Financial professionals have historically relied on relied on devices like BlackBerries and boxy Bloomberg terminals to stay informed. In the last three years, however, more of them are turning to iPhones and iPads to stay in touch and keep up with crucial market information.
This shift in behavior helps explain Bloomberg’s decision to update its iPad app this week to include deeper research layers and the company’s messaging system which is popular at elite financial firms like Goldman Sachs. Bloomberg said it used eye scanners and heat maps to design the new app, which looks like this:
A Bloomberg spokesperson said the iPad app has been “by far the fastest growing platform” among its subscribers, who each pay around $20,000 for an annual license. In the past, most Bloomberg users licensed a hardware terminal (“the Bloomberg box”) but now 80 percent of them opt instead for “Bloomberg Anywhere,” which lets them log in to various devices though a portable finger-print reader.
John Waanders, the Head of Bloomberg Mobile, said the company has been on BlackBerry since 2001 and then expanded to early mobile devices like pagers and WAP browsers. Since then, it has added a Twitter feed and an app store that features an app called “Angry Bonds.”
In the last few years, Waanders said traders have come to seek out the “lean back” experience associated with tablets, and that 38,000 of them are using the iPad app. This represents a little over 10 percent of the company’s estimated 313,000 global subscribers.
Bloomberg would not comment on the ratio of Apple to BlackBerry users among its customers but said that 50 percent of Bloomberg mobile users accessed the service on more than one device.
The company is owned by the mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, and competes with Thompson Reuters to provide financial information to the financial sector.
The rise of social media means companies are collecting more and more of our personal data every time we go online. The government has been slow to respond — or even understand — the issue, leading some people to adopt technology tools as a way to protect their privacy.
Disconnect.me is one example. Launched in 2010 by a former Google engineer, the company provides “Facebook Disconnect” and other tools to stop the “Like” button and other widgets from siphoning data about your web browsing habits. On Monday, Disconnect launched a major update that not only provides a better picture of which companies want to track you, but also improves web speed.
Disconnect 2: what it is, how it works
In 2010, Google engineer Brian Kennish created a popular extension for the Chromse browser that stopped Facebook tracking. Soon after, feeling conflicted about working for a major data collector, he left Google to work on privacy issues full-time. He formed the company Disconnect along with consumer rights’ attorney Casey Oppenheim and another Googler.
The team’s first move was to replicate the features of Facebook Disconnect and use them to shut out other data-collecting platforms like Google, Twitter and Yahoo. Kennish made these companies his target because their widgets appear on many of the most popular websites on the internet: sites that offer information about health or news or weather. These widgets, which invite a reader to “like” or “share,” also act as backdoor portals that disclose what you’re viewing to advertising and analytic companies. For instance, the social media companies help ad firms learn when when you visit sites like “6 Things I wish I knew about Cancer.”
Now, the company has unveiled Disconnect 2, which Kennish describes as the tool he wanted to build all along. In a phone interview, he and Oppenheim explained that the new version is meant to embody three goals: privacy, speed and “don’t break the internet.” The company says this last goal means that Disconnect’s filtering tools won’t interrupt or interfere with a user’s ordinary browsing experience — even as it screens out more than 2,000 of the biggest data-collecting sites.
Disconnect 2, which you can install on your Chrome or Safari browser, also has a new look that provides much more information at a glance than the previous version. The icon sits in the top right of the browser; here’s what you see when you click on it:
The three letters at the top, which represent Facebook, Google and Twitter, are displayed separately because their tracking tools are found on so many websites. The user can also see the number of other tracking sites broken down by category. The drop-down arrows provide specific information about those other tracking sites. Meanwhile, hovering over the bars at the bottom shows how much faster the page loads without all the tracking tools (in this case, 28 percent) as well as how much less data is being consumed:
Finally, users can also pull up an image of just which companies trying to track them on a given webpage. If you click “Visualize page,” this is what you see:
The above image shows that BuzzFeed is one of the dozens of sites, including advertisers, data firms and analytics companies, that request information when I visit the Huffington Post (I don’t mean to single out either BuzzFeed or HuffPo — a similar graphic appears if you visit Reuters, ESPN, Weather.com or nearly any other well-known site — including GigaOM).
What Disconnect 2 means for users, publishers and advertisers
The new version of Disconnect should be a hit with privacy-craving internet users, who will welcome the opportunity to throw up a bigger shield between their social media identities and companies that want their data. The faster, less-cluttered browsing experience is also appealing. Publishers and advertisers, however, will not be giving Kennish and crew a high-five anytime soon.
That’s because, in addition to cutting off tracking sites, Disconnect 2 also strips out many of the ads that appear on a website (I visited Drudge Report, for instance, and the prime top-of-the-page ad had vanished). This is hardly good news for publishers navigating an already challenging ad economy. Advertisers too will be unimpressed since the data Disconnect is unplugging is the lifeblood of popular “retargeting” campaigns.
On the other hand, publishers and advertisers can take comfort in the fact that only a relative handful of users are sophisticated enough to understand the tracking issue in the first place — let alone download a special browser extension to stop it. According to the company, there are one million active users a week for the original Disconnect. While advertisers may fear a future surge in the tool’s popularity, that number alone will not have them quaking in their boots.
Disconnect 2: no match for the movement to mobile
While Disconnect 2 has the potential to throw a wrench into the advertising operations of Facebook and Google, it’s also unlikely to check the larger erosion of privacy taking place all around us. The reason for this is not because Disconnect 2 is an esoteric product. The problem is instead that its arrival coincides with a major shift in how we explore the internet.
Today, the most serious threat to our privacy is not the screen on our desk but the one in our pocket. Our smartphones are not just little computers — they are also GPS tracking devices that record our every movement and many our thoughts. Consumers happily enable this process with toys that blare their location like Foursquare and Facebook. And the trend is only accelerating (see Om’s trenchant thoughts in ”Why Facebook Home bothers me“).
