When Free Doesn't Work Anymore - or, MySpace is Dead! Long Live Myspace!

MySpace is dead.

The once-trendy social network site has been shedding unique visitors at a rate of around five million a month, according to Compete.com, a web analytics firm.

It's a grim warning to anyone hoping a free website can survive from community participation alone, and should give pause to all internet media owners, from individual bloggers to Ted Turner.

Free Exchange suggests the collapse in users amounts to a near-irreversible freefall - once your friends stop being on MySpace, you stop going there. And so do your friends.

Web 2.0 growth spurts point to two things: the fragility of social networking sites and the resilience of clunkier competitors. Twitter or Facebook may well suffer the same lingering demise against nimbler rivals. But look at other service websites - for some variety, let's pick email, torrent sites, and news - and you'll find a great deal of brand strength that, whether profit-generating or not, trumps Web 2.0 upstarts every time.

Email eludes MySpace's problem, because even if you're still using your rickety old AOL email you picked up before the dotcom boom, you can still communicate with anyone else who has an email address. With most Web 2.0, this isn't the case - you're limited to other users.

Torrent sites - i.e. sites used by pirates to find illegal software and music - have an inbuilt bias towards community participation - they need users to locate and vet pirate downloads found elsewhere online, but a community alone doesn't build a torrent site. The key factor for the consumer is links to other torrents. Two Somalians in a raft could do that.

News also avoids the problems of Web 2.0 because it has been so stubborn in face of the communitarian spirit of the blogosphere. Removing the comments section wouldn't affect unique users. Newspapers can lose community engagement, and people will still keep coming back, albeit in increasingly dwindling numbers.

But comments affect time spent on a website, and that's important. The biggest money spinners for newspapers have been broadcasts of events in the real world lasting more than an hour, like Barack Obama's inauguration, and football games. The recent England-Ukraine game pulled in half a million viewers, each paying a fiver, but the amount of time a user spends parked at the same web site makes it a gold mine for advertisers.

But wait! Football games share a quality with MySpace and other Web 2.0 programs - they're miles better when you're with your mates. News media knows this - CNN has already been providing streams of Facebook comments alongside live events, which have proved remarkably popular.

Could news websites provide a portal for people with related interests to view events and form networks? Media companies seem to think so.

But the death of MySpace will haunt all such efforts as a warning of how quickly community-based websites can be abandoned by users, and will give pause to any CEO hoping to drive company revenues with Web 2.0 tools. Of course, any penniless blogger could have told you that.

When Free Doesn't Work Anymore - or, MySpace is Dead! Long Live Myspace!

Intermission

Earnest young amateurs try to recreate the entirety of Star Wars: A New Hope in 15 second clips.

http://www.starwarsuncut.com/#/

(Because I know all of you are geeks at heart.)

Still, crowdsource an entire film? That's a clever idea - one with hells of implications for the movie industry, which as I mentioned, needs all the clever ideas it can get...

Intermission

How Much Are You Worth To Rupert Murdoch?

Ray Snoddy at InPublishing magazine has an interesting statistic for those of you that still read a newspaper.

He says the worth of the average paying reader to a newspaper is £155 - 58% of which is the cover price. The rest is advertising.

Here's the kicker - the same lad (or lassie) reading the newspaper online is worth just £5.

One reason why there's such a disparity in that figure is that while a reader will happily leaf through a newspaper for a total twelve hours a month on average, that same reader spends only ten minutes a month on the equivalent news website.

That has frightening implications for news. But it also presents great opportunities.

Dwell time - the amount of time a user spends on a site - can only increase exponentially as news organisations expand online.

One example that has been staring news organisations in the face for years is broadcasting live football games on their websites. Back in the day, how many fathers heaved their Sunday Times across their knees, supplements spilling about, as they watched the local derby as they scoffed down their pie and beans? A fair few, I'm sure you'll recall. Yet news organisations have been so haplessly inept at transferring this experience online.

Keeping audiences' attentions glued to one website for a full 90 minutes would go a long way toward remedying the dwell time imbalance.

What makes it so difficult is, paradoxically, one of the joys of reading the news online - tabbed browsing.

One swift press of CTRL-T and you're off onto another story, and whoosh! before you know it, off to another website.

There is one branch of news media that enjoys significant dwell time, and it's the RSS feed. Providing a shell for the various news outlets available online, an RSS feed is an instant money spinner for those that can market it (i.e. Google) because it instantly alerts the advertiser to the readers' interests.

So why oh why oh why have we not seen news organisations creating their own heavily branded RSS feeds - leveraging the fact that their own readership is more familiar with their brand than with that odd-looking yet ubiquitous RSS symbol - and then linking to the increasingly niche feeds that interest their own writers?

