by Alex Nesbitt
At the 2009 Future of Hollywood conference, held at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, California, Blair Westlake, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Media & Entertainment Group was interviewed by Tom Adams, President of Adams Media Research.
Hulu has been a great consumer success. But it’s not clear how it plays out for the traditional distributors like cable and the content producers.
The traditional distributors are saying hold on, we’re paying to distribute this content and you are giving it away for free online.
The content producers are used to the TV load of advertising revenues which is much higher than the ad load at Hulu. We may not be talking about trading analog dollars for digital pennies, but it may be analog dollars for digital dimes.
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by Alex Nesbitt
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.
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by Alex Nesbitt
Over at Friendfeed, in the Start Up Success Room, I came across a post by Zee that pointed out a really interesting blog post entitled “Learn How This Blogger Averages 100+ Comments Per Post And Did It In Under a Year”. Now this seemed quite interesting. Comments are a true sign of user engagement and inspiring comments is a true art.
The post is an interview with MizFit Online who’s a fitness blogger. Reading the post however did not get me too far, other than MizFit’s avid blog reading and commenting herself and a key phrase “commentversation” which tried to capture her approach. Even MizFit seems unsure of what drives the comments saying “If only I knew. It varies wildly.”
I decided to do some analysis to figure this out. The results are quite interesting…
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by Alex Nesbitt
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.
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by Alex Nesbitt
At the recent Digital Hollywood conference, I met with Tom Gerace, CEO of Gather.com. Gather is a social network focused on the over 30 crowd and with a tagline of “The Best Conversation Online”. The social network is oriented by topics such a politics, music, cooking and movies with strong incentives for users to create posts on these topics. The site gives people on the network “Gather Points” for participating. These points can be cashed in for gift cards at Starbucks, Target and Amazon.
Tom and I had a great conversation about Gather and what they are doing to make the site a success.
Digital Podcast 57 [15:56m]:
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by Alex Nesbitt
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.
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by Alex Nesbitt
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.
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by Alex Nesbitt
Jason Calacanis, CEO and founder of Mahalo, has managed to turn layoffs into link bait for himself and Mahalo. Mahalo is a self described next generation search engine (more realistically an about.com business model with freelance/contract editors and writers).
Some months ago Mr. Calacanis decided to stop blogging and communicate with his readers through an email newsletter. The newsletter has grown to many thousands of followers.He has written about the impact of the financial crisis on startups and done a good job telling it like it is.His most recent email went into deep detail about the cuts he has made at his own company, the logic behind it and how he dealt with the situation.
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by Andrew Krainin
I’m an Obama supporter who is fortunate enough to be in a high tax bracket, and I wanted to see just how much my vote will cost me. So I visited taxcut.barackobama.com, selected “$250,000 and up” for my income, filled in the other fields, and clicked on “CALCULATE NOW”. And clicked. And clicked. Nothing.
Note the addendum to the full article wherein Andrew admits to egg on face.
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by Alex Nesbitt
Today, I received a email from someone I’ve never met who is involved with involved with International Medical Corp that asked me to post about their project at the American Express Members Project.
I was impressed by their use of social media. It’s good to see social media doing some good things for the world. She sent me a link to their social media news release that was chock full of ways to learn about the project.
In short the project goal is saving the lives of malnourished children. And they need your vote to help them increase the amount of funding they can get for the project.
Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children [3:00m]:
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