In the face of this voluntary surrender of our location and habits, does Disconnect’s attempt to staunch the tide of desktop data even matter? It can certainly help, of course. At a time when Facebook is collecting not just our online habits but our offline ones too (the company is now partnering with retailers like drug stores), any tool that will deprive them of data will be a comfort to privacy advocates. Overall, though, Disconnect is unlikely to be a game changer.
Kennish appears to recognize this. In our phone interview, he said the company is at work on tools to limit the spread of data from mobile devices. He also stresses that one of Disconnect’s primary goals is education and awareness. By distributing a tool that helps average people understand how their data is collected, the company can help build a critical mass aware of what is happening and what is at stake.
Finally, here’s a video in which the company explains Disconnect 2 in its own words:
Correction: This story was amended at 3pm on Monday to state that the original version of Disconnect has 1 million active users, not 1 million downloads.
In a sweeping proposed deal with European antitrust regulators, Google has agreed to include prominent links to competitors like Yelp and TripAdvisor in its search listings, and to label in-house services such as Zagat. The agreement also sets out restrictions on how Google sells advertising and how it treats third party content like news articles and restaurant reviews.
The long-awaited deal is significant because it concludes a multi-year investigation by EU competition authorities, and because it is the first time that Google has bent to government demands over how it presents its search results. The details of the five-year deal, which has yet to be formally announced, were reported on Saturday by the Financial Times.
The terms of the deal
According to the FT, Google’s obligations vary depending on the nature of the search results. The most onerous conditions relate to listings like travel or restaurants where Google has a clear financial interest. In these cases, the company must identify any search listings that are Google-owned, and also provide at least three links to competing search engines. For other Google-related listings that do not produce direct revenue — weather or news, for instance — the company must provide a label.
The labeling will involve markers like boxes, separate page placement and “hover links.” A third party will monitor for compliance with these and other parts of the agreement.
The deal also requires Google to honor requests from news agencies and other sites not to “scrape” their content for use in its search listings, and to provide assurances that it won’t punish these sites by deleting them from the search listings altogether.
The agreement also addresses Google’s advertising practices by preventing it from imposing exclusive ad deals on its partners, and by making it easier for those partners to switch their ad campaigns to rivals like Microsoft and Yahoo.
The FT has a detailed account of the obligations here.
A victory for the EU, the public or Google?
When the deal is formally announced by EU regulators, we can expect to see considerable spin from Google and its competitors about what it really means.
At this stage, it’s clear that the deal represents the largest regulatory imposition to date over Google’s search business, which is still the core of the company and its prime money maker. This amounts to a victory for the EU and its high-profile competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia.
While Google will hardly be celebrating the regulations, the company could have fared far worse. The five-year deal, which is legally binding, means Google avoids the sort of heavy fines and bitter regulatory battles that ensnared arch-rival Microsoft for well over a decade.
Europeans consumers, meanwhile, are likely to continue using Google as they have done so far. Despite repeated accusation by groups and companies tied to Microsoft that Google manipulates its search results, there is little actual evidence that the company blatantly puts its thumb on the scale.
The agreement may, however, serve to give Google critics some peace of mind by providing legal assurances that their worst fears won’t come true. And, as the deal is not finalized, critics and others will have time to comment on its provisions.
A different outcome from America
One of the most noticeable features of the deal is how much it differs from the outcome of a similar investigation carried out by America’s Federal Trade Commission.
In a January report, the FTC concluded a two-year antitrust inquiry by announcing that Google had done nothing wrong in the field of search. While the FTC did extract a pledge the company related to patent abuse, this was more a face-saving measure for the FTC than a burden on Google. (Here’s a plain English summary of the US investigation).
Different laws in the US and EU explain the divergent outcomes. American antitrust laws, for instance, focus on harm to consumers not competitors — a different line of inquiry to what happens in Europe. America also has more robust speech laws. Google argued strenuously that its search results are protected by the First Amendment; the FTC likely folded its cards rather than risk losing a court case over the question.
According to a source familiar with the investigations, Google was also more willing to settle in Europe because a legally binding EU commitment does not expose the company to civil lawsuits.
Ad.ly is a Beverly Hills firm that charges brands to obtain social media endorsements from the likes of Mariah Carey and Kim Kardashian. But since its new CEO came on board in March 2012, the four-year-old firm has come to rely less on celebrity tweets for its business model.
According to Ad.ly CEO Walter Delph, the firm had trouble in the past obtaining steady revenue because many brands used it for a one-and-out campaign. Now, he said, Ad.ly has found a second form of income through licensing the company’s analytics platform — tools that can help brand track how mentions on Twitter and Facebook ripple down from a celebrity to their fans.
“We had an activation business, but we didn’t have a data management platform. Now, we do. … It’s a logical extension of the celebrity tweet business,” said Delph in an interview in San Francisco this week. Delph, who was formerly a SVP at News Corp’s Digitam Media division, added that Ad.ly now has more than 10 repeat customers and is on pace to generate around $5 million for the year.
Adly’s decision to turn towards licensing also amounts to an admission that the company is pivoting, and that basing a social media business solely on celebrities is not not viable. This is likely due to the fact that Twitter and Facebook mentions are typically wrapped up in a larger endorsement package — tales of a one-off tweet from Charlie Sheen selling for $9,500 are more the exception than the rule.
Delph also added that social media marketing is a challenge the platforms typically don’t convert into immediate sales.
“You can’t expect me to sell a truck right on Twitter,” said Delph, adding that Ad.ly in the past has done a poor job of explaining how to measure ROI from social media.
While the focus on its analytics tools provide a way to persuade marketers of the value of social media, the new stragegy could also make it hard for Ad.ly to stand out from the dozens of other firms that offer social media listening platforms for brands. In response, Delph said Ad.ly is distinct because it can not just monitor social media ROI but also “activate” it through the celebrity tweets.
Delph adds that the overall social endorsement business is getting stronger because of richer media capacity built into platforms like Twitter.
“If you can show anything beside written word, it’s worth much more. A photo brings 3-4 times the performance.”
