Are content aggregators inherently more profitable than content creators?
Because making a blockbuster movie is expensive, people assume that it is a scale business—that is, the bigger you are, the more cheaply you can produce something. But the defining characteristic of scale is high fixed costs that can be spread most efficiently by the largest player. Moviemaking is not this kind of business. The...
Is the word “digital” becoming superfluous?
The first thing Lascarides says to me is, “Digital is becoming the horseless of our age.” He’s referring to the late nineteenth century time that produced publications like, “Horseless Age,” the Wired of the early automobile era. His point is that the word “digital” is becoming unnecessary because “digital is woven into everything.” You add...
Why is CNN beating all its cable news competitors on the web?
For my latest article on Harvard’s Nieman Lab, I interviewed Meredith Artley, the managing editor of CNN.com, about why CNN dominates its cable news competitors — and virtually ever other news source — on the web: Why does CNN trounce all its competitors on the web? AdWeek took a stab at this question a year...
What’s the business justification for consolidating all AOL news sites into Huffington Post?
AOL will eliminate Popeater and Parentdish this month and roll them into the Huffington Post. Arianna’s people are plotting to eliminate all non huffingtonpost.com websites and redirect all traffic to the huffingtonpost.com. No one thinks consolidating to huffingtonpost.com is a good idea from a consumer or an advertiser perspective, but no one will stop Arianna....
Can Todd Park ignite a technological revolution in the health care industry?
Over at The Atlantic, I profiled Todd Park, the chief technology officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, detailing how he is opening up the health care data floodgates for the tech community: Park first got a taste for the massive blockades hindering payment reform when he and his partner launched Athenahealth. Before...
Twitter claims 50% engagement on Volvo ad
Spreaking to Walt Mossberg at AllThingsD’s D9 event, Costolo said that Twitter was a “remarkably successful business” that currently has over 80% of its advertisers choosing to renew their campaigns on the service. Referring again to Twitter ads as “orders of magnitude higher” than traditional web adverts, advertisers including Volvo have seen 50% engagement rates...
“Links? Where we’re going, we don’t need links.”
But the other thing that we’re doing that’s more strategic is we’re trying to move from answers that are link-based to answers that are algorithmically based, where we can actually compute the right answer. And we now have enough artificial intelligence technology and enough scale and so forth that we can, for example, give you...
The Atlantic less reliant on Andrew Sullivan than previously thought
This graph comes via Business Insider Some advertising numbers from the Business Insider piece: We’re up 20% in digital ad revenue YOY 2011 compared with 2010, Jan-May. We’re up 219% in digital ad revenue comparing Jan-May 2011 with Jan-May 2009 We’re up 20% in the # of campaigns we’ve carried in digital Jan-May 2011 vs...
Massive traffic growth at Slate
The magazine’s No. 1 story last month was not about bin Laden per se, but related: Cats of War, a slideshow revealing “the Pentagon’s top-secret feline special-operations program.” That cunning bit of lolcattery brought in a cool 3.7 million pageviews, Plotz said. Other top stories included William Saletan’s piece arguing Osama bin Laden’s porn stash...
Can Orkut withstand Facebook’s intrusion?
What is amazing is where Facebook’s new members are based. The social network has tapped the United States and is focusing most of its efforts on growing overseas. A lot of Facebook’s growth over the past month has been in Brazil and India, two huge countries where Orkut, another social network, dominates. Orkut has more...
Will display advertising revenues ever catch up to search advertising?
The overall numbers for 2010 were impressive, with total online ad revenues reaching $26 billion. Search made up 46 percent of that total in 2010, followed by display ads at 38 percent. But display advertising grew twice as fast as search (24 percent growth versus 12 percent), and, today, Karsten Weide of IDC says, display...
The problem with confusing the “music industry” with the “recording industry”
When you look at it that way, you begin to realize that perhaps the only real issue is that one segment of the industry is becoming obsolete. But the other parts of the industry are more than making up for it — indeed, the larger music industry has grown from $1.26 billion to over $1.4...
