Whereas O’Donnell laudably tried using to concentrate the audience’s focus onand hopefully last, Charlie Sheen trainwreck interview, courtesy of the tragic undertow that threatens to pull Sheen beneath for decent, I was overtaken, not from the pulling on the thread, and therefore the voracious audience he serves. It didn’t make me sad, it crafted me angry.
When it comes to celebrities, we are able to be considered a heartless region, basking within their misfortunes like nude sunbathers at Schadenfreude Beach. The impulse is understandable, to some degree. It may be grating to listen to complaints from most people who enjoy privileges that most of us can not even visualize. In case you can’t muster up some compassion for Charlie Sheen, who would make extra funds for any day’s effort than many of us will make inside a decade’s time, I guess I cannot blame you.
Using the quick tempo of occasions online as well as the advice revolution sparked from the Web, it is especially straightforward for the know-how industry to feel it’s exclusive: frequently breaking new ground and performing things that nobody has actually achieved prior to.
But there's other kinds of home business which have by now undergone several of the exact radical shifts, and have just as great a stake inside foreseeable future.
Take healthcare, as an illustration.
We regularly think of it as a tremendous, lumbering beast, but in fact, medicine has undergone a series of revolutions while in the past 200 years which have been a minimum of equal to individuals we see in technological innovation and details.
Much less understandable, but nonetheless inside of the norms of human nature, may be the impulse to rubberneck, to slow down and check out the carnage of Charlie spectacle of Sheen’s unraveling, but of your blithe interviewer Sheen’s everyday living as we pass it from the proper lane of our every day lives. To be sincere, it can be challenging for individuals to discern the big difference involving a run-of-the-mill focus whore, and an honest-to-goodness, circling the drain tragedy-to-be. On its personal merits, a quote like “I Am On a Drug. It’s Referred to as Charlie Sheen” is sheer genius, and we can not all be expected to get the complete measure of someone’s existence every single time we listen to a thing amusing.
Quick ahead to 2011 and I'm endeavoring to investigate will mean of staying a little more business-like about my hobbies (primarily audio). By the end of January I had manned up and began to advertise my weblogs. I had generated various various weblogs, which were contributed to by colleagues and colleagues. I promoted these activities by means of Facebook and Twitter.
2nd: the little abomination that the Gang of Five about the Supream Court gave us a year or so in the past (Citizens Inebriated) in reality includes a bit bouncing betty of its own that can quite properly go off while in the faces of Govs Wanker, Sacitch, Krysty, and J.O. Daniels. Seeing as this ruling prolonged the idea of “personhood” to both equally firms and unions, to check out to deny them any suitable to operate inside of the legal framework that they had been organized under deprives these “persons” from the freedoms of speech, association and movement. Which suggests (the moment yet again, quoting law college trained relatives) that both the courts should uphold these rights for the unions (as individual “persons” as guaranteed through the Federal (and most state) constitutions, or they have to declare that these attempts at stripping or limiting union rights should utilize to important companies, also.
With the national and international news game more or less dominated by traditional media and web giants like Google and Yahoo, much of the focus for companies that want to grow online is moving toward niches: sports, technology and other topics. But one of the biggest remaining unfilled niches in online content is hyper-local news. AOL has made the biggest investment in this segment, spending an estimated $50 million or so on rolling out its Patch.com network last year to almost a thousand towns. But Topix CEO Chris Tolles — whose company aggregates news and community discussions around thousands of small towns and regions — says that’s likely just the beginning of the hyper-local land rush.
The Topix co-founder says one of the reasons why local content is ripe for investment, and one of the things likely pushing AOL in that direction, is that “local monetizes better than just about anything else” in terms of advertising. “The figures show that ads are about four times as effective if you localize them,” Tolles said. This phenomenon has likely been driving advertisers to work with other avenues like Groupon, which can target individual regions or towns. Topix, meanwhile, has been making an average $4 eCPM (cost per thousand) for its advertising, says Tolles, and has also been getting much more response from large ad agencies than in the past.
Two to three years ago when a sales rep would call on some Madison Avenue firm, the 25-year-old sales guy would say “local sounds like my local news, and that sounds like my mom and dad — so no thanks.” Now they’re saying “local sounds like Foursquare and I have an iPhone and that sounds interesting, so yes.”
Local Advertising Rates are Climbing
The fact that CPMs for local advertising are up means that lots of companies like AOL and Yahoo — which is pursuing a Patch-like strategy with its Associated Content unit, which it acquired last year for an estimated $100 million — are going to be looking to amass as much content as possible so that they can get the scale necessary to make an impact on their businesses, the Topix CEO says. “It’s all about who can create a large local footprint,” he said. “I think we will see acquisitions this year, as part of a land grab from these companies, looking for someone who can deliver a large enough local footprint.”