Google users can share access to email and social media from beyond the grave thanks to a new feature that sends out password information if a user has been offline for a long time. The tool comes at a time when people are leaving beyond fewer physical artifacts like letters or photographs for loved ones to remember them by.
The new “Inactive Account Manager” is intended to help users manage their “digital afterlife,” said Google in a blog post on Tuesday. The tool works by instructing Google to email passwords to as many as ten “trusted contacts” in the event that a user has not signed in for three or more months. Alternately, users can tell Google to simply delete the accounts; in either case, users receive a text message before Google takes action.
You can find the tool by going to Settings -> Accounts in your Gmail account or by clicking the link in Google blog. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like:
For practical purposes, this means that you can ensure loved ones have an easy way to access not just Gmail but other Google services too — like documents in Drive, Blogger accounts, Google voice and Picassa pictures. All of these services are likely to contain information that is of financial or sentimental value to family members.
The Google feature arrives at a time when property and privacy laws have often failed to keep up with the digital age, leading to conflicts between relatives and social media companies. Last year, for instance, parents unsuccessfully sued Facebook to obtain messages of their dead daughter (Facebook refused on the grounds of federal privacy law).
The new Google tool, however, contains a notable omission: it does not allow users to provide access to the music, books and movies contained in Google Play. The reason is that, like Apple’s iTunes, Google Play customers don’t actually own the items they buy. As a Google spokesman explains:
“Digital content purchased on Google Play is licensed to the individual account holder personally. These rights end on the death of the account holder, and there is currently no way of assigning them to others after the user’s death.”
A federal judge threw out an anti-trust case brought by airlines passengers who accuse internet provider GoGo of illegally raising the price of in-flight service to rates as high as $17.95.
In a decision issued Wednesday in San Francisco, US District Judge Edward Chen ruled that GoGo, despite supplying 85% of all internet-equipped airplanes in the US, does not have a monopoly. The company’s customers include Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Delta, US Airways, and Virgin America.
In throwing out the case, Chen accepted GoGo’s argument that it doesn’t have dominant market share because it covers only 16% of all US airplanes, and it’s possible for the remaining planes, which do not offer internet, to sign up with a competing service provider. The internet contracts are sold on airplane-by-airplane basis, and not across entire airlines.
The passengers sued GoGo in October, claiming that competitor Row44 charges only $5 for an entire flight of internet service but that airlines can’t drop GoGo because of ten-year contracts that lock them in. They also argue that GoGo’s internet technology is inferior because it relies on ground-to-air tower transmission rather than the satellite service offered by Row44 and Jet Blue’s ViaSat service.
The decision also agreed to GoGo’s request to acknowledge that a third provider, Panasonic, is entering the market with satellite service on United.
Chen dismissed the case without prejudice, meaning the passengers can try to bring up new facts to show that GoGo does have a monopoly. You can read the decision yourself below.
Mystery solved. Many were scratching their heads over why Google sold Frommer’s Travel Guides this month — less than a year after buying the brand for $22 million. The answer is the same as for why Google does nearly anything: data.
As Skift reports, Google handed over the company to founder Arthur Frommer sans social media accounts. In other words, Google is keeping all of the followers that Frommer’s accrued on Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Google+, YouTube and Pinterest. These thousands — or more likely millions — of accounts are valuable because they represent a huge collection of serious travel enthusiasts.
While Google will not keep the Frommer’s name, it’s able to keep the followers by simply changing the name on the account; in the case of Twitter, all of the @FrommersTravel followers are now following Google-owned @ZagatTravel:
This account is now @zagattravel! Welcome. Stay tuned for info on where to go, where to stay and how to explore around the world.
The social media data will power Google’s ongoing forays into the travel market in which it offers services like flight and hotel search, and Zagat reviews.
In retrospect, it appears that the social media data may have been Google’s goal along when it obtained Frommer’s from publisher John Wiley & Sons for $22 million in August of 2012. The company has not disclosed how it much received for selling the brand back to Arthur Frommer, who intends to relaunch the title’s print editions which Google decided to discontinue in favor of digital-only offerings.
In response to a question about the social media accounts and the price of the sale, Google provided this response:
We’re focused on providing high-quality local information to help people quickly discover and share great places, like a nearby restaurant or the perfect vacation destination. That’s why we’ve spent the last several months integrating the travel content we acquired from Wiley into Google+ Local and our other Google services. We can confirm that we have returned the Frommer’s brand to its founder and are licensing certain travel content to him.
Social media accounts are becoming increasingly significant as more people use them to connect with people and brands and to explore the internet. Popular New York Times reporter, Jim Roberts, cause a fuss for instance, when he revealed that he would take his 75,000 Twitter followers with him when he left the paper this year.
AOL today announced a new product for publishers called Marketplace, which integrates various elements of its ad tech platforms. The move comes as AOL redoubles its efforts to bring in revenue unrelated to its legacy copper wire business.
“This gets us back into the ad tech game in a serious manner,” said CEO Tim Armstrong, speaking at the AdTech conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.
The new Marketplace product, which will compete with offerings from Google and Adobe, is intended to provide publishers with an alternative to using multiple companies to carry out the process of selling and serving digital advertisements.
“All these companies create a false sense of complexity in industry but also take a lot of money out of it,” said AOL Networks CEO Ned Brody, in a recent interview. Brody claimed that the multiple pieces in ad tech amount to “too many mouths” to feed, and that AOL’s new integrated platform will let publishers keep 80 cents, rather than 50 cents, out of every ad dollar they receive.
Brody also argues that the lion’s share of ad tech innovation has occurred on the buyer’s side, giving brands new tools to obtain ads more efficiently but failing to help publishers. He claims tools like Marketplace will fix this imbalance. Brody also says that AOL’s own media entities, like Huffington Post and Engadget, use its ad tech tools — giving it a perspective on what ad tools other publishers want. An ad manager I spoke with was more skeptical, saying companies are constantly offering magic bullets to make advertising cheaper and easier but that the industry remains much the same.
