A great post today from Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and author of the well-known “A VC” blog. I have come to believe more and more that the media who survive/succeed will come to be a fusion of professional content — long form articles as Fred points out — and user-generated content. This is kind of what the local Examiners are doing, but Fred hits the nail on the head by emphasizing the need for curation:
If I was starting The Village Voice today, I would not print anything. I would not hire a ton of writers. I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople. I would hire an editor and a few journalists. And then I’d go out and find every blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, and other social media feed out there that is related to downtown NYC and I would pull it all into an aggregation system where my editor and journalists could cull through the posts coming in, curate them, and then publish them. I’d do a bit of original reporting on the big stories but most of what I’d do would be smart curation, with a voice, and an opinion.A VC, Jun 2009
If the New York Times is doing it on their home page, you can bet on it.
Categories: Dept. of Evolution · Dept. of Social Media
Tagged: Media, Newspapers
Today’s news that GM will put Pontiac out to pasture probably does not come as a surprise to most people. My wife, when we saw it on TV yesterday, said, “It’s about time.” And that’s probably the sentiment of a lot of people. But if you’re wondering whether today’s GM can ever build great cars again, amigo, rest assured they already do.
Working with Motor Trend, Automobile Mag and IntelliChoice.com in recent years has given us a ringside seat at the drama playing out in Detroit. One of the biggest impressions we took away is the great strides that GM has made at Chevrolet, Cadillac and, yes, Pontiac, in building not just quality cars but great ones. Last year, the Motor Trend staff spent time with the Pontiac G8, a powerful sedan derived from GM’s Holden division in Australia. The G8 was designed to serve as an American super-sedan or bargain priced BMW. In a one-on-one comparison the Pontiac G8 GT bested the Nissan Maxima, and according to Motor Trend editors was “one of the great driver’s-car values on the road today.”
It will have to be chalked up as a moral victory. Aside from the credit crunch, the problem facing GM and Detroit is one of perception built over decades. Anyone who drove in the eighties, as an entire generation of car buyers in their thirties and forties did, will well remember the anonymous and terrible-looking boxes that Detroit churned out. If you showed some of those cars to me today without their badges, I doubt I would be able to name the manufacturer, let alone the model.
One car from the eighties does stand out, at least to me: the hot-s**t Pontiac Bonneville owned by Brendan Finnigan’s Dad. The car had crazy bells and whistles before everything was connected to the Internet, and on those nights when J.T. was crazy enough to give Brendan the keys, a couple of high school seniors put that car through the paces. Riding in it was like gliding.
So long, pony boy
All is not lost. If GM and now Ford can continue to build on the foundation they’ve poured in the last few years, more Americans will get the chance to discover cars like the Pontiac G8. That, and only that, will change the way a lot of people think of U.S. automakers.
Categories: Dept. of Innovation
Tagged: Bonneville, Detroit, GM, GM bankruptcy, Pontiac, Pontiac G8
So our former client SpiralFrog has finally succumbed, and music industry pundits and reporters are taking the news as a flier for the death of ad-supported music.
This is a mistake.
SpiralFrog had its share of problems, as we well knew when we took on the business in the summer of 2007. By then, the company had gone through a wrenching management change, a missed launch date and a turnover in investors. The service itself set out to legitimize music downloading by attracting enough users (the benchmark was 10 million) that SpiralFrog could charge high enough CPMs to brand advertisers that the music would pay for itself.
Keep in mind that SpiralFrog got more than halfway to its goal, at one point garnering 6 million monthly uniques, and was building a nice grassroots following. It simply ran out of runway. Based on the feedback we received from journalists and analysts, as well as my own observations, here are the top three reasons SpiralFrog didn’t take off faster as a service:
- It didn’t work with iTunes. Forget the iPod for a moment. iTunes has proven to be the de facto media UI for just about all of us, whether we get our music from Apple, eMusic, Amazon or wherever. Even if you’re downloading your music via Limewire or other P2P networks, you’re still using iTunes.
