Oct 09
3
Media barons and some of the anointed (think glitterati,
freemasons or whichever other conspiracy theory you subscribe to this week);
spend a lot of time gnashing teeth these days….
In the inimitable voice of Peter Sellers, “ Oh dearie dearie
me, we have let de cat out of de bag”, –
how the hell can we entice it to climb back in.
Media watching “experts” tell us that the official word is ‘that
consumers no longer want the crass commercialism that was apparently
responsible for the Global Financial Crisis to rule their lives’ and as a
consequence, blog about their lives, friends, and experiences.
Well that’s one version of why.
But I would posit a slightly different opinion. Blogging is
not news.
Blogging is a call to action.
“Hey, Bruce, wanna go fishing this weekend?”
Blogging is the technology upgrade of the traditional 6:00 pm pub conversation between mates/friends
and has managed to transmogrify somehow into the 7:30
news report on channel X.
And lets face it, who are you going to believe, the mate,
his mate or some pretty newscaster on the news?
Wikipedia defines a “blog” (a contraction of the
term “weblog“) is a type of website, usually maintained by an
individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other
material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in
reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning
to maintain or add content to a blog”.
Which is great and the entire article is actually worth
printing – but it’s a little long.
Blogs can be long rambling commentaries, or short
“micro-blogs (think twitter). But essentially, blogs are about “look at me!”
Look at how clever I am.
Look at what I’m doing – hoping it will attract enough
people to have a party.
Look at how opinionated I am.
Look at how bad my spelling and Grammar is… (Ok – well
possibly, that’s just my blog.)
On January the 8th this year I started blogging with
my friend and colleague, Chris Gilbey at www.perceptric.com and in the intervening
nine months we moved the attention numbers from an Alexa score of 4.7 million
to an Alexa score of 271,000.
Not bad for a couple of old dudes.
One effective meme appears to be humour.
But humour alone is not sufficient to keep the attention.
Content variety is the spice of user attention.
And a large catalogue helps. (We'll talk about catalogue and deep catalogue another day – but essentially, the larger the output, the larger the cataolugue resulting in a higher ratio of high ranked referencing.)
Bloggers who know this, keep moving the subject matter along
and whether the spelling is atrocious or not, they will keep coming back,
fearful of what has been have said whilst they were away.
If the content is edgy, unique and controversial, the users
will come back – just to see if you’re talking about them.
Because they know that if they’ve done something wrong, in
the world of content, eventually the blogger bloodhound will sniff the trail
and pounce.
In effect, the Blogsphere has turned into a Global version
of the Truth Newspaper combined with Choice magazine.
Relevancy and popularity depends on third party referrals
via tools like Dig and Twitter and part of the very attractiveness of blogging is being able to warn your confederates that Company X is not quite kosher.
I like reading certain blogs. The individual style of each
blogger eventually shines through the mostly self inflicted editorial shutters.
In other words, if all writing is political in content, and
bloggers write,
and;
There are two new blogs created every second of every day.
175,000 blogs per day.
1,225,000 per week
37,303,700 per month
447,644,400 per year
Some people blog daily, some bi weekly and some only once
per month.
So if we allocate blogging frequency arbitrarily – thusly:
1= Twice Daily
1=Daily
1=2 x per week
1= weekly
1=fortnightly
1=every 21 days
1=every month
Then we have a methodology for calculating the number of
blog articles created per second
|
New Blog Sites Per |
447644400 |
|
|
New Blogsites |
63949200 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Bloggers |
Articles |
|
|
1= Twice Daily |
60.904 |
|
|
1=Daily |
30.452 |
(Days in a month) |
|
1=2 x per week |
8.700571429 |
|
|
1= weekly |
4.350285714 |
|
|
1=fortnightly |
15.226 |
|
|
1=every 21 days |
1.450095238 |
|
|
1=every month |
1 |
|
|
Total per 7 People |
122.0829524 |
(Per Second) |
|
|
2631052.8 |
Seconds in a month |
|
Total Articles Per |
7,807,107,138 |
|
|
Total Articles per |
93,685,285,661 |
times 'n' number of years. |
|
Total Blog |
468,426,428,304 |
‘N' = 5 |
|
3 billion Internet |
156.14 |
Articles Per Year |
|
Average Article |
1.45 |
1 minute 45 |
|
Total Attention |
0.75 |
45 seconds per |
The attention paradigm is now 45 seconds per day for the
average opinion dissemination site.
This is borne out by Alexa ratings that show most media
sites receive less than 2 minutes attention per day per unique visitor.
And unfortunately, a lot of that attention is waiting for
the statistics meters and advertisements to load before the reader can get to
the story that brought him.
So what does that information tell us.
It tells us that the myriad of choice means that content
providers have to work harder to obtain and then keep the “consumers”
attention.
The 26-34 year olds appear to be more interested in how to advance themselves. Their favourite
hangout used to be Yahoo finance.
Unfortunately, too many burnt their fingers as day traders.
The numbers indicate that these 26-34 year olds are the same
users that now spend the majority of their time, clicking squares pointlessly
on inane games inside Facebook.
Humanity has given up on moving forwards. Everyone is just
marking time waiting for the apocalypse or the food shortages, or the petrol shortages.
The big media end of town, instead of recognizing this
defeatist attitude is still attempting to coral the sheep into their own
stockyards.
Be a Businessweek reader and you will be smarter.
Read the New York times and you will learn the secret of how
to make money.
