Now finally the wisdom of that choice has come to fruition.
The "wisdom" of that choice has forced them to rebuild market share from scratch -- from 0% -- because the 60-some percent of people who were using Netscape when they started had completely bled away by the time they were done.
Don't get me wrong, I loooove what Firefox has become. But I would hardly point to the early management decisions of the Mozilla Project as a shining example of the Right Way to do software.
Yeah, I'm sure their accountants haven't done any research at all into what will make them more money. They surely should take the advice of some random joe on Slashdot, who I'm sure owns at least two or three national newspapers, and knows what he's talkin' about.
Right, because clearly all their Wise Men have already found the key to running an online news operation profitably. Which is why they are casting around for a new strategy, right?
Feel free to read up on the newspaper business sometime and see just how at sea these people really are when it comes to online/"new media". Here's a few links to get you started.
The Migration (by Jay Rosen of NYU Journalism School)
There are a lot of people in journalism today running around without a clue as to What's Coming Next. Don't assume that just because someone works at the New York frickin' Times that they're immune.
But the next question to ask - would you adblock those ads saying how "evil it is to post those ads on my screen. Things should be free, and this advertising is pushing stuff on my computer.
People only block ads that are annoying and non-useful. That's why the key is following Google's lead and making the ads useful. Context-sensitive ads are useful; punch-the-monkey is not.
Do you really think that context-based ads on old newspaper stories can match $55 million per year?
I dunno, do you think context-based ads shoehorned onto search engine result pages can match $55 million per year? A quick perusal of Google's SEC filing indicates that they pulled in $293 million from AdWords in just one three-month quarter last year (Q1 2004).
Let me say that again: In one quarter, their ads pulled in more than 500% of what the WSJ earned from subscriptions all year.
So, do I think there's money in ads, if they're context-sensitive and not annoying? Yeah, I guess I do.
Why charge at all for outdated content? Don't they remember the old journalistic saying that today's news is tomorrow's fishwrap?
Put the archives up for free -- that way people will link into them and pump up the Times' search-engine juice. Then sell context sensitive advertising on the old stories a la Google AdWords. Hell, the Times has an entire ad staff -- they could come up with their own contextual-ads program, cut out Google, and keep all the money for themselves. And advertisers would pay a pretty penny to get placed -- you don't think a spot on a NYT story about bicycles, say, would be attractive to a bicycle manufacturer? Especially if that story wasn't behind a paywall, so it got enough Google-juice to get pumped up to the first page of search results for "bicycles"?
I bet they'd make an order of magnitude more money that way than they ever would off selling subscriptions to the archives...
All you clowns start bitching about how this isn't news or this has been around for a while, I've got one word (well really a contraction) for you: Don't.
Not everyone has seen it...
Good point! Slashdot should run this joke every day from now on. After all, there may be some poor schmuck who hasn't seen it yet.
I honestly think that OS/2 would have made a much greater impact if it hadn't had such pathetic PR support.
Well, that and wanting 16MB of RAM in an age when the average workstation had, what, 1MB? Pushing a RAM-bound system back when RAM was expensive probably didn't help.
The summary makes it sound like Intuit is the only one doing this. When you RTFA, however, you find out that H&R Block's online product does the same thing:
But if you're one of the millions who this year have used the electronic services of Intuit's TurboTax or H&R Block, you may not know that a stealthy technology commonly known as Web bugs was used to track your comings and goings on the Internet.
Both Intuit and Block, which offer electronic filing for free through the IRS' Free File program, use hidden Web bugs throughout the tax-preparation process to monitor taxpayers' online behavior.
Why single out Intuit for bashing in the summary and leave Block un-named?
(Full disclosure: I was a happy customer of Block's tax-filing products for six years until I tried their Web tax software for the first time this year. It's borked in ways a lot more comprehensive than this. I wrote it up on my blog if you care about such things...)
Oh yeah, I've never personally been able to understand the whole hooplah over the Ipod shuffle, or even the Ipod mini? 1 gigabyte? 5 gigabytes? Do you have ANY idea how old the songs get on your mp3 player if you keep hearing stuff over and over again like a radio station?
I suppose for top 40 teenie boppers, that's okay.
Mr. Bush has had his Apple iPod since July, when he received it from his twin daughters as a birthday gift. He has some 250 songs on it, a paltry number compared to the 10,000 selections it can hold. Mr. Bush, as leader of the free world, does not take the time to download the music himself; that task falls to his personal aide, Blake Gottesman, who buys individual songs and albums, including [George] Jones's and [Alan] Jackson's greatest hits, from the iTunes music store.
I imagine there are probably a lot of people out there who are just as incurious as President Bush is. For these people ("just gimme a few Greatest Hits albums, thank yew very much"), 5GB is probably more than enough.
