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Mark Glaser to the NY Times: “Chairman Sulzberger, if you seek peace in cyberspace, if you seek prosperity for your company, if you seek to spread ideas online: Come here to this TimesSelect gate! Mr. Sulzberger, tear down this pay wall!” A rebuttal. My take: TimesSelect is a perfectly good business decision for the Times. I just think the alternatives are better business decisions.
A list of the 100 best corporate citizens for 2006 from Business Ethics Magazine. Nike is at #13, Whole Foods at #47. (via rp)
Media kit for the New Yorker, including an issue calendar, circulation stats, and advertising rates & specifications. Only 4% of their circulation is via the newsstand…that’s a lot lower than I would have expected. Vogue’s newsstand rate is ~36% and Wired’s is ~13%.
In an article for the BBC, Alan Krueger describes how the entertainment industry in the US has become more business-like over the years:
“Early on in the entertainment industry, it’s in the interest of the business to think of themselves as throwing a party, not selling a product. I think they attract more of a following that way,” he said.
“But over time, the industry takes more the form of a market and is driven by market forces. The Superbowl initially felt like it was rewarding its fans. But then it becomes established and the League finds it in its interest to push up prices.”
As my involvement in kottke.org resembles something more like a business and less like a hobby, I’ve noticed the trajectory described by Krueger, both in my approach to the site and in how kottke.org’s readers perceive it. I’m sure other people have experienced this when their small projects have become businesses — like Blogger, Movable Type, del.icio.us, Upcoming, etc. — and have struggled to maintain a “rewarding its fans” type of relationship with their customers under increasing pressure from the market to focus on other things. Craigslist has done a good job in sticking close to their initial values and not allowing their business to be driven primarily by market forces. A company like Friendster? Not so successful.
Anyway, an interesting pattern to be aware of.
“Kiva lets you loan as little as $25 to a qualified low income entrepreneur in the developing world.” Basically no-interest loans to developing countries as charity, but you get the original donation amount back. Pretty cool idea. (thx, jonah)
“The cluster effect is the effect of buyers and sellers of a particular good or service congregating in a certain place and hence inducing other buyers and sellers to relocate there as well.”
Economist Thomas J. Holmes studies the diffusion of Wal-Mart across the US (here’s a video showing the retailer’s spread). Here’s Holmes discussing how density considerations affect where Wal-Mart places their stores.
I got an email weeks ago urging me to look at a new micropayment system called IndieKarma. Pretty much every other micropayment scheme I’ve seen is too clunky to actually be useful, but I was pleasantly surprised with IndieKarma when I got around to checking it out. Here’s how it works.
If you’re a blogger or web site owner, you sign up, put a bit of JavaScript code on your site, and whenever a reader who’s signed into IndieKarma visits your site, you get a penny. Seamless and easy.
If you’re a reader, you sign up, put some money into your IndiePass account (with PayPal), and then as long as you’re signed in, whenever you visit a site that’s using the IndieKarma JavaScript, a penny is deducted from your account and into the site owner’s account. Again, fairly seamless and easy.
What I love about this system is that it’s passive and based on actual usage. The reader doesn’t need to decide that they want to support a certain site, just that they want to support the IndieKarma-enabled sites they read often. For a reader who doesn’t necessarily want to support a certain site, if they happen to click through for a visit, it only costs them a penny and then they never come back.
Financially, if a reader visits a site 60 times a month (which is not that unusual for weblogs), that’s $0.60/mo. or $7.20/yr…the price of a couple lattes at Starbucks. If you’ve got 1000 people who read your site that are signed up through IndieKarma, that’s $7200 per year, a sizable chunk of change.
So that’s the good part. Here are some problems with IndieKarma and some suggested features:
But the big problem with IndieKarma (which I hope they can overcome somehow) is that it’s one of those things that’s only useful when there’s a lot of people using it. As a reader, if only 1 or 2 sites I read are using IndieKarma to generate revenue, I don’t have much incentive to go through the sign-up process, but if there are 30 or 40 sites I read that are using it, I’d be much more likely to sign up. Same goes for site owners…if 10 of my readers are using IndieKarma, that’s not good, but if 1000 of them are using it, that’s something.
It’s a chicken and egg problem…you need users to get sites to sign up and you need sites to get users to sign up. This would work much better for someone who already has tons of signed-in users and payment systems (Amazon, PayPal, Google, etc.), established networks of sites that have lots of potential users across many similar sites (Gawker, BlogAds, 9Rules, The Deck, etc.), or really big sites that could sign users up in 4+ digit quantities (Slashdot, MySpace, LiveJournal, Drudge, HuffPo, etc.). Like I said, I hope IndieKarma can overcome this problem because I think the basic idea has a lot of promise to provide an alternative to advertising-supported media, both from the standpoint of readers and web site owners.
John Gruber has more information on what’s going on with Aperture at Apple. Bottom line: by throwing too many engineers at the problem, they made a late project later (see The Mythical Man Month, one of my favorite business books), and after it shipped, all those extra engineers were redispersed within the company and the managers responsible for the debacle got the boot. Good stuff.
Steve Jobs to Apple shareholders: I have no interest in running Disney. He also said that he’ll be spending less time at Disney than he did at Pixar, which is good news for Apple.
Sun founder Scott McNealy has stepped down after 22 years as CEO. Some say that McNealy was too focused on his personal crusade against Bill Gates and Microsoft to take Sun to the next level.