Casual readers still don't have a clue what an RSS feed is - so how long can it be until news media decides to simply say to them "ah yes! It's one of the exclusive services available on Timesonline.co.uk. Here, let me show you..."

How Much Are You Worth To Rupert Murdoch?

Do Corporate Robots Make Better Bloggers? Branding, Blogs and You

Over the summer, something curious happened. The Economist, the famously haughty British weekly news review, decreed that all those posting comments on its website should use their real names – and with surnames to boot!

“Our hope is that increased use of real names will help the quality of online discussion,” wrote one of The Economist’s anonymous writers. Readers soon rebelled against such provocation. Besides, how could they verify that somebody is who they say they are?

The key is trust. The web can provide a screen of facelessness which it still retains to an extent, but if Facebook’s popularity is anything to go by, they still prefer the chumminess of a person at the other end of the line.

Blogs and Twitter have vastly expanded professionals’ abilities to recount their daily lives and give people access to who they really are. But far from divulging all, users have jumped on opportunities for controlled personal branding and identity online.

The business world is convinced that it needs personal branding to compete – partly jumping on the bandwagon, partly to communicate directly without mediation from journalists, but Chris Brogan, author of the book Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation and Earn Trust, argues that it’s also to present more human faces. He says that if people lack a face to a brand then they think of a company as merely a place for transactions – which in a recession, can be hazardous for a brand.

Does it make a huge difference to sales that there individual Facebook fan pages for the Ford Mustang but not the Adidas Gazelle? Not sure, but the brand that reaches out to its community has 330,000 fans. That's a pretty big potential market for upgrades, services and so on.

It’s strange that for publishers a clear human face is not always a plus. Blogs have tended to favour the personal touch, but the need for non-stop content means that teams of writers are a more reliable way of maintaining traffic to a site than one prolific writer chained to a netbook. Or perhaps there are personalities more suited for constant blogging than others.

Mass media is declining as audiences move on to more personalised forms of contact, and Vin Crosbie touts individuated media a real growth area for writers. Opinionated youngsters still crowd into journalism schools rather than simply starting blogs and typing loudly enough for the rest of the world to hear them. The most likely reason is that they wish to leverage the potential of big media brands to make their voices heard.

Yet for a big brand, the need for a human face is debatable. The key seems to be tailoring your human face to your audience – so corporate monoliths like Pepsi have jolly interns Ana and Rachel manning the wires, while The Economist can publish reams of bond yields and diplomatic analyses without a hint of human involvement at any stage.

What seems to unite all the successful internet brands is a hook – be it in terms of writing, editorial slant or a strong personality – which sets an internet brand apart from the rest. Still, as the owner of an unsuccessful blog, I feel it my duty to inform you all that comedy linking is not the highway to untold wealth that it might at first seem.

Do Corporate Robots Make Better Bloggers? Branding, Blogs and You

Good News, Everyone!

SNOBBY iPhone users* look like being the unlikely saviours of the news industry.

http://blog.flurry.com/bid/26376/Mobile-Apps-Models-Money-and-Loyalty

News applications have been a clear winner among users of 75,000-odd apps available for the iPhone, Android, the BlackBerry, and the Palm Pre.

Flurry, a mobile application analysis service, said "news apps get re-used more than once per day, at a rate of 11 times per week," a higher rate of use for a longer length of time than any other type of mobile application.

This comes alongside news that online advertising has outstripped TV advertising in the UK for the first time, according to a new report by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB).

Internet advertising surged in the first half of 2009 to £1.75bn (23.5 per cent of all ad spending), while press advertising fell by a withering 37 per cent.

This could represent a huge opportunity to profit for upscale newspapers, especially now that Apple have developed in-application payment schemes - which would potentially allow news organisations to charge for payment day-to-day, much as they would for their paper product.

The losers from this? Low-income readers won't be take advantage of colossally expensive 4G mobile phones with app services, so tabloids like the Sun and the New York Daily News likely don't stand to gain as much.

The Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal are also in an interesting position: while their readerships tend towards early and enthusiastic adoption of technology, the advantages to businessmen being seen reading their giant, salmon-coloured pages are hard to replicate on an iPhone. Captains of industry will have to seek other ways to compensate for this - branded pinstripe iPhone case, anyone?

At the opposite end of the scale from News apps were "Entertainment" applications of minimal reuse, such as the inexplicably popular "Fart" app, which allows sandal-wearing, soy-eating technology evangelists to emit a silly fart noise, electronically.

*Sorry iPhone users, I got nothing against you, you're just an easy target.

Good News, Everyone!