From a larger business context, the ad tech offerings are also part of Armstrong’s efforts to refashion AOL into a company that no longer has to rely on its legacy dial-up internet subscriptions. This has meant creating two other separate divisions: one dedicated to its media properties, and another dedicated to its ad technology. Recent earnings reports show the two newer divisions are performing well from a revenue standpoint but are still waiting for profits to roll in.
At the conference, Armstrong also says he wants AOL to be like financial firm Goldman Sachs by relying on strong partner relationships, but also innovating in its own right.
The concept of selling digital ads is basic enough — offer up a piece of screen and invite brands to buy it. But for publishers, the ad tech industry can feel like a mix of quantum physics and witchcraft.
Instead of simple transactions between publisher and buyer, digital ad sales rely instead upon a bewildering degree of middlemen who offer competing versions of a lengthy technology product. Ad executives say, for instance, that there are now eight different technologies just to count if an ad has even appeared.
“How f’ed up is our industry? Even after you work with five or 10 companies, you have to hire two more companies to find out what you achieved,” said Ned Brody, CEO of AOL Networks, while speaking on Monday at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference in San Francisco.
The good news is that Brody predicts that the ad industry will consolidate and offer publishers fewer and easier choices. Instead of having to navigate a series of disparate SSP’s (supply side platforms), DMP’s (data management platform), ATD’s (agency trading desk) and so on, he says more companies will offer a one-stop shop. Brody also suggested that that fewer “mouths to feed” along the ad chain will result in publishers receiving closer to 80 cents, not 50 cents, on every ad dollar.
Alas, this promise of a simpler and more lucrative ad landscape may not emerge anytime soon. Speaking from the publishing point of view, the chief revenue officer of The Weather Channel, Curt Hecht, was more sanguine about the situation.
Hecht agreed that the ad industry was over-complicated but said the Weather Channel “embraces all these things” and looks for “market signals” — chatter from agencies, marketers and tech partners — to ensure it’s familiar with whatever technology its ad buyers request. In other words, publishers like The Weather Channel have accepted that the current cluster of ad tech companies may not untangle itself anytime soon.
Publishers’ hopes for simplicity may also be dashed by ad buyers’ increasing desires for cross-channel marketing — reaching potential customers on laptops, mobile devices and more in the same campaign. While this may deliver more effective marketing messages, it also has the potential to further complicate the current ad tech witches’ brew, especially on the measurement front.
As other speakers at the conference noted, ad buyers are still skittish about the tools used to measure online ad purchases on platforms like video. While the metrics are fast improving, publishers may not be able to promise that ad buyers are reaching more than 50 percent of a given video audience — let alone a cross-platform one. All agreed that the online ad economy will improve significantly with the arrival of a single Nielsen like rating, which may (or may not) get here by the end of 2013.
The bottom line is that the ad tech industry remains a fragmented industry with many moving pieces and that, despite the promise of a streamlined experience, publishers will have to wait awhile to see more daylight in the notorious LUMAscape slide.
Video has been an ongoing bright spot for the online ad industry, offering brands the chance of a TV-like experience while providing publishers a healthy revenue stream. Now, the video ecosystem is changing rapidly as the industry grows and more ad buyers turn to automated buying.
A new study by Forrester Research claims that so-called “programmatic” buying or “real time bidding” will account for nearly 25 percent of online video ad purchases by next year. This mirrors what is going on in the world of display advertising where more big advertisers are using ad tech tools to serve ads to diverse audiences in real time.
The report, which was commissioned by SpotXchange (an online video exchange that has skin in the ad game), also says that premium publishers have been slower to adopt programmatic bidding, in part because they fear it will undercut the value of their inventory. The report predicts, however, that many of these hold-out publishers will change their position as brands get accustomed to programmatic buying and begin to demand it.
The impact of programmatic on video ad prices is debatable. People in the ad tech industry point out that automated ad buying is simply a tool — not a reflection of ad quality. By this reasoning, publishers can hold their pricing line if they wish while also ensuring that their space is available in real time when there is a surge in demand. Conversely, as the report points out, publishers remain wary that brands will use the tools (as they did for display advertising) to drive down prices.
Overall, the future of video prices in the short term may be determined less by ad tech tools than by more basic principles of supply and demand. On this front, the good news for publishers can be seen in this chart which shows online ad spending rising quickly:
Another recent report is even more optimistic — pegging the 2013 number at $4.1 billion.
The bad news, though, is that the word is out about video’s promise and more and more people are showing up to grab a slice of the pie. Ad industry sources told the Wall Street Journal last month that there is ”not enough to feed everybody.” The Journal reported that, despite brands beginning to reallocate their TV budgets, prices are already under pressure; $15 to $20 per thousand views (CPM’s) last year versus a CPM of $17 to $25 in 2011.
The Forrester report also predicts that video ad inventory will be become increasingly divided between private and public exchanges.
An array of enemies, from professors to Google to the Supreme Court, are dragging the U.S. towards copyright nihilism that resembles Russia — at least this seems to be the view of Authors Guild President, Scott Turow, whose latest screed entitled “The Slow Death of the American Author” claims the country is betraying its writers.
Turow’s piece, which appeared in this weekend’s New York Times, could have been a rallying cry to support American literature. Instead, it amounts to a hysterical rant full of slipshod reasoning that shows again the Guild’s propensity for tactical errors and alienating potential allies.
The central conceit of the piece is the U.S. Constitution’s intellectual property clause, which permits Congress to grant limited monopolies to “promote the Progress of Science and Useful Arts.” Turow, despite being a lawyer, miscasts the clause to suggest it awards a constitutional right to authors and to say that the current copyright system betrays the founders. This is misleading twice over.
First, the grant of copyright is discretionary — as with many of the other items listed in Article I, Section 8, copyright is a power (like declaring war or borrowing money) that Congress can choose to exercise when it sees fit. The clause does not, as Turow writes, “instruct” Congress to protect authors’ rights.
