Category Archives: Podcast News
Is There a Future For TV?
In the first session at the Future of Television Conference, held at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, California, was full of stats and data from analysts at SmithGeiger, Parks Associates and Magid Associates.
The bottom line – the internet has caught up with TV for entertainment use. TV viewing is down by about 2 hours from last year, with most of the increase being in watching online video.
Podcasting: A New Word in The Oxford English Dictionary
A very new word, for a recent phenomenon, and a great example of how technological change, especially that relating to the Internet and the media, can be a driving force not only in generating new words, but in determining whether they survive and succeed. In this case the rapid adoption of podcasting (the technology) as a means of making audio material available has seen podcasting (the word) move quickly from its first tentative steps in 2004, as only one of a number of suggested names for the process, to near-ubiquity in 2008.
The Seven Trends of the Current Economic Storm
While I normally focus on digital and social media, my focus has been completely distracted by the current economic turmoil and political season. The world is facing a very difficult challenge that will likely result in many disruptive changes for everyone. I wanted to get my thinking straight on some of this stuff and I thought I would share. I hope you find it useful. If you have thoughts you would like to add, please leave a comment.
I see 7 major trends affecting consumers, businesses, investors and governments that will result in major changes from the way things have been. It’s going to create new winners and losers. For those with a ready mind and the ability to invest it will mean big opportunities. Let me know what your think.
Old Media is Dying Faster – It’s Time for Radical Innovation
The NY Times put out a press release this morning announcing its earnings. Quite a sad situation, the Grey Lady is dying and if they don’t figure out some massive change there will be some type of forced restructuring.
On the positive side, their internet revenues grew 6.7% to reach $87 million. The bad news however is the continued plunge in print advertising which was down by 15.9%. The net result is that overall revenues dropped by 8.9% to $687 million. They have cut costs by 6.7%, but the death spiral continues.
Best Practices in Podcasting
One of the key factors in turning podcasting into a real business is effective execution of best practices in content creation, marketing, distribution, monetization and user experience. Many publishers are not following best practices in these areas. The result often looks more like someone’s hobby than a real business endeavor.
Developing content, building audience and getting advertisers to buy in will take serious effort. Publishers who understand the huge opportunity for subscribable media and its capacity to shape the media industry’s winners and losers will step up and make the investment required.
Putting these elements into a framework allows for systematic evaluation of operating practices across publishers and for the identification of best practices for new media publishing.
The Podcast Consumer in 2008
Edison Media Research has released a new study the podcast consumer. The study has lots of interesting information that I think reinforces the importance of traditional media companies starting to think of subscribable media as an important new line of business.
Key findings from the study include:
Podcasting continues to grow quickly: Audio podcast listeners grew from 13% of Americans to 18% and video podcast consumption grew from 11% to 15%.
Podcasts enable more media consumption: The people consuming podcasts spent approximately 90 minutes longer per week listening to online audio than other online audio consumers.
Podcast consumers are an attractive advertising demo: Podcast consumers are more likely to have a college degree and earn in excess of $75,000. They are also more frequent online shoppers and spend more money online than other Americans. These consumers are also adverse to interruption based advertising and use pop up blockers, SPAM filters and other tools to block out commercials.
Podcast consumers are internet social: 25% of them have MySpace pages and spend lots more time on the internet than non listeners.
Realizing Podcasting’s Potential – The Market Beyond the Pod
Podcasting 1.0 has been the age of iTunes and iPods. The original software clients that were built in late 2004 and early 2005 were designed to automatically download media files and put them into your iTunes music folder. By labeling the files as podcasts, they automatically went into a folder on iTunes for podcasts and from there the files were automatically synchronized with your iPod.
The problem is that the installed base of between 100 and 200 million iPod devices is actually quite limited, particularly when you take into account the number of iPods people own and how many actually get used.
To realize the true potential of podcasting, we need to go beyond the iPod and expand the market for subscribable media to billions devices worldwide with potential audience sizes as big or bigger then television.
Innovations Driving the Future of Connected Games
In this panel at the LA Games Conference, the expert panel talks about innovations in connected games. What does it mean to be connected? What are the big changes and what’s next? This is a continuation of our live blogging at the fifth panel from Digital Media Wire’s LA Games Conference 2008.
Panelists
Keive Huffman, SVP, Business Development & Sales, Championship Gaming Series
Robert Norton, VP, Business Development, King.com
Rob Uhrich, Senior Director, Digital Markets, PaymentOne
Brent Hurley, Strategic Partner Developments, YouTube
Jason Rubinstein, Senior Director, Entertainment, Mobile Devices, Motorola
Moderator: Jay Moore, Head of Special Ops, The Strategery Group
This Just In: Sex Sells
You’ve seen the scantily clad cocktail waitresses in the casinos. The sexy woman posed on the hood of a car. We know that sex gets men’s attention.
But does sex actually sell?
A new research study by Brian Knutson of Stanford suggests the answer is yes; at least, that heterosexual men are more likely to take financial risks after being subjected to positive emotional stimuli – in the case of the study, erotic photos of a man and woman.
Do Interactive Applications Pave the Road to Superfan Communities? Part 1
Andrew and Alex joined Forrester for its 2008 Marketing Forum, which focused on the challenge of customer engagement in a digital media world. This second series of articles focuses on case studies of companies using interactive applications as the hook for building communities of superfans.
Creating Brand Advocates at Nike’s Jordan Brand
Emmanuel Brown, Director of Digital and Content, Nike’s Jordan Brand
Nike’s Jordan Brand has developed a couple of immersive experiences for highly engaged fans. The experiences start with deep insight into these “superfan” needs, and build intense community engagement for these hardcore fans, but are small scale communities relative to the scope of the Jordan Brand. Which raises the question, are these high ROI applications for engaging and activating superfans, or are they so focused on the hard core that they are failing to engage the brand’s mass market? Read on and share your opinion…
