Bloggasm

Over at The Next Web I interviewed Noel Biderman — whose dating website has been banned on both Google and Facebook’s ad networks — about how a business manages to survive without these two major ad platforms:

A quick look at the Alexa rankings of these websites shows that Biderman has been effectively closed off from reaching an incredibly large group of potential customers. During phone interviews with me and other reporters he has cast himself as a businessman who is being unfairly punished. He alleges that these major online platforms have singled him out and they’re prudishly attempting to block people from carrying out an act (infidelity) that they’d be doing anyway.

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1. How will online retail growth affect advertising rates?

2. The blogger who claimed Roger Ailes will be indicted didn’t have a very solid source

3. 43% of the Washington Post’s revenue generated online

4. Google Accidentally Resets 150,000 Gmail Accounts

5. Is Anonymous becoming more politicized?

6. How journalists are using Facebook to crowdsource

7. The decline of the paperboy

8. Google CEO: Mobile Growing Faster Than “All Our Predictions”

9. Are we too skeptical about major media launches?

10. Could a filmmaker skip Hollywood completely and make a living on YouTube?

11. Hill staffers hate managing their congressmen’s social media accounts

12. Revealing the Man Behind @MayorEmanuel

13. Can a company market itself after being banned from every major ad network?

14. Newser had enough money to buy Salon? Who knew?

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That’s the natural question to ask when reading that there are now “YouTube millionaires,” people who have partnered with the online video giant and take more than 50% of the ad revenue.

Google revealed last week that it is running ads against three billion videos a week on YouTube, up 50 percent from last year. That means the amount of cash it shares with its YouTube partners is going up as well. Google gives its content makers more than 50 percent of the ad money from their videos.

Hundreds of YouTube stars are making more than six figures, and hundreds more are making more than $40,000 a year — roughly the median salary in the US. There are even stars who have topped a million dollars, although the company wouldn’t say how many.

While it should remain obvious that these successful partners make up an extreme minority of all YouTube users — and that their success would be incredibly difficult to mimic — the lower barrier of entry that YouTube provides creates a kind of democratization of talent, one that will surely award at least some filmmakers who would not have had the luck that’s necessary to break into major media markets.

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Though the debut of Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily received widespread press coverage, it was treated more as a novelty than an actual attempt at creating a viable news organization. Most tech pundits quickly dismissed it if they hadn’t already pre-launch. Bloggers gleefully listed other failed Rupert Murdoch internet ventures and a quick rundown of the newsonomics of the venture found that there’s really not much of a market for an expensively-run tablet-only newspaper. The sale of Huffington Post to AOL was met with slightly less pessimism, but few writers outright declared that the move would save AOL. Demand Media’s high IPO was met with much derision and a widespread assumption that its days are numbered.

In fact the only major launch of a news product that was met with widespread praise has been TBD, which recently disappointed everyone with the announcement that it would be laying off most its staff.

I was thinking of all this pessimism when reading this Adweek piece on the merger between the Daily Beast and Newsweek. Count me among a group — comprised of nearly everyone — who assumes the merger will fail to do anything to make either publication profitable. Given this, Adweek questions why the New York Times decided to promote the merger on its front page:

Anyone outside of New York City’s media fishbowl could be forgiven for waking up last Monday and wondering what the heck some lady named Tina Brown was doing on the front page of The New York Times. In the 21st century, Brown has edited a failed magazine, hosted a failed talk show, written one well-received book, and launched a Web site that loses an estimated $10 million a year and attracts relatively few readers. Even Jeremy Peters, the author of the Times article, acknowledged that Brown’s greatest achievements—as editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker back in the 20th century—were long behind her.

Even in the case of The New Yorker, the magazine wasn’t even profitable until Brown left and David Remnick took over. I don’t think it’s mean-spirited or jumping the gun to assume that this latest media venture will not be a success.

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Vadim Lavrusik interviewed reporters and editors at NPR, Al Jazeera, the New York Times, and other outlets on how they use Facebook to find and cultivate sources:

At National Public Radio, its 1.5+ million-member Facebook community is invaluable for finding sources, said Eyder Peralta, an associate producer on NPR’s social media desk.

“There hasn’t been any query that we haven’t gotten good sources for,” Peralta said. From finding high school dropouts to people who have recently been laid off from their jobs, Peralta said the organization regularly posts inquiries for sources as status updates on its page and receives hundreds of valuable responses. “We’re using it as a megaphone, and people have always been extremely helpful.”

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The internet hactivist group Anonymous first gained mainstream attention when it targeted Scientology, disabling its websites and staging mass protests. It also engaged in dozens of smaller skirmishes, carrying out a kind of vigilante justice on a number of individuals, at one point even launching a Denial of Service attack at Gawker. In most instances, there seemed to be no political motives other than protecting freedom of speech.

But in recent weeks it has become one of the prime defenders of Wikileaks, completely disrupting the website’s antagonists — Paypal, Amazon, Mastercard — and arguably ruining the career of a security consultant who had been planning how to take down the whistleblower website. And then today we learn that the group has taken down the Americans for Prosperity website, citing the Koch brothers in the process:

It has come to our attention that the brothers, David and Charles Koch–the billionaire owners of Koch Industries–have long attempted to usurp American Democracy. Their actions to undermine the legitimate political process in Wisconsin are the final straw. Starting today we fight back.

…Anonymous cannot ignore the plight of the citizen-workers of Wisconsin, or the opportunity to fight for the people in America’s broken political system.

If the group becomes increasingly politicized, will it lose some of its allure with its supporters? And if it did, would it even care?

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At first glance, the Washington Post’s Q4 report suggests that newspapers may be able to rein in the revenue decline they’ve been experiencing for the last few years. Revenue remained stable from year to year and 43% of the paper’s revenue came from online. But Frédéric Filloux easily read between the lines:

Now the bad news: this trend is more a reflection of the print’s business continued erosion than of a sufficient growth on the online side… Over the last seven years, for each dollar added to online revenue, the WaPo lost five dollars on print. During that time, the Post has lost $88m of print ad revenue and it improved its online business by only $18m. This leads us to a key realization, a sobering one: there is no hope current online revenue stream will someday offset the past decade’s tremendous losses.

Despite such pessimistic forecasts, Filloux had some suggestions for how WashPo could stem the tide:

- Cutting down at their inventory by at least 50% in order to revive a sense of market scarcity.
- Investing much more in technology in order to match the sophistication of clever pure players.
- Refusing to sell the lower end of their inventories to bottom-feeding “ad networks” that act as powerful deflationary engines.
- Getting out of the audience-measurement systems that are ridiculously inaccurate and setting up their own system of traffic analysis.

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