Krispy Kreme bacon cheddar cheeseburgers

Krispy Kreme bacon cheddar cheeseburgers, originally uploaded by ccaviness.

this is really another great reason to be a fan of bacon

The Next 25 Years in Tech - The Media Company of the Future - Features by PC Magazine

The Next 25 Years in Tech - The Media Company of the Future - Features by PC Magazine

The Media Company of the Future

12.19.07

 
Total posts: 1

Successful players will launch niche products quickly and affordably, and be unafraid to experiment.

by Elizabeth Spiers, Founder, Dealbreaker.com and Gawker.com

For
all of its faults, there's an inherent appeal to globalism. Even those
most horrified by the notion of a McDonald's on every corner like the
idea of a global cultural exchange, because it implies a human
universality, a willingness to share ideas and engage people who have
different experiences from our own. We can watch Japanese sitcoms via
satellite TV,
eat rare fish airlifted daily from the Mediterranean, and talk to
friends in South Africa free of charge using VoIP technologies. And
this is, in Martha Stewart parlance, "a good thing," because our worlds
have been expanded in a way that promotes human progress and a movement
toward universal understanding. Our worlds have gotten bigger thanks to
circumstances blissfully beyond our control.

But the rise of globalism has a certain irony: Inasmuch as we can
actually control it, our worlds have also gotten smaller, at least in
terms of media consumption. Given a wide range of choices (Japanese
sitcoms? British documentaries? American reality TV?), consumers tend
to consume media products that fall within very narrow constraints that
reflect of their own tastes.

This is partially a function of media fragmentation, where media
formerly dominated by a handful of major players are now splitting
their markets among several different companies. And as media becomes more fragmented, consumers find themselves with more choices than ever before.

Given more choices, consumers naturally gravitate toward those choices
that reflect their own personal preferences. The more distinct those
preferences, the stronger they feel an affinity to the media product
that best caters to them. (The online gamer obsessed with multiplayer
first-person shooters is more likely to frequent a site about that
specific topic than to develop a hard loyalty to a general gaming
site.) And the more consumers become accustomed to being addressed in a
personal way, the more demanding they become. They begin to perceive a
personalized product as higher quality than a similarly produced
product that doesn't address their specific needs and wants.

The Savvy Media Consumer

In the same way, media consumers—and Web media consumers in
particular—are both savvier and more demanding in terms of how they
choose to consume media. They need to be able to consume it easily, and
anywhere, or the product loses some of its appeal. The more
device-agnostic the media product is, the better its chance of
survival. If you can consume it (watch it, listen to it, read it) on a
portable device as easily, as enjoyably, and as usefully as you can on
a large screen, and vice versa, consumers will also consider it to be
of higher quality, even if the content is comparable to other content
that isn't device-agnostic.

Consumers also want media products that go down easily, with the
proverbial spoonful of sugar. Even if they think they should be
reading/watching/listening to a specific magazine/radio station/TV
show—all available on the Web, of course—they won't do it if it's
inherently difficult, less palatable than the alternatives (work,
entertainment-oriented Web sites), or somewhat painful to do.

In some cases, the spoonful of sugar is entertainment. If The Daily Show
has taught us anything, it's that well-educated, affluent people over
the age of 18 are more likely to watch rehashes of the news in a
slightly skeptical way with a bit of humor than they are to watch
typical network news. This is also a function of media fragmentation
and the proliferation of new media products. Given two otherwise equal
alternatives—NBC Nightly News and The Daily Show,the more
desirable demographic gravitates toward the show that covers the basic
stories and adds a bit more in the form of humor rather than the show
that covers the basic stories and leaves it at that.

In the same way, consumers also want a viewpoint, which The Daily Show
offers, and which nearly all of the most popular news-oriented blogs
offer. On the downside, consumers nearly always want a viewpoint than
matches their own. But material representation of a wide variety of
viewpoints is better than a limited range of choices, where only one or
two viewpoints are available. Given a situation where the latter
occurs, consumers will not only seek alternatives; they'll also create
those alternatives themselves.

Consumer as Creator Which brings us to another function of
modern media: Consumers can now create most types of media themselves,
easily and inexpensively. Web media allows for instant publishing and
broadcasting at such a low cost that nearly anyone can publish or
broadcast the media products that are most reflective of their
interests and desires. If traditional media companies fail to create
what consumers want, eventually the consumers will step in and create
it themselves.

The implication is that traditional media has to learn
to think and act like the typical media consumer. It has to be as
picky, as unforgiving, and as critical as the people who are opting to
use RSS instead of subscribing for home delivery, who are downloading
music via file-sharing services rather than paying $20 for a CD, and
who are looking to the Drudge Report for breaking news updates rather
than tuning into CNN. It also has to be willing to experiment in the
same way that consumers experiment with new media, trying things just
because they might be interesting and might tap into some emotional or
cultural milieu that has been previously untouched.

Would Crying While Eating, I Can Haz Cheezburger?, or Cute Overload
ever have been developed by a major media company? No. Why? I can hear
the excuses now: "Too small a market. "Not a proven market." "No
comparable publications/shows/Web sites."

The media company of the future will think differently. It will take a
cue from its counterparts in the technology industry and focus on
research and development. Ideally, it will have an in-house R&D
division that concentrates solely on the sort of consumer media
products that have proven to be popular in recent history—and
unexpectedly so to many traditional media watchers. These companies
will be able to quickly launch niche media products in text or
broadcast format by paying attention to what consumers want and
producing it. And these media products will be affordable. Instead of a
$100 million television pilot, it will be a video series produced for
less than $100,000, downloadable via the Web. Experimentation for its
own sake will be less expensive because failure will be less expensive.

A single Cute Overload may seem like small fish to today's media
companies. But a hundred Cute Overloads is nothing to sneeze at.

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Google admits social network's are tough to monetize..or is the monster from mountain view just piling on

Two points, just points or a trend?

Google blames disappointing earnings on difficulty monetizing the social networking inventory that they paid for Myspace's Google’s Loss Is Murdoch’s Gain

“We have a huge amount of social networking inventory, including the
MySpace relationship,” Mr. Brin said. “I don’t think we have the killer
best way to monetize social networks yet. We are running a lot of
experiments and we have had some significant improvements. But some of
the things we were counting on in Q4 didn’t pan out. There were some
disappointments there.”

Simulateously...Lookery “Guarantees” (Drum Roll) 12.5-Cent CPMs. 

So social networking is hard to sell as an advertising medium....that's wasn't hard to predict.  Advertising inside of people's personal communications is clearly more invasive that any other form of advertising.

Of course it is in Googles best interest to keep the digital ad market focused on search as opposed to flowing out to myspace and facebook.   I wonder what this means for youtube?

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Changes!

Embedded Video

got to love this video....

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Rob Corddry - 2007 Sucked!

Yeah, the year sucked, but something really needed to set it off...tiger!

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