Short remembrance by Rob Janoff about designing the logo for Apple Computer. The logo was to be black & white to save on printing costs, but “Jobs was resolute, arguing that color was the key to humanizing the company”.
New business practice: bring your own laptop. “Basically treat the employee’s laptop as you would treat the employees’s pants: require it, pay the employee enough to buy it, and provide the infrastructure that works with it, but that’s all. Give the employee the price of one laptop per two years, plus, say, the price of one major troubleshooting session per six months.” Very good idea.
Hollywood studios are increasingly not showing their movies to critics before the official release. “The media world is changing, and the people they want to reach are the kids who are looking at MySpace.com and exchanging instant messages about pictures aimed at them. Conventional critics don’t matter.”
John Gruber steps in front of the bus that is making a full-time living from your weblog. As a supporter of DF for the past two years, I wish John the best of luck.
Because of their Dollar Menu (which doesn’t feature any of their recently added healthy menu items), sales at McDonald’s have risen sharply over the last three years. In the article, a McDonald’s rep calls the Egg McMuffin “a very nutritious sandwich”. I like me some McMuffin, but if you look at its nutrition info (22% of your daily saturated fat and 77% of your daily cholesterol…and a McMuffin isn’t that big), it’s hard to imagine the circumstances under which you could call it “very nutritious”.
The company that makes Moleskine notebooks is putting itself up for sale. Says the head of the company, “Moleskine is growing very quickly and it is becoming too big for us. We do not have the capacity to follow it through.” Hipsters and GTDers ponder an uncertain organizational future. (via moleskinerie)
Rule of thumb from CEOs: forget how people treat you, how they treat the waiter is a window to their true character. “A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, or to others, is not a nice person.”
Chris Ware, unwilling to compromise the quality of his products, moves his ACME Novelty Library series from Fantagraphics to Drawn & Quarterly. (via waxy)
A fan site on MySpace for the hot UK band Arctic Monkeys reportedly sold for $2000+, although it’s unclear (because they took the auction page down) if eBay allowed the transaction to go through. Mena, how much for Ready Steadman Go?
This is great…Kyle MacDonald started with a single red paperclip almost a year ago and is trying to trade up to a house. He’s made 10 swaps so far and is currently offering one year of free rent in Phoenix.
Starting next month, kottke.org will be joining The Deck, a “creative, web + design professionals advertising network” consisting of Waxy.org, 37signals, The Morning News, Coudal Partners, Daring Fireball, A List Apart, and now this site. Here’s the announcement. I am honored for kottke.org to be associated with these fine sites.
Functionally, this means that a small ad (120x90 pixels) accompanied by a bit of text will appear on (nearly) every single page of the site beginning May 1. If you’ve been paying any sort of attention over the past few years, you know I’m not a big fan of advertising and putting ads on kottke.org was almost the last thing on my mind. From the perspective of the reader/viewer, ads are often pushy, irrelevant, redundant, deceitful, insipid, or just plain poorly done. But advertising can also be useful when it communicates clearly, is relevant to its audience, doesn’t attempt to mislead, and lets the product/service in question sell itself. An artfully done advertisement can raise the boats of all concerned: the advertiser sells more products, the reader/viewer is informed of useful or appealing products and services, and the content provider is able to feed and clothe her family.
In the past few years, mechanisms for the delivery of advertising have evolved outside the purview of traditional advertising agencies. Two of the better efforts I’ve seen are Google’s AdSense (simple, straightforward, highly relevant (most of the time anyway)) and small ad networks like The Deck (high quality, considered, relevant). For instance, here’s The Deck’s policy on accepting ads:
We’re picky about the advertising we’ll accept. We won’t take an ad unless we have paid for and/or used the product or service. Sell us something relevant to our audience and we’ll sell you an ad.
That’s a pretty sweet deal for advertisers and readers alike. In the past, I’ve dismissed advertising without experiencing it from the perspective of the content provider. By giving The Deck a go on kottke.org, I hope to gain a better understanding of the issue and fulfill my desire to keep doing kottke.org as a (nearly) full-time endeavor.
With Web 2.0 afoot, SF dot com ghost town South Park is on its way back to boom time. Peter Merholz, a current corporate resident of South Park, recalls the good old days in the area.
Even with the encroachment of blogs, craigslist, and online stock listings, James Surowiecki says the newspaper business is actually not a bad business to be in these days. “Newspapers are classic cash cows: solidly profitable businesses in a stagnant industry.”
Rebutting Caterina, David says it’s a great time to start a business. Good points by both, but they’re ultimately arguing different things. ps. Staying small isn’t the answer to everything, guys.
Interesting interview with Jonah Peretti about contagious media, business, and web media. (thx, carrie)
Shaking up tech publishing: “It seems that the industry standard [for authors] is something akin to 10% of the profits (which easily take 4-5-6 months to arrive), being forced to write in Word, and finally a production cycle that’s at least a good 3 months from final book to delivery. That’s horrible!” Building a shop “to take $19 from your credit card” and laying out books in InDesign aren’t as easy as he makes it out to be for everyone, but it’s a great overall point.
“It’s a bad time to start a company”. Amen. It’s kinda what I was getting at in this post…”if you’re buying low and selling high, the time to buy optimism was two to four years ago, not now”.
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