Last week, I was a panelist at Digital Hollywood. As usual I was invited to speak to issues around the intersection of technology, digital entertainment business models and content licensing. It turned out to be a great discussion. I suspect that the panel moderator, Mike McGuire of Gartner, had hoped to pit us against each other, and to a certain extent he did. In fact we did not agree that outdated copyright laws and complex content licensing are a bad thing.

The panel split into two groups, the lawyers and the entrepreneurs. We had very different perspectives on how to solve the difficulties, complexities and time involved in negotiating content licensing, especially for new tech enabled entertainment startups.

Technology now enables us to push the edge of the envelope with new entertainment business models. Consumers and artists are ready to try new approaches. In fact, one audience member suggested that Creative Commons offers a solid alternative to the current approach.

This panel, reinforced my opinion that the greatest obstacle to new entertainment business models may be outdated copyright laws and not content pirates or fear of technology.

In a recent CNET article “Why isn’t Beirut burning in Google Earth?” the author points out that in Google Earth, the skies over Beirut are clear, the grass is green and the buildings are standing. The article goes on to say that according to a Google spokesperson, the images come from Digital Globe and are updated, on average, every year to 18 months.

According to one comment, it’s at least 30 months since Google has updated their neighbourhood in Google Earth. On the Google Earth website questions and answers section it states: “Google Earth acquires the best imagery available, most of which is approximately one to three years old.”

Since Google’s search and other products and services seem to be real time, why wouldn’t we expect Google Earth results in real time? Are we expecting too much — I believe so. I’m just happy for services like Google Earth and look forward to the day when the entire planet is covered. Obviously, the first information to be real time for Google Earth and similar services will be related to traffic in urban communities in Asia, Western Europe and North America, where GPS and personal navigation markets are growing fastest.

While Google, is one of the top aggregators for text based news, it is hardly a top source for visual news. CNET should be careful for what it’s wishing for.

In the last week, Nielson//NetRatings and comScore Media Metrix, two competing Internet measurement companies, both released their search engine results — with contradictory findings and implications for GYM. Tables 1 & 2 show Nielson//NetRatings results while Table 3 shows comScore Media Metrix results. Here is a link to the Nielson//NetRatings press release in pdf or in html at Tekrati and a link to comScore press release in pdf.

What’s interesting is the degree of the difference and the implications that can be derived.

According to Nielson//Netratings, searches grew by 1.6 billion or 39%, January 2006 over January 2005. It looks like the growth is very good, not quiet as high as the same period in earlier years — but trending well. According to comScore Media Metrix, search grew by half a billion or 11%, January 2006 over January 2005. Now the alarm bells are ringing and I’m wondering whether search engines and media sites that derive significant revenue from partnering with these search engines (like Google Adsense), are a worthwhile investment.

What’s even more confusing is share percentage increase. Looking at one set of numbers Google & Yahoo only slightly increased. Looking at the other set of numbers Google had a good increase while Yahoo lost 3 points.

It seems the only thing that both agree upon is the fact that Google is still the leader and still pulling away from its competitors.

Table 1. Total Online Searches, Jan 2005 vs. Jan 2006 (U.S.), According to Nielson//NetRatings

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings, February 2006

Table 2: Search Share Rankings (U.S.), According to Nielson//NetRatings

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings, February 2006

Table 3: Total Internet Searches and Share of Online Searches by Engine, January 2006 vs. January 2005 — Total U.S. Home, Work and University Internet Users, According to comScore Media Metrix

Source: comScore qSearch

Technorati Tag: Media

According to a press release today by The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), they and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) performed a joint study and found that Internet advertising revenues for 2005 are estimated to exceed $12.5 billion.

… a 30% increase over the previous revenue record of $9.6 billion in 2004. The 2005 Q4 revenues totaled a record $3.6 billion; making it the second consecutive quarter to surpass the $3 billion mark and the highest quarter reported. Fourth quarter revenues represent a 35 percent increase over the same period in 2004 and a 17 percent increase over Q3 of 2005.

I wonder what the split is between search based advertising and banner advertising — perhaps the IAB can tell us when their report is made available in April.

In today’s article in CNNMoney.com entitled Is Slashdot the future of Media?, an idea was floated that Slashdot, and even VA Software, should be snapped up by another media company.