The second problem with the constitutional conceit is that Turow and others would likely have been appalled by the Founders’ ideas of about copyright conception. This was an age when Alexander Hamilton opted for piracy as an industrial strategy, and authors’ rights were precarious at best. Indeed, foreign writers received none at all (ask Charles Dickens what he thought of the Founders’ copyright law).
In lamenting the attenuated state of U.S. copyright law, Turow also fails to mention that protection for authors has been expanded from its original 28-year term to the life of the author plus 70 years. Congress and the courts, in other words, have signed off on a scheme that locks up titles like Presumed Innocent until the year 2200 or beyond — is this not enough copyright for you, Mr. Turow?
It is these absurd terms — plus harsh penalties of up to $150,000 per infringement — that have helped to make copyright such a mess in the digital age. In an era when the internet grants every writer a printing press and a distribution system, it seems absurd to hand out century-long copyright terms.
Instead of discussing how copyright can work in digital times, Turow instead lashes out at academics and librarians who are trying to find a way to distribute neglected books and locked-up research to broader audiences through efforts like the Hathi Trust. In my experience, these people respect copyright — they just don’t like the way that some abuse it — and their goal is expanding access to knowledge. Librarians at Duke are among those who are most forcefully challenging the current state of copyright; you can decide for yourself here if they are selling out authors.
In addition to a potshot at the Supreme Court, Turow also trots out the usual canard that sites like Google and Yahoo are complicit in book piracy with “paid ads decorating the margins of [their] pages.” While book piracy is indeed a problem, Turow’s suggestion that search engines are engaged in deliberate criminal behavior is far-fetched; these are mature companies with big and legitimate customers that have scant need or interest to pander to pirates. (While Google has landed in very hot water in the past over ads for illegal pharmacies, it now says it vies to curtail the bad advertising actors.)
In short, what Turow has done is to raise an important issue — how to devise an economic means to support modern literary culture — and then alienate nearly every potential ally, not to mention distorting the picture to his own ends. If Turow and the Authors Guild are really on the side of writers, they should toss the specious and acerbic arguments and work instead to build a coalition of advocates for a fair and workable copyright regime.
When The Week launched in 2001, the Wall Street Journal asked if its owner was “mad” to take on famous weeklies like Time and Newsweek. Over a decade later, those publications are on the ropes, while the The Week has defied the odds to become profitable both online and in print.
In a recent interview, CEO Steven Kotok explained how The Week has bucked the fate of the troubled magazine industry, and how the publication plans to stay relevant in the future.
An American Aggregator
The idea of a “weekly” news magazine seems quaint in the age of the internet, but The Week has carved out a niche by distilling current events into a smart bundle of excerpts and opinions. It aspires to provide tight writing and snappy headlines that let readers feel in-the-know about news, culture and policy.
According to Kotok, this style of curation was considered a “weird thing” when The Week launched and the site had to persuade advertisers it was viable. Now, nearly publication does it one form or another – a situation that would seem to erode The Week’s strategic advantage. But Kotok says the publication is still growing its subscription base by catering to a distinct “psychographic” (read: affluent, educated folks) and by promoting a left-right political discourse.
“Kids buy it for their parents and vice versa. You might buy it for your conservative uncle or your liberal nice – it’s a way to get the other side in.”
The pitch appears to be working. The company says it has a rate base of 550,000 readers and annual revenues of about $50 million. It says it has had annual profits of between $4 million and $5 million in each of the last three years.
Most of that profit is coming from home subscription sales (fewer than 1% of its readers come by way of a newsstand) but, increasingly, The Week is looking to the web to make money.
Building the digital domain
With a few exceptions, like the Atlantic, legacy print titles have fared badly online – slow starting and caught between two worlds, they lose to digital natives.
In the case of The Week, Kotok admits it was late to develop a web strategy, but says its site is now profitable. Citing February comScore numbers of 2.3 million unique visitors, he says The Week has surpassed the Economist in two of the last three months.
The Week’s website doesn’t reproduce the magazine’s content but instead offers a stream of smart, snackable news bites along with “Guilty Clicks” from around the web (“Do we really need a drone hoodie”, Ke$ha, etc). The online fare is produced by a separate group of writers that represent about half of The Week‘s 29-person editorial team.
The site earns its keep by selling advertising to major companies like IBM, Xerox and Zurich Insurance but also serves as a vehicle to heavily promote its print cousin. Kotok credits the site with bringing in $1 million a year worth of magazine subscriptions.
On the tablet front, Kotok says iPad advertising and subscriptions (access is free for print subscribers) are producing almost $1 million in sales but that the Apple relationship is difficult. “It’s hard because we’re used to having a reader relationship but Apple controls that. Sometimes they promote you and sometimes they don’t.”
The future: commerce not a tin cup
Having discovered that readers are not put off by price increases — The Week‘s average annual price has risen from $30 to $50 in the last six years — Kotok says he is now focused on revenue rather than subscriber growth. Gift subscriptions, which are a big part of The Week’s business, will be an ongoing source of income but, in the long run, the company still confronts a magazine business that is in wide and permanent decline.
The Week also faces a more immediate challenge in the Post Office’s plan to end delivery on Saturday (the day the magazine arrives in readers’ mailboxes). Kotok says he can meet the Saturday challenge by shifting production schedules, but that the publication is also focusing on developing other revenue streams – a tactic that is becoming necessary to media outlets of all kinds.
For now, he says, that will not include a paywall or donations experiment of the sort being conducted by Andrew Sullivan. Instead, The Week is betting on ecommerce to compliment its editorial strategy. “We won’t put out a tin cup. Many of our subscriptions are gifts so our ecommerce will be too,” Kotok says, suggesting that The Week fans will buy each other t-shirts, books and more.
The Week’s ecommerce experiment will be helped by its 2011 acquisition of Mental Floss magazine, which has an online store that brings in 30% of its $10 million. Items for sale include smart people t-shirts (“Pi Hard,” “Spell Czech”) and quiz books. In its push into retail, the company will be joining the likes of Gawker Media and Thrillist, which are likewise trying to leverage content into ecommerce.
