If I steal your car, you don’t have a car anymore. It’s a physical object. We can’t both have it at the same time. Everybody realizes that’s wrong. But if I make a copy of some digital music you’ve purchased, you still have it. So have I wronged you? I may or may not have…
I’m assuming you’ve used ChatGPT. If so, you’ve probably run into its very annoying super ego. For example, you’re doing some research on nuclear power and it hectors you with grade school morality about the dangers of this and that. It’s quite annoying. But there’s a value in that. It shows it’s possible to layer…
I’m a big advocate of practical tools: checklists, forms, and that sort of thing. When I was a VP of operations at a large association, I learned a lot about frameworks. This post is about one very simple kind of framework: Quadrant analysis. You’ve seen these before. It’s a 2×2 matrix where some value on…
Micropayments are the idea that won’t catch fire but also the idea that won’t die. Publishers are starting to take another look at micropayments because ad revenues are declining, and subscription revenues aren’t always making up the difference. Are micropayments a desperation move, or do micropayments belong as part of the paid content ecosystem? Advocates…
The “People vs. Algorithms” podcast has an episode called “The Deterioration of Webpages.” It raises some very interesting questions about the future of media companies. If you’re in the media space, you should listen to it. Here are my comments and opinions on their analysis. Some of it follows what those guys say, and some…
Yesterday I had the privilege of watching Brian Morrissey and Sean Griffey record the latest Rebooting Show at a MACMA event in Washington. Relevant links below. Brian mentioned that publishers don’t want to depend on other tech platforms. If you live by the algorithm, you die by the algorithm. And Brian is exactly right about…
Bo Sacks distributed an interesting article by Peter Houston yesterday called “How to build a future-proof editorial operation: Insights from IFJ 2023.” IFJ being the International Journalism Festival in Italy. I’ll review his five points and give my take below. 1. Serve your audience This should be obvious, right? If you make a product, you…
Google has unveiled precisely the doomsday scenario that I’ve been warning publishers about. Put simply, Google will do what ChatGPT can do, but it will also have access to the current web. When someone enters a query, they won’t get a list of websites to visit. They’ll get the answer to their question. There will…
It wasn’t long ago that people were praising Quartz as magical. Media experts pointed to Quartz as a model strategy that other publishers ought to consider. Well, times have changed. Quartz recently removed its three-year-old paywall. The move is designed to expand its general readership, but that’s at the expense of its paid membership business….
What are the key distinctions between these three models, and how do they affect publishers and their revenue options? We might start by asking what “membership” means. For example, my “membership” at LA Fitness just means that I pay a fee to get access to their equipment. But members at the American Legion have to…
Scott Brinker has an article about the second order effects of generative AI. He says the first-order effect is that the quantity of content in the world will grow exponentially. He’s probably right, but I think my brain was put in backwards because when someone makes a claim or a prediction like that, my immediate…
I wanted to do a little experiment this morning, so I fed this prompt into ChatGPT. I would like to see how well you do at writing a post for my blog, which is for publishers, and focuses on technology and operations issues. I will give you links to my 15 most recent blog posts….
Martin Schori mocks the idea of “peak subscriptions” in a recent article featured by Bo Sacks. The underlying reality is that – despite some recent growth – there’s been a leveling off in digital subscriptions. Why? The article makes some important points. First, you can’t make a good “digital subscription” by making a lousy “digital”…
You can read this article, or watch it here. Twitter has announced a new program for online content, which, of course, they claim is a great deal for publishers. It will allow publishers to charge a fee to read a single article. The catch here is the same as it always is with all tech…
Publishers need to broaden their concept of payment. There are far more options than simply money for access. Jim McKelvey’s Invisibly app allows readers to pay for content in one of three ways. They can let Invisibly sell their data, they can voluntarily submit data (like survey answers), or they can pay money. It’s all…