controlled by Kindle (which at least now lets you read on just about every popular screen -- from laptop to Blackberry; though not, officially, the Nook, eh?).

But it's not like Google doesn't know anything about eliminating inefficiencies, or being an engine of commerce. Or that Apple doesn't know about having direct relationships with consumers. And, don't forget that the Android upon which the Kindle is based -- even if it is forked from Google's -- was created by Google.

Amazon’s Future Is So Much Bigger Than a Tablet | Epicenter| Wired.com