Barry Diller: It's 'Going To Take Years' For The New York Times' Paywall To Succeed

Barry Diller: It's 'Going To Take Years' For The New York Times' Paywall To Succeed

IAC chief Barry Diller was on Bloomberg TV yesterday talking about whether paid online content will succeed.

Diller thinks it will. “Oh eventually. Absolutely," he said.

But not so fast for The New York Times, whose paywall is scheduled to go live in January 2011.

“I think they'll succeed eventually, not this time around," he said. "This is going to be an evolution. It's going to take years for the pricing to get in line, for the form factors to get in line, for consumer habits to develop, for one click, one ease path of pricing, one completion of the order to happen. All this stuff is going to jumble around awkwardly for the next years.”

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Forget 2009 – Here's How Facebook Makes Billions In 2019

Forget 2009 – Here's How Facebook Makes Billions In 2019

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We hear Facebook expects revenues to reach $1.5 billion to $2 billion this year.

Here are the businesses the COO Sheryl Sandberg (pictured) hopes will get Facebook to $10 billion or $20 billion in five years…

Search ads – All these "Like" button are building a hierarchy of Web pages, similar to Google's Pagerank.

Facebook Credits in games – Thanks to hugely popular games like Zynga's Farmville, this could already be a third of Facebook's revenues in 2010.

Pay with Facebook on third-party ecommerce sites – If your credit card is already in the system, why not just click "Pay With Facebook" instead of going through the hassle of a check-out process?

Local coupons – Facebook is about to get a check-in feature. Groupon is showing that local businesses will buy coupons if they will draw a crowd.

Brand advertising on Facebook.com – Brands like Facebook ads because they drive traffic to Facebook pages.  If user "Likes" a Facebook page, that page owner can them spam them almost at will.

Brand advertising off Facebook.com – Almost 100 million Facebook users log-in to third-party sites using their Facebook IDs through the program that used to be called Facebook Connect. Facebook knows more about these visitors to third-party sites then the third-parties themselves. This puts Facebook in a position to either sell ads for those third-party sites, or to sell anonymized data to those third-parties sites, so they can themselves sell better-targeted  ads.

Don't miss: Facebook's Soon-To-Billionaires

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Facebook 2009 Revenue Was Almost $800 Million [REPORT]

Facebook 2009 Revenue Was Almost $800 Million [REPORT]

Facebook’s revenue in 2009 was nearly $800 million, and the company turned a part of it into a solid net profit, according to Reuters, which cites two sources familiar with the situation.

The number is significantly higher than earlier estimates of $500 million revenue in 2009, and even the projected $710 million revenue in 2010. Facebook, as usual, declines to comment on any of these numbers, but we know that somewhere in 2009. Facebook became cash-flow positive.

“They are downplaying their performance. There’s no upside in getting people’s expectations high, it’s always better to go low,” said one of Reuters’ sources. It could be true: if Facebook is heading towards an IPO, it’s definitely better to be able to show big growth than to boast high numbers now, and end up unable to beat them after.

If these new estimates are true, this is great news for Facebook, which has been on the ugly side of a privacy-related scandal that ended up reaching the cover of Time Magazine and had Mark Zuckerberg, the site’s founder and CEO, apologizing for the company’s misdeeds. As long as the earnings and growth is strong – and according to the latest numbers from Compete, Facebook is still growing quite fast – Facebook will have time to tinker and experiment with privacy to find out how far it can go before causing a backlash.



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Tags: business, facebook, Revenue, social netoworking


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Google reportedly building a paid news content system.

Google reportedly building a paid news content system.

With all of the recent pay walls springing up, it’s no wonder that it has come to this.  In fact, Google had talked about building a paid content system as far back as nearly a year ago.  According to a story on the Paid Content website, that system might be coming to Italy quite soon.

No confirmation from Google on this story yet.  As is common, Google tends to be very tight lipped about upcoming products.  However, an article in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica says that the Mountain View, California company has been reaching out to local publishers to test the water, so to speak.

Is this the future of premium content on the Internet?  Though some publishers believe so (just look at the catastrophe surrounding The Wall Street Journal), the commonly held belief is that any paid content system is going to take a lot of work before it would be accepted on a global scale.

One possibility with this is a system called Newspass (a translation from the Italian paper, so this name might not be accurate).  Not unlike any other subscription service, Newspass would allow its holders access to content across any site that used the service.

It’s no coincidence, mind you, that this service would spring up in Italy.  The country has been a hotbed of confrontation with Google, so this appears to be the first steps toward a resolution.

According to Google, and from the Paid Content article:

“We’ve consistently said we are talking with news publishers to figure out ways we can work together, including whether we can help them with technology to power any subscription services they may be thinking of building. Our aim, as with all Google products, would be to reach as broad a global audience as possible.

We don’t pre-announce products and don’t have anything to announce at this time.”

Original title and link for this post: Google reportedly building a paid news content system.

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Wired verkoopt 73.000 iPad-magazines

Wired verkoopt 73.000 iPad-magazines

Wired voor iPad is bijna 73.000 keer verkocht binnen 9 dagen. Dat vraagt wat mij betreft om een snelle rekensom. De apps van het magazine kosten 4,99 dollar per stuk. Waardoor de totale omzet voor uitgever Condé Nast en Apple samen neerkomt op 364.270 dollar.