Not surprisingly, Tolles says Topix is in a pretty good position if that happens. The local news aggregator was profitable for the first time in 2010, he says — with revenues that were up by more than 50 percent compared with the previous year. “We are one of the largest local sites in the U.S.,” the CEO says, “larger than any other except maybe one of the big newspaper chains like Gannett or McClatchy. Not bad for about 30 people in an office in Palo Alto [Calif.].” The site gets about 8 million uniques a month, he said, which is roughly the same as twice what AOL’s Patch is estimated to have across its sites.
Topix doesn’t get much attention when it comes to the online-media space, perhaps because it has been around so long. It was created in 2004 as an automated news aggregator by a team that included Rich Skrenta — who now runs Blekko — and Tolles. They used algorithms to crawl tens of thousands of news sites, blogs and other sources of information and then filtered it into topics. Over time, the company started to focus on location as the main filter, and categorized the information into more than 20,000 towns and cities. In 2005, it got a large investment from several media companies including Gannett Communications, the Tribune Co. and McClatchy.
News Is Easy — Community Is the Hard Part
And what does Tolles think about competing with Patch, as AOL pours more money into the hyper-local effort, which is now in close to a thousand different towns across the U.S.? The Topix CEO says his site doesn’t really compete with Patch in many locations yet — and when Patch has good content from a local area, “we can aggregate that too,” he says. In some ways, Topix approaches local news in the same way that The Huffington Post did with national and international news: the site pulls in and shows excerpts of stories from other news sites. But more important even than the news, says Tolles, is the fact that Topix gives readers from those areas somewhere to discuss the news.
“We started out as a news aggregator, but the thing that we have done a really good job of is giving people a place to come and talk about the content, the news from their local community” the Topix CEO says. During the mid-term elections, for example, the site created pages for every local race, all the way from sheriff to local city council. Across all of its pages, Topix gets about 4 million comments a month from readers, which is roughly the same as The Huffington Post.
“Patch may be able to set up thousands of sites in local towns, but it takes time to develop that kind of community — it doesn’t just happen overnight,” says Tolles.
Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d):
- Why Google Should Fear the Social Web
- Lessons From Twitter: How to Play Nice With Ecosystem Partners
- What We Can Learn From the Guardian’s Open Platform
Post and thumbnail courtesy of Flickr user See-ming Lee
For Every Entertainment Industry Job 'Lost' To Infringement, Could 12 Jobs Be Created Elsewhere?
from the fun-with-stats dept
For years we've debunked various entertainment industry studies claiming ridiculous job and economic "losses" from copyright infringement. These studies tend to have all sorts of problems; ignoring the ability to adapt and to introduce new business models, using "ripple effects" in just one direction to double, triple and quadruple count the same "losses" over and over again, and counting every download as a "lost sale." The ripple effects one is especially pernicious because the industry likes to pretend that the impacts of infringement only go in one direction. They ignore that the money not spent on such content doesn't disappear from the economy but can be used elsewhere -- perhaps in areas that provide greater economic growth.
A few years ago, the folks at CCIA smartly took the copyright industry's exact methodology and showed that for all the claims of how much copyright contributed to the economy, exceptions to copyright contributed even more. While the copyright maximalists totally missed the point and attacked the methodology -- not realizing that, in doing so, they had undermined their own methodology -- the point was made. If you believe the claims from the copyright industry, then you also have to believe that the exceptions are more important. The methodology is the same, so either neither are right or both are right.
It looks like Rick Falkvinge, of The Pirate Party, has now done something similar on the "job loss" side of things, and concluded that, using similar methodology to the industry reports, for every job "lost" by copyright infringement, the positive ripple effects in the other direction mean that 11.8 new jobs are created. So if we accept the claim that 1.2 million jobs can be lost due to infringement, it would mean that a separate 14.2 million jobs were created elsewhere.
The report broke down the "creative industry," by noting that (contrary to copyright maximalist claims), most of that industry doesn't actually rely on copyright to make money. In fact, certain "creative" industries could be seen as "copyright-inhibited." For example, advertising. As we constantly hear from copyright maximalists, various sites are making big bucks by using advertising in association with file sharing. So based on the industry's own argument, it seems that the advertising market is clearly copyright-inhibited, and it would grow if there was greater infringement. After going through the numbers, it was determined that the majority of GDP, by quite a bit, are likely in the "copyright-inhibited" arena.
Now, you can certainly argue with the methodology here. I don't think anyone actually believes these numbers are accurate. But it's using the same basic methodology, assumptions and thought processes behind the studies in the other direction. You can also, obviously, claim that Falkvinge is biased. He is. But is he more biased than the entertainment industry legacy players who do the other studies? It seems clear that the industries are likely to be more biased, since they have billions of dollars bet on keeping the old structures in place. I think both studies are probably far from accurate in all sorts of ways, but if you're going to cite the entertainment industry's claims based on this kind of methodology, it seems you should also have to accept these claims. Not doing so suggests serious cognitive dissonance or someone who is paid not to believe the truth.
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