Google Has a Climate Change Problem

You know how when Bono gets all dolled up, dons his favourite pair of Raybans, and tells us all how we should do our part in the fight against climate change and global poverty, we all feel a little nonplussed when he carts off in his private jet to riches untold?

Well, imagine a whole army of Bonos, and a fleet of private jets enough to knock out the Death Star, all descending upon the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, their engines thick with seabird feathers and belching out hazy fumes, enough in number to block out the sun's light from reaching earth. A mite hypocritical, you could say, if you were to hazard an adjective.

This week's announcement from Google seems to be something of a stablemate.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/sep/25/google-earth-climate-change-copenhagen

NorCal-based global overlords Google have come up with a neat extension for their five-star distraction Google Earth, allowing globally-minded viewers to see the amount of carbon chucked up into the lower atmosphere year-on-year, along with all the damage caused to the environment by human industry until 2100.

For your author, who hopes by then to be a sprightly 113-year-old, the prospects are not cheerful. And good on Google for highlighting the 100m-odd refugees who will be crowding his porch door as they flee from the waters of the Atlantic lapping around their ankles. There are fewer more deserving causes for such a company to be putting their weight behind, and their new media push is commendable in many ways.

But Google is in a delicate position as climate change dominates the global agenda.

The Internet isn't immune from climate change. Google neglects to mention the amount of carbon belched out with the results of its search functions, not to mention the energy used in providing GMail, Blogger, Google Earth, Google Finance and so on. Google took about 70% of the 10 billion searches carried out in August 2009, according to Nielsen. Each of these Google searches is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2, the search giant has stated publicly. Supposing Google's carbon output is equivalent across the board in search engines, you'd have 24,000 tonnes of carbon each year just from search, which is the equivalent of 18,888 plane journeys from LA to London.

That number is increasing rapidly as China, India and other emerging markets switch on. It's a number without an upper limit. Google doesn't penalise users for searching as much as they want - indeed, it's how the company profits. Nor do Facebook or YouTube penalise you, however much time you fritter away therein (although that time is not coming back, I should remind myself.)

But the use of the internet is not free, no matter how much Google would like us to believe that, and it will become even more expensive as efforts to curb emissions increase. Carbon taxes and cap-and-trade schemes will push up costs for many industries. Because of its dependency on electricity, the internet is in fact rather vulnerable, though companies the size of Google have the finances to absorb the blow. Facebook and Twitter might have a more difficult time by comparison.

Google and friends will not suffer from reduced demand in the way that, say, overseas holidays might - but they will still have to tighten their belts in a world dominated by carbon taxes, high deficits and limited scope for expansion of net infrastructure. Just like the financial world's growth was spurred on by cheap credit, the flourishing growth of the internet has been fed by a glut of cheap electricity. That future is no longer certain.

The Copenhagen charm offensive can be summed up thus: Google is dusting off its "Don't do evil" motto - so sorely neglected in the last few years - to hammer home the social benefits of having everyone connected to the internet (and the profit that allows). Compare that with Microsoft's much more mercenary approach - come up with a good reason for the existence of Bing that isn't "eat into Google's market share", for example.

Could it be that Google, as it expands into every conceivable field of human interest, just wants to be that cuddly search engine with the feel-good 90s slogan again?

I'll bet Bono would kill to be just making rock songs again, too.

Full disclosure: obviously this blogpost used a fair whack of energy. And I've recently flown from LA to London, so I'm not exactly claiming sainthood. But let's be honest - who's going to give up a chance to knock Bono? Call me hypocrite if you will. Comments underneath in an orderly fashion.

Google Has a Climate Change Problem

Twitter Has Become Too Serious

Internet, I apologise for my long absence, especially during this turbulent time for you.

In my absence, Twitter has proven itself valuable, confounding naysayers and poo-pooers the world o'er.

By prompting (near) revolution in Iran, and attracting the ire of the despotic Chinese, Twitter has shown itself to be a Serious Tool for Serious People who do Serious Things like Bringing Down Governments.

But this means that it cannot proceed so named, if anyone is to take it seriously. Imagine if the tank had been named the Laff-Laff Car, or the Wright Brothers had dubbed the aeroplane the 'flying snugglepuff.'

So too must Twitter acquire a Serious Name to compete with the Serious Inventions of the 21st century. I at first proposed Teletext, a regal and Latinate composite fit for the Pope Himself, but soon realised it had been taken. At a loss for suggestions, I open the floor to you, the Reader, who may leave a haphazard comment or two below. Do be courteous to each other.

Serious Point: Perhaps Twitter's lack of a Serious Name and its instant dismissal as a silly West Coast toy - like the MacBook - meant that moustachioed sorts did not take it seriously. More fool them, it seems.

Twitter Has Become Too Serious