psmith, journalist

BBC’s Helen Boaden.”The BBC’s 45 [regional] websites are devoted to big cities and counties… In contrast, the Newspaper Society says there are 1,500 local newspaper websites. Some of which are local, some are hyper-local. The BBC is not competing for audience in the same space.”

Rory points out the yesteryear print-is-king quotes in a PPA press release, .e.g: “Barry is an out-and-out print man. He has print running through his veins. I can’t imagine a better ambassador.” Erm, what about online?

Bit depressing when free labour is the only route to the job you want. And what about people that can’t afford to be without an income? Middle class jobs for middle class kids.

Problems at Google?! Ahem, i think this is the key data point: “Total revenue at Google, the world’s No. 1 search engine, rose 17 percent to $6.67 billion.”

I agree with Dom – it’s madness to think the ad market will sustain the same level of public service reporting. The Tories need to re-think this – unless they want to see fewer reporters and less scrutiny. Hang on…

Any doubts mobile can make money? eBay makes $600m a year from mobile.

So if ads are falling, put more effort into the Metro music festival. People like music, but advertisers don’t like newspapers.

“Another example, such as the one Abacus recently developed for Building and Property Week, might see the user’s level of ‘free’ access being metered to a certain number of transactions in a month before they are required to sign up for a product…” Interesting…

… and it will have a bespoke toaster, a geigocounter, a rabbit hutch, digital earmuffs, a drive-through chemist and free News Saviour lotion, to be liberally applied to all failing business models.

The Twitter API only allows this service to collate up to 3,200 updates. I’ve got well past 6,000 so what happens to all those early updates? Lost forever?

Chris from PA tells it like it is in the comments

“He is also a political columnist for the News of the World and political editor of The Business”, which shut down a year ago.

paidContent:UK reads massive reports, so you don’t have to: “2009 digital sales hit $4.2 billion, or 27 percent of industry revenue – up from £20 million and a negligible share in 2003 – according to IFPI’s Digital Music Report 2010.”

QOTD from Kev: “I find it a bit rich that media monopolies are railing against Google. Monopolists trying to use the law and courts to defend their position against a rising monopolist should be the plot for a farce. Why don’t we create a web television series?”

What a great idea — see the sidebar to take part! Here’s Suw’s description of Kerchingle: “…users decide on a maximum monthly donation, currently set at $5 (£3.50). When they see something they like, they simply click on the Kachingle “medallion” to initiate a donation. Kachingle tracks their reading habits, tots up how many times they visit each favoured site and divvies up the money proportionally at the end of the month.”

A not entirely impartial FT columnist writes: “The point that link economy enthusiasts miss, I think, is that the trade-off between subscription and advertising is not a zero-sum game. Rates for online display ads have been falling steadily as competition has proliferated, with most sites now finding it hard to get more than $4 per 1,000 impressions on their pages (or $14m for the 3.5bn hits on all US newspaper sites monthly).”

Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien: “I have a problem when people in the industry say ‘it’s killing the industry, it’s the thing that’s ripping us apart’. I don’t actually believe it is … (Pirates) might not buy an album, but they’re spending their money buying concert tickets, a t-shirt, whatever.”

It’s won’t be majoratively ad-funded in the near future, so there has to be some kind of solution…