Media Industry Archive

One of the most difficult things when you try to evaluate a website is the lack of reliable metrics. A related problem is determining which metrics really matter. Into this void, many a privately held company exaggerates its traffic, and — depending which metrics service they choose in their SEC filings — public media companies may be doing so as well. It is hard, as one who...

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This seems as appropriate a topic for a post as any for the last weekend in August: that the Walt Disney Co. apparently has no problem with this YouTube video showing a group of gay men cavorting to the Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana video “Party in the USA.” This was reported in The New York Times, y’all, so it must be true. (Well, possibly not, but that’s a story for...

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Back in late June, several days after Michael Jackson’s death, I figured that the demise of the “King of Pop” would be a shot in the arm for the magazine business. But I wasn’t expecting it to be this big. MagNet, which follows these things, says that so far the magazine business has benefited to the tune, forgive the pun, of $67 million — $55 million of that...

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“We’ve signed an agreement with Barnes & Noble to distribute Smashwords e-Book titles, all of which are self-published or from small independent presses,” CEO Mark Coker told me this afternoon. “As you might imagine, I’m thrilled.  It marks the next stage of our development as we evolve to become a full-scale e-Book distributor. “We originally hoped to do a...

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There are not very many charts measuring the state of the U.S. newspaper industry  that have trended in a positive direction the past few years, and the one above, charting newsprint consumption from 2003 onward is no exception. This data was compiled by Matalia & Co. for the Newspaper Association of America. The authoritative industry blog for Editor & Publisher called Fitz and Jen...

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The next time somebody tells you Canada has no influence online, you can point them to this news story: The Canadian Privacy Commission issued a report in July critical of Facebook’s privacy policy, and as a result, the popular social networking site is changing the way it displays and maintains personal information. One in three Canadians, or 12 million northerners, use Facebook. The...

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Google is in a class of its own in the sheer scale and ambition of what it chooses to do, and today’s announcement that the search giant will make over a million public domain books available for free downloads in the open-source ePub platform is a prime example of that truth. “By adding support for ePub downloads we’re hoping to make these books more accessible by helping...

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If media companies were automobiles, most of them should be racing as fast as possible toward the new world of networked mobile devices — a technological opportunity that promises to utterly transform the industry over the next few years. As the media companies enter this race, a pretty good place to embed an applications company would be under the hood of all those “cars.”...

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The bankruptcy of Reader’s Digest is yet another reminder of the magazine industry’s weighty dilemma: Much of its branded print content is devaluing faster than it can be exploited online. As some general interest publications fall away and some savvy niche titles thrive on the Web’s long tail, the search for new business models is taking unexpected turns. Time Warner is...

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It has become all too clear that the retro-named Journalism Online, which is Steven Brill’s latest attempt to suck dollars out of the troubled newspaper industry, is nothing more than a scam, pure and simple. So, in an effort to help my colleagues in that industry avoid yet another financial disaster, I suggest a careful reading of Alan Mutter’s three-part series on his blog,...

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