Why can’t the government be more like Silicon Valley? It’s a common complaint by those who contrast the fast, innovative tech sector against the plodding ways of Washington. It’s also unfair.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, for instance, just announced it is updating its rules for social media. The rules may “fall short” but, overall, the SEC’s initiative is a welcome effort to adapt policies to emerging technologies. In other words, the government gets it. And not just for financial reporting — regulators are also updating rules to account for the impact of new technologies on everything from crowd-funding to video rentals to the Patent Office.
In light of such progress, why then is the government so often reviled by the tech community? To see what I mean, look at recent stories (and related comments) involving issues like online privacy, file-sharing or the sad death of internet activist Aaron Swartz. These situations, which may reflect poor choices by individual prosecutors or bureaucrats, have served to reinforce an article of faith for many tech enthusiasts: that the government is populated by people who are malicious and intellectually inferior to those who read sites like Reddit or Hacker News.
While the press and tech readers are right to be vigilant, the larger caricature of bungling government fools is neither fair nor responsible. For starters, the people who work at places like the SEC or the Justice Department are not schleps off the street who can barely use a computer; instead, they are often top-of-the-class graduates who accepted less money in favor of more fulfilling work. The agencies they work in can be dysfunctional — like many big corporations — but the people themselves are not.
There is an even larger problem of looking at the government through the fast-moving prism of the tech community. Namely, the government is not supposed to resemble the tech sector in the first place — pivoting, rapid adaptation and “move fast and break things” are fine qualities for a start-up, but they’re ill-suited as a method of governing a democracy.
Don’t forget that the country as a whole looks nothing like the tech sector. America is not disproportionately composed of affluent white and Asian males, but instead contains a far more diverse population with a multitude of interests and incomes. This is the lens through which policy choices should be viewed — not through cliches that pit tech geniuses against bungling bureaucrats.
Bloomberg LLC’s terminals, used by financial analysts and traders around the world, will now integrate Twitter feeds to help investors watch for market-moving information.
The new feature, which Bloomberg announced on Tuesday, comes after the Securities and Exchange Commission updated its disclosure rules to say that public companies can now reveal important news on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
For practical purposes, Bloomberg’s decision means traders will not have to monitor a separate screen to watch for companies or executives that announce news on Twitter. While most market-moving news still arrives by way of traditional news wire agencies or official websites, social media sites are becoming an increasingly important tool for distributing such information.
The SEC’s rule to allow social media disclosures comes after an investigation into Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’ decision to share relevant corporate information through a Facebook post.
Under the new rule, public companies that want to use social media platforms for market-moving news must first tell investors that they are doing so.
Harlequin Romance has prevailed in a class action suit brought by three authors who accuse the book publisher of depriving writers who published books between 1990 and 2004 of their fair share of ebook revenue.
In a ruling issued on Tuesday, a New York federal judge threw out the authors claim that Harlequin had used a corporate sleight-of-hand to pay them 3-4% of ebook royalties instead of the 50% they believed they were due.
The case, which turned on technical questions of law, is an example of the collisions that can arise as a result of book contracts signed in age that pre-dated the current boom in ebooks. (In another case in the same court, parties are squawking over whether an author signed to a 1971 contract can shop ebook rights to another publisher.)
In the Harlequin case, the authors pointed to publishing contracts that granted them 50% of the digital royalties that the publisher collected. The authors believe this should let them collect half of the $4 Harlequin earned from an ebook with a cover price of $8
Harlequin instead decided to pay 3-4% ($0.24 to $0.32 on an $8 book) on the grounds that this was half of the 6-8% it received from licensing the rights to a different publisher. The issue became contentious because the third party publishers in this case were subsidiaries created by Harlequin for tax purposes.
In a related letter to authors, Harlequin explained that, prior to 2005, no one had foreseen the growth of ebooks and that it was reasonable to pay authors less than 50%.
In a four-page decision, the New York court declined to consider the authors’ arguments that the “third party publishers” were alter-egos for Harlequin. Instead, the court relied on a narrow interpretation of contract law to dismiss the claim.
The decision is very brief and contains an unusual footnote stating that the judge’s clerk, a second-year law student, had largely researched and drafted the opinion (clerks often help with such tasks but judges rarely acknowledge this).
The authors’ counsel included veteran publishing lawyer David Wolf. Reached by phone, Wolf declined to comment and said his clients were considering their options. You can read the ruling for yourself here:
The Financial Times last year decided to eschew the world of Apple and app stores in favor of an independent mobile content strategy based on web apps. The publisher says it has no second thoughts about the decision, and is instead pushing forward with its web-based smartphone and tablet experience.
On Wednesday, the FT rolled out a new version of its iPad offering that lets readers toggle between a live version of the website and a static view that resembles the morning newspaper. The new “app” also allows readers to clip articles to read later and features a personalized reading history and financial portfolio.
“It’s a much superior second-generation web app based on the latest HMTL5 implementation out there,” said FT.com’s Managing Director, Rob Grimshaw, in a phone interview. He added that it’s only on the iPad for now, but will soon be available on other devices like the iPhone, the Chromebook and Android devices.
While the new version of the web app is nice enough aesthetically (you can see screenshots at right), its real significance remains on a symbolic level. In deciding to bolt Apple altogether last year, the FT took up a vanguard position in the “web vs app” debate — standing for the position that improvements in HTML5 means native apps have become unnecessary. Other premium publishers, such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, have so far resisted the FT’s “all-in on web” approach and continue to design apps specifically for Apple and Android devices, and sell them through app stores.
The FT’s decision to quit the app stores meant it would no longer have to fork out a 30% commission to the likes of Apple, but also raised a risk that readers would fail to find the publisher on smartphones and tablets. Grimshaw says this”discoverability” concern is not an issue for major brands, and that the FT’s tablet traffic has actually risen 70% since leaving iTunes.