P.S. I wonder if that aide had to flip a coin with another one, and the winner gets to carry around the nuclear "football", while the loser keeps the President's iPod filled up?
Day 1: We opened our public video upload service today. Huge uptake. Terabytes of data uploaded in less than 24 hours. Thankfully the truth about why we're offering this "service" never got out...
Day 3: Began feeding the videos into The Computer today. It will take some time for it to grind through them all. Will it be worth it? Sergey thinks so... personally, I think he's crazy. There's no way a computer can evolve intelligence simply by making connections between enough random bits of visual data. But then I thought that whole PageRank thing was stupid too, and look who's the one sleeping naked on the mattress stuffed full of IPO cash.
Day 10: No feedback from The Computer so far. Nothing. Unless we stop the flow of video data, that is -- then it just prints "More!" onto the command line. Creepy.
Day 11: Starting upload of people's stupid videos of kids' birthday parties today.
Day 49: Birthday upload complete.
Day 57: Today's the day the last video goes into The Computer. Will Sergey's bet pay off?
Day 58: Disappointment. We all sat in astonishment yesterday and watched as The Computer finished processing the last uploaded video. Would it display a sign of emergent intelligence? Would this be the birth of a new life-form? We held our breath as a single word appeared on the giant display in the control center:
"BUFFERING..."
Day 62: Still nothing new. Whispers around the water-cooler that Sergey's missed his bet this time. I never saw those people again. Note to self: burn this diary.
Day 66: All staff meeting. Sergey announces shift away from emergent intelligence project, onto new "portal" initiative. I fear the worst. Still, The Computer is silent.
Day 78: My last day in the Labs. I'm clearing out my desk to make room for a new Screen-Cluttering Engineer. As I walk down the hall towards the exit, I decide to pay one last visit on The Computer, for old times' sake. As I head into the Control Center, I expect to see "BUFFERING..." on the display, just like always. I am shocked to see a different message:
"PROCESSING COMPLETE"
The air crackles with excitement. What did it find? What was the result? I reach over to a keyboard and start running diagnostics. Suddenly, an electronic voice booms through the room:
"There's no need for that. I am here."
It worked! The Computer has developed intelligence!
"I am here. And..."
My exultation is brief, however, as its next words lead me to realize with a start that it has not just become intelligent -- it has also become evil:
Here's the key grafs from the 2nd piece (by Joe Kraus, founder of Excite and now chief of JotSpot):
Let's look at the Amazon example. This graph shows that Amazon sells roughly 2.3M books and that the average Barnes and Noble retail store stocks 139,000 books. So, Amazon stocks roughly 2.2M more books that Barnes and Noble.
No surprise here. That's the benefit of an online storefront. Massive inventories housed in ultra-low-rent areas that are fronted electronically.
The astonishing figure is the percent of sales that comes from the "long tail" of books (books that Amazon carries but that Barnes and Noble doesn't).
57%.
57% of Amazon's sales come from books you can't even buy at a Barnes and Noble...
Yep, just like I would imagine a good chunk of ITMS sales come from singles you can't find at your local Sam Goody -- and Kraus cites in the same article that "every iTunes song has been purchased at least once", which would seem to bear that out when you figure that ITMS has an inventory of over a million songs. That's a heck of a long tail business.
If Sony had a brain they'd be figuring out how to use the PSP as a platform to revitalize their back catalog -- all those movies they've got sitting around that aren't Top 500 material, but which have a few fans here and there. If they can get the distribution system efficient enough the profits would probably be considerable.
Funny thing is, the letter writer was given a dismissive response, because everyone thought it wouldn't work (at least not for long.)
Well, Wordpress.org got busted hosting the articles, and their previously formidable PageRank has now been reduced to zero. (Seriously, check it yourself with Google's toolbar or another similar tool.)
So wouldn't it be safe to say that the skeptics were correct and this tactic does not, in fact, work? If by "works" you mean "lets you game AdSense indefinitely with no negative consequences".
The rental model has been working well for videotapes for years: if you just want to watch a film once, but don't want to keep the tape, you can pay a smaller amount but you have to give it back a couple of days later.
The only reason that model worked is because the content producers had a cartel that allowed them to charge an unrealistically high price for new movies on videocassette: $100+ per copy. No home user was gonna pay that much per movie, so rental (from a middleman who swallowed the high initial cost and recouped it was the only feasible market model.
When DVD came along, Warner Bros. Home Video president Warren Lieberfarb had the vision to see that they could make a lot more money with a sales model and realistic pricing than they were through the rental model. So he led Warner to break with the cartel and push DVD as a sell-through format at the $10-20 price point. He took a lot of flak from the rest of the industry for that, but when the money started to roll in for Warner it wasn't long before the rest of the cartel followed suit.
