Wired Magazine’s editor in chief Chris Anderson, wrote a new book entitled “The Future of a radical Price“, where he outlines the future of media content concerning pricing. And he does so with a suprisingly counterintuitive prediction.
It begins with this video, Disruption By Design. Aside from a disruption caused by shoddy cameramanship, (the person shooting this video needs to be fired immediately, seriously), he basically outlines a picture that disruptions are here to stay, they are our future whether we like them or not. So the only way to prepare for the disruptions, is to become the disruptive force, be the driver of disruptive change by creating disriptive technologies.
Chris goes on to state that small groups and individuals tend to be quicker at adapting to disruptions and creating new disruptive technologies than large corporations or governments. One can then conclude that the future to successful enterprises will be in their ability to shrink themselves down to the smallest group possible in order to handle disruptions while retaining their overall connectivity with the larger group.
I think this is already evident in the form of spinoff’s, incubators, idea labs and skunk works projects. This is a trend that will continue, and how comanies organize themsleves to deal with and respond to disruptions will be a large determing factor to their success.
In Chris’s new book “The Future of a Radical Price”, he outlines the biggest disruptive force to hit the media. And in fact, this disruption is already here and being dealt with by anyone doing business online. Even Rupert Murdoch gave his opinion on free versus paid media content.
The premise outlined in Chris’s book states that as products go digital, their marginal costs goes to zero. “This is the law of gravity online” he says. “Everything that becomes digital will become free. There will be a free version, either you will be competing with free or giving it away for free and selling something else. If it is not zero today, it will be zero tomorrow.”
Pretty harsh disruptive force indeed. So how will businesses make money online with digital content? Chris outlines 4 methods:
- The best model is a mix of free and paid.
- You can’t charge for an exclusive that will be repeated elsewhere.
- Don’t charge for the most popular content on your site.
- Content behind a pay wall should appeal to niches, the narrower the niche the better
These last 2 points come as a suprise, and almost counterintuitive to what most web enpreneures believe. What Chris is in fact saying is, don’t charge for all your most popular media content, that which is driving your traffic. That will drive your ad revenue.
The content you need to charge for, is the long tail niche content, the hard to find and obtain content. While it’s true that fewer people will be interested in that content, they will however be more willing to pay for it.
Anderson’s last book was “the Long Tail”, where he predicted that in media, “The head of the curve will be free and the tail of the curve will be paid.”
In a move to compete with Salesforce.com, Amazon and Google, Intuit launched a cloud platform for 3rd party developers called Federated Applications.
Applications do not have to conform to QuickBooks but will instead go through a minor configuration process to adapt. This is a major breakthrough for reaching an international audience.
According to Leena Rao:
Intuit’s Partner Platform provides a foundation for developers to build and deploy apps that can be integrated with Intuit’s small business accounting software, QuickBooks. QuickBooks has close to 25 million users within 4 million businesses who can buy these apps on Intuit’s own version of its Salesforce.com-like App Store, Intuit Marketplace.
With the multilingual “Federated Applications” functionality, developers who have existing SaaS applications that are built with any programming language, database or cloud computing platform can quickly and easily publish their apps on Intuit Marketplace.
There is a lot of lingo exclusively used amongst SEO/SEM professionals. It can sometimes get confusing trying to make sense of all the jargon.
Here is an A to Z list of some of the most common terms in the SEO/SEM industry:
Navigation:
0-9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Glossary:
0 – 9
200
Status OK – The file request was
successful. For example, a page or image was found and loaded
properly in a browser.
Some poorly developed content management systems return 200
status codes even when a file does not exist. The proper
response for file not found is a 404.
See also:
Continue reading →
There’s a lot of reasons why the big 3 failed, pundits will argue that it’s the UAW union, management or the dealers or that they are spread too thin into the verticals from financing to steel mills. The biggest reason put out there is that they simply aren’t building cars people want.
Ultimately there’s always one reason that carries the most weight when pinpointing a given failure. Most will agree that GM, Ford and Chrysler failed because “they aren’t building products that consumers want“.
