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The Demise Of The Net Magazine
The virtual extinction of the online magazine is upon us. Slate exists primarily as a massively-subsidized bulletin board for narcissistic Washington and New York publishing and media people -- it wouldn't last an hour without Microsoft's cash. Word folded last year and Salon is in almost continuous decline, struggling to stay afloat by doing something it really, really, didn't want to do -- charging subscribers for some of its content. Earlier this year, the floundering, media-centric, super-hyped Inside.com was swallowed up by Stephen Brill's Contentville.
One of the persistent myths about the Net has been that because it costs so little to publish online, and the technology makes it so simple, diversity can flourish in cyberspace no matter how big "Big" media gets. As we're learning, that isn't so. The history of media, especially of the large corporatized media of modern times, is that individuals, small groups, and people with some common interests can spout off to their heart's content on their own websites, pages, mailing lists, and in chat rooms, just as they once did in pamphlets and on posters. But independent, distinctive and varied media entities find it just as difficult to compete with conglomerates online as off.
This creates an odd new reality for media online. Individual voices have never been freer, more numerous or outspoken -- witness the rise of instant messaging and inward-looking p2p forums. But they've also never been more marginalized or insignificant.
What happened to the traditional media -- acquisition by conglomerates that offer diverse services which happen to include tepid and homogenized content -- is happening in cyberspace, too.
As Feed and Suck, two of the smarter, more attitudinal publications of the Net's first generation, vanish, they will not be replaced by similar kinds of publications. The difficulties of competing for staff, services and content with Big Media have become dauntingly obvious. AOL Time-Warner is now the largest media company in the world, with revenues of $36.2 billion. Disney is second, at $25.8 billion, followed by Viacom ($20 billion), Vivendi Universal ($17.7 billion), Bertelsmann ($15.7), News Corporation ($14.2 billion) and Sony ($10 billion). Feed and/or Suck could each have gone a decade on one day's petty cash from any of these companies.
Against these behemoths Feed and Suck had a combined editorial staff of between four and eight people, according to the New York Times, and the publications had no marketing budgets with which to reach beyond their small, and generally, elitist, readerships. Nor did they have enough of a sales force to generate additional revenue. They couldn't drawn enough subscribers, or raise even a small amount of money. That's a pretty chilling bit of media truth.
AOL Time Warner has Wall Street investors drooling over its new "all you can eat" Net access strategy. It's now a company that can deliver to its subscribers nearly every form of media content -- magazines, movies, web sites -- via every form of delivery -- including print, Net, wireless, digital, cable and phone. Sure, countless grown-ups and adolescents can still spout off on its mailing lists and public discussion forums. But individualistic sites like Feed, Suck and Salon can't deliver in all those different modes, can't offer large numbers of consumers the same range of services. They can't give you all you can eat, or even that big a meal.
This is a danger that much of the hacker universe has missed from the beginning. The problem isn't that cops will show up at your doors, and close down our sites and shut us up. Why should they bother? The real threat is that companies like AOL Time Warner and media outlets like MSN are already marginalizing, then eliminating lesser competitors by offering vast amounts of content and service to middle-class consumers at relatively low cost. Idiosyncratic Net voices get stilled by economics: they're forced into positions where they can't function independently or competitively. And a lot is going to be lost - like diversity of opinion. AOL Time Warner's idea of fierce civic discussion is a spokesman for the left, and one from the right, screaming at each other.
Salonhas for years provided some of the smartest coverage of technology anywhere. None of the big media companies offer smart and smart-ass commentary the way Suckonce did. What's the last provocative story or discussion you saw in a Disney or AOL Time Warner property or on AOL?
In an only-recently different world, Time's reporters would be keeping an eye on companies like AOL. Now, Time itself is one of the behemoth's smallest and least significant properties. What's the last story you read there?
"This has got to be some type of conservative plot to restrict free-thinking attitudes," Plastic contributor Star Freed wrote in the site's chat area earlier this week. "I'm sure of it." But he's flattering himself. In the Corporate Republic formerly known as the United States, neither liberals nor conservatives need a plot to wipe out a small magazine website. Big Media will do it for them.
Weblogs and blogs can be vibrant and fascinating. So can mailing lists and me-to-me-media media entities. But they don't reach significant numbers of people; the don't have significant influence; they don't offer any real bulkwark against the AOL-ing of the Net. Nor are they a substitute for truly free-wheeling, idiosyncratic media outlets.
These defunct sites aren't blameless. While Feed and Suck offered interesting original and provocative reading, they never quite embraced the power of interactivity. They never really gave readers a role in agenda-setting, and they clung too long to old, top-down media sensibilities. Salon has never quite shaken the feeling that it's at heart a newspaper/print magazine grafted onto the Web.
For all that, these online magazines were and are interesting and important. Disney, AOL and Sony are, at their core, entertainment entities, not journalistic ones. They aren't interested in free speech or outspoken opinion that might offend potential consumers or spook advertisers and stockholders; they function according to the principle of mass-marketing, not hell-raising or intellectual exploration.
The corporatization of media ought to be a hot political issue, but who's going to raise it? AOL? The members of congress whose campaigns are funded by large corporations? The public has little consciousness that its media have been taken over by conglomerates.
The process that has essentially homogenized the popular press and made it irrelevant to anybody under 50 is spreading online, unopposed by regulators or by the Netizens who ought to be up in arms about the creation of a monstrous entity like AOL Time-Warner.
The demise of Suck truly sucks.
It would seem as if people value the content of media itself very little. What they are looking for is the community around the media. Consuming mainstream media makes you part of the mainstream, it makes you feel like you belong to something large and popular. This is why people are happy to spend $9 to see "Pearl Harbor". It is $9 spent on being part of the community and feeling like you belong. $1 spent on Salon or Suck is a waste of money because it only provides you with ideas and thoughts which are condradictory to the mainstream ideal, and are therefore don't satisfy people's need to belong. Additionally, economies of scale make it impossible for a small magazine (even a web magazine) to compete with a multi-industry conglomerate, even if they both made the same amount from subscription fees.
Web media sites fail because no one wants to pay for content. People go to sites every week, week in and week out, but refuse to pay fees equivalent to a weekly magazine or Sunday paper. They visit some sites every day, day in and day out, and then sniff that the content has little value to them, that it isn't worth thier money. (these are often the same people who in other contexts, will smugly tout the superiority of "New Media", it's ability to get the latest news to them faster than dinosaur print and co-opted mega-media tie-in sites) They visit a site several times a day, every day, and then scoff that the content the site gives them they can easily find on a dozen other places, and they still refuse to pay, not that site, and not any of the other dozen sites they contemptuously claim they can alternatively get thier info from. They will log into thier favorite chatrooms and messageboards, and bemoan the death of the latest website, and snarkily blame bad management, or a bad economy, or stupid people who don't "get it". They will champion thier particular version of web business sucess, wherein if only the company advertised more, or less or differently, or not at all or asked for donations, or micropayments or barter they would have survived. Because of course, if the costs had been, oh..a dollar a year, they would have paid. Or two dollars. Or five cents an article. Or .001362833 cents a click. Or whatever mythical number (hovering conveniently below whatever number the site ever, ever tried to float to users, only to be scorned and spurned) they claim would have been efficient enough and fair enough and worth enough to them to pay.
Stuff. Costs. Money.
Salaries. Bandwidth. Hardware. It all costs.
People. Don't. Pay.
Not ever. They will hack, crack, webwash, block, re-route, anonymize, copy, share, forward, ware-ize whine and bitch and moan and sneer and flame, but they will not pay. They will not pay, and they will not look at advertising.
And then the sites die. It's just not very mysterious.
Finally, someone else explaining how it all really work. I've been in the publishing business (on the editorial end) for about five years, and everything you say is 100% true. Ad reps are high-pressure tactic assholes who make up bullshit about viewership and readership or whatever else the advertiser wants to hear. An amazingly high rate of return on, say, direct mail flyers is something like 5% and that's considered a massively huge success rate. Another problem is the lack of targetting. Right now, no matter what website you're checking out, you see the same uselss ads for: GM, Online Gambling and that Punch the Monkey thing. God forbid if I was reading a gamestory on /. I'd see a game related ad.... Pathetic, really, considering how easy it would be to do.
On or around September 25, 1690, Benjamin Harris' newspaper "Publick Occurences both Foreign and Domestick" appeared on the streets of Boston. It is generally considered to have been the first newspaper in America. However, its first issue was also its only issue. Shortly after its demise, it was clear that this new media model wouldn't work, and everybody just went back to talking to each other in person, and sharing stories in the local saloon and re-circulating old wives tales. The End. At least, that's how some people seem to think history works. For the love of god, people, there will be another Suck! There will be another Salon! There will be many, many, many more webzines! Only they'll have SOME idea of how to generate revenue. Some of those ideas won't work. Those webzines will die. Some ideas will work, those 'zines will thrive and grow. Does anybody else have a problem imagining this scenario??? To all those woe-begotten souls mourning the loss of Suck and Salon: How long before you move to something else? How long before you say something like "Man, I remember Suck, it was cool. Hey, wanna go see if 'X-Men 2' is on Freenet yet?" Was Suck The Best Thing You've Ever Read in Your Life? Was Salon The Only Source of Real Information on the Planet? They were largely smarmy (albeit funny) rants and there is no shortage of those on this planet. Unfortunately, both lacked TRULY ORIGINAL INFORMATION and RELEVANT FACTS: the basis for most NEWSpapers and the main reason (I suggest) anybody really reads anything IN THE LONG RUN. I love the Onion, but it ain't my homepage, and if I forget to read it, I'm not too bothered. On the other hand, I've spent weeks hunting down a new issue of The Baffler because IT MATTERS. If you're defending them strictly on the grounds of comedy, fine, but to suggest that the content on Suck or Salon matched the work of writers like Christopher Hitchens or Lewis Lapham or Tom Frank or a host of other print journalists is incredibly obtuse. Don't get me wrong: I liked those sites, really, I did. I still check Plastic every day. But I'm not about to fool myself into thinking that anybody's REALLY going to notice. Sure, there will be lots of late-night conversations about how new media is cool and those big media corporations suck, but this is hardly a cataclysm for online-anything or media-anything. They're just sites that went down. Let's not make TOO much of a big deal about it. You know how many newspapers went down after the last increase in newsprint? Well, it was lots, and nobody was decrying the business model of cutting down trees and putting ink on them. The real question here is why isn't anybody doing usability tests on what advertising works on the web? I've been checking out sites for the last five years and the greatest leap I've seen has been banner ads--an idea that looks like somebody, once, spent about five minutes on it and everybody just agreed to copy it. So far, GM, some online gambling places and that stupid Punch the Monkey ad are pretty much the only banner ads I see anywhere. God forbid that when I go to a game-related story on Slashdot I'd see an ad for a game. (uh, smirk or something) Being able to target ads is the greatest and most unused feature of auto-generated sites. Meanwhile, advertisers bemoan the lack of clickthroughs--I'd like to see them measure the clickthroughs on every print ad, billboard, TV commercial and flyer I ignore every day. The only reason anybody thinks those work is because they've succumbed to the 'post hoc ergo propter hoc' fallacy. "We spent $1 million on advertising and generated $23 million in revenue. Let's increase our advertising budget and see if we can beat that record!" Companies spend millions on advertising on TV and newspaper because they THINK it works. Because they've been lied to by the slimy, neurotic sales people I've worked with for the last five years. Perception is reality, people. Just one idea. Its not mine, I've seen other references to it, but I think it makes sense considering I now block all banner ads with Naviscope: So, you're reading Slashdot. You've got a few minutes to kill, so you're actually checking out a few stories and a few posts. However, the site is now set up so that every ten (or fifteen or twenty) links you click on (external or internal) you now have to watch a six second flash ad that takes up the entire screen. After those six seconds, it takes you too the link you clicked and you don't see another ad until another ten (or fifteen or twenty) links. However. If you pay Slashdot $9.99/year, you don't have to watch any of the ads. I'm not actually suggesting those numbers and figures as an actual model, so don't start picking the goddamn thing apart because I'M NOT ACTUALLY SUGGESTING THOSE NUMBERS AND FIGURES AS A MODEL (sorry to be a dick, but every time I mention this, all I get is "well maybe it should be every five links," and "I think the flash ad should be ten seconds long." I'm not even suggesting this would work, all I'm suggesting is that there are OTHER WAYS of doing things. The above clearly points to a TV-oriented model as opposed to the print-oriented model. If you're business-oriented, think of your sites' "viewers" instead of its "readers." And, as a final postscript to the longest post I've ever made on the internet: I've been planning a webzine for about five months now and the news about Suck, Feed and Salon disturbed me plenty, but hasn't changed my plans one iota. I may have an advantage because I've been working in the 'Old Media' publishing field for about seven years and I know writers/artists/photographers, etc. who are my friends and willing to work for cheap (er...free) but the idea of spending 5.5 million in six months is STUPID AND INSANE. Yes there's promotion--it's called putting stickers up and visiting people online. Yes there's marketing--it's called making a big noise. Well, surprise, surprise, the old media and new media aren't so different. But, 15,000 paper copies of a 28 page, 11" X 15" newspaper was going to cost me $4,000/week to print. I'm narrowing down a host for the site that that will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $500/year to reach the same audience. Of course, it helps that my plan is not to take over the entire media world. If I get 100 readers a day, I'll be ecstatic. If I get 1,000 readers a day, I'll be delirious. If I get 2,000 readers a day, I'll be able to talk to any advertiser with the confidence that my readership now matches that of any other small magazine, and I will have exactly the same information (although, actually, a little more detailed) as the other sales people who walk in from the small print magazine/newspaper. I suggest, ladies and gentlemen, that the demise of the Net Magazine has been greatly exaggerated. bigbrownindia@yahoo.ca
JonKatz wrote:
>
> Big Media will homogenize opinion,
> marginalize you and other smaller competitors
> and make it impossible for anyone else to
> compete or grow in the emerging
> NetAOL/Disney/Sony information economy.
This will happen only if the Big Media manage to find the Internet profitable for all of their efforts.
If Big Media can't turn a profit on the Internet, they'll ditch it just as fast as advertising companies ditched banner ads.
This is the best hope for a Free Internet (TM).
This is reminiscent of one of the Big Threats (TM) of Free Software. If people can conveniently get better things for free, the old-economy paradigms just can't compete.
If enough people dedicate themselves to turning out quality content/software/services, then the Free Internet (TM) hope may be realized.
On a related note, you have probably noticed that the OpenSource/FreeSoftware "revolution" has, for the most part, conicided with an unprecedented "Internet Boom". Due to the resulting boost in the US economy, the sting has gone out of the "economic whip" for many Americans.
Many doomsayers have predicted that this would have dire consequences. People would slouch around, and do nothing but eat, sleep, and fuck. But, as you can see, there has been a renaissance of creativity, at least for those with the skills to contribute to the culture and potential of the Internet.
Instead of passive consumerism, or apathetic sloth, people with leisure have proven eager to be creative and productive. This is a refutation of the puritanical work ethic, and may lead to the liberation of human potential.
If the concentration of power and the monopolization of resources can be resisted successfully, there is hope.
--Sergey Goldgaber
If you're reading this, it means we're not marginalized yet.
I wish I hadn't just used up my last moderator point.
I think it does have to do with Media though. Especially the news and commercials. Our 30min news broadcasts have taught us to expect all of our information to come in 30sec bite-sized chunks with a visual and a talking head telling us what to think. Commercials have trained us to think in those 30sec chunks also, just reinforcing the behavior.
The internet DOES NOT HAVE such a restriction.
To some extent there's a limit to how much you can scale- if 10 million people tried to read my 'Airwindows' site tomorrow, I wouldn't be charged extra, but the site could very possibly go down under the load, something I would just have to accept. My capacity to put information out globally does not equal anybody's _obligation_ to have it stand up to such loads. If I had anything especially important for everyone in the world to know about, I could put it out as open content, and have people mirror it and distribute it in a P2P way, and that _does_ scale.
But the real point here is that by the very nature of their approach to media, the AOLs of the world are put at a disadvantage, unavoidably. They must take a middle line (or whatever is safest and can be _spun_ as a middle line- you'll find them taking a quietly ultraconservative line on corporate power, obviously!). They cannot introduce content that's too 'niche'. Most of all, they must produce revenue. Not for them the capacity to cheaply fund a small web presence out of pocket change indefinitely! Everything they do has to _pay_ them, because their operations cost so damn much.
At the same time, you have media kingpins like Clear Channel Communications (real scumbags, btw- and it was Salon that had the story...) who take the corporate media suck-fest and escalate the hostilities- who put further revenue pressure on operations like AOL/Time Warner by outflanking them and out-NASTYing them in every way. Once you begin to play the 'driving revenue, appeasing mainstream' game you're at risk of being outcompeted on those grounds by total scumbags. You can't even be a _boring_ media monolith and be safe. Evidence suggests that under laissez-faire modern capitalism you _must_ be scum, or you get beaten up and your lunch money taken away, no matter how big you are. AOL/Time Warner is in no way safe just because they are big, unless deregulation is slowed or stopped.
And all the while, on the Internet, you still are one click (or one typed-in URL, remember- one Google search? etc) away from any person's niche content- hosted at that person's expense. Sure the sites can't stand a slashdotting, but so what? The information is out there. The thing to really watch out for is not that the Salons of the world get crushed- that's a pretty big niche and there will be others if there's a need to be filled. The thing to watch out for is any mechanism that might block the individual from putting their own information out there on the network- NOT in some wildly public way, that's not a given, but just OUT THERE at all. Nobody is guaranteed attention, but the nature of the Internet would be horribly compromised if anything reduced the ability of people to just buy some cheap hosting (say, under $50 a month- comparable to buying dial-up) and have their material linkable to, one click away from anyone who saw fit to refer to it.