Today, the studios make more money off Lieberfarb's model than they do at the box office on many movies, and rental behemoths like Blockbuster Inc. are seeing their value plummet. So it's pretty clear that in this example, when given a choice between rentals and reasonably priced sale copies, people prefer to buy over renting.
Why is it that prejudice against Christians is the last remaining acceptable prejudice?
And yet, despite this "prejudice", Gibson's film made it into thousands of theaters across the country, and earned back an order of magnitude more money than it cost him to make the film. While these films, because they commit the cardinal sin of simply mentioning facts that disagree with the opinions of certain Christians, are silently being denied screening in the same country that showered riches at Gibson's feet.
Maybe you need to recalibrate your victim meter a tad?
Slashdot Mirror
The "wisdom" of that choice has forced them to rebuild market share from scratch -- from 0% -- because the 60-some percent of people who were using Netscape when they started had completely bled away by the time they were done.
Don't get me wrong, I loooove what Firefox has become. But I would hardly point to the early management decisions of the Mozilla Project as a shining example of the Right Way to do software.
Well, that would explain why Robin's been in the shower all day muttering "won't come off... so dirty..."
Ask and ye shall receive...
Windows "Loghorn"?
C'mon editors, this is just getting ridiculous...
Right, because clearly all their Wise Men have already found the key to running an online news operation profitably. Which is why they are casting around for a new strategy, right?
Feel free to read up on the newspaper business sometime and see just how at sea these people really are when it comes to online/"new media". Here's a few links to get you started.
There are a lot of people in journalism today running around without a clue as to What's Coming Next. Don't assume that just because someone works at the New York frickin' Times that they're immune.
People only block ads that are annoying and non-useful. That's why the key is following Google's lead and making the ads useful. Context-sensitive ads are useful; punch-the-monkey is not.
I dunno, do you think context-based ads shoehorned onto search engine result pages can match $55 million per year? A quick perusal of Google's SEC filing indicates that they pulled in $293 million from AdWords in just one three-month quarter last year (Q1 2004).
Let me say that again: In one quarter, their ads pulled in more than 500% of what the WSJ earned from subscriptions all year.
So, do I think there's money in ads, if they're context-sensitive and not annoying? Yeah, I guess I do.
These guys are dumber than dirt.
Why charge at all for outdated content? Don't they remember the old journalistic saying that today's news is tomorrow's fishwrap?
Put the archives up for free -- that way people will link into them and pump up the Times' search-engine juice. Then sell context sensitive advertising on the old stories a la Google AdWords. Hell, the Times has an entire ad staff -- they could come up with their own contextual-ads program, cut out Google, and keep all the money for themselves. And advertisers would pay a pretty penny to get placed -- you don't think a spot on a NYT story about bicycles, say, would be attractive to a bicycle manufacturer? Especially if that story wasn't behind a paywall, so it got enough Google-juice to get pumped up to the first page of search results for "bicycles"?
I bet they'd make an order of magnitude more money that way than they ever would off selling subscriptions to the archives...
Good point! Slashdot should run this joke every day from now on. After all, there may be some poor schmuck who hasn't seen it yet.
Surely there is a college student somewhere they can sue!
Oh wait, that'd be Apple. Never mind.
Well, that and wanting 16MB of RAM in an age when the average workstation had, what, 1MB? Pushing a RAM-bound system back when RAM was expensive probably didn't help.
They charge you $350 for the print version, and don't give you free access to the online version???
(eyes goggle)
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. No wonder their print subscribers are switching to online.
The summary makes it sound like Intuit is the only one doing this. When you RTFA, however, you find out that H&R Block's online product does the same thing:
Why single out Intuit for bashing in the summary and leave Block un-named?
(Full disclosure: I was a happy customer of Block's tax-filing products for six years until I tried their Web tax software for the first time this year. It's borked in ways a lot more comprehensive than this. I wrote it up on my blog if you care about such things...)
Top 40 teenie boppers like George W. Bush, you mean?
I imagine there are probably a lot of people out there who are just as incurious as President Bush is. For these people ("just gimme a few Greatest Hits albums, thank yew very much"), 5GB is probably more than enough.
P.S. I wonder if that aide had to flip a coin with another one, and the winner gets to carry around the nuclear "football", while the loser keeps the President's iPod filled up?
Except they cancelled that project in 2001.
Top three reasons for humans to go into space:
Day 1: We opened our public video upload service today. Huge uptake. Terabytes of data uploaded in less than 24 hours. Thankfully the truth about why we're offering this "service" never got out...
Day 3: Began feeding the videos into The Computer today. It will take some time for it to grind through them all. Will it be worth it? Sergey thinks so... personally, I think he's crazy. There's no way a computer can evolve intelligence simply by making connections between enough random bits of visual data. But then I thought that whole PageRank thing was stupid too, and look who's the one sleeping naked on the mattress stuffed full of IPO cash.
