Category: Media/Tech Business Models

So Marc’s company will go first – the first of the companies on everyone’s list of ’04 IPOs to drop an S-1 at the SEC’s doorstep. Here’s the Merc’s story on it…

Alex Salkever of Businessweek gives Google an interesting business model once over, leading with a scenario in 2006 where Google runs just about everything web-related. He introduces the term “Googlization” – which I take means the creeping (his word) dominance of Google over nearly all forms of informational commerce on the web.

Salkever points out that all the new features Google is adding end up stealing traffic and revenue from other companies, starting with the example of Google’s new ability to track FedEx packages:

“Perhaps more important, Google is providing this new shipment tracking service even though it doesn’t have a partnership with FedEx. Rather, Google engineers have reprogrammed it to query FedEx directly with the information a user enters and provide the hyperlink direct to the customer’s information.
No doubt, this is an ingenious way to keep people at Google longer. By extension, the search giant can create more online real estate to sell ads on. But with every new service, Google takes a slice of someone else’s pie. Its ability to find pizza places within any given Zip code ultimately eliminates the use of YellowPages. Using it to find word definitions diminishes the business proposition of online dictionaries.”

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An interesting interview in Ad Age with Don Logan, Chairman of Time Warner’s Media and Communications Group (he runs the Time Inc. and AOL businesses, among others). He’s an old Time Inc. guy, and that company has been running out of steam of late, reporting its first ever quarter without profit growth. So he’s got two “troubled” units. He speaks about a number of issues, including putting Time Inc. content behind the wall at AOL, launching new magazines, and whether or not AOL should be sold (not if it remains a “sustainable business,” hmmm…). (link via Rafat Ali, thanks).

What a surprise (see my rant below). What *is* surprising is for Ad Age to hype the fact. SURVEY: NETWORK TV DOES WORST JOB OF PROVING ADVERTISING ROI

While I was in NY this week talking to media types this article was published in the NYT, asking why the new network shows (such as The Next Joe Millionaire et al) were not drawing in the young viewers they were designed to snare. “It’s a mystery” seemed to be the theme of the article, which went on to blame everything from Iraq (!) to complicated television hardware. Please! Doesn’t anyone at the Times realize these folks are online, and on cell phones, or simply not interested anymore? If a show sucks, or seems to suck, or – particularly – if their friends are not *talking about it*, they will tune it out, or watch The Daily Show on TiVo, or whatever.

The article has a built in presumption that whatever is heavily hyped by a network will certainly draw its appointed Neilsen rating. After all, they hyped the new shows during the baseball playoffs, and those had great ratings! What went wrong? Steve Outing points (in E-Media Tidbits) to the lack of interactivity in these shows, but that’s only part of it. It’s also that the networks have failed two basic tests of making good media in the Internet age – connecting with a built in community (as all great magazines, sites, and blogs do), and promoting through trusted channels. The only real promotion Fox does for its shows is…during other Fox shows. And the only thing they are selling is the same kind of television experience as everyone else – titilation and escape. That’s not exactly a diverse ecology, and audience members are wising up.

It’s interesting to note that “hits” like Queer Eye or Trading Spaces have devoted audiences in the hundreds of thousands – audiences that look remarkably like magazine readerships. Hmmmm. More on this to come.

The NYT’s piece today on TiVo once again questions the company’s prospects, and lays the blame for its possible demise on cable obivating the company’s hardware business by incorporating TiVo-like features into set top boxes. But as usual the piece ignores the implications of what happens to consumer choice and the future of ideas (in the Lessig sense) if we allow cable companies to control what features are available on PVRs. Not only do we lose the freedom to tinker, we also push intelligence, such that it is, into the cable companies’ systems, and away from the edges. Sigh. Time for Apple to step in?