Posted by Jacob Harris
Wed, 28 May 2008 03:30:00 GMT
As regular readers might know, I’m a big fan of Twitter. Perhaps it’s my lamentably shrinking free time or the general state of fatigue that makes it hard for me to coerce sentences together into a coherent post, but it’s a lot easier for me to prolifically twitter about all the profound and mundane (okay, pretty much just the mundane) moments in my life. More personal than the referential style of tumbleblogging but also too short to generally encourage overweening preciousness, Twitter hits that nice sweet spot of letting my friends know what I’m up to, but without it becoming a large chore to do it. Yeah, twitter is stupid, but it’s the right kind of stupid in the way in which it emphasizes that communication is the glue of community and the ease in which it allows everyone to take part. Microblogging is here to stay.
Last week, I gave a talk at the New York Times about Twitter. At the Times, we regularly have lunchtime talks on various educational topics and I thought it would be fun to do one on twitter and why I think it matters (_on a related note, it is interesting to see how various sections in the paper have covered the twitter phenomenon so far). As the developer behind the nytimes twitter feed, I also personally have an interest in seeing how twitter might mesh with more traditional forms of journalism and discuss what we could do further with the feeds, so it seemed like an excellent opportunity to talk about new technology at the Gray Lady. Here are the slides.
I was going for a more oblique visual style on the slides, so you might need to infer the context for a few of them, but the general thrust should be apparent. I’ve also had to redact a couple of slides where I made some suggestions about how the New York Times could expand and enhance its presence on twitter. There was nothing proprietary or wildly radical in them, but I wanted to just head off Gawker or other sites that might erroneously construe them as representing the Grand Official Vision for the New York Times on Twitter. There are some changes I would like to make to the feeds (visual branding of the icons is an obvious one), but my real goal here is to be part of a discussion at the paper and beyond about our place on Twitter and the modern Web at large. Let me know what you think. Thanks.
Posted in Web | Tags presentations, twitter | no comments
Posted by Jacob Harris
Wed, 13 Dec 2006 13:56:00 GMT
And now for the second post in this minor series All The News Fit To Serve wherein the blogger attempts to parlay a passing knowledge of the newspaper business into an exploration of how newspapers might change in the Web age. As it should go without saying, these are my opinions, and do not reflect any thinking at my employer or any actual strategy being taken there. Just needed to clear that up. That said, on with the show! This post’s theme: advertising, or how “old media” is not so much different than new media when it comes to bringing home the bacon.
Analyzing the newspaper business today is a study in contrasts. On the one hand, print circulation continues to decline and the recent drop suggested a more extreme decline may be in the future. Net wisdom decries newspapers as ailing dinosaurs doomed to extinction by 2014.
On the other hand, papers still enjoy healthy profit margins and often monopoly status in local markets that gives them an advantage in covering a local area unmatched by anyone. Still, newspapers have seen some unsettling drops in readership and the decline in classifieds might be a troubling portent. On the other hand, newspapers are far from finsished and the warning signs have actually helped some papers to retrench and repair wasteful processes. In terms of readership, ewspapers still enjoy esteemed and privileged positions in their local markets that are still worth a lot, but Wall Street is alarmed whenever at the anemic growth or even retreat many papers are suffering. Putting it more simply:
- The glass is half full
- But the water level is dropping at an accelerating rate
And now every paper is trying to figure out how to refill the glass. But why is declining readership such a concern for newspapers? It helps to understand how the business operates.
You might assume that papers are supported largely by subscription fees and the decline in print readership is troubling because of decline in that revenue. But for many papers, subscriptions only offset delivery and printing costs; indeed, it is possible for some small urban papers to even make a business giving away their product for free! Rather, subscriptions have the unusual property in that they are meaningless as money, but essential as a quantity. Because the real value of circulation is to set the advertising rates.