Because to some extent this is a value-added proposition to the AOLs of the world, but it also potentially dulls the sales message, draws attention away from AOL/Time Warner properties, is content that's not owned by AOL/Time Warner etc., plus you have people who would really prefer individuals' abilities to reach a worldwide audience to be globally restricted on grounds of content. They might be making pr0n! Or advocating gay rights! Or suggesting parody is not against the law in Korea! Or that women shouldn't wear veils in Iran! So even the ability of niche people to connect to the worldwide electronic network is resented by some- and THAT is the area to watch out for. In particular, anything suggesting that Big Media should have control over individual Internet content should raise a red flag. (I see Microsoft's 'Smart Tags' as potentially a hell of a Trojan Horse in this regard, but there could be other issues ahead too.)
Feel free to go make (for instance) a radio station, and 'compete' in the 'free market' with Clear Channel. They will murder you. They have jocks _kill_ _animals_ on-air for attention (Clear Channel aired the live killing of a boar and the station posted the bloody pictures on its website). They control live concert promotion of record companies and can and will pull a label's artists off the playlists of _hundreds_ of stations unless they cooperate and freeze you out completely.
Clear Channel is what happens when an industry is both mature and completely deregulated. Radio went totally laissez-faire during the Clinton administration through pressure from Republicans, and this is what happens. Clear Channel is working on taking over 'independent promotion', too. They are flat-out vicious. There is no 'market'. A lot of good people are now out of radio entirely because of Clear Channel taking over the whole damned industry.
IT CAN HAPPEN HERE.
When some future AOL or Microsoft or who-knows-what gets control of enough of the Internet, owning the hardware and the big web sites and the backbones, and decides it is time to announce to everybody else that they will not peer with you if you host content they don't provide, where will you be then? Where will your common market be then? The only thing stopping us from facing that is the fact that the Internet is NOT really mature, and that it is by no means unregulated. The regulation is hovering around waiting to happen- nobody's really clear on what the rules are.
If the rules turn out to be 'no rules', kiss your ability for grassroots media goodbye. Inevitably someone is going to want to MOW that grass. I ask you, if AOL/Time Warner really did have authority over enough of the internet that they could do what Clear Channel does, and if there was no regulation, what possible reason would they have for allowing ANY independent content on their internet, or allowing any unauthorised networks to peer with the Internet? It comes down to dollars and cents in the end.
I am sorry, but you are naive and painfully uninformed about analogous situations in radio and you need to grow up and learn how the big bad world really works. The only way a 'free market' _ever_ exists is within a context of rules. No rules, no market. Those rules are demonized as 'regulations', which they are, and having too many of them puts business in a straitjacket, which is unhelpful- but if you get rid of them, you kiss off any chance of a functioning market. Look at radio post-deregulation. This isn't theory. You're talking theory. I'm talking observation and analogy. I defy anyone to claim Clear Channel is a desirable outcome of a market. Christ, it is the UN-market. Clear Channel armtwists everyone they deal with and cannot be challenged or competed with. Try it and watch your revenue from record labels, advertisers, _anything_ be choked off. If you're in radio your whole environment is Clear Channel now and they will tell your advertisers whether they can advertise on your station, will tell record labels whether they can let YOU play the new releases- everything. Thank you, Clinton Administration and Republicans who got their way against the impotent wishes of the Clinton people. So much for an industry.
It CAN happen here, too.
Now, bearing this in mind, why do you behave as if 'stopping you from buying a domain name and writing good content' is a rhetorical, sarcastic aside? It's no immediate threat, but that is precisely where all this is heading. There is no reason to assume you, or I, or anyone will forever be allowed to buy a domain name for 20 bucks and write good content, even if we put up the money ourselves. This capability is not some sort of natural law, but the consequence of largely unstated rules that are being increasingly overturned, as in the radio deregulation.
I would respectfully suggest that if they CAN stop you from 'buying a domain name for 20 bucks and writing good content', it is WAY, WAY TOO LATE to worry. How can you seriously suggest such a Pollyannaish attitude? It is very akin to saying, "If you die, _then_ you can see a doctor".
As for how to realistically change the situation? I don't know. I can only do little things. For instance, writing open source dithering software to try and get some of the proprietary tools of Big Media into the hands of individuals. I did that. I upgraded the cabling and provided technical advice for a Brattleboro micro-radio station while I lived in Brattleboro.
What I do is not much. I'm completely out of my depth regarding stuff like Clear Channel. All I _can_ do is what comes to hand- for instance, I have hopes that my work will lead to pro audio software for Linux. I'm not good enough of a programmer to write C programs for Linux, so the program I wrote is in REALbasic for MacOS. I GPLed it anyway, because what if someone can make use of the algorithms and translate them? It may end up benefitting nobody but me, but I _did_ have the option of going wholly proprietary with it- high-end dithers and wordlength reducers can fetch thousands of dollars just to use them, in proprietary-land- and I couldn't accept that.
I've put effort into understanding the music side of modern media as well- not 12 hours ago, I uploaded my Evergreens analysis, which starts with inspection of the entire history of platinum albums and goes on from there to extrapolate what recent trends mean for the future of this form of media. I think that counts as my thoughts on the matter. I'm of the opinion that 'Big Media' in the sense of the RIAA is heading for a nasty fall but I _don't_ know what will replace it, I only know that it will involve levels of differentiation vastly in excess of what is possible with the traditional radio/retail sales channel, which has been getting absurdly restricted in terms of total inventory. I don't know the form this will take, or whether the record labels will have a heavy stake in it. I do know that if the labels try to sell on the Internet they way they are selling through retail, they are fooling themselves and guaranteed to fail expensively.
Again, I'm sorry for misjudging you- reading Slashdot has caused me to be awfully sensitive to freemarket chauvinism, maybe too sensitive. Just because I see some attitudes as horribly damaging doesn't mean I need to see them in every little remark, and I apologize. I vented unjustifiably at you- my beef is with the numerous people out there who swear up and down that ideology-driven, totally heedless deregulation of everything is the wonder drug to make everything be marvellous and great, and obviously I think this is cult-like insanity with lots of evidence to harshly disprove these promised benefits, but THOSE PEOPLE are the ones running things now. Hence my occasional venom- and I'm sorry to have nailed you with it and disrespected you.
Well at least Katz's prediction that Suck would either have to change or die was correct.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This is probably the first time that I don't agree with Mr. Katz mainly for his view of who and what Feed, Suck, and Salon were. First of all, they were already homogenized versions of the pamphlet. They tried to create the same Magazine business model on the net. Now I've said this time and time again. The net is/should not be about making money (unless you sell an actual product - which Amazon still can't make a dime doing.)
The net, as the Supreme Court has stated, is still free. You can say what you want when you want. But think about Suck.com. It lasted a year before it's creators sold out. Why? Well, if I was doing something I loved and not making money at it just enjoying the true freedom of the press that the net allows then when someone comes to me and gives me a bag of money for the site - I'll take the money and run because there is no real way the site will generate actual revenue in the long-term. When it was sold it should've have been renamed Suckers.com.
I read all three websites for about two months before leaving. Why? The sites were bland didn't necessarily give any real underground info into tech, or politics, or whatever. They were marginalized fairly quickly because other media were looking at them and marveling over how many people read them. They tried to copy it but really couldn't because Mass Media has to appeal to the Masses and running down the middle isn't what the net is about - that's what newspapers, magazines, and TV News is all about.
The Net is about allowing a single individual a voice to speak his/her/its mind. I predicted that most of the sites would die by 2005. Guess I was wrong - it happened way earlier. Now does that mean Big Media will take over the net. Not really because the net caters to niches and niche people won't necessarily pay for there info, or fun. And niche people can range in the thousands but a business needs a million to thrive. Also, unlike TV, ads can be and usually are ignored. Thats why ad revenue has dropped. How do you get people to click on a banner? I've always said give them money and they will come. But what company is a fool enough to give anyone who clicks their banner a buck to just that. Doesn't make sense.
And as long as the model of the net stays many to many it will stay free or Big Media. Big Media can still take part but it shouldn't be about them making money it should be about them offering themselves up for free so that maybe we'll find that product or service that we will pay for.
But it won't be a niche product or service but that's what has always been free.
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
What the ever-loving hell does the software they use on the server have to do with the failure of their business model in this case? The proof may be in the pudding, but this is a whole different flavor here. Salon is not going to die because their server gets attacked, or because their data is stored in an unreliable fashion. It's going to die eventually because of a lack of revenue or uninteresting content. The best OS or server setup in the world isn't going to save you if you're not making any money on what you're serving.
Yikes, that would be a scary situation!
Corporations do not live and die by the consumer, they live and die by profit. I have some libertarian friends I love and respect, but the idea that corporations can do bad things that can only be addressed through regulation rather than market forces is just as alien to them as the idea that market forces can bring benefit to the working class is to a diehard Marxist.
This whole "all regulation is communist" bullshit is getting real old. It's the same tired New Right rhetoric that should have been buried a long time ago. Time and again corporations have proven that given a choice between (a) fixing flaws, even lethal ones, in their products they know about and (b) doing their best to cover up the flaw and continue business as usual, they will only choose (a) if it is cheaper than (b).
We'd all like to believe that companies succeed by delivering the best product at the best price, but companies succeed by being profitable--which simply means minimizing expenses and maximizing revenue. Pleasing the consumer is one way to do that. So is reducing your competition, setting up barriers of entry to new competitors, reducing your workforce, giving lower wages and fewer benefits, and making the absolutely cheapest product you can get away with and still be accepted. In a completely unregulated market, this creates a downward spiral--your competition will maximize profit by sinking to your level.
And anyone who has actually worked in media will tell you that the increasing media concentration is leading to fewer and fewer reporters working under more and more restrictions, turning in more and more tepid, "safe" stories--investigative journalism is a dying art.
Maybe you think a society where the only consumer protections amount to "stop buying Ford Pintos if you hear people are dying in them" is just great. I don't. If the vast majority of media outlets are controlled by three or four corporations who all get major advertising revenue from Ford--and will thus increase their profit by not reporting on exploding Pintos--that society isn't improved in my book, either. (Incidentally, the real Ford Pinto story was broken by Mother Jones, one of those crazy non-corporate left wing magazines.) And your assertion that the only alternative to unchecked corporate power is state ownership is bullshit of the highest order.
Yep... and if they don't care to shut us up, what's the problem? I can find whatever I want on the web no matter how big the conglomerates get. Further, I can publish anything I want and people who know how to look can find it.
;)
Agreed. The open and free nature of the web makes it possible for anyone to have a voice. THat part isn't going away (although poorer people may get squelched a bit by the proliferation of popup ads that need to be closed before their content can be read).
But if you're gonna play the business game, you gotta make money. I guess that bothers an 'online journalist' like Katz more than it bothers me.
I'm not sure I agree here - there's a kind of "critical mass" when it comes to a web news site.
You start off on a free host provided with your ISP account - or something like Geocities - and you start to get a readership.
Eventually, the bandwidth usage of your readership becomes high enough that the free hosting just doesn't work (either your site gets too slow, or your hosting service asks you to leave, because the bandwidth your readership uses is costing them too much)
So, yo leave, get a domain, and pay for hosting. If you're lucky, you can host a server yourself - but most ISPs don't allow you to have a static IP, much less host a domain. So chances are you pay for hosting.
Once you are footing the bill for hosting, chances are, you've got metered bandwidth. Go above your ammount, and you start getting charged extra.
For a site that acquires a vast readership - that load can be a lot to bear, and many sites are starting to fold under the burden of bandwidth bills.
It's like you get punished for having a popular site - unless you can fund it.
Some sites turned to banner ads and popups - annoying, but they were supposed to pay the bills. Unfortunately, many of the ad companies didn't pay, or paid far less than they promised. Only now are sites seeing that they can't rely on banners alone.
Some sites turn to donations to pay their bills - while some can become quite successful this way - eventually, that money will dry up too.
Some sites get bought by a larger company, who then assumes the bandwidth burden, and ofen retains the site's staff - sometimes giving them a salary for their efforts. Unfortunately, the main reason companies buy things is to make money. If they can't, or don't make money off of the site, they may sell it again, lay off the staff, or let the site die. They'll throw as many banners and popups as they can get away with - sacrifice content for the sake of ads - basically do anything theycan to try to at least break even on the site. This leads good sites down a poor path, and generally isn't a very good option these days.
Some sites just fold. They get reborn, regather their readership, and suffer the same fate.
It's sad that some of the web's greatest independant media sources get squished because of bandwidth bills - while the crappy ones, or the ones that are bread-and-butter to big corporations with money to burn, live on.
You don't sound like a troll, so I'll assume you're talking about yourself & not the original.
Sure, the things Katz is pointing out are straightforward results of economics and not some evil conspiracy by "big media". But unless you're a hopeless Randian that doesn't make them good. Maybe Katz is anthropomorphising too much, but that doesn't make the issues any less important.
Ask yourself a few simple questions:
Does control of the media by a few huge corporations have a "lowest common denominator" effect on the content that's produced?
What sort of effect does this have on people, most of whom may be quite capable of thinking criticaly but don't unless goaded?
Do you want to live in a world where most people (even if not yourself) don't think or worry about anything that hasn't first been fed to them by large corporations?
For myself, the trend Katz is talking about is very worrysome. Sure, it's nothing new, but I think there's a chance we can use the net to break the cycle that's been going on for the past 50 years. So I think it's worth it to try to understand why it's going on and how we might be able to change it.
It is possible for web-based startups to succeed over traditional mass media. In India, for example, the extremely popular rediff is not controlled by the traditional newspaper houses (it came from an advertising agency, I think) and more recently, an upstart called tehelka has been making big news, mainly on corruption exposes.
What's needed is intelligent marketing, good content for a broad-spectrum audience with the occasional "scoop" to retain audience interest, and high-quality presentation. The same things as for traditional print media or TV. Nothing new here.
Wouldn't that be ironic. To preserve free thinking people will have to communicate using a mysterious black art....the printed page.
See this is the great fallacy of the net - that it would simply change the world. It didn't it won't and it never can. For if it was possible then the typewriter would have been the second or third greatest invention in the history of civilisation. Easy creation of content and easier access guarantees nothing if what you say falls on deaf ears or people are too busy getting their poles greased to pay attention.
Take a look at a mass media site like ABC News. The average article takes less than a minute to fully read at a 6th grade level. The front page is a testament to ADHD, the visual equivalent to Tourette's Syndrome. And be clear the most significant way to write pithy yet short focused articles is in response to something. If you didn't know anything about culture or politics then you would never get anything out of the one page articles that are the the genius of Lewis Lapham. Which is context you really don't need when you read the latest news cum stain on USAToday that correlates astrology with the weather.
So in the end it will be harcopy that survives and the ephemera of the web will be used to bolster television but not exist independently of it.
The site you refer to prides itself on "hardhitting" "nobullshit" Bill O'Reilly in- your-face I-dare-you-to-differ-with-me news all served up on a platter for people who can't distinguish or don't want to, editorial from news. Apart from the political slant which you nailed squarely. Else The Nation would be the hottest website in the world. Which its not because like it or not, sites like The Nation require the reader to think whereas The Free Republic merely requires the reader to have an opinion and type.
BTW two of the biggest columnists @ Salon are David Horowitz and Camille Paglia neither of which are very far to the left of Ghengis Khan.
"New Media" is the term that people (dare I say like yourself) came up with to describe the Internet. They did this because they were initially unable to comprehend the aspects of it that were not directly analagous to their world. There are a range of totally wrong implications to the term, which have not been borne out in practice. For example, that having an "online magazine" was a reasonable thing to do.
Calling it "New Media" is about as accurate as calling it "New Bookstore" or "New Pornhouse."
Sig. Heil!
Hey, and people thought I was paranoid!!
I don't believe for a moment that the failure of online magazines is the fault of the big monopolies and existing media providers.
For a start, the existing media providers all set up with the model that to produce an expensive distribution (I.e. magazines, tv shows, movies etc) they had to sort out a means whereby they could make enough money from it to enable them to make the next one, and pay the staff for their time.
A lot of online magazines simply didn't do this, and relied on revenue streams of banner ads, if that, to pay their bandwidth and staff bills.
With the proliferation of banner ads (they're far cheaper than magazine ads), eventually, their revenue won't keep up with costs.. Thus the company goes out of business.
This problem has been afflicting many suberb publications since time immemorial in many different media...
I happen to work for an online publication (a very sizable sports information site), in which the management, to gain extra revenue, contract out the skills of the staff to implement projects for other companies who don't have the necessary skills/resources to achieve this.
Lo and behold, the company is still going strong, and with a decent revenue stream, capitalising on the skills it has.
Why blame the big guys, just because the little guys didn't quite get it right?
It's sad, but it happens.
It's a money driven world in the net these days, and to stay in the game, you need to pay your distributors (ISPs instead of printers) and staff, just like all the other businesses in there..
Perhaps many of us techs suffer from the arrogance that just because we operate in an advanced and new media, we're exempt from all the practices that have preceeded for hundreds of years..
