Web 2.0 brilliant explanation

Newspapers as transformers

The age of convergence is forcing newspapers to transform themselves into TV and radio stations. One great example is of Star Tribune that just announced that it is installing a “stand-up” studio and editing suites, and plans to launch newspaper TV station.

“We are starting with information shows around content that we already own to a large degree: sports, local entertainment, lifestyle and news/public affairs (politics),” says Editor Nancy Barnes in a memo to staff.

“We plan to add a daily newscast, available on demand, and may expand into weather.”

The age of convergence is putting everything on its head. I love it.

Borrell Associates predict 45% growth in online revenue for TV

I just finished reading Borrell Associates study conducted for Local TV websites. Borrell, a trusted source for the industry, said that local TV stations will grow by 45% to $1.1 billion in online advertising.

Borrell said local TV operators generated $772 million in internet sales 2007, for a growth rate of 72 percent over 2006. Borrell is forecasting total local ad growth of $13.01 billion by 2012, with $9.89 billion this year, compared to $7.63 billion in 2007 - a 29.6 percent increase.

The worst is yet to come for CBS

I just declined an offer from CBS because of its stability. Now, judging from the announcement below, it was a right decision.

CBS has cut dozen of employees from its owned and operated stations, like: WBZ, WBBM, and KPIX. In light of talks with CNN, the cuts are just the beginning. CBS will likely cut at least third of its reporting staff.

TVNewser is reporting layoffs and restructuring at CBS News: “Insiders say the cuts amount to ‘just over 1%’ of the CBS News staff. CBS Corp. reported a 14.6% decline in fourth-quarter earnings. The share price is down 19% so far this year.”

Associated Press and Reuters Beware

Today, TIM ARANGO of New York Times reported that CBS, the home of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite has been considering partnering with Time Warner on a deal to outsource some of its news-gathering operations to CNN.

This announcement shows that CNN is making a strategic move toward B2B relationships. Less than a year ago, The CNN ended a 27-year relationship with Reuters, to cut costs and invest in its own news gathering operations.

"This is all about us, not Reuters. This is about content ownership," CNN spokesman Nigel Pritchard said. "Everything is changing and content ownership is king."

For CNN, a deal with a broadcast network would mean a new revenue stream without having to add much in costs. For CBS, an arrangement with a cable channel would allow it to cut costs while maintaining the CBS News brand.

If a deal is reached between CNN and CBS it would mark a strategic shift for both companies, and a change in media landscape.

For CNN that deal will be the beginning of repositioning its CNN NewsSource to serve the network.

With the current announcement, it seems like CNN is on its way to compete with wire services, like AP and Reuters for the network business.

“Willy why do you rob banks? That is where the money is.”

ComScore Session
Online is the new primetime:

Multimedia planning is where the big providers are going.

There are powerful new tools for online media planning and analysis

· Growth rate of online advertising is 25% in comparison to traditional media that is growing at 2%. Brand building vs. direct response issue.

Stats on Internet:

Massive, growing media

185 million in US

- Search is slowing down, 99% of population search over 20 searches

- 75% of online population stream a video on average 70 times per rmonth

- UGS, YouTube is catching up in MySpace

- Internet reaches across day parts. TV has an advantage over primetime numbers. Online have daytime audiences.

- Internet is the third most used medium, and it is becoming second only to TV.
Although, younger demographics use Internet slightly less than they do TV

- Ads online have been growing with broadband

- Newspaper industry had experienced slow growth in classifieds

- Online is only 7% of total ad spending

- Broadcast TV 45,749 (000), Internet is 21,000,000

- Online advertising is probably going to get a boost in the tightening economy.

- 1/3 of online advertising is branding, the rest is direct response

- Search, classified is direct response

- Is there enough inventory online to meet the demand for online advertising

- Impressions per person are much higher for online

- If we can get the proof that online advertising does what it is supposed to do, then CPM would impove.

- Moving dollars online, online is moving to be more important than 30 sec spot.

- GM is shifting half of its budget to online

- Big advertisers are paying lots of attention to online

- Cookie deletion problem, to what degree cookies are deleted that rely on cookies.

- 30% of online users delete Cookies per month.

- The people who are deleting their cookies (4 times a month)

- That blows the UV counts out of the water

- The overstatement is true for ad serving cookies

- Ex. Tried in Australia to count the total people online, without counting for cookies the number came up with number of online users higher by 50% than the population.

- Decline in ad click-through rates, non reach media .2%

- Tacoda and ComScore did a study on display ads, 1/3 were clicking on display ads.

