Scott Kirsner, who runs the CinemaTech blog, says in a Sunday op-ed piece in the San Jose Mercury-News that amateur video is on the verge of being pushed off the playing field by big bad professionals. Kirsner is a got-my-head-on-straight realist, and his point is well heard. Of course it is foolish to say that the awakening of the huge corporations to the power of video on the web will have no effect on the amateurs already in the space. But Kirsner still underestimates the ease of entering the fray and the power of networks to pick and choose content regardless of brand identity. Its a good piece though, read away.
December 5th, 2006
Three weeks ago, Google brought the digital advertising revolution, will all its fancy bells and whistles, to print, partnering with 50 US newspapers on a 3-month trial basis. At the annual UBS media conference in New York, James Conaghan, vice president for business analysis and research at the Newspaper Association of America offered some news:
In a test recently started by Google to sell advertisements that appear in the print versions of 50 major newspapers, “the ad volume placed in the newspapers in the first three weeks has exceeded Google’s expectation for the entire three months of the test,”
No real surprise there, eh? Newspapers are gagging to fill their empty slots and looking a bit embarassed when a young digital company comes and out innovates you in your own sphere is a small price to pay for more advertising pages.
December 5th, 2006
“The audience is dead. Long live the participant.” At least that is what Sarah Fay, president of Isobar (a conglomerate that includes Carat among many others) thinks. We formulated it slightly differently in our recent presentation–”Mass markets are dead, long live the network” but the basic point is very similiar: passive groups are out, participatory masses are in. Participation doesn’t just mean voting in digg, bookmarking in del.icio.us or commenting on a random story–statistics still say only 1% of people interact like this–it means choice and connection, the building blocks of the network. We are now intimately involved in the way we receive and process our information. We have the freedom to annoint the The Hindu newspaper king one day, boing boing the next and best friend Bob the next. Choice in many ways is the ultimate participation.
December 5th, 2006