But it seems to me that any media company aiming to go deep into the modern world of user-generated media might want to think about buying this gem. Investment bankers, take heed.

Not only that, but whomever bought VA Software would be buying critical DNA — knowledge about what software the world is using. Sourceforge.net has essentially no competition, so effectively it has created a marketplace of producers and consumers.

Perhaps, my suggestion on January 3, 2006 in VA Software sells Animation Factory. Is there more to come? that VA Software divest of its media assets has been taken to heart and articles such as this are great ways to drum up interest. Or maybe VA Software itself is for sale and pushing its hottest media properties Slashdot and Sourceforge along with its affinity with Open Source, as the reason to buy the entire package.

I was very surprised to see that VA Software had sold the Animation Factory assets to JupiterMedia. This brings an additional $9.35M cash to the company, bringing the total equity to approximately $55M. Is this a single event, or is this the start of a strategy to re-invent the company? I hope it’s a re-invention. This is what I’d also like to see.

1. Quickly grow the equity by selling off the rest of the e-commerce business (Thinkgeek).
2. Divest of the media business (Slashdot, freshmeat, Newsforge, ITMJ and Linux.com), but keep Sourceforge.net.
3. Change the name of the company to Sourceforge Corp, — there is far more brand equity in Sourceforge than VA Software.
4. Change the stock ticker symbol from LNUX to SFRG.

Steps 1 & 2 should yield at least another $50M to $100M cash. Maybe Novell or Red Hat would be interested in the Linux.com url. If done correctly it would free up a significant server farm that could be used for the new Sourceforge on Demand ASP solution. By keeping one or two of the media ad sales team, revenue from ads on sourceforge.net would be easily accomplished. The cash on hand might very well be used to purchase companies that fit with the sourceforge business and result in faster company growth.

Of course this is wishful thinking. As the former executive who turned around OSTG, I would like to see VA Software succeed at last, and see OSTG become a part of a larger media business where it can take advantage of media synergies.

Technorati Tag: Open Source, Software, Slashdot, Sourceforge, Media

This week the Syndicate conference is being held in San Francisco. One of the themes is Syndicated Public Relations, which according to the show press release: “Shows how leading PR pros are using blogs, podcasting, RSS, and a new crop of search and tracking tools to build relationships with a new group of influencers while finding innovative ways to stay in touch with established target audiences and communities of interest.”

What’s amusing is how hard it is to find RSS feeds of press releases from either high tech vendors or high tech online media. I’ve been trying to aggregate the press releases from several high tech vendors only to find that in most cases these RSS feeds don’t exist. Take IDG for example. I’m picking on IDG since their subsidiary, IDG World Expo, is running the Syndicate conference. Here is an organization made up of some of the most popular high tech publications, such as ComputerWorld, MacWorld, InfoWorld, … all with an online component. Many of the publications have scores of editorial based RSS feeds, but just try and find an RSS feed of their press releases. As far as I can tell IDC is the only IDG company that provides their press releases as RSS. By the way it’s not just IDG, check out CNET and JupiterMedia — both have long pages of RSS feeds to choose from, but none for their own press releases.

I’ve always found it extremely amusing that high tech media companies push the importance of RSS to syndicate their editorial, while abandoning the concept from their own marketing. While at OSDN we implemented RSS feeds for press releases — now it seems they’ve gone all the way back to availability in pdf format only.

Let’s hope this conference can start to educate and explain how RSS can be an effective marketing and PR tool. Let’s also hope that the public relations teams of media companies will pave the way, by using RSS feeds to get their own PR and marketing messages delivered more ubiquitously.

In a recent report by Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy, reported in Clickz , the tipping point for offline ad dollars moving to online will be in 2006.

“We believe online media now receives about 5 percent of total marketing spending, up from 3 percent two years ago. However, online is on its way to a 10 percent share much faster then we anticipated, and we believe we are now approaching an inflection point when spending growth could accelerate,” Rashtchy wrote in a newly-released report. “This point is likely to be in the second half of 2006, as the full impact of some of the recent allocation increases from major marketers becomes evident and creates a momentum that will attract more spending by advertisers who are on the sidelines now.”

The big winners of all this online ad spending are predicted to be Google and Yahoo. Additional spending will be on smaller vertical sites.