- 6% of Internet population clicks on ads ( lower income demographics.)

- Click throughs does not measure sales impact

- Number of ads seen by advertiser, by site. ( ComScore Ad Metrix)

- 16%, ROI, ¾ are latent (off-line)

- Half of the Internet visited food websites by search

- Price was a lot less important in brand switching for searchers

- 16% in brand recall if it in top organic search

- Kellogg ( has problems with organic search)

- Impact of online ads for in-store sales

Dying is Easy, Digital is Hard

For the past week, I attended the three-day ARF Research Conference, which focuses on digital media.

The first session focused on finding the clear direction in a time of digital confusion. Alan Wurtzel, President of Research & Media Development, NBC Universal. Alan started with the tape that highlighted the importance of research to NBC. Alan started off with predictions from the past years, which included one from Josh Bernoff 1989 that predicted the end of network TV.

The next topic of discussion was how in the current times the pace of innovation changed.

“It took PC 17 years to overtake America; It took DVR 5 years,” said Wurtzel of NBC

“Dying is easy, the digital is hard,” Alan says. He followed by saying that the confusion can only be resolved with research, and measuring digital. NBC has been making substantial investments, focusing on three primary issues:

What is the future of the industry?

The old models do not work any more. Some predict that traditional media is ending. Alan said that as opposed to many who believe the end of traditional media, he believed media is entering the golden age.

An example, TV time has grown to 8.25h in comparison to last year.

How do new media technologies affect traditional media and consumer behaviors?

Impact of DVR: DVR turned out to be the friend of traditional media. DVR added almost 1/3 to the ratings of the program. Before the advent of the DVR, NBC would have lost the DVR users who would choose to watch their number one choice.

Fast forwarding commercials: Death of the 30-second spot, to test that NBC conducted a study. They found out that 42% ads were recalled when the users fast-forwarded through the DVR tape. As the speed of fast forward increases, the mind still absorbs advertising. Through the research, NBC shared several actionable rules.

Cannibalization: NBC’s research says that they are not worried about cannibalization. Some use Internet as the DVR, others use Internet to watch shows for second or third time, and the last groups samples shows.

How do we advertise and market at 360-degree cross-platform media?

Alan shared a case study for “Fantastic Four,” campaign. They used Heroes to advertise the FOX film, “Fantastic Four.”

· Eleven percent of people who saw Heroes promotion went to see the movie in the opening day. In August, NBC is launching a research lab, which will cost them over 1B dollars to measure how Olympics are consumed across the media. The Olympics will enable NBC to measure reach, frequency, and return of investments.

.

In summary, the takeaways are:

· Job security for researches

· Dying is easy, digital is hard

o Technology and consumers are a constantly moving target, with some of them being” lots of smoke.”

o Half of what we are thinking in digital will be wrong

- If we cannot measure it, we can’t sell it

- There is no “low hanging research fruit in research.

Brought to you by Olympics

Olympics are coming, and with it BBC News. Guardian Newspaper is reporting that Chinese authorities stopped blocking BBC News in English. The BBC website in Chinese is still blocked, but many find ways around the blocs. China has 210 million citizens with internet access, but most do not speak English.

But this is not an end to Chinese censorship. Last week, Guardian reports, China blocked all foreign coverage of disturbance in Tibet. Yahoo, Guardian and YouTube were all affected. Guardian described it as a “deliberate act of unacceptable censorship.”

Even though, censorship is still strong, but allowing Chinese citizens to access BBC is a small step in the right direction.

Paranoid searcher

Yesterday, as I was nonchalantly browsing through the Internet looking for ethical dilemmas to write about, I stumbled on myself. I literally did. There was a website, www.veromi.net that gave me indigestion. The website had me, it had all my addresses and my “potential roommates,” which included my parents and my husband. The website had all my places of employment.

I began to think that Internet does give us access to the world of information, but the trade off is ourselves. I use google.com about two hundred or more times a day. I look for everything from doctors ratings to jobs online. However, recently I found out that Google has the worst privacy practice out of top online destinations. A report came out in 2007 by London-based Privacy International, which assigned Google the lowest grade in privacy. The group described Google in the following terms, as the company “comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility in privacy.”

The other companies that were surveyed, including Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL did not reach the same “height” as Google to “achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy.”

Google responded by saying that they aggressively protect the privacy of their users. But do they really?

Maybe in our new Brave World my searches will be sold along wit my address and “roommates.”