Like many Web sites, the dominant driver of revenue for newspapers is advertising. Of course, there are sometimes a few other minor revenue streams (licensing, royalties, books), but advertising is such a dominant revenue source that you can directly gauge the health of a paper by the advertising rates it can charge. And since the value of an advertising in a paper is largely determined by the size of the audience it reaches, advertising rates (and advertising profits) are directly influenced by the circulation of the paper. Advertising has been exceedingly good for newspapers – the total ad market for papers is estimated at $45 billion – but the writing is on the wall. Classifieds (another form of advertising) have already precipitously declined, and it’s only a matter of time before commercial advertisers follow suit. The party is over; this is why the papers are getting scared.
There is some good news on the horizon though. Internet readership of papers has been climbing steadily and ad rates are expected to continue increasing at a phenomenal rate – next year, internet advertising is expected to increase by 29% while traditional media advertising will increase only an anemic 1-2% – and some papers like the New York Times have built online web sites that reach a global audience and dwarf the readership of their printed versions. A lot of geeks read these trends and argue that papers should save themselves today by discarding the printed product and surviving off websites only, but such a move would only be suicide for any paper foolish enough to try it today.
The catch is for all its promise, Internet advertising is nowhere near the profitability of print advertising – optimistic estimates suggest it might be there in 10 years. This gap is simply stunning to casual pundits like me who think the Web is a ready equivalent to anything in traditional media. Why is this disparity so great? I think it has to do with a few different factors. One possibility is that Internet advertising is not attractive enough to traditional print advertisers yet, perhaps because of its perceived limitations (you just can’t buy a flashy three-page spread in the first few pages of the Magazine online). In addition,
unlike print advertising, no single entity has a monopoly in a local ad market on the Internet. Which belies another difference between the two ad markets: the print version is local, the web version is global. I think it will take a while for some advertisers to want to reach the latter.
All is not bad for for Web advertising however. As stated before, web ads are able to reach sheer numbers of people inconceivable for any print publication today and at all times of the day and night, so some profits might be made in volume. Newspapers could also conceivably farm out web advertising to outside sources too who might have a better chance selling to Internet-savvy advertisers (Google is certainly hoping for this). The main advantage of online advertising in the long run will prove to be demographics however, and how intelligently newspapers are able to target them. The audience for a print ad can only be considered as an aggregate average, since the same ad goes to every subscriber, be they rich or poor, urban or suburban, dog owners and/or video game players and/or coffee drinkers. But the beauty of Internet advertising is that you can target the ads to the consumers more likely to respond to them – I am still talking about marketing to aggregate groups and not individuals (that gets a little too much into privacy), but the groups are much smaller here. This might make Internet advertising rates eventually exceed those of print ads. Newspapers would be foolish to ignore this opportunity. Which is why every newspaper at this point seems to require users to register. As an anonymous reader, you’re worth so very little to advertisers; as a 27-year old female from the Midwest, you (as part of an advertising group) might be worth much more. More readers and better marketing might help to make up for the decline in print readership.
But the real kicker is that for many newspapers, the website will never be able to close the gap.
Online readership growth for any paper must eventually reach a stable plateau where it starts to level off. How do you increase readership to greater levels beyond that? One possibility is to increase the paper’s website to be more than the news. The New York Times has followed this idea and unveiled sites for interactive applications like movies, travel, and home finance. Another possibility it acquiring outside media sites like About.com (NY Times) and Slate (Washington Post). This helps to some degree, but it can also seem like developing portals in an age where portals are no longer relevant. Personally, I think the opposite approach might be the wave of the future. Stop expecting your readers to live their online lives at your websites and distribute your content to them all over the web. But that’s a topic for the next post.
Posted in Web, Newspapers | Tags advertising, newspapers | 1 comment
Posted by Jacob Harris
Wed, 29 Nov 2006 21:01:00 GMT
Here in New York, it’s routine for people you’ve just met to ask you what you do for a living (we inquire about rent when we get to know each other better, about 10 minutes later). As interesting as it was at Alacra, most people’s eyes would start to glaze over when I summarized the various minutiae of reselling financial information online (I eventually learned to describe it through the metaphor of a grocery store). But everybody knows about the New York Times, and I can almost visualize the cascade of associative thoughts—complete with press passes tucked in fedoras, people shouting at each other in a news room, and the obligatory spinning newspaper transition. This then leads right into the next question: that’s the newspaper, but what do you do at Times Digital that’s so different and special? Not much for the moment, and that’s a problem.