To back this up, all one needs to do is look at the biggest losing cars ever.
1990-Present
In the past 20 years, 7 out of 10 of the biggest automobile failures has been American cars. That’s 70%. So clearly, America is the leader of crap cars. But this doesn’t necessarily mean they “aren’t creating cars people want to drive”, there’s a difference, a big difference.
The difference can be summed up in one word… BRANDING!
People want to drink coffee from white plastic lidded cups with a circular green logo on it. People want to listen to their music from white ear bud iPods, check their emails with Blackberrys. The world of consumerism is all about branding, and there’s no more importance in branding than a car.
A car is an ultimate representation of who you are, who you think you are, or who you want to be. And it goes a little something like this:
I’m conservative and safety consciences = Volvo. I’m rich and into Luxury = Mercedes. I’m well off and into Performance and Luxury = BMW. I’m doing alright and into performance, luxury and value = Audi. I’m a family oriented person into simple quality engineering = VW. I into precision engineering, luxury and value = Lexus. I’m all about high quality and high value = Honda and Toyota. I have more money than the baby Jesus = Lamborghini.
Now, lets look at what the American automotive brands represent:
I live in the ghetto but wanna come across as fly with deep pockets: Cadillac. I want something parked on the front lawn of my doublewide trailer jacked up with one wheel missing: Pontiac. I want a cheap car that looks like an expensive European car, or even a Bentley: Chrysler. I want a car that looks and drives like a cheap rental car: Most other American cars.
The Big 3 can not simply create cars people want to drive, because they killed their brand. Nobody wants to drive garbage, and for far too many people, the Big 3′s brand stands for garbage. This should be written in history books for what it is, brand failure.
But there is hope on the horizon for the American automotive sector.
Posted in Blunders and Fail, Branding, Failures
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Tagged automotive failure, big three, brand identity, Branding, brands, chrysler, fail, failure, ford, gm
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If you are in the process of marketing your website to search engines, a process known as SEM, Search Engine Marketing, then you have probably already heard about Link Enhancement, or Link Building.
What you probably haven’t heard, is that it MIGHT be illegal. well, not illegal according to the law of your country, but illegal in the eyes of Google. Specifically, sites that charge to post links and sites that purchase links. This is what Google has to say about the practice of Link Building:
We work hard to return the most relevant results for every search we conduct. To that end, we encourage site managers to make their content straightforward and easily understood by users and search engines alike. Unfortunately, not all websites have users’ best interests at heart. Some site owners attempt to “buy PageRank™” in the form of paid links to their sites. Buying links to improve PageRank violates our quality guidelines.
Google uses a number of methods to detect paid links, including algorithmic techniques. We also welcome information from our users. If you know of a site that buys or sells links, please tell us by filling out the fields below. We’ll investigate your submissions, and we’ll use your data to improve our algorithmic detection of paid links.
What Google is talking about in this policy refers to websites that charge a fee to list your site, such as these websites. Google is also referring to the websites that pay to be listed on those sites.
Google however is NOT referring to the practice of link building or link enhancement, which is to essentially go around the internet to forums, discussions groups, blog comments sections etc.. and post a link to your website.
That practice is ok. So is the practice of exchanging links with other websites. So, is it acceptable to pay a company to build links for your website? YES! Is it ok to pay a company for posting a link to your website? NO!
There is a difference.
CafePress and Spreadshirt competitor Zazzle, who specialize in mass customization, are going global and localizing their website for the Australia and Canadian market.
Zazzle has also expanded its existing UK site, launched in late 2008, to the greater European market by accepting payments in Euros.
Earlier this year, Zazzle underwent a reduction in force of 15% of their staff due to the sluggish economy. So it’s a good sign to see they are expanding into the English language foreign markets.
Competitors Cafepress and Spreadshirt both already have an established international presence.
The definition of Cibai may vary depending on who you ask. If you talk to a Microsoft researcher, they will tell you it’s an “abstract interpretation-based static analyzer for modular analysis and verification of Java classes”. Cibai is the name of a product developed by the Microsoft research team.