Watch Foxtel and – well, nothing really – Foxtel actually
don’t lie to their users. They promise rubbish and deliver it, albeit nicely
packaged.
Advertisers continue their advertising campaigns of old, not
realizing that more and more users are now using the tools for removing
unwanted adverts from web pages.
Exceptions to the declining readership model are the social
networking suites that don’t over-commercialise their content (e.g.: Myspace.)
Facebook appears to have earned readership by creating an
interactive environment.
So that the 12-25 year olds (look at me – how great am I?)
can keep their friends apprised of their daily life conquests.
And; any political message – (or all blogs) have to be extremely short and direct. Todays' users/readers don't have the time for long engagements.
Short, sharp, to the point and varied.
Like Facebook, very nearly the number one site on
the Internet which in fact actually is a giant blog.
Look at me – I'm doing all these different things and this is what blogs Im reading and this the score from the game that I am playing.
(We have already discovered that every active facebook users plays approximately five different games – or at least has registered for five different games.)
And the successful developers on Facebook are learning about
commercialization through sponsorship.
(Lil) Farmlife for sometime have offered their users the
ability to save the rainforest by sending gifts to their fellow players.
Who wouldn’t want to save the rainforest by clicking a few
times a day.
Zynga Farmville this week announced their financial support of
Haitian starving children (through planting sweet potatoes).
“Salutations, y'all! Today, FarmVille is proud to release
“Sweet Seeds for Haiti“.
In this event, y'all will be able to purchase Sweet Potatoes that NEVER WITHER,
yield XP and 125 COINS PER HARVEST! Even better than that is the f…act that
50% of the proceeds will go to helpin' children in Haiti.
What could be sweeter than lending a helping hand to children in need? You'll
also get a SPECIAL GIFT with your purchase so hurry on over to FarmVille and
check it out! “
What an excellent idea – wish I’d thought of it…
So let’s examine a couple of business models that don’t lie
to their users and as a result, obtain extremely high trust levels from
Internet users:
Google – By essentially not filtering the content.
Facebook – By offering a word of mouth user referral
service.
And of course, P2P.
Download this content and you won’t get advertising.
Download this content and it’s free.
How is that a business model Koltai?
It’s a business model for branding artists.
In the future it will be a business model for advertisers
via PPPP which we covered briefly in our story earlier this year The End
of Appointment Media).
Of course P2P is already a business model, for Microsoft, PC
vendors, Cisco and other Networking equipment vendors, Telco’s/RBOCS, ADSL and
cable internet vendors; P2P means huge growth in sales, revenues and for those
charging for MB downloaded (Cell phone companies), enormous extraordinary
profits. (We covered this in our article In
Australia P2P is Big Business ).
So what is the conclusion?
The conclusion is that by 2011, 90% of all content on the
Internet will be user generated and not corporate generated.
The bloggers that manage 10 or better non-partisan
articles per day will obtain the highest readership.
Blog sponsorship will become the new advertising words model
(which of course, Google appear to be on top of).
And big media? Will unfortunately become irrelevant. I say
unfortunately, because whether we like their opinionated politically motivated
diatribe or not is irrelevant. Their
method of delivery whether via the printed word, FTA television, Cable or radio
station, had structure, reason and clarity.
The replacement of fifty media organisations with one
(Google) is not necessarily the best outcome for continued free speech.
In this regard, the upcoming face-off between Facebook and
Google will be interesting.
For this reason, I consider that those organisations that
can offer structure to the blogsphere will reap the highest rewards over the
next five years.
Someone needs to invent the “scrape all blogs for all words
and present by indexed relevancy” software that has a commercial model that can-not
be filtered, and will return a profit to early adopters.
Those that consider that Google already does this, have
missed the point of this article.
The EPG is king. Long live the EPG.
Yep – the next stage of development will be the online
Internet Electronic Program Guide that functions via Mobile
cell-phone, Television, Car and of course netbook/PC.
What about Radio, Koltai? No comment, except that I think their
audiences will gradually reduce to the 30% of the unconnected world. (Of
course, as the internet users grow older, the unconnected will decrease.) Which
means that in Australia Radio stations like 2SM and 2UE will actually again
eventually – for a limited time – dominate the airwaves – but this time,
comprised of the technological luddite members of our population.
What about radio stations like Nova 96.9? Ummm, no.
Transitional extant value only. This can be measured by their minimalistic online
streaming audience, which of course is actually most effectively censored (dictated)
by Telstra’s stranglehold on the broadband costs in Australia.
Unfortunately the 96.9 demographic is actually the largest pre
internet user portion of the population – and whilst these are the people that
are most entertained by media faux pas like the recent Sanderville publicity
stunt, they are also the demographic that as they turn 15, suddenly discover
alternative interests, (boys – who are all connected to the Internet).
So the people that are most likely to be affected by 96.9 PR
stunts are the future mothers of Australia?
Yes. One can only hope that 96.9 take this into
consideration for their future programming and advertising efforts.
The Winners?
Early Developments in this area include:
Ubiquity
add-on to firefox
Both are apparently different products, yet both have
portions of what the future Media Barons of the world will need to be
successful.
Anyone interested in this topic would do well to watch the
following Kevin Kelly Youtube video “The next 5,000 days”; although it’s 365
days into his predictions, it is still extremely relevant.
Authors personal Comments.
In closing. When companies use other peoples ideas, it is
usual to at least hat-tip.
Failure to do so usually winds up losing credibility and
eyeballs. Um that would be Zynga.
Hat-tip
To Stilgherrian for the heads up on the Political writing
quote.