The lion’s share of traffic to the New York Times Digital goes to www.nytimes.com, which is largely just a reformatting of the printed paper for a web audience. Sure there are some additional applications specific only to the website (eg, you can search through movie reviews and we now have videos), but you could easily miss them, since the focus on presenting a cohesive look that mirrors the printed product all but guarantees that anything truly exclusive to the website will never be allowed to stand out. Indeed, one might get the sense that the management of the Times thinks of the Web as merely another printing format, rather than a completely different medium in its own right. Despite the fact that online readership obliterates the print subscribers these days, I would honestly be surprised if any newspaper’s editorial board contained a member who only read the paper online and “understands” the web. Furthermore, even “understanding” the Web does not entail grokking how savvy readers browse the paper online—how many newspaper editors know what a tabbed browser is for instance? or why single column is preferable to users with scroll wheels on their mice? My guess is not many. These sort of blind spots are not much of a big deal to those who want to just maintain the status quo in a new marketplace (and how mostly see the online paper as merely a convenience for people on the go), but I think there are so many unique web-only opportunities being missed out that newspapers need to grasp. And I’m going to write the next few blog posts on some ways in which newspapers might uniquely evolve online. I think the problem is not so much the people, but the cultural mindset needs to evolve a new notion of what newspapers are and how the public interacts with them. In the next few posts I will explore some ways in which the notion of newspapers might change online and how that might affect the news of tomorrrow.
But first, a few disclaimers. I’m not singling out my employer only for ridicule. Many of the problems the Times faces in the Internet age (declining readership and a demographic that’s skewing older) are striking the industry as a whole. Also, unlike some smaller regional papers, the Times has been working hard to position itself as a global news brand both in print and online, which could make all the difference between success and failure in any new web ventures. And the paper side of the operations here does at least recognize that something must be done to reverse the slide in readership and profitability and integrate the web and newspaper operations more tightly (although they don’t quite know what that might be). But the New York Times does share much of the mindset current to the newspaper industry, and I do work here, so it’s too easy for me to single them out for examples indicative of newspapers as a whole.
Also, I am not a media analyst or expert in how the newspaper business works. I do not have a journalism background and I do not even have a lot of experience working in a newspaper environment. I have never visited a newsroom and even navigating the old building’s corridors to visit the credit union or get a photo ID left me as bewildered and confused as a tired old man. It’s possible I’ll gloss over something momentous or overstate something glib. But I do think I understand the Web and how people use it and I will treat the idea with more seriousness and depth than the usual buzzwords when geeks try to reinvent the newspaper business. Hopefully it’ll be good, but as always let me know how you feel in the comments.
And finally, I do believe there is a place for newspapers in the Web world and I am working here at the Times mainly because I am interested in being a part of developing new refinements of a business model that’s been unchanged for hundreds of years
That said, on with the show! Newspapers online are rather limited, what are the ways they can change and embrace the web? I will be following up with four further posts organized into distinct but overlapping themes:
Notice how I started the latter three with ‘D’ to be extra clever. Those will link to the further posts when they are published, but stay tuned and watch this space.
Posted in Web, Newspapers | Tags newspapers | 1 comment
Posted by Jacob Harris
Fri, 06 Jan 2006 04:11:00 GMT
It’s been an excellent week for my geeky self-esteem, with beta invitations to both Ma.gnolia (a new bookmarking site) and Measuremap (a blog statistics tracking program). Both are written in Ruby on Rails and both look pretty awesome. That’s all I’m going to say (not sure how much I can legally say yet), but I will close with the observation that there’s an energy for new projects on the web I haven’t seen in years and that the Ruby on Rails community is one of the nicest and most open I’ve ever seen.
Ah well, two down, approximately 100 to go.