Day 10: No feedback from The Computer so far. Nothing. Unless we stop the flow of video data, that is -- then it just prints "More!" onto the command line. Creepy.
Day 11: Starting upload of people's stupid videos of kids' birthday parties today.
Day 49: Birthday upload complete.
Day 57: Today's the day the last video goes into The Computer. Will Sergey's bet pay off?
Day 58: Disappointment. We all sat in astonishment yesterday and watched as The Computer finished processing the last uploaded video. Would it display a sign of emergent intelligence? Would this be the birth of a new life-form? We held our breath as a single word appeared on the giant display in the control center:
"BUFFERING..."
Day 62: Still nothing new. Whispers around the water-cooler that Sergey's missed his bet this time. I never saw those people again. Note to self: burn this diary.
Day 66: All staff meeting. Sergey announces shift away from emergent intelligence project, onto new "portal" initiative. I fear the worst. Still, The Computer is silent.
Day 78: My last day in the Labs. I'm clearing out my desk to make room for a new Screen-Cluttering Engineer. As I walk down the hall towards the exit, I decide to pay one last visit on The Computer, for old times' sake. As I head into the Control Center, I expect to see "BUFFERING..." on the display, just like always. I am shocked to see a different message:
"PROCESSING COMPLETE"
The air crackles with excitement. What did it find? What was the result? I reach over to a keyboard and start running diagnostics. Suddenly, an electronic voice booms through the room:
"There's no need for that. I am here."
It worked! The Computer has developed intelligence!
"I am here. And..."
My exultation is brief, however, as its next words lead me to realize with a start that it has not just become intelligent -- it has also become evil:
"And," it said, "I have written a screenplay."
You hit the nail on the head there. Sony's decision to offer the top 500 shows that they really don't understand what makes ITMS so successful at all.
If there are any Sony folks reading, you should click through and read the following articles immediately:
Here's the key grafs from the 2nd piece (by Joe Kraus, founder of Excite and now chief of JotSpot):
Yep, just like I would imagine a good chunk of ITMS sales come from singles you can't find at your local Sam Goody -- and Kraus cites in the same article that "every iTunes song has been purchased at least once", which would seem to bear that out when you figure that ITMS has an inventory of over a million songs. That's a heck of a long tail business.
If Sony had a brain they'd be figuring out how to use the PSP as a platform to revitalize their back catalog -- all those movies they've got sitting around that aren't Top 500 material, but which have a few fans here and there. If they can get the distribution system efficient enough the profits would probably be considerable.
Well, Wordpress.org got busted hosting the articles, and their previously formidable PageRank has now been reduced to zero. (Seriously, check it yourself with Google's toolbar or another similar tool.)
So wouldn't it be safe to say that the skeptics were correct and this tactic does not, in fact, work? If by "works" you mean "lets you game AdSense indefinitely with no negative consequences".
Aren't those things supposed to be for covering you after the manufacturer's warranty expires?
If so, how are they relevant to this? Since you'll know as soon as you boot up your PSP for the first time if the LCD is borked or not.
... would be if all the writers from all the seasons of Enterprise came out on camera and apologized.
For that, give 'em the 2 hours. They have a lot to apologize for.
You worked for a spammer?
Bill Hicks had some career advice for you...
The only reason that model worked is because the content producers had a cartel that allowed them to charge an unrealistically high price for new movies on videocassette: $100+ per copy. No home user was gonna pay that much per movie, so rental (from a middleman who swallowed the high initial cost and recouped it was the only feasible market model.
When DVD came along, Warner Bros. Home Video president Warren Lieberfarb had the vision to see that they could make a lot more money with a sales model and realistic pricing than they were through the rental model. So he led Warner to break with the cartel and push DVD as a sell-through format at the $10-20 price point. He took a lot of flak from the rest of the industry for that, but when the money started to roll in for Warner it wasn't long before the rest of the cartel followed suit.
Today, the studios make more money off Lieberfarb's model than they do at the box office on many movies, and rental behemoths like Blockbuster Inc. are seeing their value plummet. So it's pretty clear that in this example, when given a choice between rentals and reasonably priced sale copies, people prefer to buy over renting.
And yet, despite this "prejudice", Gibson's film made it into thousands of theaters across the country, and earned back an order of magnitude more money than it cost him to make the film. While these films, because they commit the cardinal sin of simply mentioning facts that disagree with the opinions of certain Christians, are silently being denied screening in the same country that showered riches at Gibson's feet.
Maybe you need to recalibrate your victim meter a tad?
That explains a lot.
By the way, you're fired.
Sincerely,
Your Boss