On the other hand, if you ask anyone in Singapore or Malaysia what Cibai means, you may get slapped. Cibai is slang for… VAGINA! It can best be translated into the dredded C word… “C_ _ _”.
As Josh Lim puts it…
Cibai’ is a a Chinese dialect (specifically, Hokkien) term for vagina, and ‘Cibai’ remains the most popular spelling. Other variations include ‘chee bye’, ‘chibai’, or ‘ji bai’. ‘Cibai’ can also be used as the equivalent of ‘damn’! or ‘fuck!’, as it is also used as an exclamation if someone is angry or upset. It also can be used with adjectives, eg ‘Chau cibai’ basically means ’smelly cunt’. There’s also the 6 hit combo ‘Kan Ni Neh Chau Ci Bai’ (often abbreviated to KNNCCB) term that is quite popular that means, er, nevermind.
You can see more the term defined here at urbandictionary.In short it’s one of the worst things you could call your software product.
Talk about a colossal branding fail. It’s almost as bad as Ford’s attempt to market the Pinto in Brazil. Aside from being a total pile of crap car, they couldn’t sell the car in Brazil and it went down in History as perhaps their greatest failure. Pinto is slang in Brazil for minuscule male genitalia.
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft eventually gives into international political correctness and changes the name. Bottom line, if you are doing business internationally, you need to be aware of such cultural nuances.
According to Rupert Murdoch, in one year’s time, the economy will rebound and allow for the charging of news delivery online; at least, his own brands such as Fox News, The Times, The Sun, etc…
Billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch gave a strange response when asked about plans for mainstream news websites to charge for content, declaring, “The current days of the internet will soon be over.”
He was making reference to the fact that corporate media websites cannot continue to survive under their current failing business model.
The establishment media is dying and advertising revenue has plummeted as people turn to blogs and the alternative media for their news in an environment of corporate lies and spin.
This has forced sectors of the corporate media to charge the dwindling number of loyal readers they have left for news content, a practice which is set to become widespread according to Murdoch. This will only send more people over to the alternative media as the old organs of de facto state-controlled propaganda wither and die.
“There are encouraging signs in some of our businesses that the days of precipitous declines are done, and things are beginning to look healthier.”
“[Wall Stree Journal is experiencing] booming subscription revenues.”
“That it is possible to charge for content on the Web [based on data from our Wall Street Journal Subscriptions Revenue] is obvious.”
The establishment media is dying and advertising revenue has plummeted as people turn to blogs and the alternative media for their news in an environment of corporate lies and spin.
This has forced sectors of the corporate media to charge the dwindling number of loyal readers they have left for news content, a practice which is set to become widespread according to Murdoch. This will only send more people over to the alternative media as the old organs of de facto state-controlled propaganda wither and die.
Source
Search queries has continued to grow, it is up 68% over the past 2 years. However, the number of paid clicks, clicks on ads contained within the search results, has only grown 18% over the past two years. The graphs below show these two trends.
What accounts for sizeable gap between these two numbers? Why is growth in the volume of search queries outpacing the growth of paid ad clicks by a factor of more than 3x?
According to Gian Fulgoni of Comscore, the difference seems to reside in the fact that ad coverage has dropped from 64% to 54% of searches.
In other words, the percentage of search results pages that contain a paid ad has dropped from 64% to 54%. Why is that? Why has ad coverage declined?
One hypothesis is that search engines have been improving the searcher experience and reducing the importance of less relevant advertisers. So, essentially, more relevant search results.
Backing up this theory, Gian looked into the rate at which searchers clicked on paid ads and found that the rate hasn’t changed at all over the past 2 years.
But yet another theory according to Gian is as follows:
An analysis of comScore data shows that search queries are actually getting longer and that as searchers become more experienced they are using more words per search query. And this apparently reduces the likelihood that an advertiser has bid to have his/her ad included in the results page from these longer queries, due to paid search advertising strategies that limit ad coverage, such as Exact Match, Negative Match, and bid management software campaign optimization.