Posted in Web | Tags betas, ma.gnolia, measuremap, rails, ruby, web2.0 | 1 comment
Posted by Jacob Harris
Fri, 07 Oct 2005 20:46:00 GMT
It seems like I’m not the only person thinking about the Web2.0 hype in terms of the previous bubble. There have been two interesting articles posted on the subject, sparked by massive interest in the Web2.0 conference this year (for me, it’s an effect of finding an old exuberant issue of Wired from 1998).
First up, there is a post on the subject from O’Reilly Radar titled If Everyone Thinks It’s a Bubble, It’s Not a Bubble. This quite frankly is an idiotic title. I’m not a VC, but near the end of dot-com boom, even I and everbody knew that things were undervalued and it was a bubble. Still, many people thought they could cash out in time. Anyhow, despite that disappointing start, this article redeems itself with the following insight
Here at Web 2.0, no one believes the mania, at least not yet. No one thinks, as they did in 1999, that we’re looking at new technologies that will, say, wipe away bricks and mortar retailers and leave online businesses in their place. No one believes that old and powerful industries are about to be destroyed en masse by the rise of asynchronous Javascript or data as the Intel inside. These Web 2.0 markers are great developments, and are enabling great applications to get attention and immediately dominate the Web applications they replace. They’ve clearly valuable. As of yet, though, Web 2.0 is a revision of the Web and what has been built on it, not a revision of the world, which was the premise of the last bubble.
Which is very true. As much as we can joke and fret about the Web2.0 hype, it has not been on the level of the hype back in the previous bubble. Where the web was going to annihilate geography, change the way we shop, and connect us all in one happy hive-mind. Expectations are more realistic now on the technical side, but I do wonder if people still believe in Google and Yahoo too much.
From a different perspective, Fred Wilson has answered my silent prayers and given me an example of what a VC thinks about Web2.0 . Fred’s a really smart guy (I am only slightly biased because he’s an investor in Alacra), so I like to think he reflects the thinking among the smart money in the tech sector when he notes:
Last year at this time we were talking about interesting companies like Skype, Flickr, MySpace, etc.
Many of them are gone, gobbled up by the web 1.0 giants or the mainstream media companies.
In their places we are seeing second derivatives. I heard one business described as Google Maps meets delicious, and another described as Skype meets MySpace. When the first derivative hasn’t fully figured its long term business model (other than getting bought), the second derivates are pretty scary.
I am a contrarian at heart. This situation bothers me.
Translation: VCs won’t just fund your mashup because it’s cool. As I was ranting the other day, there has to be more to a business plan than hoping to be be bought by Yahoo or Google, and it’s even sillier to expect fame and riches from doing a mashup. Thankfully, rational voices are prevailing here, so the innovations of Web2.0 won’t be lost in the disappointment of a bubble bursting.
Posted in Web | Tags business, web2.0 | no comments
Posted by Jacob Harris
Wed, 05 Oct 2005 16:06:00 GMT
Back in the day of the first Web boom, it seems like a lot of companies were started on the simple premise of
- Make a web site
- IPO or maybe get bought out
- Cash out with millions!
And so, a boom and bubble was born. The problem here was a lot of VCs and rational investors found themselves swept up in the frenzy back in the day, and placed their bets even though there was no real knowable way to accurately estimate the future profitability or net worth of their investments. Sure, there was a risk of failure, but that wasn’t viewed as negatively as the risk of not getting in early while it was still cheap. Add that to the later shared delusion of being able to cash out before the bubble burst, and the shortsightedness of those days is a lot more understandable. It seems though we’re on the verge of a new way of thinking:
- Make a web site
- Get bought out by Yahoo or Google
- Cash out with millions!
Maybe I’m being a bit pessimistic (and I will freely admit I’m no business expert), but I am slightly concerned about there being a new web bubble that could lead to disillusionment over Web2.0 technology. I like Google, but I think their stock is too overvalued at over $300 a share; thankfully, the company seems interested in correcting
this problem. And Web2.0 has become such a hype word among investors, it’s led to a wave of people trying to define what it is, offering alternative definitions, and mocking the business world for caring
Investors looking for the next big thing are starting to latch onto the Web2.0 excitement and I think some people think Google and Yahoo can do no wrong; I only hope they do their homework first this time.