Malk
Well, that's a problem that has been pretty well solved outside the clickedy-colourful world of commercial web sites. People set up mirrors all around the world for all kinds of stuff, and so everyone gets to take a share of the bandwidth costs. The problem I see with this is that Internet bandwidth is getting more and more asynchronous (ever since the 56k modem, upstream has been sacrificed for faster downstream, with ISDN being the notable exception), and so individuals will have trouble keeping up a usable link when DSL users hammer their site. But that's a completely different rant :)
So, if you're worried about bandwidth cost, find a good incentive and let people do your hosting, akamai-Style :)
--
It's a shame the links in IS KATZ ON CRACK? are broken. Does anyone know what they pointed to?
--
What was once a joke on Saturday Night Live (*Coke is it*) may actually work in the (*Chevy Trucks. Like a Rock.*) cyberspace world (*Spice Girls Reunion Tour -- Coming Soon!*).
Where's Mr. Subliminal (*Nike. Just do it.*) when we need him? He was one of the (*Wasssup!! Bud Lite*) least effective on television (*Read Slashdot!*), but his ideas (*Watch Shrek!*) may appeal in cyberspace where (*Disney's Atlantis -- Opening Tomorrow!*) banner ads have been met with both (*Tojans mean never having to say 'I'm Sorry!'*) open hostility and ridicule.
Somehow, we must (*Salon.com -- only $30/year*) find a new way to finance (*Vote Republican in 2002, or we will send Willie Horton to your door!*) the sites that we really love to surf (*Summer sale at Macy's: up to 20% off!*) or we will find many more of these well-written, but (*Carl Hiassen's new book: Sick Puppy! Now in paperback!*) underfunded sites go down just like (*Isuzu welcomes back Joe Isuzu! Buy a truck from us!*) Salon, Slate, Suck, and (*New York Times. We have the fnords!*) Feed.
--
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
No, I don't think the libertarian audience really is that big.
Oh, you mean conservatives? Those bastions of "fact" that in some cases rely on Rush Limbaugh for "news", when he's repeatedly been caught in flagrant opposition to the facts (and waves such things away since he's only entertainment after all)?
Sorry, but everyone, right left and center, tends to gravitate towards views of the news that reinforce their own world view, and so towards anything that is "sanitized" in the direction that they want to hear. It's human nature. To claim that liberals are all for censored news, but the freedom loving (ha!) conservatives want everything to be told is to ignore all kinds of conservative whitewash.
people who want the honest truth about the socialist and homosexual communities
You want the honest truth about "the homosexual community"? Here it is: gay people want to be allowed to express themselves and love whoever it is they love without fearing that their jobs, their homes, and their lives may be taken from them by people who are afraid of them because they are different. Just like the italian community, the puerto rican community, the asian community, and every damn other community in this country.
Unfortunately, some people who have to have a "them" to be against have to invent moronic evil agendas that bear only fleeting resemblance to reality so they can feel justified in having no sympathy when those they fear "get what they deserve." "But we weren't really advocating violence against them." As Dogbert says: "Bah!"
With this statement you've demonstrated exactly how "objective" the news you consume is--no more than that on Salon etc., just better targeted at the prejudices of the majority.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
With conservatives running the show in Washington, the country is beginning to gravitate back towards its moral roots.
Those puritan roots are what you're talking about? Never mind the convicts and other criminals that also helped establish the colonies...
And of course, this trend toward our puritan roots is why rude rap songs about sex, teenaged slut pop and online pr0n are doing so well....>coff<.
The fact is, Suck & Feed had little to nothing with being "mouthpieces for the liberal left", and inasmuch as Salon & Slate do, their failures have nothing to do their ideology and everything to do with the fact that banner ads just don't support a website unless they're porn ads.
How about another web magazine that somewhat disproves Jon Katz's poorly thought out premise? Nerve! They seem to be doing well, they're definitely not conservative, and their main selling point seems to be that they are just respectable enough to not be dismissed as pr0n while still appealing enough to that same part of people to be successful.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I think there is a lot of truth in your post, with the major point being objection to the content.
While salon.com has some articles of interest, they usually just lean "left" most of the time (whatever that means), and offer little intelligent articles explaining the "other side".
As a non-extremist, I'd like to see different views, not propaganda. To me salon.com is just as absurd as it's opposite twin newsmax.com, why a person would trust "investigative" journalism from sites with political agendas will always escape me.
- sigs are for wimps.
Jon, I believe that you forgot a key factor that not only deals with the workings of the online world, but also the rest of society. This factor can best be described by Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress with TANSTAAFL or there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. In order to survive online, the bills must be paid somehow, and drastic times call for drastic measures sometimes. Just look at this site, which started out as an independent work, but had to merge with Andover.net in order to not just survive, but also grow.
The only way I can see us, as a society, move away from this factor and into something where we only rely on the ideas of others is to do away with greed by taking Rodenberry's approach and remove money altogether. Another side affect is that this would do away with the giant coglomerate corporations that serve little, if any, purpose now.
I think other people in this discussion have hit the nail on the head when they said it's not about content or dissenting opinions, it's about ad revenue dwindling and vanishing. Look at Keenspot and Sluggy Freelance, both of which have instituted "if you pay us, you'll be supporting our site(s) and you won't have to see banner ads" programs. Look at Themestream, which went belly-up, and TheVines, which looks like it's also headed for extinction. Look at all the free ISPs that have either vanished or consolidated and cut way back on the services they offer. Banner ads just don't work.
There definitely does need to be a new model for websites to earn revenue. The problem is, nobody's really sure just what it is yet. Tipping might work, but only if the tipper is willing to subscribe to the payment service used by the tippee. Micropayments sound good, but there are a whole bunch of hurdles in the way, and there's no more venture capital to develop such a system.
Whatever happens, it seems like ad banners are rapidly becoming so ineffective now that having them at all is tantamount to a superstitious gesture, like crossing your fingers or putting a horseshoe up over the door--it makes you feel better, but doesn't actually do anything.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
The big lie of wireless web is that we need new technology. We just need all the graphic intensive multicolum web designers to be sent into space. Lynx was a god send; frames capable Netscape the devil's work. (look who bought them. ;-)
Grey (Chris Lusena)
So, Katz, how were you so much smarter than the Great Unwashed Masses and able to overcome the Big Media brainwashing in the Corporate Republic?
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Calling these countries "market economies" is like calling Microsoft "innovative;" it takes an awful perversion of the meaning of the word to get to that conclusion.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Where in the hell did you pull this from? Rush?
Look around you, dude. Net sites are failing left and right and it has nothing to do with people "loosing interest in liberalism". It has everything to do with not making money! Ever been to Fucked Company? Read over just 10 of the FCs - they are mostly stupid ideas in the first place, such as the ever popular breakfastcereal.com - the breakfast cereal portal! Imagine, if you will, Yahoo! with nothing but breakfast cereal. Like I am going to make THAT my home page. And the guy who started that winner of an idea got VC for it.
This has nothing, zero, zilch, to do with us having an idiot president getting his marching orders from the religious right and big business. These sites are failing for a reason: they are poorly run from the outset, have burned through all their VC by buying Aeron chairs for everyone and their dog, and then are left wondering why nobody clicks on the banner ads.
In a way, I'm not really all that sad about the demise of Suck. I was a regular reader of the site from its inception, and one of the key points of the Suck philosophy back then was this: know when to cash in. Nothing on the internet lasts forever, so make the best of it when you can. The fact that they were saying this in 1995-1996 is proof of their insight and wisdom. The guys who started Suck made quite a name for themselves, and I'm sure they'll have little problem keeping gainfully employed for the rest of their careers. More power to them.
On the other hand, I do want to see high quality independent journalism and commentary survive on the net - I think that independent/grassroots journalism is one of the greatest things to come out of the internet, and I want to see it survive and propogate. But I don't have any answers as to how to pay for all the bandwidth that a popular site involves -- with any luck, bandwidth will become less of an issue in time, and this will make it easier for people to self-publish in any kind of significant way.
Lev, you are *so close* to the right answer. I run a little-city entertainment guide. One of the most popular pages on our site is a listing of local bands. I am writing some PHP code that: a) will expand each listing into a micro-site, where bands could create added value with pay-to-play pictures, lyrics, etc. (thus enhancing *my* revenue stream) nestled within my site; b) enable each band to sell MP3s through their site; c) have advertisements on the entertainment guide from the bands (more revenue for me), and d) have those MP3s randomly chosen to go streaming out over an automated internet radio station, which will also display that band's ad (linked of course back to their micro-site) while the song is playing. See? It's not just *big* business that has to advertise, it's *everybody* who has something to sell. It's the synergistic code that ties it all together that triggers the network effect!
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Am I the only one who sees these companies who's goal seems to be "to take on the big boys" as silly?
Before the rush of companies clamoring over each other to be the biggest best site for whatever audience they were trying to reach, small companies used to succeed. Frequently even.
What they did not do is immediately try to challenge "AOL/Disney/Sony". Heck, /. is a great example of this. Rob didn't set up shop intending to try and take on ZDnet for title of "King Shit of geek news reporting".
If you start small with a small audience and grow, you're much more likely to succeed, at least IMNSHO.
--
Give a man a match, you keep him warm for an evening.
Give a man a match, you keep him warm for an evening.
Light him on fire, he's warm for the rest of his life
Maybe the net magazines that Katz reads are faltering, but WorldNetDaily is doing great. The problem with Suck and Feed is that they were just more of the same old media monoculture, recycling the same old worldviews and biases of the Old Media. WorldNetDaily, on the other hand, has been
- reviving investigative journalism,
- covering many stories the "mainstream" media
won't cover,
- providing an alternative voice that has long
been missing in the Establishment media, and
- delivering more genuine political and
idealogical diversity in its columnists than
any Old Media publication.
How relevant is WorldNetDaily? It cost Al Gore the election! Its series of articles investigating law-enforcement corruption in Tennessee, and Gore's connections to the same, were widely reprinted and discussed in Tennessee, causing Gore to lose his own home state.
If people find content worth it - they'll pay.
And if they can't find it? If say, some big website/isp/cable company decides that no "competitor" can advertise on any of their channels (or mags, or sites, etc)? And then you get two other companies to decide the same thing, and all of a sudden there's no real way to tell the whole world about the best site on the Net (i.e. the one you want to advertise). This is the media spectrum we face today. Getting outside of the walled garden is a bitch, and with incredibly restrictive copyright laws, it'll stay that way and make sure all the old, classic content stays wrapped up tighter than a properly administered *BSD server.
--
+&x
You are comparing apples and oranges. A click through requires far less effort and interest than a visit to a car dealer or or even calling someone. Which translates into far lower follow through rates. Also, with bingo cards, phone calls..., the company gets address information that they can use to follow up. With click-throughs, you don't. Unless they fill out some kind of information request form. And furthermore, click-through rates have come WAY down over the last couple of years and simply don't justify the prices most of the websites asked for. If a $10,000 ad in a major magazine gets you exposure to 100,000-300,000 people and you get a 1% response rate, you are infinitly better off than if you pay $5,000 for 10 CPM at some obscure web site and see no firm opportunities spring up.
One of the persistent myths about the Net has been that because it costs so little to publish online, and the technology makes it so simple, diversity can flourish in cyberspace no matter how big "Big" media gets. As we're learning, that isn't so.
How is this a myth? This statement is absolutely true. It's never been cheaper to set up a website online. Many, many hosting companies offer web-serving, email, dns delegation, gigabytes in monthly traffic, and access to back-end technologies such PHP and ASP for under $20 a month. This kind of affordability just doesn't exist in any other form of media.
Suck was set up in the spare time of a couple of Hotwired employees - it quickly become an icon of intelligent/satirical commentary on the web. It was a success. Once they tried to to operate the site as a business it was then matter of waiting for the money to run out - but I for one certainly wouldn't be pointing fingers at big media in looking for the reason for their downfall.
Somewhere along the line large numbers of people stopped seeing the web as a cheap and effective place to publish original commentary or to host free-flowing discussion groups. Instead, they began eyeballing the bank balances of the ever-increasing numbers of geek-millionaires and looking to get a little of that action for themselves.
Katz, diversity can and does flourish in 'cyberspace', it just doesn't necessarily turn a profit doing so. That's all you seem to be saying.
--
--
Rare Window - free your photos
an intelligent person reads opposing viewpoints.
so even if (and i'm doubtful) most people are conservatives right now, intelligent ones would still read well written liberal/left-wing articles (and vice versa.)
however, the key thing is that these sites all suck (no pun intended.)
their articles are rarely even entertaining, let alone informative or thought-provoking. consequently, nobody bothers reading them.
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
Yes, there are many other factors. Please go read "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", and think about the parallels.
It seems to be universal, when a country rises to power, it's citizens become soft. They don't want to work or think, and you end up with "Bread and Circuses". You soon end up with the downfall of that country, and another becomes the world leader.
If the citizens of the old power are lucky, the fall is smooth, and they get to sit back in their country's old age, and enjoy life at a slower pace. If they are unlucky, the new power isn't so nice, and a lot of people die
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Nothing new here. It is a new way of funneling the lemmmings, errr, public down another chute to the trough. The public has been so ingrained on 'brand names' that something not a brand name is not where they will go. The majority of the public is not cynical enough with the big media corporations to want to go elsewhere.
I am guilty of it too. I hit CNN a couple of times a day, in spite of other sources being available.
I should mention that I am refering to the situation from a strictly US attitude. I do not know how the situation is in other parts of the globe.
Most of the people on /. seem to want to see Linux succeed in the business world. If they go, this will be a blow to the "Linux is good for your bottom line" reasoning that we try to push so heavily. They run Apache/mod_perl ferchrissakes! They're the good guys. If they go under I can't help but believe that this will be a blow to Linux advocates, because, after all, the proof is in the pudding.
Check this for more.
- Rev.Has told me that voluntary support has been disappointingly low. Oh well. I hope folks will feel differently about music, etc. but it might take lots of education -- at least more than I'd hoped.
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
(at least in Salon's case) is that they refuse to even consider alternate ways of getting paid. Needless to say, I'm not going to be nearly as sympathetic as Mr. Katz if/when they die but they don't even bother to ask for tips...
:)
Synopsis of e-mail conversation (not direct quotes) is below...
Salon: "We're losing money on this banner-ad thingy, so now we want $30!"
Me: "Maybe Salon shouldn't lock people into a $30 relationship for wanting to read ONE article, when reading one article can easily be paid-for with e-gold."
Salon: "Sorry, we don't want to think about that right now."
(Who knows? Maybe when Salon runs ALL THE WAY out of money they'll try something new?)
JMR
Speaking once-again only for myself -- nobody else around here is quite this annoying!
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
The web is a better way of publishing zines. Zines and small publications are the way tastes outside the mainstream are solidified and built. Trends outside the mainstream are what drive the mainstream, which then pukes out tons of shoddy, pale imitations. Every now and then someone surfs the wave up and produces something truly amazing on the mainstream level.
What sucks is that the infrastructure and costs for subscription stuff is still expensive, difficult, and/or time-consuming, and subcription content is a hard sell until people understand how to sell it as "insider" community. You can't do that with 100 employees on staff, and you won't, ever.
There are plenty of us who realize that the Net is the future of underground COMMUNITY, and appreciate that for what it is. If a few of us make careers out of it, great. I don't see the immediate need for something on the order of major movie studios to come out of the way the 'net is changing our consumption and production of culture.
Many to many is SUPPOSED to create fewer blockbusters that everyone sees and more small content. All the pissing and moaning about content on the web is silly when you realize that it basically amounts to the breathless expectation that content will be produced "peer to peer" and then disappointment when that turns out to be true.
Fine with me, though I'm still certain that the bell hasn't even rung to START round 1 yet, so there's a lot of time to see what happens and what new empires arise. Suckdot was hilarious.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
There are any number of independent Web magazines still producing valuable daily content. Pigdog Journal is one. Others can be found at, say, the Webzine 2001 site. Indymedia is another great resource.
Zines, of course, don't have the reach or breadth of a well-funded media company. This is a feature, not a bug. By focusing on particular issues, and by giving a particular point of view, zines as a whole are able to give a more truthful and deep view of the world than the watered-down mutterings of any given mass media publication.
Not to be too harsh, but suck and feed were fairly light and fluffy as far as magazines go. Suck published a single article each day. Feed maybe got one out a day, maybe. This is not the foundation of a healthy independent media, folks. Really, in the big picture, they won't be missed.
Finding, using, and reading zines is harder for the average person than getting spoon-fed conglomerate media baloney. But those who think that media diversity is important should take the time to focus on, and support, independent publishers, rather than decrying their insignificance.
Evan Prodromou | evan@prodromou.name | http://evan.prodromou.name/
Many off-line publications are supported largely or solely by donations from concerned listeners/viewers/readers. For example, public radio, public television, etc. There's no complicated subscription process, nor are their intrusive and unproductive ads. (Some paper magazines, like The Nation, combine a subscription model with donation support.)
Those who value independent Web publications should maybe think about changing the way that these publications exist, rather than considering it a question of market economics. Sure, surviving as a business is one way to keep a magazine up, but there are others. And really, isn't media too important to be left in the hands of professionals?
Evan Prodromou | evan@prodromou.name | http://evan.prodromou.name/
Zeldman of zeldman.com wrote an article about this:
http://www.pdn-pix.com/pix/column/ Now has never been a better time to start an independent creative project on the Internet. C'mon, the Internet was never meant to be a damn strip mall next to a porno theater. Let's turn it into the Louvre museum next to the Library of Congress!
Yep... and if they don't care to shut us up, what's the problem? I can find whatever I want on the web no matter how big the conglomerates get. Further, I can publish anything I want and people who know how to look can find it.