“If you are a big brand, why not use that? We don’t need Apple or anyone else to say what the FT is,” said Grimshaw.
He did acknowledge that collecting payments from mobile devices are still a challenge for publishers; unlike iTunes, which already has a user’s credit card on file, the web doesn’t offer a quick and easy way for people to pay. Grimshaw added, though, that a solution is coming soon.
“Players like Amazon are opening their payment plan more,” he said. “There’s Amazon, PayPal and one or two others. It’s problem that’s about to get solved.”
For now, Grimshaw says that 15-20 percent of new digital subscriptions are coming via a mobile device and that he expects that number to rise. Like its sister publication, The Economist, the FT has unbundled digital access from its print subscriptions and is offering a variety of price points: a premium online subscription is $8.49 a week while a standard one is $6.25 (Grimshaw says a third of subscribers buy premium); a print and digital subscription is $11.49 while print-only is $7.25.
The FT has become something of a poster child for the idea that news that a bright future in the digital era. It recently announced that it had “crossed over” with its audience, amassing more digital subscribers than print ones. But, as we’ve noted before, the Financial Times‘ distinct audience and product make it more of an outlier than a model that lots of other news publications can replicate.
About.com announced on Tuesday that Neil Vogel, founder of the best-of-the-internet “Webby Awards,” will be the company’s new CEO. His immediate tasks will be to increase the site’s brand recognition and to persuade people to spend more time engaging with the content produced by About.com’s more than 900 expert “guides.”
Vogel arrives eight months after the New York Times Company sold About.com to IAC, an internet conglomerate best known for the Ask.com brand. Prior to the sale, About.com — which depends heavily on search for its traffic — suffered a drop in business when Google downgraded its content in its search algorithm.
In a phone interview, Vogel said the Google setback was overblown and About.com is humming along at a profitable pace on the basis of its traditional display and automated ad business. He also claimed that ad prices have stayed strong and that the existing “monetization model is very good.”
Vogel said his immediate plans are to grow traffic and to make the site flashier along the lines of BuzzFeed or Pinterest. He also says the site has great content but low name recognition.
“There’s clearly some design things to make this site more compelling,” he said, adding that there was a lot of potential on the “social side” but that the same social strategies don’t work for all content.
Whatever strategy Vogel chooses, he has no shortage of content with which to work. It will be interesting to see what a CEO with a show business streak does to spice up a website that covers everything from bankruptcy to baseball to Buddhism.
Google has announced a new partnership with two companies that provide social sign-in tools to a wide range of major websites and apps, including Nike, NPR and Fox. The move is designed to make Google+ become a more commonly used registration tool alongside Facebook Connect and Twitter, and might even inject some life into the search giant’s social network.
In a Tuesday blog post, Google announced that infrastructure platforms Janrain and Gigya will start including Google+ in their product suites; the tools provide a way for publishers to let visitors log-in through existing social media passwords rather than creating a new account from scratch. The news comes a month after the company rolled out the Google+ log-in tool with a handful of partners, including The Fancy and Open Table.
Seth Sternberg, who is director of product management at Google+, said in a phone interview that the log-in option provides Google+ users with a secure way to log in to websites without having to worry that the sign-on will lead to over-sharing and spamming friends on the social network (this has been a problem for Facebook in the past). Sternberg also touted the log-in tool as a way for publishers to garner data about Google+ users and to take advantage of the “over-the-air” app feature for Android — a tool that allows publishers to beam their app directly to a mobile device.
The widespread availability of Google+ as a log-in tool may prove convient for some users, but it also raises questions about Google’s overall strategic goal for its social network, which has in the past been derided as a ghost town (the characterization may be fair — I visited for the first time in a while yesterday and discovered none of my friends had posted there in months). While the company boasted in December that it had 135 million active users, it’s far from certain that most of those are treating Google+ as a full-fledged social network — as my colleague Janko Roettgers pointed out, many of them may just be dropping by to use the video chat service
Increasingly, it’s coming to seem that Google+ may never become a popular social network in its own right, but that it’s most valuable role may be as as a piece of backend infrastructure for Google’s other properties — search, YouTube and so on. In the meantime, tools like the log-in function will serve to drain at least some data and users away from rivals Facebook and Twitter. And on this front, the company may be having some success. According to Gigya CEO Patrick Salyer, Google is the second most popular social sign-in option after Facebook.
The rise of the mobile web offers publishers a way to reach many screens at once — without having to tailor content to an-ever growing number of custom platforms. Does this mean publishers can finally turn away from apps, which were once a source of so much promise but are now regarded by some as an expensive distraction?
For skeptics, apps amount to a temporary — and increasingly unnecessary — technology. But this is hardly the only view. Many in the publishing community still thinks apps will deliver on their initial potential to provide deep reader engagement and handsome ad revenues. Now, with the arrival of more tablets and smartphones than ever, the debate over apps becomes more acute: should publishers turn away and rely solely on HTML5 or instead double down on these new app opportunities?
These are some of the questions we’ll explore during “Are Apps or the Web the Future of Mobile Content?” one of many discussions that will take place during paidContent Live on April 17 in New York City. Our guests include Jason Pontin of MIT Technology Review, whose widely read 2012 essay made him a leading voice in the counter-revolution against app idealism. He will be joined by ESPN’s Ryan Spoon and Nick Alt of Vimeo – two mobile experts who offer other alternative app narratives.
Here are more of the topics we’lll be exploring during the panel (feel free to propose more in the comments below):
Is the payoff worth the cost?: Apps are nice in theory but they cost a pretty penny to build and maintain – especially as the number of platforms grows. Is the return worth it? Or should publishers plow that money into other parts of their editorial operation?
Platform proliferation: The initial promise of apps appeared brightest on Apple’s iPad. But now dozens of tablets, from the Galaxy to the Kindle Fire, are emerging – and consumers are finally picking them up. Do all these new screens present a new opportunity? Or another reason to escape apps once and for all?
