On Google and The Future of News
Google ☞ reacted pretty quick (Dec.1st) to the pressure news corporations put on them when mentioning delisting from the search engine. In case you missed this part see the resource section for a couple of links to give you more context.
What exactly are they offering? Nothing: 1/ a change to the “First Click Free” program (see link for more details ☞ Changes in First Click Free), whose implementation responsibility is still on the published side and 2/ crawling and indexing of preview pages, which is something that they were already doing.
Then, Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, has an article published on WSJ: ☞ How Google Can Help Newspapers in which he reinforces the Google benefit:
We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle.
Such a statement is a bit confusing to me as it sounds like the users generating this traffic were not looking to but they were convinced by Google to check the newspapers. And this sounds pretty incorrect. People are going to Google looking for something. If Google wouldn’t be there, they would go somewhere else to look for their answers and so those billions of visits will not be lost.
The only interesting part of the article is his perspective on the future of content consumption:
It’s the year 2015. The compact device in my hand delivers me the world, one news story at a time. I flip through my favorite papers and magazines, the images as crisp as in print, without a maddening wait for each page to load.
Even better, the device knows who I am, what I like, and what I have already read. So while I get all the news and comment, I also see stories tailored for my interests. […]
Some of these stories are part of a monthly subscription package. Some, where the free preview sucks me in, cost a few pennies billed to my account. Others are available at no charge, paid for by advertising. But these ads are not static pitches for products I’d never use. Like the news I am reading, the ads are tailored just for me. Advertisers are willing to shell out a lot of money for this targeting.
Resources
- ☞ Rupert Murdoch and Google Part 2 (Nov.10th)
- ☞ Microsoft Offers To Pay News Corp To “De-List” Itself From Google (Nov.22nd)
- ☞ Bing trying to get exclusive on Fox…Smart (Nov.22nd)
- ☞ News Corp. - If You de-Index Will They Still Come? (Nov.23rd)
- ☞ News Corp. Joined by Rivals Weighing Google Block (Nov.24th)
- ☞ Rival Magazine Publishers Plan to Launch iTunes for Magazines (Nov.24th)
LinkedIn: Platforms, APIs and Openness
LinkedIn has firstly mentioned a platform API a few years ago, but until now access to it has been granted only to partners (remember those 8 applications that you could install on your LinkedIn profile). I assume they have realized that this “closed” API will not bring a lot of applications and that APIs are meant to be open to be both useful and used.
While I cannot find the references right now, I do remember reading about other companies trying to create a business by monetizing their APIs (nb I’m pretty sure though that I read about them on Fred Wilson’s blog) and not getting it to work as they expected. It was only after they have flipped the model and started to pay companies to use the API (or platform) that the adoption took off and they have started to benefit.
There are other signs that LinkedIn have realized the power of open: ☞ a partnership with Twitter (see video down the page), the ☞ Outlook integration, etc.
An interesting topic to be analyzed would be: what are the possible benefits of opening up a platform? (besides the publicity and good kharma).
References
- ☞ The LinkedIn API Opportunity
- ☞ LinkedIn Platform: Open for Business
- ☞ LinkedIn API Platform Goes Live: Your Resume and Business Network Now Have an API
- ☞ An Ecosystem Is Born: LinkedIn Opens Up API
- ☞ Five Ways Startups Are Tapping Into LinkedIn’s API
Reid Hoffman and Biz Stone talk “Twitter #in”
How To: Back Up All Your Stuff, For Free
A review of a couple of different ways to backup your data for free. While imo not all reviewed solutions qualify as backup, there are a few interesting options.
The Fake Free by Jeff Jarvis and Chris Anderson
They both speak about free. They both wrote a book. Printed and sold in bookstores. Not really free though.
And both are suggesting that newspapers should give up their print version. And leave their content available for free.
Isn’t this sort of funny?
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“Free” in the enterprise:
- Free is not a business model, it’s a marketing and distribution tactic. Don’t forget this, and don’t get distracted into thinking otherwise.
- Free is not an excuse to make a lesser product, in fact it forces you to make a better product or no one will ever pay.
- Free will expand your market size and scope instantly; make sure you’re prepared, and make sure you can survive and thrive if only a subset ultimately pay you.
- Freemium works when you know who will want to pay for the service and what extra bells they will pay for. This can be based on usage thresholds, ROI achieved, more features, better support, etc.
- Freemium also works because larger businesses have specialized requirements that they’ll pay for: more security, more users, better management, etc.
- Treat free as an advantage - learn from all those new potential customers of your product, pay attention and allow niches to emerge that you can sell to.
- Lose customers to yourself, not your competitors
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Mark Cuban brings an interesting point to the debate: when you live by your free service, you die by your free service. There’s certainly merit in this argument if your business model is an advertising model based on pageview volume alone or if you’re holding up solely because of venture capital.
Aaron Levie""
Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine —too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property,’ the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.
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The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.
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