;)
But if you're gonna play the business game, you gotta make money. I guess that bothers an 'online journalist' like Katz more than it bothers me.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
OK, this time you made it 944 words without using the term "Corporate Republic". C'mon, Jon -- a few brain workouts, a few pep talks, and you can make it to 1000. I believe in you!
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Last I heard a lot of "big media" companies from CNN to the NY Times was laying off online staff and rethinking their commitments to the medium. Doesn't get much bigger than Time-Warner.
Instead of focusing on substantive problems like an acceptable model for compensation for providing content (which EVERYONE from huge conglomerate to one-man shops seem to be struggling with), we get another lament on a contrived theme.
The author of the book was highly biased, having been fired by IBM.
The title of the article was inflamitory, to put it nicely.
The whole spin towards "war is good for profits".
A lack of perspective about all of WW II.
Revisionism.
And finally, and quietly, the lawsuit that was filed against IBM (a PR stunt if there ever was one) was withdrawn.
Does 'journalism' that is that badly screwed up need to continue to see the light of day?
It's too bad Katz didn't just say, "most magazines fail and these two fit that mold". Instead there must be grand, over-arching understanding of 'phases of the net'.
NOT
Suck sucked. Get over it.
-- Multics.
P.S. Salon sucks too. What insanity is it to post things like "the us spies too much". Flawed analysis will get you closed faster than anything but missing advertisement dollars.
watch out katz. as the last sane voice in this electronic wilderness, it is up to you to lead us out from under the oppression of Big Media. I can only hope that they don't stop you first...
...shyeah.
The real threat is that companies like AOL Time Warner and media outlets like MSN are already marginalizing, then eliminating lesser competitors by offering vast amounts of content and service to middle-class consumers at relatively low cost.
Yeah, nobody saw that coming.
In the 1910s there were over 100 automobile companies in the United States. Now there are two.
The concept of a new industry spawning off lots of little fish, and then ending up with just a few big fish isn't exactly a revalation. Even in the computer industry, both hardware (how many different platforms were there in the early 80's?) and software (Ashton-Tate. Remember them? How about Digital Research. Foxpro. Lotus... the list goes on).
I'm waiting for the end of the "end of the net [whatever]" articles.
but what is the difference between a highly specific website tailored to the "elite" and a print magazine which does the same? Print media has the advantage of charging per-issue AND has advertising revenue. And yet, magazines still fold.
The reason is simple. Magazines and Netzines serve a purpose and a constituency. If their market for whatever reason decides not to support it, then obviously it will have to close up shop. I can't expect a publication tailored to a small market to survive for too long with other publications with a larger one.
I believe this topic was previously discussed /., but no real solution arrived at.
I personally think that an ad-serving system should be developed in the open source community that would facilitate easy ad sales/link exchanges, that would be full featured enough to become somwhat of an industry standard. The Apache of ad-serving so to speak.
The existance of this "Ad-pache" would allow smaller sites to have an easier time selling ads and attracting revenue. And of course it would have to provide all the bells and whistles like time/geo targeting, etc, and possibly some of the other features not offered by anyone else (like ad feedback, etc)
With such a system in place and showing tangible results, the playing field might be leveled for the small guy.
Ñ'
I have become more and more convinced that the net is simply not a serious vehicle for business. Which is basically what those in the know were saying back in 1993/94 when the whole Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "hey kids... let's start a web shop!" hysteria began. Full circle.
So this doesnt worry me at all. Television, newspapers, magazines: We already have our gullets chock full of for-profit journalism. And guess what? it's all homogeneous and shallow crap.
If the web isnt capable of supporting for-profit journalism, so what? Independant journalism wont die. In fact, with the wanna-be-future-media-moguls out of the way, there will be room for new players with better ideas.
So goodbye, net mags. Maybe now new, more interesting models can evolve.
:M
Big Media
Big Tobacco
Big Oil
Big deal.
This column would get moderated down as a toothless, ad hominem attack -- it claims to tarnish an entity (in this case, by making the ridiculous assertion that outlets like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times conspire to Keep the Man Down) simply because they exist in the mainstream, and, therefore, are recognizable.
Mister Katz takes this argument to the epitome of lunacy, arguing that media is undergoing "corporatization" (defined as organizations associating freely, but not to Mr. Katz's taste) and that you, me, and my neighbor should care -- it "ought to be a hot political issue." In fact, one could infer that the reason why Mr. Katz's column appears not in The Washington Post but rather an online rag has much to do with a "Big Media" conspiracy to keep his opinion out of the public view.
And he does this by calling newspapers of both good and poor quality one name -- "Big Media." Say it with me now: "Big Media" controls your thoughts. "Big Media" will take over the world. "Big Media" must be stopped.
This makes a column? Sadly, yes. Quoth Katz:
The process that has essentially homogenized the popular press and made it irrelevant to anybody under 50 is spreading online, unopposed by regulators or by the Netizens who ought to be up in arms about the creation of a monstrous entity like AOL Time-Warner.
The ridiculousness of such a passage is astonishing. "Essentially homogenized?" Check out http://www.fair.org/ or the Media Research Center, both of whom strive to point out media bias, FAIR being liberal, the MRC being conservative. And they are not creatures of the web -- both were founded in the mid-1980s! Oh, and Brill's Content often runs two news articles side by side that, apparently, cover the same story, but come out w/the opposite headlines. Homogonized?
The idea that any newspaper or news station is "irrelevent to anybody under 50" is not only wrong, it shines of ignorance. C-SPAN callers come from all walks of life. CNN, FoxNews, etc. get decent if not fantastic demographics from the 25-54 age group. OpinionJournal.com, which echoes WSJ editorials, wouldn't work at all if it only appealed to AARP members. And if a doughnut was valued more than a copy of the New York Times, the commuter rail to Grand Central would be littered with crumbs, not the "House & Home" section.
But no! The notion that people may not care if media is "Big" or "monstrous" or, erroneously, "homogonized" is impossible! Why? Because, asserts Mr. Katz, things that are "Big" or "monstrous" or having to do with corporations or conglomerates or other things are ipso facto evil! Perish the thought that people may not care because they weren't reading Suck or Salon or Inside.com anyway -- out of personal preference -- and instead wished to continue reading the Chicago Tribune -- but did so via an AOL dialup.
When reality does not support your political motives, it works to call your enemies names. If anything is homogonized about media, that's what it is -- and Mr. Katz has shown that he is willing to add his name to that milk carton.
You seem to forget that all of this "New Media" can't exist without those boring Old Media venues. Slashdot is nothing without the article links. People still need to get their news from somewhere. Not everything can be an editorial. Sites like Salon.com deliver amazingly high-quality writing. Few other venues even come close to the level of skilled journalism that exists there. I like salon.com because I get the sense that the journalists really love journalism, and they really care about what they are writing. And they are excellent at expressing those things. That's something you can't find in USA Today or even the venerable Slashdot.
Try going to FreeRepublic, setting up a new account, and then voicing an opinion or two - not lies, or rants, or insults, or flamebait, just an opinion, and you can phrase it as diplomatically as you like - that lies on the political spectrum anywhere to the left of Rush Limbaugh. They'll revoke your account within the day.
Truly contemptible. Bunch of losers. And that also explains why that damn site is so boring.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Why is the price of oil so high?
The real secret is: it's not. Relative to the rest of the world, spending 2 bucks on a gallon of gas is still a pretty good deal. You're right, the oil interests do run our country, but the real evidence for this is the fact that - you ready for this? - the price of gas is so low. Exxon et al. realize that, as long as they can keep gas prices at a reasonable level, people won't put any heart into looking for alternative fuels, and the oil companies will continue to dominate the market.
Personally, I think the only explanation for this is sloth. The oil companies could just as easily put some effort into R&D and be the first ones to come out with awesome fuel cells, but they'd rather just keep selling oil 'cuz it's easier. If only the government would subsidize oil-company research instead of the price of raw oil, the country would be a much cleaner place.
Why are term limits riduculous and un-democratic?
For the record, what's so undemocratic about letting people elect whoever they want? It's true that the incumbent candidate has more name recognition and the advantage of not having TOTALLY messed up the county/state/country in his last term, but a reasonably informed populace would still base its decision on the candidate's policies for the future. So, maybe a better question is, "why do we even need term limits at all?" That seems to be a better indicator of the lack of clue among people.
Why do Iranians and Guatamalans have contempt for the US?
Now that's a good point.
---
You've got the first part absolutely right on the head. An active and informed citizenry is crucial to a free state. You are also correct in pointing out that Americans are rarely active and informed. Yes, this is a problem.
But blaming the "Corporate Republic" is an intellectual cop-out. First of all, the entire concept is a load of bullshit. You better damn well believe that if the government had any real desire to shut down Microsoft or AOL, they could. Corporations aren't more powerful than government, they only sometimes seem that way. If America were really owned lock stock and barrel by corporations then we wouldn't be seeing the load of regulatory garbage that gets passed through Congress each year.
The idea that corporations are able to shirk all responsibility is also BS. Corporations live and breathe by the market, and the market is driven by the consumer. The reasons we're seeing all this vertical integration is sure as hell not out of some kind of diabolic plan to squelch the voices of independent content producers, but because it's getting harder and harder to attract the kind of audiences that media outlets are used to. Hence AOL buying everything from ICQ to Netscape - they need to get subscribers to keep their bottom line. If you've got several million eyeballs, you can keep afloat of ads... and even then it's a crapshoot. "Big Media" isn't more powerful than ever... it's trying desperately to keep from hemorraging cash by spreading itself around. In the end, that may only make the situation worse.
Unless corporations understand market demands, they're doomed to end up pretty well fucked. Corporations have an *extreme* amount of accountability, to their shareholders, to the market, and more important to the consumers. AOL is sucessful because it caters to a large group of people and does it well. Ditto Microsoft, or almost any other major corporation.
This whole "corporate republic" bullshit is getting real old. It's the same anti-capitalist rhetoric that should have been buried a long time ago. The alternative proposed by this New Left is a socialist system where the *government* runs everything - and all you need to do is go take a little trip to a former or current Communist country to see where that would lead us. (And don't talk about Sweden like it was paradise either - they have a yearly national dept equal to 133% of their GNP. That's a burn rate that would make some dot coms flinch!)
Suck is still posting their summer "reruns" and they haven't announced anything about shutting down permanently so there is still hope. But it is interesting to note that the banner ads that they used to run in a frame at the bottom of the page have been replaced by a plug for their summer reruns. It's hard to see how they will start up again with no advertisers.
Does this
Before the internet all we could do was to print flyers, march in a public place with signs or run around naked in protest hoping some local media will show and cover the history. Now we publish a website and we get our point heared worldwide. They cannot allow that, they don't want you to run a server in your dsl line, you can use their server but following their guidelines. They want to control the content so you will only find the chewed material they want you to find.
... Am I becoming paranoid?
---
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
Thanks. I'll keep that in mind in the future.
You can point the bone at Big Media crushing the 'net zines, or you can point it at disappearing ad dollars and "big media" and other "traditional" news sources finally "getting" the web and putting out products that people want on it, the (inherently?) losing proposition subsidized by their traditional offerings.
Can you really cry for Suck and Feed dying at the same time you pooh-pooh Salon for (gasp!) trying to stay afloat? No, their content ain't what it used to be, but the age of micropayments is still far off, and smarter folks are doing what they can to stay in business.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
I don't personally anyone who actually read those sites, I work for a larget networking company and not one person here ever read them.. Its no surprised they all failed or are failing, they were'nt very interesting to read... not flamebait.. jsut the truth...
The problem is mainly the truth that advertisers may be coming to grips with: that their whole business may not be as effective as they believed.
When advertisers place ads in magazines / on TV, they try to get our attention with flashy scenes, big pages, etc. But the fact is that 99% of people ignore them. And even if they DO pay attention to the ads, the odds of the add enticing them to purchase anything are low.Until now, advertisers have had no die hard proof about how much their ads were affecting revenues. One can't monitor everyone who buys a magazine and see how many were affected by a particular ad. All you can do is make extrapolations based on the aggrigate.
But with internet ads, you can see EXACTLY how effective an ad is. If your clickthrough is low, the ad is not effective (at least that is the premise). So the revenues go down. It's that simple.
This whole way of measuring ad effectiveness is ludicrous. There are no ways to measure "clickthrough" rates for magazine ads or TV ads, so why should web sites be subject to the same thing?
Maybe this decline of the internet ad industry will cause some people depending on advertising to take a look at what they are spending so much money on, and ask if it is really effective at all, and if so, to what degree.
well yes there's more information available but if it's of considerably lesser quality then you can't really blame 'us' for ignoring it. perhaps this (necessary) "filtering" has made us a little impatient, but i'd hardly say that i skim-read slashdot because i'm looking for immediate gradification. the real fact of the matter is that most of it isn't worth reading, impatient or not.
- j
People don't "read" Slashdot. They skim it. Most people don't even really read the posts before they start writing replies, and don't even ask about clicking links to read off-site articles.
true, but in our defense, most of this shit isn't worth reading. i don't mean this to be flamebait, but it's bound to happen with any site who's content is primarily generated by users. there's a good chance, even with moderation, that a good number of the comments will be poorly written, perhaps with bad grammar, no thesis or common thought pattern, ignorant and/or completely wrong contect, or even written without capital letters! all of these things make reading comments painful and time-consuming.
of course that doesn't make the content useless, and there are always gems to be found, but it does excuse us for skim reading a lot of the content here on slashdot.
to stay on topic: as for Feed and Suck i didn't really like either site but i will miss Wednesday's Filler on Suck. any idea what "Polly Ester" will be doing in the future?
- j
CEO Michael S. Dell was overheard saying "You know it was funny, we had these codes in our print ads that people would type in online so we could see exactly how many sales we were generating [from our print ads], and it was pretty substantial, but I guess that was all some kind of elaborate hoax, perpetrated by the shysters in the advertising industry, thank you slashdot posters for showing me the light!"
Finally Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda founder of Slashdot.org, a website generates $50 per 1000 pageviews in banner advertising revenue, much of that advertising directs many of its viewers to thinkgeek.com (co-owned by their parent company OSDN) where they buy lots of geek trinkets, has decided to stop making many thousands of dollars in revenue because as he says "banner ads don't work, and besides if people want to put up editorial web pages they should do it for fun, and not worry about feeding themselves or making money."
Has it not occurred to anyone that web magazines are failing simply because they're crap? Even Suck, long one of my favorite sites, had become boring. You see, their schtick became old, and no wonder - Mad Magazine had already worn it out by the mid 80's.
The real issue is not the corporatocracy per se. The suits at these media companies are not sitting around in the boardrooms dreaming up ways to destroy indie web media. The issue is that web magazines and journals are publishing crap in order to have content at all.
For a web magazine to succeed, they will have to publish consistently good material for quite some time (and do so on a shoestring budget) in order to prove to the world at large that they are capable of equal or better quality than "Big Media." Its harder than it looks.
Actually print ads don't really work either, but there's no micro-tracking mechanism (i.e. real life counterpart of "clickthru's") to prove this. What happens is only a very small number of people will act on a magazine's ad, but usually this is, more or less, enough to pay for the ad in the first place. Plus ads help with name recognition, so no action is even required. Evidently banner ads aren't held to the same standard.And 1% click-thru is considred a "failure." Uh-huh. How many ads have you seen in magazines that you actually acted upon (visited the car dealer, whatever)???
I suspect the real dirty secret is that its not that banner ads don't work, its just they show how badly ALL advertising works in general, at least in any sort of specific "see donut ad-->buy donut" way. But no ad agency will admit this, and very few companies w/ ad dollars want to admit this either, so there is this big consipiracy to keep shush about this so evryone who works in marketing and ad sales can keep their jobs. It's working, for now.
The second problem is that Suck, Feed, Slate, and Salon are all essay-centered reflective publications. Sorry, there's *never* been a big market for those. The real-life counterpart to to them (Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The New Yorker) have *always* sold poorly too(around 200,000 each, actually). I don't see MSNBC or CNN.com going anywhere. ..
Honestly...this is a free market economy. The MARKET (not "Big Media") decides who thrives and who dies. The real beauty of the internet is that anyone can launch their own word-of-mouth marketing campaign to build traffic. I mean, honestly, getting a write up on a site like Slashdot can do wonders; no doubt the traffic at Feed and Suck has spiked in the last week, and too bad for them that it was because of a story about their demise.
Actually, Feed is still hanging around, isn't it? Ok, so they've had their "Slashdot experience," will they continue to get a boost in traffic from it? More importantly, how are they changing to capture their target market?
Besides, with Dot Coms crashing to earth all around us, mostly because of poor business execution, is this really that big of a story? They're just one more Dot Com that couldn't figure out how to have fun AND make money.
I thought Suck's original announcement said that it was a "break" for the summer. When I read that, I was kind of like, right, probably eventually a permanent break. But have they now confirmed that it's for good? If so, it's a damn shame, and when Salon dies I'm personally losing my favorite magazine, print or otherwise. -brennan
-brennan
The problem with Katz analysis here is that it rests on the same faulty premise that Salon.Com, Feed, etc. were built -- that the only way the web will be a serious media contender is if you have these mega-magazines sites like Salon that significant percentages of people read.
To put it bluntly, that's just plain stupid, especially with the way many of these sites spend money (i.e. faster than should be humanly possible).
What, you can't read that in 14 minutes?
Got Rhinos?
That's exactly the point. The fact that massive amounts of information are readily accessible has not improved our cognitive abilities, but hindered them; If we don't get immediate gratification, we search elsewhere. We no longer know how to sit and read something to get information out of it.
Got Rhinos?