- It had only two of the four major labels. The Frog was never able to capture the Warner and Sony catalogs. If you search a couple of times for music you want and don’t find anything, you’re probably not going to be inclined to come back. Blame that on the labels who are still refusing to do reasonable licensing deals.
- Search and discovery was frustrating. SpiralFrog had a nice home page and kept the flow of new music coming, but even I found the search function frustrating. To be fair, SpiralFrog never was able to add the features — concert listings, merchandise sales — that founder Joe Mohen envisioned for it.
One thing that SpiralFrog did NOT set out to do was be an “iTunes killer,” another favorite media trope. Joe and his team understood that the service’s incompatibility with the iPod somewhat limited its audience. But there are lots of folks out there without an iPod, and millions of kids whose primary listening device is the PC — just a fraction of those users would have been enough to propel the Frog. It was a compelling and well thought out business plan.
SpiralFrog did excel at one very critical element of digital music. The company built a very sophisticated back-end system that matched the holders of the recorded music rights with those who hold the publishing rights. A lot of folks don’t understand this is a critical distinction in building an online music service. Publishing rights are notoriously hard to source and manage because there can be many people who own the rights to a single song. The fact that the Frog figured this out and built a sophisticated system to keep both sets of rights holders happy is one of its most valuable legacies, and sooner or later, someone will figure out what huge value there is in this system and bid for it.
Is there a market for ad-supported downloading of premium content, especially music? When you remember that a vast majority of Internet traffic — more than Google’s total traffic — is devoted to file-sharing, I think the answer is a qualified yes. Someone’s going to do it. It’s just a matter of when.
Categories: Digital Music · P2P
Tagged: Ad-Supported, Digital Music, iPod, iTunes, Qtrax, SpiralFrog
A few months ago, The Atlantic did a cover story on whether Google is making us stupid. I don’t know about that, but if we’re not careful, Twitter might.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Twitter, and when I’m able to give it the proper attention, I’ve gleaned some interesting and sometimes very funny observations, thoughts and articles from it. The problem is that 140 characters threatens to become (if it hasn’t already) our new attention span.
My friend and mentor Barry Collodi asked me the other day if I had read an article in the Times. Yes, I said. Or, rather, I skimmed it. Leave it to Barry to cut through the crap: “That’s what EVERYONE is telling me. They’re skimming. They’re not actually reading. You have to READ.”
Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures not long ago wrote an interesting piece about how status is the ultimate social gesture, allowing anyone to put forth a constant stream of information, be that posts, pictures or a potpourri of links. For that matter, RSS feeds are similar. In many ways, our access to information is a little TOO easy. You can skim the headlines, but where’s the beef? With the torrent of information on Twitter and elsewhere, one’s media diet can be both voluminous and anemic.
I’m struck by how many Twitter updates are links to blog posts and articles. I’ve done it myself plenty of times, but I wonder how many folks actually read the articles they’re linking to.
In our rush to keep up on Twitter, Facebook, etc we can’t forget the essential act of paying attention. Everyone, and especially those who work in the media business, need to make it a priority for ourselves and the cultures that we work in to stop, drop and read. Barry’s suggestion: as soon you get a magazine, scan the ToC. Mark it. Save for later. Read. But read you must.
What a pleasure it was to skim the latest issue of Fortune with a cover story of Meg Whitman and a profile of the world’s largest hedge fund. I can’t wait to dig into my dog-eared copy.
Categories: Uncategorized
Welcome to “In Media Res,” a blog devoted to observations, thoughts, concerns, ideas and beliefs about the evolution of media and those things that derive, depend and sometimes shape media: PR, marketing, advertising and even things like Democracy.
Recently, our firm sat down to again ask the question, “What is media?” An interesting question that took us in interesting directions (YouTube is a media platform. But is the Wii?). This blog will explore the answers to that very large and important question. Along the way, we may just enlighten ourselves and hopefully a few other people.
It’s a big conversation, and with our little space we hope to join it.
Categories: The Great Uncategorized
Tagged: Media, Wii, YouTube