On the technical side of things, I have a fear of web developers starting companies with the sole goal of being bought by Google or Yahoo in a few years or less. There’s a big difference between planning a business for the long haul and hoping to get snatched up before you burn through all your cash in two years. So, I must admit it was with some dismay today that I read that Yahoo has acquired Upcoming.org, just like it had with Flickr. This is not to begrudge Upcoming their success (it’s a great web app), but I’m just afraid of where the combination of lazy web developers and over-eager investors will take us. We’ve been there before, and I don’t want to see it again.
And of course, the biggest problem with all this is the way in which this weaking leads to the end of the openness and choice out there now. How many options are there really if your choice for web applications is between Yahoo and Google? Will this lead to a segmentation of content and communication? And more importantly, if you think that the Web2.0 is all about the free flow and interchange of data, won’t the growth of Google and Yahoo into all areas of the Internet choke that off?
Posted in Web, Silly | Tags flickr, upcoming, web2.0, yahoo | no comments
Posted by Jacob Harris
Fri, 30 Sep 2005 07:09:00 GMT
Courtesy of Tim O’Reilly’s
Foo Camp (which I am definitely not cool enough to be invited to), there is now a picture to match the exciting flow of ideas and themes coalescing into
Web 2.0. I think this assemblage of bubbles and trends is a great thing to see, especially since it serves as a better executive summary of high-level ideas than gleaning bits and pieces of the big picture from blogs and demo sites across the web.
That said, I think one thing is missing from the picture they provide. Maybe I am a bit preoccupied with the subject, but I think RSS (or Atom here, I’m just using RSS as shorthand for syndication) is really one of the biggest things driving Web2.0 services and adoption these days, but it hasn’t even gotten a mention in the top as an influencing technology (unlike blogs or Gmail). I think blogs were great at establishing RSS as a way of keeping track of changes, but the really influential aspect of Del.icio.us and Flickr is not just tagging, but establishing RSS as a mechanism for tracking any possible view of the system you might want in as light-weight and user-friendly mechanism as possible (as opposed to the awkwardness of SOAP or even REST to the end user).
I think the source of my unease here is that I’m mostly a backend guy. A lot of my work at Alacra has been making sure that all sorts of information flows agilely between processes and servers. Backend stuff. It makes it happen, but if it’s working, you never notice how critical it is to success. Similarly, AJAX and other front-end browser mechanisms are very nice in my mind. But the biggest joys and successes of Web2.0 are all driven by the fluidity and ease of RSS and REST. “Hackability”, “Data as Intel Inside”, “Right to Remix” ... RSS made this a possibility and these are what drives me to take Web2.0 seriously and not just as another wave of web hype. All I’m asking for is a little recognition. Thanks.
Update: The good news is that it seems like I’m not alone in this view. The bad news is my company is Dave Winer.
Posted in Web, Web Services | Tags rss, web2.0 | 1 comment
Posted by harrisj
Thu, 21 Apr 2005 22:17:00 GMT
I am very busy these next few days, so I don't really have much to add to the existing commentary on this merger out there, but if you haven't seen it already,
Daring Fireball's translation of the Adobe merger press release is a great analysis of the reality of the deal. I particularly like this translation of the release's original mention of "the complementary nature of Acrobat and Flash.":
Where by "complementary" we mean "the two leading technologies that irritate people when they’re used in lieu of regular web pages." Note that we’re using PDF to serve this very FAQ — in our synergistic future, perhaps we’ll serve our FAQs in a hybrid PDF/Flash format. One can dream.
Indeed, one can. And then hope to wake up...
Posted in Web | Tags adobe, macromedia | no comments
Posted by harrisj
Wed, 20 Apr 2005 06:26:00 GMT
The digerati are all abuzz about Fred Wilson's recent seed funding for
del.icio.us, the popular social bookmarking/tagging service. What's especially interesting is that Fred himself concedes he has no real idea of what the business plan for his new investment might be (see
Funding Del.icio.us):
The question everyone asks is "what is the business model". To be completely and totally honest, we don't yet know. This was a seed investment and none of the investors put up very much capital. Joshua retained complete control of the service and is going to focus on making it better. That is all anyone wants to see happen right now. In time it will become clear what the business model should be. And there are a number of them to choose from for sure.