As more and more people are turning to the internet to get their news, shop and answer their basic questions, good online ads can help readers, consumers and researchers find what the items they are seeking. In my opinion this can only be good, and will allow internet sites to be more innovative as they see an increase in revenues.

Clickz has a story on the IAB’s recent guidelines for broadband video commercials to be broadcast on internet sites. I recently talked to an ad sales rep who informed me that technology and gaming vendors are starting to consider this type of ad format. Can’t wait to see the reaction of the slashdot posting crowd when they have to view a commercial before reading or posting. Although I suspect some will have already figured out a way to disable these ads. You can view the complete guidelines here.

From Clickz — They suggest an ad length of “up to 30 seconds” for commercials appearing before or during content. Post-roll ads may be any length. Interactivity, such as clicking within ads, is a matter of publisher discretion, and fast-forwarding should be disabled during ad play.

I use my Tivo to fast forward through commercials. According to surveys performed by Jupiter Research I’m not the only person with this behavior — nearly 40% of DVR users skip commercials “most of the time” while 12% say they “don’t watch any commercials anymore.”

As hated as pop-ups became, “broadband video commercials” will likely become even more obnoxious, especially given that fast forward will likely be disabled. I wonder which browser, toolbar or plugin will be first to block this kind of ad. Of course, if they become merely a video within an existing banner location, can be easily scrolled off the screen, then perhaps they might be accepted. Why, however, would agencies and vendors go to the expense of creating and placing the video ad only to have it ignored?

Business Week Online’s article Less Impact from the Slashdot Effect leaps to conclusions about why the Slashdot Effect has weakened over the last 12 months. While I do not necessarily question an overall decline in the percentage of traffic that other tech news sites attribute to Slashdot, I do take issue with what appears to be lazy journalism in citing causes for the decline.

The article asserts that the number of news sites Slashdot is linking to has skyrocketed. And that has reduced the impact Slashdot can make on each individual site’s traffic. I decided to do a little investigating.

For example, compare the number of original stories and links embedded in them on a random day over the last three years. I picked the last Tuesday of February — February 22 2005, February 24 2004 and February 25 2003. BTW: On Slashdot it’s really easy to look at any day in history by using the ?issue=yyyymmdd url parameter. For example, February 22 2005 is http://slashdot.org/index.pl?issue=20050222.

2003: 17 stories on the index page with 38 links
2004: 22 stories on the index page with 48 links
2005: 22 stories on the index page with 51 links

The difference between 2004 and 2005 is nominal where is the “skyrocket”? Three additional links on a given day cannot cause a radical decline in The Slashdot Effect.

The article also suggests that look alike sites are lessening the Slashdot Effect. This means that sites such as geek.com and gizmodo.com are diluting the Slashdot Effect. This is ridiculous. The average number of comments per story on geek.com is less than 25. Compare that to 450 comments per article on Slashdot. The lack of community focus on these competing sites means they are too weak to either generate their own Slashdot Effect or too insignificant to dilute Slashdot’s.

Finally, the article also suggests that the growing number of tech news sites is another reason that the Slashdot Effect is diminishing. I fail to see the logic here. The sheer growth of Slashdot unique visitors and page views negates this theory.

If there is, in fact, a decline in the Slashdot Effect aside from anecdotal evidence, there were no plausible reasons explored in the article. Perhaps, Slashdot has grown beyond its original tech editorial focus and is linking more frequently to sites beyond the conventional high tech list. Perhaps, the proliferation of links to CNET and other tech sites have, over time, caused readers to visit those sites as part of their normal daily reading habits. Perhaps, the visitors to Slashdot are becoming increasingly focused on the community comments themselves rather than the news links. Or perhaps, more and more visitors to Slashdot have already linked to the source from their RSS news and blogs reader.

At a minimum, I would hope that an interested journalist or anthropologist will take a closer look at Slashdot to find out if there is a correlation between its increasing page views and visitors and declining traffic referrals. My sense is that we may be seeing the evolution of this worldwide community and its dynamics, rather than simple advertising-mentality trend lines.

Disclaimer: The opinions in this Weblog post are my own. I am no longer associated with Slashdot, OSTG or VA Software.

Technorati Tag: Slashdot