You don't see blood, guns, t&a, tears, massive armies, explosions, sweat, smiles, or anything else when you read. You imagine them. Television and movies have rotted our brains enough that we are no longer capable of imagination; We simply watch. If it's not in front of us in living color, we can't understand it.
People don't "read" Slashdot. They skim it. Most people don't even really read the posts before they start writing replies, and don't even ask about clicking links to read off-site articles.
This has nothing to do with Big Media and everything to do with information apathy.
Got Rhinos?
That doesn't mean they're correct in believing that such ads work.
Doc Searls writes occasionally about what would happen if your TV's mute button sent a message upstream, showing advertisers how few people were actually watching their ads. Perhaps no ad medium works (in general), but because the web is measurable, it's failure to work is proven. For instance, your "push" reference to magazines also makes traditional advertisers and media happy, because they all agree to talk about how many of those decisionmakers are reached with a magazine, ignoring the issues of (a) whether a given "target" opened the magazine, and (b) opened the particular page where that ad was, and (c) actually saw the ad.
You're missing the point. The end result of capitalism is a single monopoly. We saw it at the beginning of the last century, and it is making a fashionable comeback at the beginning of this century. Corporations have no obligations to the consumer, their only legal obligation is to the shareholder. That's why there are decisions by companies like Firestone that figure 100 deaths is better than 1 million recalls: simple math. Our current system of government is toothless against these corporations. First, corporations make huge contributions to lawmakers. Even if you don't believe this is a "pay-to-play" system, one must admit that all that cash gives AOL/Time-Warner a rather loud megaphone to broadcast its views. Second, corporations have all the rights of humans (except for the Fourth Amendment, I believe), with none of the pesky drawbacks, like mortality.
"Big Media" is a problem because "Big Media" has an interest in what news it lets its consumers hear. Did anyone expect to hear criticism on the Time-Warner holdings about the AOL/Time-Warner merger? Recently, The Boston Globe refused to run an ad critical of Staples. (See FAIR for a summary) The Globe is owned by the same company that owns The LA Times -- both with strong ties to Staples.
This "Corporate Republic bullshit" is not getting old. It's terrifying to see that success is measured only in dollars. It's horrifying to see large corporations spreading their money around, strangling voices of dissent with cash. It's disgusting that people aren't pissed about the narrowing of social dialogue.
She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.
the Government owns the media
In the US, a tiny few companies (10, now) own the media, and will also soon own the net media.
Feudalism or Communism, pick your poison.
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Funny, I thought the point being made is that the government really is really a puppet of corporate interests. Money buys you everything. Money buys you eyeballs, and recognition. Money also buys you a good image. And thus money buys you votes.
Corporations give money. Lot's of money. They give money to both sides. No matter who the "winner" of the election is, corporate America has them in its pocket. I'm sure some politicians stand up and say, "I will not take your money." But if there principles are firm, and they say this to enough companies, the politico will not have the money warchest to get elected again.
So we are only left with corporations that are bought. This is not to say that corporations want to turn us all into mindless slaves. But it is certainly the case that representation in government is more a representation of business than it is a representation of the populous.
The saving grace of this system is that there are many corporations, with differing interests. When corporations consolidate or end up with a ludicrous (sp?) market share, those who wish to participate in a given market (i.e., using an operating system) are subject to the whims of the one corporation that dominates all others.
Related to this, Microsoft is beating every other company the same way the US beat the USSR in the 80's--resources. Microsoft simply has too many resources, and it can bleed and bleed and bleed money until it dominates a product. Witness DirectX, IE, Windows. All of these were outclassed by current products on the market for many iterations. But Microsoft always has the money to keep plodding ahead, whereas the garage startup doesn't have the capital to work through 10 versions without any payback.
It's not that they are giving products away for free. IE is not free. You think that just because you don't pay $150 for the OS and $50 for the browser that the browser is free. No, they package the browser with the OS and suddenly the OS is $200. Those who have been using computers for more than a few years know that Microsoft has continually increased the price of its OS while packaging extra features into the OS for "free".
Bleh, I could go on forever. In any case, there is good reason to be suspect of corporate America. Calling your opponents words "bullshit" doesn't change that.
Feed, suck, salon, Yeah I used to read all of them regularly. But over time, it seems like they all took on a leftward political slant and alienated me, so I stopped reading them. If they go belly up, it is their own damn fault for taking a political bent that is opposed to most hardcore internet users (who tend to be libertarian).
By taking a leftish slant, they decided to cater to lightweight internet users, and that don't pay the bills.
I really thought about paying to help keep salon alive. But the big thing they offered me for paying was daily Bush-bashing and some dirty pictures. Well, I happen to like Bush (better than the alternative), and get my dirty pictures for free.
So go cry me a river, but they get what they deserve.
There's also the problem of rotational banner ads. Sure, it's good in some ways, not in other ways. For example, here I'm holding the latest copy of Network Computing (heh). Page 80, an ad for WhatsUpGold and a link to a free demo. This intersts me, but I want to look at it later. I can come back tomorrow, next week, a year later, and find the ad and the hyperlink.
Now reload just the slashdot page. You got a different ad. Sometimes I miss a banner ad, or click a link and then realize I want to see that banner ad, but the next page loads, and when you go back, the previous banner has rotated. And I've never seen a website have an "advertiser index" like so many magazines have.
Offer online the intro to your content and a synopsis of the rest, and see how many people subscribe. Chances are, you won't get as many readers as if you offered everything for free, but you'd be getting SOME money, which has to be better than the ZERO money coming in from advertising. Just in case, offer some articles for free, just for YOU, our special potential customer. Works for IGN & DevX, at least it looks like it is. The net magazine isn't dying, it's just survival of the fittest... Some will die, some will adapt.
Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057
[o]_O
So what is it with the Web? There are enough click counts that we know people go through the sites; that's at least as good as a Neilsen or Arbitron rating. Why does anyone give a rat's ass when most of us skip the commercials just like we do in any other medium? If they just ASSUMED that everyone reads the ads on Slashdot like they assume for the ads in Rolling Stone, they would happily shovel the same cash at the Web.
But if it happens, it might make things a whole lot worse. Maybe all of this wiseass punditry is just going to have to be a labor of love instead of a career. I doubt that will decrease the supply of wiseass pundits (look around). After all, there's still more poetry than anyone can hope to read, and it has never offered anyone a living. Maybe the reason the boutique zines are good is because they will never make it commercially. If volunteer labor can build Linux, we might just be able to have good Open Source commentary/literature/critique.
---=-=-=-=-=-=---
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
What's wrong with we Americans that we act like the Meloi of H. G. Well's The Time Traveler? Why do we accept such a low intellectual level of public discourse? How is it that "professional wrestling" is even considered a sport?
I think questions like these need answering before we grumble about the big bad conglomerates. After all, they do give us what we want. If we want pablum, they'll give it to us.
And if safety issues concerning Chrysler products had come to light (which I haven't seen), they'd be crying in their beer along with Firestone. Now *that's* accountability.
When a preacher says he'll move a mountain, no one believes him. When a scientist says so, noone doubts him.
It is a simple mathematical fact many, many sources of media mean that most of them will not be viewed by a significant fraction of the viewers. So what? My mom and dad will never be remotely interested in Slashdot. They read their local newspapers and watch some network news. Are they being victimized by big media?
The good news here is still (for the time being, anyway) that people interested in almost any arcane topic can find information and opinion about it. When something threatens to shut down individual voices, then gripe away. But don't bitch because the masses don't appreciate your pet "elite" media outlet. The market does not owe you eyes for your favorite content.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
Why do Iranians and Guatamalans have contempt for the US?
On monday I watched a documentary on the history channel about the CIA in Iran. I don't know who bank-rolls the channel, but I'd reckon they aren't small.
The information is out there, its just that people don't seem actively interested in it
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
The first problem is pretty apparent with this Katz piece, unless the whole thing is a troll. Far too many posts here have said something along the lines of how consumers control the market. This is not only wrong, nor is it only laughable, it is a dangerous idea, especially when it comes to media. In order to have a well-functioning democracy, which we don't quite have (troll: FL), you need not only a well-educated citizenry (not consumers) but also areas where they can discuss issues. If large media companies control too much of the media, then the majority of the mediaspace will contain information that is favorable, directly or indirectly, to large corporations.
A second problem with the posts here, a point I just mentioned, is that people must be citizens in a democracy, not consumers, regardless of how politicians run (or have to run) their campaigns.
So, if large media companies control too much of the mediaspace, it will probably have a negative effect on our democracy, and no, consumers (who should be citizens) can't do too much about it (unless the band together, but that's another thread).
Here's a story about how consumers don't control the market, regarding instant oatmeal (like Quaker makes). Rolled oats were invented in the late 1800's in the US during the "health craze" era (when the big cereal co's, like Kellogg, started, for the same reason). No one ate them when they were first made, because no one had eaten them before. A few poor people did, but that's because they used to eat crushed oats (not rolled oats, I've had both, they're different).
However, after a large marketing campaign as to the healthiness of eating rolled oats (which no one had ever done before), people began to eat them. The consumers didn't control the market, the corporation and the advertisers did. This doesn't mean that consumers are always unwitting pawns, nor does it mean that you are. Corporations like it when consumers think the power rests in the hands of the consumers, because it doesn't and that benefits the corporations.
When clueless /.'ers go around saying how consumers control the market in the current media environment and get modded up, it's doubly dangerous because we don't have that control nor should we be constructed as consumers, we are citizens.
(Troll, on!) If you want to debate me on code, fine, I haven't coded in about ten years, but if you want to debate me on media, you'd better get a couple of years of PhD-level media studies from one of the world's best universities under your belt, because I've got five years at Michigan (and heck it's the state where /. started anyways).
a long time ago.
/. lets you do the talking.
/. lives Suck doesn't.
Suck was cool b/c they said the stuff you were thinking in a way you might say it.
Humans like that. Hell we'll even click on links and purchase little tiny stickers for a dollar.
Subsequently
---
This
All excellent points. People DON'T pay for the web.
/.)
point : People dont _have to_ pay for TV. Advertising pays for TV. (Yeah yeah, cable, satellites, yadda yadda.) All people need to do is actually buy stuff on the web. Of course consumer confidence is low. Websites go out business really fast. Even when they have cool names like eToys.
counterpoint : there's no _good way_ to pay for anything on the web. Let's say I find MegaNews useful. If MegaNews were a papr newspaper I could hand the magazine man 50 cents everyday and read the paper OR I could subscribe to the paper for home delivery.
But MegaNews is ONLY on the web. THe web has the following problems:
1 - Every time a kid in Finland gets a day off from school sites get:
+DDoSed
+Shut Down
+Hacked
+Cracked
+Defaced
2 - Internt connections can be slow.
3 - Heavily trafficked sites can be slow while everything else is fast (see also
4 - My information will be sold
5 - My information will be stolen
6 - My ISP is out of business/broken.
7 - FP
Who want to pay for that? How do you pay for thar? Year sub scription? Monthly, Weekly?
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This
Big Media will homogenize opinion, marginalize you and other smaller competitors and make it impossible for anyone else to compete or grow in the emerging Net AOL/Disney/Sony information economy.
"Big Media" has nothing to do with the proliferation of site deaths -- poor management does.
When you blow through millions of dollars, with minimal cash influx, you're going to run out of capital, and go out of business. That's not a conspiracy... it's called capitalism.
Suck.com was hardly popular anymore, and they haven't been for years. Why should they survive?
And if Salon.com can't stay in business, it's because they were proud members of the "no profit now, we want to spread our brand name!" approach. Employing 148 people to update a site with 2 articles a day is hardly good business sense. (Especially considering the fact that Jake Tapper writes half of them!)
Their "subscription" model was a joke, and has resorted to "erotic" images to grab a few Ivy League-level porn surfers who are above going to Google and typing in "naked ladies." And since half of their articles are available for free, why join? To read the "Bushed!" section that is essentially Hotline without the clever and abundent content? Or to read the "Sex" section with Q&As that can be found EVERYWHERE!?
Salon.com, while polished, was destined for failure because of poor management. Don't shed any tears for them, learn the lesson and try harder next time. Oh, and don't be afraid of "Big Media." When they can stop you from buying a domain name for 20 bucks and writing good content, then you can worry. People like Andrew Sullivan, Matt Drudge, and Harry Knowles are doing just fine, thank you, walking over Big Media all the way to the bank.
GenChalupa
That's not a myth! The Web is more diverse than ever. Yes, it's true some of the larger and older sites are dying, and more will continue, but really there are a million new small sites wainting to take their place. Becuase a few english majors making $110,000 a year got laid off doesn't mean a damn thing for diversity on the web.
SIZE != QUALITY when it comes to websites.
"Weblogs and blogs can be vibrant and fascinating. So can mailing lists and me-to-me-media media entities. But they don't reach significant numbers of people; "
Sure they do, ever heard of the slashdot effect?
Low barriers to entry ensure there are pleanty of sites waiting to jump in where suck, and maybe salon have failed.
Big Media isn't more powerful than ever Huh? Medium market cities in the US have 1 newpaper and 2 corporations competing the airwaves. That equals 2 "alternative" 2 "country" 2 "top 40" 2 etc.... 1 newpaper equals 1 dominant voice. That's pretty powerful.
Captain Ober
The alternative proposed by this New Left is a socialist system where the *government* runs everything Perhaps I could interest you in some Keynesian economics? Government and Biz don't have to be mutually exclusive. By the same token the "get the government off our back" arguement gets old also. Corporations have an *extreme* amount of accountability, to their shareholders, to the market, and more important to the consumers. AOL is sucessful because it caters to a large group of people and does it well. Ditto Microsoft, or almost any other major corporation. Extreme accountability to consumers? Since when? If regulations didn't require seatbelts or any other means to a safter life, corps wouldn't mess with it. Chrysler recently admitted to cost savings that sacrificed saftey. Now that's extreme! Shareholders don't care about any accountability other than profit. When did the pursuit of billions of $$$ ever have a moral compass? sorry for the second consec. post!! :(
Captain Ober
I was recently in Indianapolis. They have 1 newspaper. Does the NYT, USA today (if you want to call it a "news" paper), etc offer stories regarding local transit problems, tax base issues, etc? How then should we presume that these rednecks will have a reasonable idea of the breadth of the issues when its time to excercise their constitutional right to vote? There used to be several papers in many cities. Now there are 1 or two. Its not the NYC or LAs that its happening in. Its the medium to small market towns.
Captain Ober
James Madison and Alexander Hamilton harped on the necessity of an informed and active populous to drive democracy. With intelligent, public discourse reaching anemic levels in the US I can't help but be a bit uneasy. We haven't and are not taking the time to dial-in and figure out what the hell is happening. Why is the price of oil so high? Why are term limits riduculous and un-democratic? Why do Iranians and Guatamalans have contempt for the US? These questions are no longer even contemplated in the media (and worse, in the schools). So how can we make good decisions when its time to vote or, god forbid, protest? The answer is: We don't make good decisions - in fact many now chose no decision: Apathy. Moral indifference! That should have us worried. Corporations don't answer to people like governments potentially do/could. Don't give me that shareholders arguement either - it doesn't hold up! Now our opinions are shaped by corporate interests, with an agenda, and no accountability. Could this be a problem? huh, me thinks maybe. (longest post ever)
Captain Ober
Why? Well lets follow the money. Large corperations are in buisness to make money. That's a given. These buisness's have investors,individual stock holders and big corperate investors like mutual funds.
We all want to retire and buy a cabin and spend the rest of our day making finshing fly, writing novels, debugging print drivers or what ever.. But we need money to do that. So we invest in mutual fund, we have RRSP's or 401k's or what ever.
The problem with big profit driven corporations doesn't lie with the corporations it lies with us. We reward this behavior every time we deduct 10% of our pay cheque to put in out pension plan.
We're the real problem here and nobody seems to see that.
When someone yells "Stop" or goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over.
The fact is simply, yes people are getting baiesed, bullshit news from one or two major souces. BUT THEY DO NTO CARE. Theats all they want, its called apathy, if they wanted realy facts, different news, they'd get it, supply = demand.
This is another view of the world.
Yeah.. And Katz assumes that there is a finite source of 'small media' web zines etc, and that all 'Big media' has to do is buy them up.. Seems to me that the great thing about the Web is that anyone with a connection and an Idea can put something up..
So 'Big Media' is bigger. So what? It's always been that way, and it always will be. And there will also always be those of us that look for something a bit different than what 'Big Media' is offering.
air and light and time and space
Amen to that. Where will I get my Filler now?
I think Katz is underestimating the longterm influence of homegrown zines and blogs. I know many people who don't even touch mainstream news anymore because of things like this. The big guys can get as big as they want, but that doesn't mean they are always going to be the last word on anything. Sometimes people want to get word out on something without a financial incentive. Don't tell me you get paid a lot for this...
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
Heavens no! Now we have no choice but to receive lower priced content thanks to fair competition. I think we need to call in the National Gaurd.
Sarcasm aside, isn't this the goal of a free marketplace; companies that offer more to customers for less will survive while the rest will flounder. Though, I can see why a freelance content producer like Katz would object to consolidation and the lessening of demand for independent Internet content :-).
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
i dunno. looking at suck and looking at salon, i don't think either changed their design even once. and if they did - i sure hope they didn't pay too much for it. but with the traffic those sites generated, and the *ahem* qualifications of most e-zine authors, i'd really hope their monthly bandwidth bill exceeded their content costs.
but in any case, whenever your cost (whatever it is really) is greater than your revenue (wherever it comes from) it's bad business. that simple. it'll fail regardless of it's quality, it's genre, or whether it's a corporate backed attempt or a startup.