Reuters profits tumbled 13% to $542 million

Paidcontent.org analyzed operating results from Reuters. Here are bits and pieces of their analysis:

The operating profit was up 14% to ($579 million), and revenue was up 1.5 percent to ($5.16 billion). Reuters media division generated $341 million in revenue, grew 6%. The growth Reuters says was fueled by ‘strong growth in online syndication and advertising.”

Tom Glocer said in his analyst presentations “This is the last we’ll do as a standalone entity ... It feels like Chinese new year here today. The results are a fitting end to this chapter in the Reuters story.”

Glocer said that the new ThomReuters will be a 90% digital business.

http://www.paidcontent.co.uk/entry/419-earnings-reuters-07-profit-dips-on-home-strait-to-thomson-merger/

Long Tail of BBC through iPhone

BBC had struck a partnership with iPhone to make its iPlayer TV content available on iPhone. The service offers on-demand shows, which aired within the last seven days. The service is still for UK customers only.

Many others news and entertainment content providers are courting Apple. More on this to come…

Tribune company marriage between TV station and newspaper:

Sun-Sentinel and WSFL-TV, in South Florida are merging into one entity. TV station will move into newspaper newsroom.

"This strategy is unprecedented in a major U.S. market," Sun-Sentinel President and Publisher Howard Greenberg said in a news release. "This gives our print, broadcast and interactive operations the opportunity to work together to develop unique content and programming in a variety of areas. Plus, with this combination, there will be no better way for advertisers to reach more people with a consistent message."

Tribune said that with the merger of two entities it would have better market coverage and increase efficiency for advertisers.

I am sure that this is only the first out of many unifications between TV and newsroom sister properties.

23% growth in online spending

eMarketer lowered its forecast predictions for online ad growth to 23%. A downward revision from Novembers forecast of 28.5%. The revision is than due to a recession. Through 2012, eMarketer predicts robust growth in rich media/video advertising, from 9.7% share in 2007 to 18.5% in 2012.

David Hallerman, a senior analyst with eMarketer said that the popular websites on the Internet will have problems monetizing their traffic, "for example, the most popular sites in social networking where the amount of traffic and the amount of ad dollars don't match up. Maybe they won't," Hallerman said.

"While a foundering economy will certainly affect online ad spending, accounting for the revised estimate, the Internet will support continued ad spending growth even as other media may falter," an eMarketer statement says.

The growth in online spending still outpaces all other media spending, and traditional properties will likely shift more resources into this growing market.

CNN is the top media property

Nielsen-Netratings, released February ranked unique visitors on news sites. CNN Digital Network, which includes Sports Illustrated topped the list with 37MM UV’s, followed by Yahoo!News that had 35MM UVs. I did some digging and the whooping number of UVs can be explained by the search optimization that CNN is doing with the help of Inform.com

1. CNN Digital Network - 37,181,000 - 0:40:11
2. Yahoo! News - 35,274,000 - 0:23:10
3. MSNBC Digital Network - 34,013,000 - 0:29:50
4. AOL News - 21,119,000 - 0:36:14
5. NYTimes.com -18,975,000 - 0:33:29

January numbers for comparison:
1. Yahoo! News - 36,074,000 - 0:23:58
2. CNN Digital Network - 35,598,000 - 0:41:58
3. MSNBC Digital Network - 35,410,000 - 0:30:00
4. AOL News - 23,732,000 - 0:31:12
5. NYTimes.com -20,461,000 - 0:35:47

Interview with the Wire Service executive

For privacy reasons, I'am concealing the name of the executive and the company that he works for. RA (initials of the indivdual) is a online video executive with experience in SEO and advertising. I only had 10 minutes of his time, but we will continue this discussion next week.

I wanted to find out from RA what are his thoughts on the future of traditional media. Here are some of the questions I posed to him:

1. What are the key industry challenges as you see them? ( audience fragmentation, advertising competition due to cable and online, rise of online usage and etc)
RA: Audience fragmentation due to Internet and cable TV. Until about 25 years ago, three networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) owned the entire US TV audience. The widespread distribution of cable TV networks changed the industy landscape. The big advantage that broadcast networks still retain is "reach." For advertisers that want to reach the entire public, vs. concentrated effort broadcast networks are still the best.
Internet revealed the Achilles heel of TV-based advertising in general: its loose correlation to driving sales.

