Ian Lurie has a great list of things you shouldn’t do in Internet marketing. It’s worth bookmarking.
Ian tells you not to:
And much more.
Link.
New owners of newspapers — folks like Sam Zell, who made his fortune in real estate — are now saying the outlook for the papers they bought is worse than they expected.
David Carr writes:
These are all smart businesspeople, with significant success in other endeavors, who took a hard look at the wave-tossed publishing sector and appointed themselves as life savers. And very soon after jumping in, they too began foundering in the tall waves.
A lot of these deals were done in the last two years, when the economy was still good despite the troubles in the newspaper biz. With the economy headed downhill, the systemic problems with newspapers will get amplified.
However, what continues to be missing from this whole discussion about the business of newspapers is the lack of innovation in newspaper business models (not in newsrooms, which have been trying new things like crazy the last few years).
Chris O’Brien, who has worked for newspapers as a business reporter for years, gets it right:
I see tremendous energy going in to breaking new ground in gathering news, telling stories, and creating community. What I don’t see is an equivalent amount of innovation occurring around the business models that will support journalism going forward. What I tend to see, over and over, is people experimenting wildly on the content side, and then falling back on the same old business model: Selling ads.
This model is dying.
I don’t know that I agree that selling ads, per se, is a dying business model. It’s what Google is based on after all (however, unlike newspapers, Google has produced a number of innovations in advertising). But basically, that’s right. There is lots of experimentation going on in the nation’s shrinking newsrooms, not so much in the other departments.
So JPMorgan Chase is in talks to pay more for Bear Stearns than the original $2-per-share deal it negotiated with the help of Uncle Sam. This is no surprise, as $2 per share is the equivalent of giving the company away, especially since the feds were guaranteeing $30 billion worth of risky Bear assets. The new asking price is $10 a share — meaning most Bear shareholders will still lose money, but at least they’ll lose less, and perhaps fewer of them will sue to stop the deal.
Here’s what I don’t get: Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, last week wanted a deal that wouldn’t be portrayed as a taxpayer-funded bailout of Bear, taking the risk off its shareholders. But if this isn’t a taxpayer-funded bailout of Bear, it certainly looks a lot like a taxpayer-funded gift for JPMorgan. With $30 billion (or maybe $29 billion, according to the New York Times story), how is this anything other than a gift to JPMorgan?
It may very well be a necessary gift to ensure confidence in the financial markets, and therefore keep more money flowing through the economy, and therefore blunting whatever slowdown/recession were in, or in for. But it’s still a gift.
I suppose we won’t know until months or years down the road, after all these exotic financial instruments have been somehow unwound or their true values determined — that lack of information is what’s at the heart of the subprime mess and the larger credit crisis. But I wonder if someday it will come out that these risky Bear assets end up being worth significantly more than JPMorgan is paying for them? We won’t know for quite a while.
Link.
The New York Times says that more retailers are permitting their managers and sales people to haggle over price with customers — even at big box retailers such as Best Buy.
Savvy consumers, empowered by the Internet and encouraged by a slowing economy, are finding that they can dicker on prices, not just on clearance items or big-ticket products like televisions but also on lower-cost goods like cameras, audio speakers, couches, rugs and even clothing.
The change is not particularly overt, and most store policies on bargaining are informal. Some major retailers, however, are quietly telling their salespeople that negotiating is acceptable.
“We want to work with the customer, and if that happens to mean negotiating a price, then we’re willing to look at that,” said Kathryn Gallagher, a spokeswoman for Home Depot.
Who knew? Link.
Cnet has an interesting interview with John Battelle, founder of the blog network Federated Media and an expert on Google, online publishing and other things. He says what I’ve been thinking for years, and what makes the Internet so interesting to me as a writer:
I believe even more than ever in the value and quality of content. What I think has changed is that the creation of content, and I’m using content very broadly here to include services as well as traditional approaches to content…but I think the creation of content has decoupled in the last five years. Decoupled from the media business–I mean Viacom, Time Inc, CNET, Wired, Condé Nast–and that decoupling means that talented producers of content, for the first time have access to distribution, tools of production, and the ability to actually execute and produce their own content without having to attach themselves to traditional media businesses.
Link.
It seems that people in Second Life behave, at least in economic terms, very much like they do in the real world. They buy goods for the status those things confer and work to earn money.
When people are given the opportunity to create a fantasy world, they can and do defy the laws of gravity (you can fly in Second Life), but not of economics or human nature. Players in this digital, global game don’t have to work, but many do. They don’t need to change clothes, fix their hair, or buy and furnish a home, but many do. They don’t need to have drinks in their hands at the virtual bar, but they buy cocktails anyway, just to look right, to feel comfortable.
Second Life residents find ways to make money so they can spend it to do things, look impressive, and get more stuff, even if it’s made only of pixels. In a place where people should never have to clean out their closets, some end up devoting hours to organizing their things, purging, even holding yard sales.
So virtual human nature seems to be very similar to real human nature. The economic life of Second Life and the real world intersect in other ways, as well.
Italian employees of IBM are planning a strike in the virtual world, and a SL bank has experienced a run on its deposits that forced the firm to shut down.
Advertising Age’s Bob Garfield is writing a book online titled “Listen.”
Because it turns out that all those guys with the PowerPoint presentations you’ve been sitting through for the past three years – you know, the ones insisting “The consumer is in control” – are absolutely right. The consumer (and voter and citizen) is in control: of what and when she watches, of what and when she reads, of whether to pay any attention to you whatsover or to make your life a living hell. This might be an excellent time, therefore, to listen to what she has to say. And it sure wouldn’t hurt to make her your friend.
Introduction to the project here, first installment, and second installment.
How to make money from online real estate. Here’s a follow-up to yesterday’s post on domain name king Kevin Ham. Another domain name buy-up company, NameMedia, also has plans to turn some of its domain names into actual online media companies of some sort.
NameMedia recently finished building technology where visitors to niche sites — say, one on 1957 Mustangs — will be presented with links to other sites with similar images. The links will be between sites within the NameMedia network, but Mr. Conlin said that an unnamed Internet photo-sharing service with more than five million monthly users would soon join.
Link.
I would like to think I would have been smart enough to do something like this. As the Dire Straits song goes, it’s almost “money for nothing.” Kevin Ham has made a fortune, and seems intent on building a bigger business yet, based on Internet domain names.
Trained as a family doctor, he put off medicine after discovering the riches of the Web. Since 2000 he has quietly cobbled together a portfolio of some 300,000 domains that, combined with several other ventures, generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue. (Like all his financial details, Ham would neither confirm nor deny this figure.)
The Business 2.0 article includes a sidebar with tips for folks that still want to get in on the domain biz themselves.
Link.
Just kidding. I’d love to have your ads (maybe, we can talk).
But for advertisers wary of placing ads in places where the content may be unpredictable and perhaps inappropriate, Feedburner has introduced AdClimate. The tool enables advertisers to identify key words that are problematic and keep their ads off posts that contain those key words.
By way of example, let’s say you have an aversion to the word, “wingnut” and the thought of your ad for pinenuts showing up in a publisher’s blog post about the history of wingnuts would be totally unacceptable (hey - who are we to judge?) AdClimate to the rescue. In addition to screening a multi-language default list of inappropriate language, advertisers can submit their own list of keywords next to which they don’t want their ad to appear - wingnuts and all.
Do other online ad providers, like Google, do this? I don’t know. I bet this will be popular, though.
Link.