I think perhaps i'm missing the economic point of the article though. Where is the fear that power is consolidating? Is it because salon is going, and suck and feed are gone? I mean, those were boutique pubs at best. Is journalism threatened because Suck can't make money?
It's still cheaper to start a (pardon the expression) ebusiness than any other kind. Can one deny the web is still the most viable way of allowing a diversity of players? where's the danger to competition?
Failure is part of it, but just because some startups failed doesn't mean that the Harrison Beurgeron (sp?) corporations are moving in. It just means -that- experiment failed. the next have to try harder.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Are we going to fault everyone else besides ourselves for the decline in Net content? I mean, if a business' revenue is not sufficient to cover its costs (bandwidth mostly) - isn't that just a bad business? Does it matter what the content is? or who's backing it?
Is it really indicative of a state of our 'new' economy? If we can't produce content that people are willing to pay subscription fees for, or generate the audiences that advertisers are willing to pay to advertise too - then how exactly is that the fault of the conglomerates?
Perhaps Feed and Suck were too niche. Perhaps Salon just isn't all that great. Can you deny that they'd never have gotten half their time in the sun in paper and ink?
The Net has lowered the barrier of entry into the world economy - but it's even more ruthless on bad business. You can't succeed just because there's no competition in your area. All competition is everywhere. You have to provide the content that creates an audience that you can sell.
Demonizing the big businesses because a site 'suck'd and died is really quite childish.
online magazines are a business like any other. As an added advantage - the costs for an ezine roughly equate to exactly as many issues being printed as needed - so even if msnbc and cnn ate their audience - if they had decent content and a revenue stream then they'd be able to cover and cultivate the audience they kept.
who knows, in 5 years maybe we'll see that there is -no- market for content like salon, slate, or suck online. Perhaps their light-minded drivel is best suited for dead-tree editions you pick up for the flight and discard.
You can't blame the conglomerates for everything. The audience spoke and killed those zines. If people find content worth it - they'll pay. Perhaps when all the other zines dry up - and there's no other place to turn online to waste some time - a quality subscription site will spring up and flourish.
or not.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
I just miss Polly.
Not A Sig
1) Mass-generated news sites such as Plastic or Slashdot (please pardon my karma whoring, but let's not underestimated the potential of such media, especially when the mass news media are concentrated in the hands of a few corporations.
2) Zines with such a narrow audience that it is not cost efficient to publish on paper
If you aim to a nationwide audience then there are savings of publishing on the net, but there are costs of less ad revenues and smaller audience. People still prefer to read regular news on paper media.
(no link here, because promoting a political site in a forum about publishing would be off topic... if you like conservative political spin, guess the url or Google for it)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
"One of the persistent myths about the Net has been that because it costs so little to publish online, and the technology makes it so simple, diversity can flourish in cyberspace no matter how big "Big" media gets. As we're learning, that isn't so." Actually it IS so. Where else can Jon Katz go to regularly shower us with his tie-dyed colored world view? Seriously, no matter how little something costs, it must be able to turn an economic profit. Web hosting isn't free. There are electric, equipment and personnel bills to pay. There are people on the net publishing their own opinions on a wide variety of issues, from medicine to religion to engineering to art. The one thing they ALL have in common is that they don't publish in a journalistic format. The websites that last the longest seem to be the ones that don't polish their writing for the "masses." Because the "big media" model doesn't seem to fit here, it doesn't mean the end of the net as an information source. What it does mean is that people will have to sort through raw and unpolished sources - with the help of a search engine, of course, look at ALL the points of view, then make an INFORMED, INTELLIGENT decision. There is a LOT of garbage out there as well as a few gems. There may be no room for large public magazines, but there is room for small private publishers. Isn't that what we want the net to be?
321st post
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Ikaruga scoreboard (supports netranking)
I've been noodling on this for a while and it is disconcerting to me that these media outlets are shutting down or floundering.
The dearth of weblog content is an incredible outlet for relevant information on world events, often relayed by the very participants in the news. However, too often, the linking goes back to major media outlets or a subsidary of one a large corporation.
While even further "elite" discussion boards and content sites will flourish (uber, A List Apart and Flak spring to mind), they lack the resources to disseminate their clever and unabashed content.
Publishing tools like blogger make it easy for the non-technical user to publish their thoughts, witticism, and commentary to the web. It is only when these sites reach critical mass (Kottke.org, Zeldman.com) that it becomes hugely expense to continue relaying the message.
I see the future of independent content lying in the hands of smaller, more focused community sites (Metafilter, The Fray)
Despite their shortcomings, these sites are paving the way backwards to a smaller, more closely knit internet the way it was several years ago.
Suzie Homemaker and Joe Six-pack will continue to the media that's delivered to them, and the rest who desire the independent voice will seek it and should they not find it, they will create it as they always have.
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
I would certainly pay Salon by micropayments if I had the chance. I think this is very, very important.
I wonder why the Common Markup for micropayment per-fee-links hasn't advanced to Candidate Recommendation...? It has two implementations allready, it should have been a Recommendation by now...
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Just in case somebody still reads this stuff: I just signed up for Salon Premium, with the main motivation of supporting Salon. I really don't have the time to read that much, and for magazines like Salon, I would prefer to pay by micropayments. But then, $30 a year isn't that much, and I would hate to see Salon going down.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
> are increasingly not interested in liberalism
no really... great observation skills there. For years I have been wondering where in the world the liberal establishment that controls the media/schools/government/unions/ etc. etc. actually is. For as long as I have had exposure to the US by living there for a while, having many friends there, travelling etc. I have been of the opinion that it is one of the, if not the most conservative of all western countries!
I think the reason liberal publications did well on the web in its early stages was due to the part of society with web-access in its early days: university students, most of them in sci/maths/CS courses. As web-access has become more representative of society (and english sites being targeted mainly at US-audiences), its contents has come a lot closer to the other media, which is decidedly more conservativ.
Though the good thing about the internet is that niches and communities can still thrive. Be it for techies, tree-huggers, feteshists, horse-breeders, creationists, minority religious groups, whatever really. If an opinion exists it will have its niche somewhere. Volunteer run community sites are the counter-part to big-media, and provide tons of information!
I think magazines can survive and do well, but they are probably better off being run as a hobby rather than a business! The one thing big business/big media has trouble competing with is people that aren't in it to make a profit! Which is the reason MS doesn't really know what to do about Linux :)
I think what you mean to say is that banner ads can support a site if there are enough page views.
Sorry, but this is just plain wrong. And I know this from personal experience. I used to work at an online magazine called Winmag.com (formally Windows Magazine) which folded in March. We had great content, a "sticky" site (people would come back to us often), and a lot of page views (around 1.6 million a month). However, we weren't making any money from the banner ads we had up. So, CMP (which owns Winmag.com along with Byte.com and a bunch of other publications) folded it.
Ok, maybe if we were getting 1.6 million page views per day we might have broken even, but then we would have been the exception rather than the rule. Banner ads are quite simply ineffective when it comes to generating revenue.
Now, for my own site that I launched soon after Winmag.com's demise, I decided to leave out all banner ads. (Save for one for my fellow ex-Winmaggers which isn't intended to produce revenue.)
Instead, I set up a PayPal account and let people donate what they thought my site's services were worth. In the 2 1/2 months my site's been up, I've collected enough donations to keep my site running for over 9 months.
I honestly think voluntary donations are the way to go for all but the biggest site. As long as you're providing good content/services, people will be willing to donate. (Note: I said donate, not pay. Pay-per-use sites also aren't too successful, with the exception of the porn sites.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Oops, been a few months since I ran the numbers through my head. That should have read 1.6 million per week. We got about 6 or 7 million a month.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
We can only hope that Katz is right insofar as the "Corporate Republic" is powerful enough to shut him up. Then we can fight back, and maybe even find people who have something insightful and relevant to say on a subject to publish in our new netzines.
As far as I'm concerned, as long as Katz gets published (on and off line), we don't have to worry one bit about the average (or really really below average) person's ability to display to the world the depth of their brilliance.
I have an idea this time! Before you automatically start trashing this article, READ IT!! still dont like it? go into preferences and filter it out! that easy!
NEWS: cloning, genome, privacy, surveillance, and more!
NEWS: cloning, genome, privacy, surveillance, and more!
(not that anyone will read this so far down...)
I found this ironically amusing:
Salon has for years provided some of the smartest coverage of technology anywhere. None of the big media companies offer smart and smart-ass commentary the way Suckonce did. What's the last provocative story or discussion you saw in a Disney or AOL Time Warner property or on AOL?
And when was the last time we saw Slashdot do a provocative story about Slashdot, or OSDN, or Andover? When was the last time JonKatz did hard-hitting story about the lengthy articles by JonKatz?
The truth is, companies, like people don't like to beat themselves up. Salon, which I've followed for a couple years now, doesn't do articles about how it might suck or be a voice for the liberal elite, or whatever (except when the conservative David Horowitz gets flamed by liberal columnists and vice-versa).
At, in the very lest, writers for large companies will take on the other large companies. (I've seen this several times in Newsweek)
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
They couldn't drawn enough subscribers, or raise even a small amount of money. What does this mean? They were publishing for a broke-community? Or was that community not even bothered? Whatever be the case, the community doesn't get the magazine now. The publishers can publish it for themselves if they want. But to get the poor man publish for you requires a lot of money and encouragement.
You may find it interesting: Sucked: A Fish, a Barrel, and a Rubber Check.
Your rant amounts to little more than a pro-capitalist defense of a system that you no doubt suck as much life out of as you can without any regard for anyone or anything else.
Get this: this is a COMMAND economy just as your socialist or communist ones. Just because YOU are prospering--and informed, to keep this on topic--doesn't mean the other 85% of the country is.
Capitalism, the Free Market, and all the other odes to the One True Way are just another face of the systems you despise: it is a state-sponsored form of social control only less barbaric than the communism of the 20th century by a few million deaths (which in itself is debatable when one considers the "market economies" of India and Africa starved out their populations during that era).
Face it: if you're for the State, you're for Death, and Death doesn't care if you were a capitalist or a communist. The media is used by either system to keep people down.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, The Histories
Banners - These suck. The cpm's are falling every day. For whatever reason people aren't convinced they are worth paying much for. Also, half the time the banner company or advertiser doesn't pay the bill. An thus you can't pay your bills. There was a GREAT article on this on kuro5hin a while back where some people actually ran the numbers. It might be possible to make a profit with banners (slashdot), but it is very very hard. Most sites are lucky if they can pay for hosting with banners.
Subscription - Could be a viable idea. Too bad no one is subscribing. If you are a small professional publication like Suck, you have to compete with the conglomerates on the news side and the bloggers on the community side. Unfortunately, that leaves you stuck in the middle charging money while those you are competing with are giving away the content for free. What do you have to offer? Even sites that have rabidly loyal readers probably can't make this work. Why? Look at which real magazines sell well. Maxim? Stuff for Men (same company)? Generic woman's magazine? All those magazines are super-formulaic dribble targeted at the general population. Suck and Feed just don't appeal to most readers. Certainly not enough to make any real money. Look at me, I'm a total web addict and I didn't read either.
Micropayments - Am I the only one who thinks this is stupid? What successful business plan supports itself with tiny margins. How do you collect payments without spending more on the collection process? Ask anyone who's appeared on a talk show. It's more work than it's worth to cash some 8 cent checks you get from reruns. The only way this could work would be if a close system like PayPal let people have accounts and slushed micropayments around internally. But I still don't think it will work.
The balanced financial plan - We've taken a different approach. Our business plan doesn't require us to make any money. What we pay for hosting each month is about what I would spend on a meal at Wendy's. Add to that a slashdot-like submission system and our desire to write good articles about music for the fun of it and you have a system that works. We can never go out of business because we have almost no real costs. The worst thing that could happen is that we get bored. On the plus side, we don't have to display annoying standard banners or anything like that. Any money we make from affiliate type deals or short-term advertising contracts with specific businesses goes right into our pockets (and back into the site). IF people enjoy our content and site enough to want to pay for it or we grow large enough to attract some other sort of deal, fine. But we are happy now. I'd do it just for the free concert tickets.
Ok, so maybe I'm being negative. But the bottom line is that the mainstream press does a nice job of catering to the mainstream. The blog community caters to those who want an online community. Business-wise, there just isn't much room left. I say start the site because you care about what you are writing about. If a couple years down the road it becomes profitable, great.
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
...to roblimo about how to survive as a website. Running a website myself I found the article very informative, and if smaller sites plan on surviving this is a must read. The bottom line is the bottom line. Make money or die.
That there are people like Don Imus and Rush Limbaugh running in syndication, and doing quite well, suggests there is an appetite for other media opinions. Unlike radio, where a station manager may or may not carry a broadcast because it riles the sensibilities of listeners, the web is everywhere from, accessible to pretty much everyone (don't got a computer? check your library, school or community center) While web filtering may block some content, much opinion can still get through to those who persevere. (Do you ever wonder if Big Media is behind some of these filtering initiatives?)
Like TV, Magazines, Newspapers, the web also can be walked away from. I get most of my local news and discussion at the town watering hole (except on weekends when it's overrun by tourists, tho some bring news from their parts of the world and can be fun to talk to.)
This is a danger that much of the hacker universe has missed from the beginning.
I'm not sure what this actually has to do with hackers, since, by nature hackers converse through USENET, IRC, and other outlets. If any entity is successful in throttling USENET then hackers be afraid, very afraid.
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's a bit dramatic to proclaim the demise of the Net magazine, but this may be an end to it in its current form. What these magazines need to do is turn a PROFIT. It's really quite simple; the idea, that is. Actually turning a profit on the Internet, of course, is much more difficult. But, there's no reason these intelligent online magazines can't adapt; maybe, like Jon says, they need to embrace interactivity more. Whatever it is, journalism is by no means dead on the Net.
Big Media will homogenize opinion, marginalize you and other smaller competitors and make it impossible for anyone else to compete or grow in the emerging Net AOL/Disney/Sony information economy.
while i do admit there is a significant "mcnugget" quality to american culture now (and please - i'm qualifying this as american because i have little to no experience in other countries and don't want to be too much of an Ugly American), i don't think that's what's killing online magazines.
after all, what's killing them is a lack of funds, right? computers and bandwidth and even the clueless monkeys most of them call writers all cost cash. it's not a big illuminati plot or anything. they're just not producing something people are willing to pay for.
is it because, unlike Time magazine, paying to read Suck or Slate doesn't give you anything material? maybe. is it because people just don't like the hip gen x messenger bag style of most of these sites? maybe. is it because the market for ad banners has fallen through the floor and crushed the furnace? possibly. but i doubt it has a whole lot to do with aol/tw execs chuckling in dark rooms about their great plan to take out salon.
your corporate republic shite is usually a lot closer to the mark than this.
--saint----
They have pictures up usually THE NEXT DAY! Promoters LOVE this, so they are happy to send some of the racers' registration to iplayoutside. Race coverage is up in a couple of days in most cases.
They provided the servers, an RF Scan-Badge system, and even an 802.11 wireless network for EVERYONE TO USE (Waaaaaaaaaay cool!) at the 24 hours of snowshoe. This system posted results to the web IN REAL TIME as we raced.
The way to make money on an informational website is to do it the way iplayoutside does. You provide a specialized service that people will pay for. Since the racers are already paying an entrance fee for the event, part of that goes to the web-wizards at iplayoutside for the coverage. It's beautiful! Such a perfect system and it WORKS.
I run a technology news site. I dont make money with it, i loose money (hosting costs). there was a great article on that on somethingawful http://www.somethingawful.com/features/stateofthei nternet/
Its sometimes hard to stay motivated if traffic is not increasing. I guess thats a problem of many small web blogs. There is no return of investment, especially these days. Its still fun, but it would be more fun to reach more and more people and at least break even.
Plug: http://www.i4u.com
You don't have to go check for the magazine, it comes to you when it's ready. It says, essentially, "Hey, I'm here...time to read me!" On the other hand, websites are not that way, with the singular exception of whichever site is set as your default page in your browser.
And this statement brings up one of the main reason I still prefer regular magazines...PORTABILITY!
How the heck am I supposed to read Salon in the john^H^H^H^Hlibrary? Sure I could take a laptop with me, but then I can just see trying to get my boss to spring for network jacks (or wireless!) in the stalls...
I notice there are not a lot of comments posted on this Katz article. This is unusual in the extream. Could it be that no one wants to admit that the net isn't the freedom sword everyone hoped it would be?
Change tactics. On-line magazines could be successful, it's just that passivly posting a web page and hoping that someone comes to read it doesn't work.
Hope is not a valid magagement strategy.
That's the lesson here.
Above comment is personal opinion. Poster is not a spokesperson.
The reason why Big Media wins on the net is the same reason they win in the real world: they have the name.
Feed and Suck were popular with net aficionados from the beginning, but you know the story as well as I do: Mom and Pop AOL user just don't know where to go and what to do on the net, so they look for what they know, and they follow the links from their portals until they land somewhere familiar and comfortable.
And of course, Big Media has the infrastructure to support excellent sites and constantly update them with relevant information.
You know what happens to a good party when too many people show up. It's no longer a private affair in a controlled environment. The forces of nature (and in this case economics) are at work and the big guys always win.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, simulate.
It also ignores not-for-profit personal pages and blogs, user-moderated news sites like /. and K5, and other organically-grown phenomena have.
And perhaps that's the key: Suck, Feed, etc. set out to make a profit. Maybe that's the wrong way: Maybe, like hotornot.com, you have to come up with a good idea over beers, and it has to take off on its own before you move to a profit model.