2. What will help traditional media with the challenges they are facing?
RA: News is becoming a commodity. What will help traditional media is finding the business models that are right for them, and understanding that they will no longer get 20% margins on their products. News is more like milk now than like oil (years ago), you take the cost and add a percentage to it. So media companies, are becoming supermarkets, and they should not expect to make 20-30% margins on their product, but 2 0r 3%. I forsee that news companies will need to use hybrid business models, like NYT did with NYT select.

3. How will online video help TV networks and wire service handle the industry challenges?
RA: Online video helps engage the viewer with the website, but the people that watch online videos are not the ones that come to newspaper websites. So newspapers will struggle with video viewership.

4. What should the online video business model look like? ( ad supported (brightcove model, cash, or combo)
RA: They should be hybrid models

Hulu is live to everyone

The much promised and long awaited competitor to youTube is live and public. Hulu, a joint venture between NBC Universal and Fox, now offers content from over 50 media companies. According to Fortune investors, poured $15 million into development.

The joint venture did what was thought to be impossible, united rival media companies under one platform. Hulu still did not recruit ABC and CBS, but Hulu said that they still have conversations with the two networks.

Download $1 billion in online revenue

For my day-job, I had to understand the makeup of traditional vs. online revenue. For most traditional media properties, the revenue allocation is 95% from traditional sources (print, broadcast) to 5% for online. New York Times generates 90% of its revenue from advertising in print, and 10% from online.

As you can imagine, I was really surprised by Walt Disney Co announcement that they expect to collect one billion dollars in revenue from online content in 2008. Walt Disney CEO, Robert Iger said that the company has been “fairly aggressive” in its expansion to new media. Disney used tactics that need to be used more by traditional media- they advertised their online property over broadcast shows.

Still, online accounts for less than 3% of companies’ revenue, meaning Disney has ways to go.

Myopic study by Magid

Hearst- Argyle and Magid completed a research study of habits of 25-54 year olds. The study drilled down on the effectiveness of ads in TV newscasts. “Respondents reported that ads on local TV news drive greater product/service awareness than those within any other program type,” reads a press release previewing the results.” The study also looked at TV websites. “After search engines, local TV news websites are the most frequently used for local news and weather.” Interestingly, online video viewing is high on local TV news websites, “online video viewing of local TV news content is higher than that for any other genre,” 37% for local news compared to 31% each for cable news and primetime programming.

I looked at the study and found a key flaw in it, the study isolated the local news viewers (25-54), which is a broad group, and any statistician would tell Magid they need to do a better job with their sample. Not surprisingly, the study found that generally the myopically selected sample trusts the local TV. The study limited the sample of viewers to a naturally biased sample. If they would pick a sample of 20 to 30 year olds, the results would be drastically different.

Some nuggets from the press release:

- Viewers are more engaged with local news than most other genres;

- 55% of respondents cite TV as their primary source of news information, followed distantly by the Web (26%), and print newspapers (14%);

- Local TV news is more “DVR-proof” than other program formats; most viewers watch local news live, and even when they record these programs they are less likely to fast-forward through them;

- The greater loyalty audiences have toward local broadcast TV news is a factor in the effectiveness of advertising within the genre, and, in a key finding, respondents reported that ads on local TV news drive greater product/service awareness than those within any other program type.

· Other research findings point to a strong linkage between leading local television news brands and the Web:

- After search engines, local TV news websites are the most frequently used for local news and weather;

- Online video viewing of local TV news content is higher than that for any other genre – 37% for local news vs. 31% each for cable news and primetime programming, 24% for reality TV video and 23% for broadcast network news;

- Among weather sources on the web, local TV websites are the “most important source” for weather information;

- Among the online population, local-news viewers are relatively affluent technology adapters: 44% have DVRs, 32% have HDTV sets.

Trust in traditional media is eroding

http://www.zogby.com/methodology/readmeth.dbm?ID=1277

A survey, recently completed by Zogby poll measured the perception of media bias and a profession of journalism. Zogby is reporting that confidence is continuing to slip and the perception of media bias and partisan divide is on the rise. Those factors combined with more than 20 years of growing skepticism about journalists, and news companies. Zogby reports that public has come to view the news media as less professional, less accurate, less caring than before.

Public views news industry as not the industry involved in the “public good,” but regular businesses. News outlets, in order to deal with fragmentation, are prone to design and produce content to attract crowds, like Lost, Survivor. Bloggers, as was seen with Dan Rather, highlight the failures of journalists and further undermine the credibility of news industry.

Public skepticism is growing.

The number of Americans with a favorable view of the press, for instance, dropped markedly in 2006, from 59% in February, to 48% in July.