Niet gek voor een eerste iPad-magazine dacht ik zo. Van dat bedrag moet de uitgever volgens het rigide App Store model 30 procent inlveren. Condé Nast zet dus binnen 9 dagen 254.989 dollar om. 109.281 dollar gaat in dit geval naar Apple. Is dat rendabel? Dat hoor ik graag van een uitgever. Ik ben benieuwd of die dertig procent opweegt tegen het wegvallen van druk- en distributiekosten.

Nu ben ik geen uitgever maar dat lijkt mij geen slechte omzet. Niet voor Condé Nast en ook niet voor Steve Jobs. Hoeveel er is neergeteld voor ontwikkelkosten en hoeveel er wordt verdiend aan advertenties is ook onduidelijk. De ontwikkelkosten zullen waarschijnlijk flink gedrukt zijn door de samenwerking met Adobe.

Verdubbeling oplage
Volgens Crains New York bracht Wired met combodeals voor adverteerders de reclame-inkomsten bijna terug naar het niveau van 2008. Een reguliere advertentie met een link naar een website van de adverteerder kost bijvoorbeeld 1.000 euro meer dan in het papieren magazine. Waarschijnlijk is er voor de multimedia-ads met video meer betaald.

Of deze lijn doorzet is nog gissen. Het is één van de eerste iPad-magazines die ook nog een flink gehypet werd door de media. Iedereen wil er natuurlijk even mee spelen en kijken wat er mogelijk is. Neemt niet weg dat de oplage van Wired in één klap bijna verdubbelde. De 73.000 apps zouden er ‘bijna net zoveel’ zijn als de losse verkoop van het magazine.

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Tablets Will Be Outselling Netbooks by 2012 [REPORT]

Tablets Will Be Outselling Netbooks by 2012 [REPORT]

Another analyst has gone bullish on tablet computing. Forrester Research is out with a report this morning projecting that tablets will start outselling netbooks by 2012.

The report goes on to predict that by 2015, tablets will make up 23% of all PC sales (which Forrester defines as desktops, laptops, netbooks and tablets).

Early signs already suggest this shift is happening; two million iPads were sold in its first two months of availability, and netbook sales –- not long ago the hottest growth area of the computing industry -– have slowed considerably.

Moreover, seemingly every hardware manufacturer is prepping a tablet of its own, and Google is set to enter the market with Verizon Wireless as its launch partner.

This chart illustrates how Forrester sees the market shifting through 2015:

Do you think tablets are going to become as pervasive as Forrester is projecting? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.



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Tags: ipad, netbooks, tablets


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A Comprehensive Look At Who Uses Social Networks And How

A Comprehensive Look At Who Uses Social Networks And How

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Edison Research just released its latest report on social network usage, based on polling data from phone calls to a representative sample of 1,753 Americans.

The study compares the behavior and demographics of frequent users of social networks to those of the population at large.

Some of the results:

  • Though social networking is rapidly becoming more common throughout the wider population, it is still most popular among the young; students are especially overrepresented.
  • Women are bigger users than men.
  • The biggest social networkers are, unsurprisingly, more likely to be big Internet users and early-adopters of new gadgets. But they still think the mobile phone is the technology that has had the biggest impact on their lives.
  • In a somewhat off-topic result, Pandora is absolutely slaughtering the competition in online audio brand recognition.

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Iceland Passes Proposal to Become 'New Media Haven'

Iceland Passes Proposal to Become 'New Media Haven'

If you're looking to say something contentious on the Internet, then Iceland is the place to go. The Icelandic Parliament unanimously passed a proposal yesterday to make the country a "new media haven" in an initiative inspired and strongly backed by Iceland-based whistleblower website WikiLeaks.

The proposal, entitled the "Icelandic Modern Media Initiative", "resolves to task the government with finding ways to strengthen freedoms of expression and information freedom in Iceland, as well as providing strong protections for sources and whistleblowers."

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According to the text of the initiative, Iceland hopes to become the international home of news organizations worldwide by way of providing these protections:

The legislative initiative outlined here is intended to make Iceland an attractive environment for the registration and operation of international press organizations, new media start-ups, human rights groups and internet data centers. It promises to strengthen our democracy through the power of transparency and to promote the nation's international standing and economy. It also proposes to draw attention to these changes through the creation of Iceland's first internationally visible prize: the Icelandic Prize for Freedom of Expression.

The proposal goes on to acknowledge that where a particular media is published has become irrelevant in many ways and that the creation of these laws could help create an environment that fosters quality journalism, unafraid of prosecution.

"We can create a comprehensive policy and legal framework to protect the free expression needed for investigative journalism and other politically important publishing," the initiative reads.

When Al Jazeera covered the budding proposal last March, it said that "the idea behind IMMI is simple but it's ambitious - bring together some of the most progressive media laws from many different countries to create one holistic law that will position Iceland at the forefront of the battle to protect journalists, whistleblowers and their sources from oppressive libel laws."

As both Al Jazeera, the Nieman Journalism Lab and others question, however, can laws in one country protect journalists from prosecution in other countries? The article on Nieman Journalism Lab suggests that the laws may not ensure protection from other countries laws, but "if nothing else, it would probably prevent your servers from being forcibly shut down", were your content hosted in Iceland.

For now, however, the effects of IMMI are yet unknown, as it is merely a proposal for laws that remain to be written and tested in international waters. There is also the question of whether or not Iceland has the bandwidth to support large media servers, although the IMMI clearly states that Iceland "has fast undersea cables to some of the world's largest consumers of information".

Whatever the case, the passing of such a proposal is promising, if just in an altruistic and optimistic journalist's point of view.

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