Anyway, that's my US$2e-2 on how to kill big media - it's not going to be Wired or Suck, but hotornot.com that does it.
OK,
- B
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http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
The mistake Jon Katz (and Salon, Suck, etc) makes is the thinking "new media" will look similar to old media. New media is different. Just as print media is different from broadcast media.
It is pretty ironic for this Jon Katz spiel to be posted to a true "New Media" site like Slashdot, which couldn't exist in traditional medias, yet seems to continue without too much worry AFAIK of running out of money.
It would silly to wonder why a radio station that only updated their news once a day, like newspapers did, why they would be driven out of business; they are working within a different system with different capabilities and their competitors will embrace those advantages.
Join the Cluetrain.
what new media. salon etc are the same as old media r.i.p. New media hasnt even been born..or at least the glimmerings are visible. individuals' weblogs or something similar, once the technology matures ( 6 months) and can be available to readers/participants according to their preferences will be the new media of the future. plus freenet/gnutella something. ,it isnt really interactive. hopefully /.will remain interactive in spite of the mod system quirks. my 2bits
besides unless cranks get to post on goatse portman beowulf, VA
...for the reader on the go: "The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Bawk bawk bawk! CYBER-GEEKS!"
Big Media...ya right. The problem with Suck and every other high-quality failure is revenues! Until someone figures out a way to make advertising 'pay' on the Web, this scenario is destined to repeat itself. Like traditional media, advertising dollars pay the rent - not subscription fees. If Time magazine or your local newspaper tried to fund itself via subscription fees, the huge sucking sound you'd hear would by customers running for the door. The Web is no different.
No matter how good the content, it's getting tougher to find advertisers willing to put a ton of dough into Website sponsorships. Lots of top-notch writing and lots of top-notch web design costs money. Sure there are e-zines out there running on a shoestring, but they are largely aimed at small niche communities and run by volunteer labour (or at least eschew profit-making).
Advertising on the Web is inherently difficult. In printed media (for example) the advertisment is going to sit on the page until you're done reading the page. This paradigm does not hold too much water in the electonic format. So until there is a compelling advertising model and supporting technology for the Web, professionally-produced 'magazine' content will be difficult to keep alive.
CrazyLegs
"Pork!!" said the Fish, and we all laughed.
I think it is kind of funny how many conservatives would see big media as a liberal plot to restrict free-thinking attitudes. Just makes me wonder who or what is in charge. Are we all fighting the wrong enemy in blaming the left or the right?
A lot of people have mentioned the fog that exists in determining user response to print ads that is not present in banner ads, and how it's questionable whether print ads work. You'll note that I didn't say "Print ads work." I said "Nobody debates that ads in magazines work," meaning that it's accepted and widely leveraged as a means of advertising. Ergo, from the standpoint of the publisher (the real point here), they do work, because they bring in significant revenue. And while banner ads may or may not work as well from an advertiser standpoint (only to be seen as a failure because the low response rate is clearly documented), banner ads do not live up to the original expectations that were created. Like so many other things, they were supposed to be the magic bullet to render everything else obsolete, and did not achieve that; as a result, anything less is seen not in objective terms, but as a failure to reach a goal.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
The other part of the problem is that a standard magazine uses a "push" method of distribution. You don't have to go check for the magazine, it comes to you when it's ready. It says, essentially, "Hey, I'm here...time to read me!" On the other hand, websites are not that way, with the singular exception of whichever site is set as your default page in your browser. Yes, you may have a few you check every day, but how many are you really going to want to have to remember?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Maybe the reason that typical online media is failing is the net users value a forum over a lecture. Not available with a typical magazine (except for a select few in Letters to the Editor), sites like Slashdot allow content to be posted and discussed by both the editors and the readers. Maybe, despite their bits and bytes, these online magazines tried too hard to be like their paper counterparts.
Your are entirely wrong.
Actually, we're far more aware of "who" our readers are, in terms of what kind of people they are and what types of interests they have, than any your average print publication is. Folks here are in regular communication with readers, across the board, including myself.
Never, in my experience working for print publications, did I observe anything remotely resembling the kind of active, ongoing dialogue and communication we have with our readership here.
Bear in mind that Salon in particular was founded by folks from the SF Chronicle.
What is interesting is to consider whether or not the application of traditional media thinking has helped or hindered the development of online media.
Personally I think it's hindered it.
The Web will still change the media world, it will just take fifteen or twenty years rather than the six months the 'Internet time' cretins blathered about.
Changing peoples way of life takes time, live with it.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I don't think that the effectiveness can be measured 'exactly'. It is possible to detect occasions on which an advert has lead directly to a sale. But why should that happen very often anyway? A lot of the time advertising is a cumulative process, you see the ad, register the message and then refer back when you actually need (or want) the product.
I don't doubt that Nike get every penny back that they pay Tiger Woods for hawking their sweatshop produced clothing. However I don't think anyone sees Tiger Woods in his swoosh cap and runs out to the mall to buy one like it.
I suspect that a bigger part of the problem is that the Web changes the nature of advertising from paid placement to attracting trafic to the advertiser's web site. If you open up any hobbyist magazine you will see page after page of advertisements that are simply lists of products and prices. Nobody would place that kind of an ad in Salon, they would have a link to their own site and host the catalog there. The other big advertising money spinner is classified ads and EBay has cornered that market.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Katz's larger point is superb, so why does he bury the stuff about mega-media's control in a misguided eulogy for the sucky Suck?
Suck going down the tubes doesn't mean that "individual voices" are lost. Or that anyone is being marginalized. No, it means simply that you can't make money writing snarky prolix diatribes (or, actually, that you can, sort of, as long as a Wall Street-driven ad bubble hasn't burst). Every wiseacre knows this.
Yes, Big Media is gonna getcher momma. Yes, this is reason for fear. I would point to Slate, for example.
Katz has underestimated Slate's role and importance. It's easy to dismiss the rag as "a massively-subsidized bulletin board for narcissistic Washington and New York publishing and media people," and it's certainly a tasty line to read. The real importance of Slate, however, is Microsoft's gaining a foothold upon elite opinion; not only does Big Redmond get intellectual cachet in the long musty tradition of patronage, but more vitally, it corrals a number of biggies in the op-ed mob under its protective (read: paychecked) roof. The biggest snare of all is Kinsley, who, despite his tiresome editor's column witticisms about biting the hand that feeds him, is made docile by his embarrassing employment -- and the top banana makes his staff and freelancers docile, too. When is the last time you read anything in the least threatening to power on Slate? You never will. Lesson of Slate: if you ever get to be the biggest monopoly on the planet, hire the best-known Ivy League scribblers to be on your "team," too. Then sit back and watch the worker ants work. Notice their individual voices. Notice they're too busy cashing their checks to complain much about you or your friends.
I agree wholeheartedly with Katz on Salon, which, thanks to Jake Tapper, ran some of the best campaign coverage anywhere. Does Salon's imminent demise mean that Big Media is to blame? Think outside of the ad-impoverished Net context for a moment. Where is the analog of Salon in print? One is tempted to say, maybe, Harper's Magazine, although that's still a mismatch. Harper's is a much older, venerable publication, and yet even it only survived death at the hands of Cowles Media in the 80s through last-minute philanthropic intervention. As it is, it barely makes it. And yet it is one of, and perhaps the, most indispensible reads in America.
If in the print world it's hard to sell intellectual, left-of-center writing, why should it be any easier on the Net? The problem isn't Big Media. The problem is the American mind. You can't get many Americans to read such stuff; they don't like, want, respect, or see any need for it. You will have noticed which TV shows top the Nielsens, and which national newspaper is available on every corner.... This cuts to the issue of "marginalization" that upsets Katz. Please; unorthodox work is always going to be marginalized by virtue of its difficulty, its demands. The really interesting stuff is often on the margins.
Whatever happens to Small Media, I fervently hope the Net is never so thoroughly colonized as to lose boards such as Slashdot. Decades after their invention, boards represent the true revolution in digital media, and as long as they exist, we're not going to be silenced. That is enough, really. To be able to speak freely is really enough. I hope Salon pulls off a miracle, too; or maybe not such a miracle, since, although Katz fails to mention it, the site is now in the porn biz. Damn smart move, that.
their failures have nothing to do their ideology and everything to do with the fact that banner ads just don't support a website unless they're porn ads.
But this is easily falsifiable. I've already mentioned WorldNetDaily, a publication that finances itself through banner ads. I read the site hourly to make sure that I am informed on what is going on in the world, and I can guarantee you that I have never seen a "porn ad." Not once. So your statement that banner ads can't support a website has been dealt with and dimissed.
I think what you mean to say is that banner ads can support a site if there are enough page views. You get page views by having scintillating content. You get them by publishing things that people want to read. People should not be surprised that they cannot generate page views with the horrors of liberalism! WorldNetDaily succeeds because there is a large audience of people who do not want their news sanitized for them, people who want the honest truth about the socialist and homosexual communities. The audience for the type of material served up by Salon, on the other hand, has dwindled into nothingness.
The primary reason that Salon and Slate and other "Web magazines" is not that there is something inherently wrong with the format. The problem is that people are starting to reject the content. Salon and Slate are well-known unapologetic mouthpieces of the liberal left, and poll after poll is showing that Americans are increasingly not interested in liberalism. With conservatives running the show in Washington, the country is beginning to gravitate back towards its moral roots. The few Americans that do admit to liberalism are not even close to the number that would be required to keep Salon afloat (through ad revenue or any other means.) If you have no readers, you cannot possibly succeed.
Take a look at WorldNetDaily, a popular mainstream news outlet/magazine. WND is consistently voted the best site on the Web, and is going strong even as leftist sites crumble down around it. The point is that Web journalism is alive and well (and in fact, doing better than it ever has done before.) The fact that some of the old standbys are dying out is just a natural part of information evolution; it is the wheat being separated from the chaff.
2. Create a media entity to espouse this point of view.
3. Discover that you can not match the power, scope or reach of organizations that present mainstream, broadly embraced points of view.
4. Blame the corporate policies of those organizations (crafting a product that appeals across a very broad base of consumers) for the failure of your media enterprise to attract a broad base of consumers.
Don't get me wrong, I don't have a spare minute for most mainstream media. But nobody puts a gun to anyone's head and makes them buy a copy of Details. Not one of the 30 million idiots watching Survivor was strapped down in their easy chairs with clockwork orange clips holding their eyes open. Mainstream media has a singular goal and mission and that is to make a select group of people rich. This essay's whining pessimism does not contribute an iota of help or good advice as to how to succesfully make media in a different way (and it also doesn't provide much of a justification for why anyone should bother... If Katz is pining for a world where you could get a magazine full of essays like this... well, I imagine someone could pick up something of that variety in the flaming depths of HELL).
I don't necessarily have any answers either, but here's at least a few rational starting points:
1. If you want to present a more marginal point of view you have to give up, at least at the onset, on having mainstream level success. This is simple math. If you are not producing what people are accustomed to consuming, you have to expect a longer and harder path to an ultimately more modest destination.
2. If you want to eventually acheive success on the order of magnitude of mainstream media, you are going to have to aggresively lobby for new consumers and somehow convince them to give your "weird" viewpoint some of their time. That means it has to be entertaining, accessible, created in a style that appeals over a broader range of intellects and educations, and doesn't immediately attack or insult people who do not yet necessarily see your point yet.
3. You have to accept, connect and foster your natural community. The real question of this problem is, how do you stop preaching to the choir and get a broader audience? It isn't easy, and paradoxically, you have to first make sure you are taking advantage of AND taking care of the audience you can naturally get - people that share your viewpoint. Slashdot succeeds for this reason, and yet it attracts a lot of marginal types like me - a lapsed chemist who hasn't programmed a computer since 1992. How? By having a big enough basis of support in its core users (computer nerds and open source types) to have acheived the financial backing sufficent to present a broader viewpoint that appeals to a bigger crowd.
We need to stop whining about big business and realize that there is only one remedy, which is sucessfully selling the alternative in the common market. There is no legislation, no magic technology that will make rich people stop wanting to get richer. They are not the problem. We, the majority, work for them, buy from them, and vote for the politicians bought by them, and for that we have noone to blame but ourselves. Now, certainly the working family of four teetering on the poverty line is hard pressed to find the time and resources to "fight the power." But if you own a computer and have enough free time to read a Jon Katz essay and a crazy long response like this...
Then you have enough resources to change the world. So quit whining about the big bully that's stealing your lunch and go learn some kung fu.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
The exciting thing about the internet, or even better simply networked computers in general, is this potential to blur the line between a broadcast and a personal conversation. The former aspect gives communication scope, power, and a life beyond the individual. The latter is a defense against government and corporate intrusion, and the homogenizing influence of broadcast media.
The point made by Chris that I most want to reiterate is that yes, Virginia, it CAN happen here too. Keep a hawks eye on any legislation that aims its rhetoric at obscenity on the internet, cracking and electronic intrusion, surveillance and terrorism. This is where the enemies of freedom will most likely attack our freedom to use this communication tool with the full protection of the first amendment and exploiting as much reach and scope as we can afford to control.
And a nice list of examples of actions an individual can take, too. It all seems like little things, but remember - big bastards like Microsoft would not be alternately belittling and demonizing stuff like open source if it wasn't such a danger to them.
I would love to hear one of these free market advocates justify what the loosening of restraints on station ownership has done to the world of commercial radio, but I doubt I will. Chris, I've saved your web link for later perusal as I am a songwriter and singer. Since you've given an e-mail I'd like to touch base with you perhaps about projects in self-publishing and internet radio I and friends are working on. Thanks for a lively discussion.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
This is certainly true, but doesn't go very deep. Why don't those sites make money? They've received millions and millions of visitors-- traffic was rarely a problem. One of the primary reasons some of these companies are failing is their inability to make decent rates off of online advertising. And who controls the rate structure?
The online advertising crash has often been blamed on low click-through rates. Perhaps that's just a silly standard to apply. Traditional media companies make tons of money slapping glossy ads onto dead trees with no percievable response, and why is that? Because the ad industry is comfortable with that way of doing things (or in some cases, the ad industry is owned by those media companies.)
There are certainly plenty of other reasons why these sites have had trouble-- bad management, over-investment, etc. But it's disingenuous to say that the old-fashioned big-media economy had nothing to do with it.
This is why I blame Big Media. They're not exactly taking an active role in reducing online ad revenue, they're simply promoting the crap out of their print and broadcast advertising to the detriment of the online equivalent. These companies have a vested interest in reducing competition; they can afford to lose millions of dollars maintaining essentially profitless sites, until they are the only major players (especially if they're just shuttling that revenue over to their offline publications.) Wait a couple of years and watch the renaissance in online advertising rates that occurs when AOL/TW and Viacom start throwing their weight around.
PS The above is one those paranoid anti-corporate predictions that almost always come true.
Well, I'm not sure I do either :) It's just a theory, and while I believe there's probably some truth to it, it's fairly diabolical to imply that corporations are colluding to deliberately wipe out small online content companies. On the other hand, it's certainly not implausable; remember, when companies this big exist, such tactics are no longer "conspiracies", they're simply corporate policies.
Big companies aren't any happier when they lose money than small companies.
It bears mentioning that the advertising rates for the most trafficked sites (AOL, for instance) haven't plummeted the way the smaller sites' banner ad rates have. So these companies aren't losing quite as much money as their competitors. Also, think of how much money a company like Microsoft is willing to invest in something like Internet Explorer, simply to corner a related market a few years down the line. Big companies that focus on nothing but the short-term reward are the exception.
And it's not like the ad money that used to be spent on the web has shifted to print and broadcast media. It has simply dried up as companies have cut back or gone out of business.
Well, that's certainly partially true. But the traditional media companies are still getting the lion's share of the (admittedly smaller) pie. It's not particularly their fault that the economy's slowed down along with advertising spending.
I think the big mistake of both the dotcoms and the new media companies was in assuming that the Internet does indeed change everything. It changes the technology, but the wants and needs of the consumer probably haven't changed that much. We all want (in a Maslovian hierarchy sort of way) safety/security, belonging, relationship, and eventually meaning. Most of us couldn't care less how we get those things or what technology is used.
The New Economy and the New Media both focused 'way too much on the technologies and processes being used, and not enough on the purpose or result. Now they're toast, but the older companies will learn what not to do and will continue going about trying to deliver products and services at a profit.
Are you implying that Suck and Feed offered the "real journalism" that mass media lack? Suck didn't suit me, but I enjoyed reading Feed. But the idea that either was an outlet for hard-hitting journalism is laughable. Suck was all self-referential twenty-something angst, and Feed, though intelligent and a great read, was hardly useful as a source of news or analysis of actual relevant events--think about how much effort they spent analyzig the latest TV show or the latest video games. Like I said, I liked Feed, and there is a place for its kind of writing, but for "real journalism," give me Time and CNN anyday.
Dear Mr. Katz,
I've read lots of your articles and you're generally on the ball; also I liked your book immensely. However, here I think you're worried about something that's really mostly irrelevant: the mass commercialization of the net. Here's why:
1. The interest of these media conglomerates in putting up massive content sites doesn't really hurt anyone at all. The reason the magazines failed is the same as the reason most dot-coms failed: lack of revenue. The magazines you mention (which are going out of business because they can't make enough profit to stay afloat) tried to follow a traditional model in publishing on the web. They hired staff, they rented offices, they incurred huge costs, and thus depended on huge revenues. This was a mistake! Without some kind of profit coming into a company, via an actual product line (e.g. print magazines, books, etc) this sort of business is entirely unsustainable! The collapse of the dot-com world should make this utterly clear. They failed not because they were in competition with the giants, but because they never had a means to make sufficient profit in the first place.