Now, this has attracted
some snarkiness and derision from those of us who remember the dot-com boom and the days the hype subsequently died. But I think Fred Wilson is acting smart here. It's hardly a stretch to see that del.icio.us is a wonderful nimble platform for people to build things and there are some great web technologies at work behind the scenes too. It is becoming more feasible to work within a browser and choose sites like you would normally evaluate software packages. So, it's easy to see that Del.icio.us is likely to become part of the future user's toolset (like word processors and such today) and I think Fred's seed investment is mainly to ensure that when that big thing happens he has VIP access.
I found this entry of Seth Goldstein Media Futures: Alchemy to have an excellent analysis of why sites like del.icio.us might turn out to be more than just toys in the long run (it's also where I got the quote in the title about del.icio.us). Seth seems to be a very smart guy, and he is the person who introduced Joshua Schachter, the creator of del.icio.us to Fred Wilson:
This is consistent with what I see happening online, where meta-data (information about information) is creating significant economic value, from the many millions of Google and Overture keywords to the emerging class of Flickr, Del.icio.us and other tag-driven systems. Our browsing, clicking, searching and tagging behavior are the base metals which alchemists like Josh are turning into precious datastores.
I would underscore that what we are seeing here is a change in the Internet model of consumers. In the early days, the idea was that advertising revenue would drive the business and consumers were valued as passive
eyeballs, essentially a broadcast model in a new medium. But as we have seen in Wikipedia, with Flickr, and with Del.icio.us, there is real stickiness in sites that let users create, moderate, and control the content. And there is a real market for services that allow people to manage the metadata for things in their lives without imposing extra restrictions. So, Flickr makes photo sharing and classification easy, but more importantly, it makes it
fun. Ditto with del.icio.us for bookmarks. Yes, eyeballs are still important, but I think part of the Web2.0 experience is valuing the brains of the user as well.
Of course, Seth has noted all this too and suggests "it would seem that there is simply no way to create long term sustainable value online without engaging consumers in the act of media production." And yet, he notes that even the seemingly open players like Yahoo and Google are creating their own complementary suites of products so that users are limited to creating only within a particular company's sites. Will this turn the web into another AOL vs. Prodigy situation, or will there be independent and cross-provider toolsets for us to use? I suppose time will tell.
Posted in Web, Web Design | Tags delicious | no comments
Posted by harrisj
Tue, 19 Apr 2005 22:55:33 GMT
Jeffrey Zeldman coins this lovely phrase in a mild criticism of tag clouds (see
Tag Clouds Are The New Mullets) as the new senstation that's sweeping the nation:
Like mood rings and fanny packs, like mullets and the Macarena, the weighted tag clouds meme popularized by Flickr and Technorati is about to cross a permanent cultural shame threshold. Brilliant as the idea remains, faddishness is choking its air supply. Damned clouds are everywhere.
A tag cloud is one of those displays where they'll have a bunch of one-word tags as links and each link is sized based on how popular it is (more popular = larger font) You've probably seen them on places like
Flickr or
Del.icio.us. The problem snarkily alluded here by Zeldman is that tag clouds (like your favorite indie band) are not as cool when everybody knows about them, and it is dead certain you will see them sprouting up more and more, including commercial sites.
The thing is, I don't personally think they are that brilliant. I'm no visual designer (paging
Edward Tufte), but something seems to be missing for me. I know they are visually arresting and can provide a high-level view of comparative popularity, but looking at the things often gives me a real headache too. I would argue it's actually harder to find less-popular items in a tag cloud than it would be in an unadorned list (seeing the forest for the trees). And in accessibility terms, it's still no better than an ordered list with counts. For small lists, they're pointless and for large lists I find it easier to scroll down vertically than read down and across. I think there is a better interface out there and perhaps it will take the faddishness of tag clouds to give us the necessary backlash for something new.
Posted in Web, Web Design | no comments