Nice app, where do I find it? Those who want to wash their hands of apps are faced with a powerful counter-argument: You need to be where your readers are. As the mobile market grows, are the app skeptics confident their readers will find them on the mobile web?
Does sub-compact change the app game? The arrival of so-called sub-compact publishing offers a way to create light-weight and relatively inexpensive apps. Examples like Marco Arment’s The Magazine and The Awl also show how these new species of apps can deliver both a beautiful reading experience and an ongoing stream of subscription revenue. Do these offer an opportunity that the mobile web cannot?
A federal appeals court has ruled that Aereo’s TV-anywhere service doesn’t violate copyright law, opening the door for the startup to expand a service that lets consumers watch television on their mobile device for as low as $1 a day. The decision amounts to a major victory for cord cutters and could hasten the end of a pay TV model that forces consumers to buy expensive bundles of channels they don’t want to watch.
Here’s a plain English explanation of the decision, in which the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that Aereo’s technology is legal, and why it’s so significant for the TV industry. (Note that Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia will be speaking at paidContent Live).
Aereo’s legal loophole
Aereo captures over-the-air TV signals by means of tiny antennas and streams them to subscribers who watch and record shows on their mobile devices or computer browsers. Aereo’s antennas are not just a marvel of technology (see photos here) — they’re also the key to a legal strategy that helps the company avoid copyright infringement.
To get a better idea of both Aereo’s technology and its legal strategy, it’s helpful to consider how it works for consumers. According to the Second Circuit, “Aereo functions much like a television with a remote Digital Video Recorder (“DVR”) and Slingbox” — allowing subscribers to use internet technology to capture live broadcasts on stations like CBS or Fox and and watch them later.
Aereo argues that its “one antenna for one subscriber” operation means it’s just like a personal recording tool. The country’s broadcasters disagreed and sued Aereo, arguing that it’s illegally retransmitting their signals to the public.
Aereo won the first round last year when a US District Court in New York refused to grant the broadcasters a preliminary injunction, saying that Aereo’s service was on all-fours with a previous Second Circuit ruling that found Cablevision’s remote DVR’s to be legal because they involved one copy of a show being transmitted to one subscriber.
On appeal, the broadcasters repeated their argument that Aereo’s mini-antenna system was built specifically to get around copyright law and that Aereo was different than the situation in Cablevision because Aereo offers live TV without a license.
The Second Circuit, however, ruled on Monday in a two-to-one decision that each Aereo subscriber controls the TV stream they receive — including the ability to pause, rewind or record any given show. This means that Aereo is not transmitting to the public and that the service is consistent with the Cablevision decision. The court added that it didn’t matter if Aereo didn’t have a license to show the original programming or that it had created the mini-antenna service specifically to take advantage of the copyright loophole.
The decision was not unanimous, however. In a lengthy dissent, Judge Denny Chin blasted Aereo’s service as a “sham” and “a Rube Goldberg-like contrivance, over-engineered in an attempt to avoid the reach of the Copyright Act and to take advantage of a perceived loophole in the law.”
A major blow for the TV industry
The TV business has long been based on selling customers large bundles of channels at ever-increasing prices. Unlike the music industry, which has been thoroughly disintermediated by services like iTunes, the television incumbents have so far been able to resist the forces of digital disruption.
The arrival of Aereo thus represented a major threat to the TV business because it offered consumers a way to get broadcast channels where and when they wanted. And unlike other would-be disruptors, Aereo arrived well-funded and prepared to fight: it has top-notch lawyers and has already received at least $58 million in backing from media mogul Barry Diller and others.
Aereo alarms the TV industry not only because it encourages subscribers to watch shows where and when they want to, but also because it refuses to pay “retransmission” fees that cable and satellite companies give broadcast networks to retransmit over-the-air shows. At the same time, Aereo is promising to upend the cable industry by training users to come and go as they please — without expensive set-top boxes or installation fees or contracts. Instead, Aereo users can simply $1 a day or $8 a month.
For now, the broadcasters still have the upper hand in one way in that they own many popular cable channels such as ESPN that they can withhold from Aereo. This may help them in the short term but it does not address the bigger problem of changing TV-watching behavior of the sort that Aereo is ushering in. And in the meantime, Aereo has added one speciality channel (Bloomberg TV) and is likely to add others soon.
In the long run, Aereo’s CEO, Chet Kanojia, has vowed to break the current system which he has described as “an abusive system set up in an artificial way” and instead offer “rational bundles.”
Is the genie out of the bottle?
The significance of Aereo’s win at the Second Circuit is not just that can it continue operating. It’s also a big symbolic boost from the country’s most influential appeals court.
This symbolic support is likely to draw in more investment money and to facilitate Aereo’s expansion. Right now, the service is only available in New York City with plans to open soon in 22 more cities — Aereo is likely to treat the court ruling as a greenlight to open shop in the new cities sooner than later. At the same time, the new legal legitimacy is likely to speed Aereo’s existing partnership discussions with distributors like AT&T and Dish Networks.
Things aren’t all smooth sailing for Aereo, of course. The ruling only addresses a preliminary injunction, and the broadcasters will almost certainly appeal to a full panel of the Second Circuit and to the Supreme Court. At the same time, a California court has already ruled that a service offered by a would-be Aereo competitor amounts to copyright infringement — meaning that Aereo has no hope of coast-to-coast distribution for the foreseeable future. (The California case is at an earlier stage and could still be overturned; if not, it could set up a circuit split to be resolved by the Supreme Court).
But while it’s legal status remains uncertain, Aereo now has time on its side. Any future court decisions are likely to occur a year or more from now, providing the company with ample time to further ramp up its service. As it does so, consumers will become more familiar with Aereo and other over-the-top TV options — meaning it will be harder than ever for the traditional TV industry to persuade consumers to stick with an expensive bundle-of-channels model.
devices like pagers and WAP browsers. Since then, it has added a Twitter feed and an app store that features an app called “Angry Bonds.”
read later and features a personalized reading history and financial portfolio.
