Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: media

  • Daily links – Twitter founder on social media, teenagers online and tech employment

    Daily links – Twitter founder on social media, teenagers online and tech employment

    Links today have a bit of a social media theme with Twitter co-founder Ev Williams explaining his view that Instagram’s numbers don’t really matter to his business while researcher Danah Boyd explains the complexities of teenagers’ social media use.

    Apple’s patents and why the tech industry is firing, not hiring, round out today’s stories.

    Feel the width, not the quality

    Twitter co-founder Ev Williams attracted attention last month with his comment that he couldn’t care about Instagram’s user numbers, in A Mile Wide, An Inch Deep he explains exactly what he meant at the time and why online companies need to focus more on content and value.

    Apple gets patent, GoPro shares drop

    One of the frustrations with following the modern tech industry is how patents are used to stifle innovation. How an Apple patent for something that seems obvious caused camera vendor GoPro’s shares to fall is a good example.

    Why is the tech industry shedding jobs?

    Despite the tech industry’s growth, the industry’s giants are shedding jobs. This Bloomberg article describes some of the struggles facing the tech industry’s old dinosaurs.

    An old fogey’s view of teenagers’ social media use

    Researcher Danah Boyd provides a rebuttal of the story about young peoples’ use of social media. “Teens’ use of social media is significantly shaped by race and class, geography and cultural background,” she says. Sometimes it’s necessary to state the obvious.

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  • The tension between creative and business

    The tension between creative and business

    One of the ongoing tensions in the new media landscape is that between the demands of advertisers and content creators.

    This isn’t a new thing as a 1959 interview between Mike Wallace and TV pioneer Rod Stering shows.

    Sterling describes how pressures from networks and advertisers created often weird compromises along with a fair degree of self censorship among TV writers and producers.

    Little that Sterling describes would surprise today’s online journalists, bloggers and social media influencers who find themselves subject to identical pressures today.

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  • Google’s river of gold

    Google’s river of gold

    Google’s quarterly results are in – revenue up 22% on the previous year with a gross profit margin of 300%.  Although the adwords river of gold still makes up 90% of the company’s income.

    investor.google.com/earnings/2014/Q2_google_earnings.html

    While spectacular, such a reliance on one product line is a vulnerablity. It’s not surprising Google’s leadership is experimenting with new businesses.

    It’s also notable that payments to network partners fell as a proportion to revenues, which explains some of the pain sites that rely on Google Adsense checks are feeling.

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  • Is digital enough to save magazines and newspapers.

    Is digital enough to save magazines and newspapers.

    “Globally the newspaper industry’s revenue decline will end in 2015” declares PwC in their 2104 Global Media and Entertainment report released earlier this week.

    While PwC thinks the decline for print – both in newspapers and magazines – is over, however there’s little if any growth on the horizon with the company forecasting 0.1% growth per annum for newspapers and 0.2% for magazines over the next four years.

    The reason for the stabilisation in revenues is the move to paid apps and paywalls, which means advertising is less important to the print industry’s revenues.

    Circulation revenue will almost match advertising revenue by 2018. In 2013, while circulation revenue rose globally after years of decline, advertising revenue continued to fall. Circulation’s share of total revenue will rise from 47% in 2013 to 49% by 2018, meaning consumers may soon become publishers’ biggest source of revenue.

    PwC’s view is consistent with the advertising trends flagged by Mary Meeker in her State Of The Internet report last week and, if the forecasts are correct, it will show the magazine and newspaper industries are making the transition to a new business model.

    One of the strange points in the PwC report is the talk of ‘Digital First’.

    ‘Digital-first’ is becoming the norm for newspaper publishers. For many years, news publishers’ digital output was led by their print products. But increasingly, titles will be reorganised as ‘digital-first’ operations, publishing content that works best on connected devices.

    This is true, but newspaper managements have been proclaiming their ‘Digital First’ strategies for close to a decade; any media company that doesn’t put its digital channels first is doomed to extinction anyway.

    Which is one of the important points of the PwC survey; it’s about the global industry and while that might be flat-lining, individual outlets will still fail. That’s something which concentrate the minds of those managing some of the more poorly run media empires.

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  • Keep it short and snappy

    Keep it short and snappy

    “Charts are our version of cat videos” says Kevin Delaney, co-founder of the Quartz news website, in an interview with Richard Edelman, president and CEO of the Edelman PR Agency.

    Keep stories short and snappy or long and in-depth with Delany seeing 500 to 800 words as being a ‘dead zone’ for online stories. Interestingly, Edelman’s piece comes in at 760 words.

    In future, I’ll be keeping blog posts either very short or extremely long on this site.

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