The number of Americans that believe what news organizations tell them continues to drop. Zogby measured over 20 outlets the only ones that did not decline were Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, people’s local paper, the NewsHour on PBS, People magazine and the National Enquirer.⁵

A quarter of Americans believe most television outlets. Less than one in five believe what they read in print. CNN is not really more trusted than Fox, or ABC than NBC. The local paper is not viewed much differently than the New York Times.

Perception of bias is also the issue, Americans who feel that their daily newspaper has become worse, for instance, the number who blame bias, and particularly liberal bias, has grown from 19% in 1996 to 28% in 2006.⁶

One big change is that more people now feel they can get what traditional journalism offers from the Internet, and that, too, is a challenge for the press, one that may be accelerating faster than declining trust.

Other findings from the survey include:

• Although the vast majority of Americans are dissatisfied with the quality of journalism (64%), overall satisfaction with journalism has increased to 35% in this survey from 27% who said the same in 2007.
• Both traditional and new media are viewed as important for the future of journalism - 87% believe professional journalism has a vital role to play in journalism's future, although citizen journalism (77%) and blogging (59%) are also seen as significant by most Americans.
• Very few Americans (1%) consider blogs their most trusted source of news, or their primary source of news (1%).
• Three in four (75%) believe the Internet has had a positive impact on the overall quality of journalism.

New European network focuses on younger audience

Euranet, is the name of the new radio and internet project that will commence broadcasting on 31 March 2008. It is a consortium of sixteen radio stations from thirteen countries. The group includes international broadcasters like Radio Netherlands Worldwide, Deutsche Welle and Radio France International. But there are also regional and local stations, often from new EU member states. Radio Slovenia International and Polskie Radio from Poland are also part of the project. A major aim is to inform young citizens about the European Union. Unlike earlier forms of co-operation among radio stations, the Euranet programs will be common productions. Initially Euranet will broadcast in English, Spanish, French, German and Polish. The station will be paid for by European funds and will cost about five million euros per year.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3150682,00.html

Another one, pulling back from TV

Source: http://adage.com/article?article_id=125321

With viewer ship on decline, it’s no wonder that advertisers are pulling away from the medium. Recently, we learned that Unilever and auto advertisers are adjusting their media mix to spend less on TV. Today, Kimberly-Clark follow suit by lowering their TV budget from 60% to 46%, which translates to a loss of 68M for TV. They will spend more money on “nontraditional media,” including the internet and online marketing.

Kleenex anyone?

No Golden Statue for the Oscar

Oscar drew record low ratings, down by 1 million viewers from the lowest year 2003 to 32M viewers. "American Idol," the most popular U.S. series, averages 30 million viewers a week on its average broadcast. The movies features could explain the record numbers, none were box office successes. Business week said, NO BIG MOVIE MEANS NO BIG AUDIENCE. ABC tried to put a positive spin on low numbers, reports MediaWeek: “ABC tried to put a good face on the declines, pointing out the larger number of viewers could have watched the telecast in DVR playback, and that the telecast pulled in more viewers than any of the other awards shows this season.”

I watched bits and pieces of the award ceremony, and was stunned how disconnected the award ceremony and the humor was from the public.

Veritas on Net Neutrality

Harvard Law School held a field hearing on net neutrality on February 25, 2008.

Net Neutrality is defined in Wikipedia by Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu: "Network neutrality is best defined as a network design principle. The idea is that a maximally useful public information network aspires to treat all content, sites, and platforms equally."

The focus of the hearing was on cable operator Comcast’s Internet filtering activities. Comcast had stalled uploads from peer-to-peer file sharing applications such as BitTorrent.

Comcast admitted to causing delays for BitTorrent across its networks. Comcast uses packet shaping, which is a way to manage traffic across its network. Comcast says that BitTorrent causes congestion on their network, and that is the reason they are filtering the traffic.

Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-for profit company that guards digital rights, said that Comcast behavior is discriminatory because the technique only focuses on file-sharing applications.

"Consumers need to know if and how network management practices distinguish between different applications, so that consumers can configure their own applications and systems properly," Martin said in his opening statement.

“The Internet is as much mine and yours as it is Comcast’s,” said Representative Edward Markey at the hearing, who introduced a bill on net neutrality. Comcast is part of at least two consumer lawsuits over its filtering activities.

David Cohen, a Comcast vice president who spoke during the hearing, re-iterated that the company does not block traffic, but merely manages it.

"All of this is designed to have a minimal amount of impact on our users," he said. "To be absolutely clear, we do not block any websites or any protocols, including P2P.