2. The media conglomerates aren't interested in shutting anyone up, except for the occasional person who gets annoyed and more or less spits in their eye (thus getting a call from the lawyers, etc). What they want to do is get everyone on a broadband connection so they can serve TV over the web, because that's how they think. This makes them A) harmless, and B) extremely useful. No other force is going to bring broadband to the American consumer, mark my words. No other entity cares. So, let AOL put webified tv shows online! Who cares? Some of it might even be good. It won't push anyone else offline -- in fact, it'll speed up everyone's connection, and make it that much easier for them to express their own opinions.
3. Although I dearly loved Suck, I didn't see it as any more than a witty commentary in my mailbox. I go to a variety of sites, like Slashdot, NewsForge, Mr. Cranky... And, if these sites were to go out of business, there would be many others popping up all over the place to access. Often, the best information comes from private people, because they don't care about funding (they use their jobs to fund themselves). It's true that the web is a publishing medium, but more than a newsstand, it's also a huge community bulletin board. The things regular people post, which you seem to hold in little regard, are the most interesting things available because of their lack of outside influence. Online, everyone can have his say -- and despite your attitude that this is just a giant peanut gallery, which by the way is beneath you, Katz, and uncalled for, this is what makes the web useful. Not someone's attempt to start their own company by putting up a magazine, ok? It's the people who don't make any money and who just have something to say, something they can't *not* say, that are interesting.
Finally, here's an interesting point: you claim to be annoyed by huge conglomerates and their commercial interests; but you conveniently forget that these online magazines you're weeping for are themselves, commercial entities. Perhaps unsuccessful ones, but nevertheless, commercial. They idenfitied a niche and tried to make a profit, did they not? You prefered their voice to that of the vanilla mainstream, but that doesn't make them any different in terms of what they were trying to accomplish. They were magazines; they didn't get enough revenue to stay afloat and now they're not. This does not imply conspiracy, John, and even if it did, it wouldn't matter.
The web that matters to me is the noncommercial web, where people say what they want to say just to say it. And no-one's taking that away -- in fact, commercial interests (Earthlink, Netcom, AT+T, etc) are making it possible for a wider group of people every year because it's wildly profitable (26 bucks a month, right, per person accessing the web?). Just relax, man. Everything's going to be okay.
crazyphilman@programmer.net
crazyphilman@programmer.net
Sort of fat, good looking in a disheveled sort of way.
The big failure of the subscription model of sites that I like reading in appealing to me is that I have no real stake in helping them survive. There is always this blank facade that gives no real sense of the importance of my subscription to them, or their need.
I was thinking that if they publicised their costs and their income and showed exactly how subscription was making a difference, then I would be encouraged to subscribe myself. Even if they weren't in need of the subscription, I feel that I would still subscribe with this information - given the level of my interest in the site.
Katz, it must take a hell of a lot of nerve to criticize Slate as a failing site surviving only because it's backed by [evil] corporate $$ while you write for Slashdot (last I checked supported heavily by VA Linux), or to criticize the zines for cultivating an elitist readership (um, hello... you work for Slashdot).
Even setting aside your hypocrisy, Katz, in this article and others you consistently eschew precision for drama like the propagandist you wish you could be. This could have been a really great article if it were written by someone more intelligent than a gerbil. It's sad that the zines are going and I'd have been interested to read about that...but your article spends more time talking about AOL/Time-Warner than it does about its purported subject.
In usenet, in the old days, [this was probably before your ill-advised adventure into the world of technology] there used to be a concept of "Obligatory On-Topic." See, people would post completely irrelevant things, and other, intelligent people would demand that they stay on topic. So they'd have a tiny on-topic part of the post completely unrelated to the body. That's what your posts do... you take some genuinely significant topic, but instead of writing about it you make it a soapbox for your empty-headed critique of society.
why don't you go back to writing lame books and whatever else it was you were into before you started plaguing slashdot with your ignorant socialist propaganda?
magi_caspar
Hahaha... Their Stock options are in the toilet!!! HAHA all that is in the money are the PUTS!!! What a waste. That is why no Linux company(at the moment) should be public and trading on the market, there just isn't any money in trading Linux Stock.
Am I the only person reading this that has no idea who Feed and Suck are (or were...)? By the sound of it I would have enjoyed reading them, but I had no way to learn of their existance besides word of mouth. And lets face it, word of mouth is a pretty lousy way to advertise yourself on the internet. And maybe I missed something, but I still haven't heard anything about what happened to segfault.org... they dropped offline more than a week ago.
When the only tool you have to sell is a hammer, you describe every problem like a nail.
--
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
If Feed and Suck merged they could become SeedFuck which sounds like it could be really successful online, maybe as a competitor to Nerve .
You always pay for what you read or watch.
You pay for it when you buy that car,
that advertised on the TV as you drank at the bar.
And your money went to that radio show that shilled for Coke.
And to that magazine that talked you into what brand to smoke.
Your attention span has been bought and sold,
so you will buy what you are told.
An independent voice?
A bit of choice?
These are arguments gone cold,
in our relentless pursuit of Mammons' gold.
evanchik.net
I misspelled that didn't I? Sorry, the heat of the moment got to me.
evanchik.net
I think it was Winston Churchill who said that a fanatic is someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. That fits Jon Katz to a tee. He sees manipulation of the (always helpless) individual mind everywhere by any (always evil) corporation with more than 100 employees. Apparently, business success automatically makes you a threat to civilization itself. His analyses of relatively small events like the closure of these very small businesses (most small businesses of any kind do fail, Mr. Katz) begin with his preconceptions of corporate evil and conveniently ignore more relevant facts like lack of revenues. Get a grip on reality!
I can understand where Jon is coming from. (He didn't mention VA Linux, Slashdot's troubled parent, in his analysis but I suspect it hangs heavy with him.) But I can't agree with his conclusions.
The fact is Feed, Suck, Slate and Salon have no real business model. They don't know who their readers are -- they just throw out content. That's not publishing, that's printing.
Print publishers are winning right now because printed magazines know who their audiences are. They can describe to advertisers the branding impact of their ads. Very few online publications can do this, and the reason is that few had the business discipline to go out and learn it.
There will be a second generation. There is just too much potential in this medium for it to be any other way. But the second generation will be run by professionals, people who understand the nature of publishing, who know who their readers are and who organize and advocate a market or lifestyle.
Feed and suck did none of these things. They deserve to die.
I know! Evidence to back up its claims! I hate big media as much as the next guy but Katz never did give a good example of a big media corp killing off a new media effort. All he does do is offer an utterly depressing and abismal look at the US. Oooh, now there's something that takes skill and wit.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
You may or may not remember that AOL started as a little yappy dog biting the ankles of CompuServe and Prodigy. At the time AOL was lauded by many as the little guy who was making good inroads in a market dominated by the giant CompuServe. AOL won its position in the world today through a combination of skilled businessmanship and luck.
Somewhere right now is a little company with four or five staffers which will one day eat AOL's lunch.
It may be a little group like feed or suck.
But if there are a thousand little companies that aspire to be the next AOL, then 999 of them will fail. Many will fail because they just weren't good enough, many will fail because they just weren't lucky enough. And many will fail because they were clobbered by AOL. That's the way it goes.
Whether or not "big media" gets it is almost a moot point. These companies got to be big for one reason ... they succesfully attracted large numbers of eyeballs to their publications and kept those eyeballs coming back. So how did they do it?
First off, these companies are mass media outlets. Their products are specifically designed and tailored to generate mass appeal -- in other words, their goal is to please the masses . And more precisely, to profit from them. They figured out a long time ago that real journalism doesn't pay the bills. Sensationalism, bias, and easily digestable sound bites are what the general public wants, and there are a lot more eyeballs belonging to the general public than any "elitist" group I've ever heard of.
But it doesn't end there. Suck and Feed went belly-up because society as a whole (the unwashed masses, if you will) are relatively stupid and easily manipulated. People don't want to have to form opinions of their own based on reported facts. They want to be told how their favorite anchor/reporter/celebrity feels about something so they can feel the same way. And that's what big media is best at -- convincing people that the guy or gal on the screen with the really nice hair and teeth shares the audience's views and concerns. Anyone in the audience who doesn't agree must have something wrong with them.
There's no conspiracy here. Just business. Choose the largest common denominators of the general public -- language, vocabulary, likes and dislikes -- then add money and easy access. Presto-change-o, instant success.
It amazes me still that just because something is on the internet, we expect to get it for free. Its as if people think when they pay for a magazine all they are paying for is the paper its printed on. While this may be true for some publications, people still miss the fact that putting the words together is more expensive than putting them on their chosen medium. We decry Salon moving to a pay for content model, but don't question the fact that the upshot is asking some of the best brains on the net to work for free. And then we complain even more because the advertising is obtrusive.
Just because the distribution is (comparitively) inexpensive, does not mean that the production is equally inexpensive. I'm surprised that there have not been reports of net zine brain drain, when the idealist columnists suddenly realize that they need to eat too. If we have learned anyhting over the past year, its that fundamental economc principles still apply on the net.
Incidentally, I would love to see suck's content in a paper based version. Hopefully the brains behind it will find a home in traditional publishing outlets. Besides, without a wireless network, you probably can't read a net zine whilst sitting on the can.
--
Do not taunt happy fun ball
--
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball(TM)
Dammit man, don't you know? All the Jews are going to Israel!! Get a clue.
As long as it's still a single click to both Corporate Generica and Joe's Genuine Content, we're healthy. Good writing will be published, and that means it can be linked to, emailed, bookmarked and posted on community sites (like Slashdot). If barriers to entry are erected, then we're back in TV-land, and that sucks.
If bandwidth, CPU, disk space and the rest continue to improve, publishing content will get cheaper & easier. Open Source contributes here as well, providing always-improving free (as in beer) tools that wannabe publishers can seize and put to work. Big media must HATE this, having to pay extra for their Compaq servers, Microsoft software (and those XP upgrades), market-droids, PR goons, sales wankers and pretty but dim receptionists.
I pay less per month for my little weblog's hosting than my phone. It runs Linux (free) MqSQL (free) and uses PHP (free). I have no sales targets, no corporate loyalties and no fixed hours. I'll be here next year Big Media, how about you?
A reason why the click-through measure of internet advertising isnt accurate is that the purpose of advertising has never been to create an immediate sale. It's to convince us that we need the product being sold, and that we need the specific brand that is being advertised.
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When I go to the store, instead of buying the generic cheesy poofs, I need to buy Cheeztastic Cheezariffics because they're the Chee-Z-est.
So they get the extra dollar or two, so they can pay for more ads and fancy packaging. Even if it is the same product as the cheap stuff.
It's about a selling a way of life, of overconsuption, of consumerism.
This is the point that the internet ads fail to consider. It's not about who will click on the advertised website immediately. Honestly, it doesnt matter if the ads are links or not. They'd be more effective if they were considered online billboards, where you put the name of the product (not even necesarily a website) in someone's head. I mean, who wants to go to the Cheezatastic Cheezariffics website anyway? We've already seen the ad. What would matter is if the next time we go to the store, we've been sufficiently brainwashed with the superiority of Cheez-etc's over the crappy rival brand.
And besides, the internet isnt the shopping mall cash cow that all e-businesses wish it was. Why not? Because people dont want to pay for things on the internet. Especially since if you look hard enough, you'll be able to find what you're looking for, for free.
Sure, I'll use the internet to buy certain things, but only if it is cheaper
It's really a shame though that the independent media websites are folding. However, its not like the internet holds the monopoly on independent media. Personally, I prefer to read a hard copy of that stuff, but I'm just old fashioned like that
-Johnny5000
p.s. 1/7 of all money spent in the US is on advertising.
p.p.s. I liked it better when the generic products were in the big blank and white containers and said 'no frills', instead of now how they try to look like the name-brand product.. as if that ever fooled anyone into buying Cheepios in the big yellow box instead of Cheerios.
p.p.p.s. All this talk about food. I must be hungry.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
Larry Flynt's publication empire is built on a more, *ahem* visual paradigm (not that there's anything wrong with that).
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself. --Billy Bragg
Honestly, I don't consider the USA Today approach to news journalism at all. If AOL/TW, Disney et. al. control all of the outlets, then all people will get is "happy news for happy people with happy problems".
So in reeality they don't get quality service, they get the shaft.
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself. --Billy Bragg
"Some sites turn to donations to pay their bills - while some can become quite successful this way - eventually, that money will dry up too. "
Donations isn't a solution.
"We do not expect to generate sufficient revenues to achieve profitability and, therefore, we expect to continue to incur net losses for at least the foreseeable future. If we do achieve profitability, we may not be able to sustain it. Failure to become and remain profitable may materially and adversely affect the market price of our common stock and our ability to raise capital and continue operations."
Anyone else finds this alarming?
The problem the online community and the worst open source fanatics have is that they simply fail to understand the simple fact that companies _and_ the people who work there must make money in order to be able to pay their bills.
It's just as simple as that. It's nice to get things for free but a healthy economy can never be built on sharing (ask the former communist countries).
I'm all for online communities and magazines. I'm also all for open source (as in getting the source to software you use). But PAYMENT must be included in all those business models.
If you run online magazines request that the banks hurry up in the development of micropayments.
If you develop open source software. Request money for it's END USE but let people do whatever they want with it otherwise.
"Many in the geek and hacker universe have arrogantly underestimated Big Media as being both toothless and clueless. "
Ehhh? What?
WFT are you talking about, it certainly isn't "Big Medias" fault!
The one and only problem here is that THEY DON'T MAKE MONEY. End of story!
The very same problem the open source companies have out there. Companies (and their employees) must make money to survive, welcome to reality!
I just love posts like this. When the "go'rnement" passes laws that might hinder, in the slightest, freedom of speech, or when the evil and malicious FBI does thier job it's high time to grab your guns and head for them there hills to defend your rights, but when Giant Conglomo Corp Inc. does the same thing you call it capitalism. God bless the Free Market, can I hear an amen. In short the conglomo can't restrain your thinking and freedom of speech fast enogh for you, it's only natural for them to destroy their competition after all, if the governemnt even touches your precious and holy cracking rights it's time for the revolution. First thing we do--kill all the politicians.
This Sig does not Exist.
Once you are footing the bill for hosting, chances are, you've got metered bandwidth. Go above your ammount, and you start getting charged extra.
For a site that acquires a vast readership - that load can be a lot to bear, and many sites are starting to fold under the burden of bandwidth bills.
It's like you get punished for having a popular site - unless you can fund it.
Some sites turned to banner ads and popups - annoying, but they were supposed to pay the bills. Unfortunately, many of the ad companies didn't pay, or paid far less than they promised. Only now are sites seeing that they can't rely on banners alone.
Some sites turn to donations to pay their bills - while some can become quite successful this way - eventually, that money will dry up too.
A forum I frequent regularly, Animeboards.com, is going through these growing pains. At first the webmaster relied on your standard Net advertising plan...which subsequently dried up and folded under him a month ago. He then had to close the forums down and leave open only one...one relating to idea to keep the place running. He got some great ideas for the first few days...and then something became apparent to everyone:
Hardly anyone *wanted* to pay for the services.
"Yeah, so?" you're probably saying. "We all know people want stuff for free."
And that's my point. A small core of supporters is keeping the site alive with PayPal donations and the Webmaster has found some short-term solutions...but the vast majority of the posters either don't feel like it's worth their time or lack the means to pay: no extra money/no convienient way to ship checks (it's an Australian site)/etc.
The challenge is to give the visitors something worth visiting. Fresh and original content, neato graphics, downloads, etc. The costs of running your site are directly related to it's popularity. Mom-and-Pop outfits, single people running things from their bedrooms, and even small companies are learning that being popular is expensive. That's why they fold or get bought out. Are we too cheap these days to pay for the things we use? Or are the costs too much for these sites to handle...and why?
"All mankind is at the mercy of a handful of neurotics". - Norman Douglas
I second that emotion. That phrase really bothered me, too. The fact is, most people aren't so freaking geeky and fashionably counter-culturalistic as to value an independent information source that publishes all of its material online over the tried and true sources that deliver information in traditional ways, namely television, radio, and newspapers.
Its not somehow "Big Media's" fault that there is an almost insurmountable barrier to entry in the television and newspaper markets in the form of prohibitive startup costs. It's the way things are, Katz. Transmitters and printing machines cost a lot more money than a web server and underpaid staff, even though you argue(?) something to the contrary.
Another thing that struck me as the writing of an uninformed madman was this phrase:
"As 'Feed' and 'Suck', two of the smarter, more attitudinal publications of the Net's first generation, vanish, they will not be replaced by similar kinds of publications."
Obviously, the people who are not you, that is, those people who influence markets based on their browsing habits rather than their ability to invent and then spin a story, decided that 'Feed' and 'Suck' (an amusing description of the evolutionary path that many information startups seem to follow) just weren't "smart" and "attitudinal" enough to warrant their attention. Ceteris Paribus, 'Feed' and 'Suck' don't get the hits, advertising revenue, and acclaim afforded other dot.com information sources in a competing marketplace. Again, this is not a conspiracy perpetrated by Big Media. It's simply the way things are.
Same as usual, this cat(z) produces a story from his posterior that's designed to play into the collective Brave New World monopoly fear of the Slashdot crowd.
Sorry Katz, but you will not pursuade me with blatant attempts at rhetoric used to buttress unfounded opinion. Take it from another writer, that's the sign of a bad one.