Political gambling

Politics has always been my favorite sport, but now I can actually act on it with Intrate. Intrade allows me to trade ( with fake money) on the probability of candidates winning, and at times with what margin.

Enjoy trading!
http://www.intrade.com/

Will writers strike push more people away from TV?

I understand what the writers wanted, but can’t help myself that the strike actually forced viewers to turn away from watching TV. My thoughts were confirmed by an Interpret LLC, which found that vast majority of Americans know about the writers’ strike, and approximately one-third of the population has already changed media habits as a direct result.
More than one-third of Americans (35%) have already changed their TV viewing habits as a direct result of the strike:
Three in ten (27%) are watching less network TV because of the strike.
Heavy TV viewers (21+ hrs/week) are most impacted by the strike: 32% are watching less network TV as a result.
Last week, a Broadcasting & Cable editorial warned that TV newscasts could follow the way of the newspaper. This week, B&C’s Jennifer Yarter asks, “What happens when the web starts to replace the television?”
The answer is that broadcasters need to move away from dull local newscasts, and start producing original programing that attracts younger audience. What kind of original programing should the local stations produce?

MSNBC earned around $5M in January.

MSNBC.com recently launched a newly designed page. They followed ABC.com and CBS.com. However, their results are much better than for other networks. In January they hit traffic record of 94 million UV’s, and served over 32 million streams in a week of February 9^th. If you do the math, MSNBC earned around $800k from one week of video streaming, and around $2.3M for UV’s to their webpage. If you add the math, it amounts to around $5M for a month. I’ve assumed that they get $25 for 1000 UV’s or streams.

Media companies continue firing bloggers

A senior producer Chez Pazienza, CNN’s American Morning, says the network fired him this week for blogging.I work for a media company, that will remain nameless, and we have a strict policy against blogging. The policy states that they can fire you if they find out you have a blog. So much for reforming traditional media.

Readers are not created equal

NAA published a press release calling 2007 a “banner year” for newspaper sites. WSJ blogger Carl Bailik called up Nielsen-Netratings to see if newspapers really had increased their audience share over the last year. He found out that the audience grew by 38%, but the online revenue told a different story. In 2007, newspapers grew by 26.9, reports Borrell Research, but in 2006, they grew by 44.1%. This drop means that newspapers and other traditional media companies do not quite understand how to monetize growing audience.

In addition, lots of newspapers and TV stations tell their stockholders that even though they are losing print/on-air subscribers they are gaining online users. The news that online revenue was down, while online users grew proves that it a myth that online users have equal value to a user of print or broadcast.

CNN launching the next YouTube

CNN is launching a standalone user-generated website, akin to YouTube. The look and feel of the website, as well as sharing capability will be similar to YouTube In August 2006, CNN launched an iReport initiative, and received close to 10,000 news-related photos and videos, Mediaweek reports. CNN used the UGV to cover last April's shooting on Virginia Tech campus. The site will be market regulated, with community of user deciding what is news. Last month CNN paid $750,000 to acquire the domain.

It is elections, stupid!

TVB predicts that 2008 promises to be a lucrative year for TV, with Total Spot TV revenue up by 9% -10% in comparison with 2007 revenues. Local Spot revenue will be up by 5% - 6%, and National Spot will be up by 14% -16%. TVB projected that in 2008 market would be shaped by political cycle. Local TV stations will be the winners, per Veronis Suhler Stevenson, an investment firm that analyzed media companies. Local TV will win because campaign strategists want to target their political ads to congressional districts. The precision to go down to district level can only be achieved with Local TV stations, per journalism.org.

What traditional companies are doing to stay competitive in the online world?

Traditional news industry has been surrounded by the haze of doom and gloom. The newspaper circulation continues a decade long slide, television networks are struggling to retain the viewers; terrestrial radio now competes with satellite and internet streaming radio. Traditional news industry is wrestling with an enigma of what they should do to stay viable to consumers and profitable in the marketplace, but advertising dollars are quickly escaping.

But even while competitive forces from new media, DVRs, VOD, and YouTube continue to decrease the appeal of newspapers, radio and TV as an advertising medium, the traditional broadcast industry is still reaching over 90% of the American public.

The reach of traditional media hints that traditional players aren’t going away. However, to thrive in the years ahead all companies will need to pursue new on-air, print, and online strategies. This blog focuses on what traditional companies are doing to stay competitive in the online world of media consumption.

Question: With much confusion in the media industry, the question remains, where is the traditional industry going and what will happen in the future?