Despite our advances in digital cable delivery, the analytics aren't there. Ad deals are still bought and paid for around Nielsen ratings, which is based on the same sampling methodology they've been using for decades.
There may come a day when we have the same analytics on TVs and cable boxes as we do online, but that day hasn't come yet.
Not trying to schill for the cable companies (although they do pay my salary), because I, too, think the current model sucks ass. But we can blame Nielsen and advertisers for this mess- not the telcos, and not the cable networks.
I know I'm a few days late replying but yes- I completely agree. It seems crazy to me as well.
Some advertisers are smart- they know exactly the narrow, niche audience they want to reach, and are willing to pay a premium for it because they're betting those customers will be more profitable in the long term. Most advertisers, however, are not. When their target is simply "People aged 25-54" rather than "Wealthy female northeasterners who like outdoor sports", it doesn't matter how engaged the audience is.
The main issue is measurement- despite all our advances in digital technology, Nielsen ratings are still based on a panel of a few million homes that act as a model for the entire nation- essentially the same methodology as in the 1950s. When the advertiser has no way of really knowing who's seeing their ad anyway, the incentive is just to blast it out to as many screens as possible and hope it sticks.
Let's put $80 billion in perspective (data mostly courtesy of XKCD http://xkcd.com/980).
$80 billion is:
4 new subway lines in NYC (~$17 billion each) 9 aircraft carriers (Gerald Ford class, ~$9 billion each) Less than Apple's cash on hand (~$97 billion) Slightly more than the F-22 Raptor program (~$67 billion, now halted/wasted) Slightly more than President Obama's 2011 high-speed rail proposal (~$53 billion) About half of the International Space Station (~$138 billion) Less than half of the Apollo moon landing project (~$192 billion) 3 Manhattan Projects (~$24 billion each) 80 Instagrams
In the grand scheme of Humanity, $80 billion is a trivial cost if it could help solve the world's energy concerns. At least in my opinion.
Pricing for a specific deal is based on people reached, as measured by Nielsen, after the fact. Long-term relationships between a channel and an advertiser for multiple deals are based on potential reach, before the fact. An advertiser doesn't want to go to 9 different individual small channels to get the scale they need for a campaign- they want to go to one channel with the scale to accommodate them.
Ad revenue won't go up until we all move completely to digital and have better numbers than Nielsen's 1950s strategy for measuring TV audience. We actually do make higher CPMs for online video deals than on-air, but the scale isn't there to make it profitable yet.
I work for a major cable network- here's a hopefully better explanation of why we've stuck with the bundling model.
A cable channel gets its revenue from two main sources- cable subscription fees from the cable provider (~70%) and ad revenue (~30%).
Let's assume we have a cable channel that is currently bundled, and in 100% of households with TVs, with revenue of $100 million a year. We're getting $70 million from cable subscriptions, and $30 million from ad revenue.
Now let's say we switch to a-la carte, but 100% of households still want to subscribe at a price that leaves us revenue-neutral. The cable channel says "great! we're still getting $70 million from subscriptions and $30 million from ad revenue. Everybody wins."
But, let's say only 50% of households would be willing to subscribe, but they're willing to pay double the price because they love the channel. We're still making $70 million from subscription fees. However, we're now only in 50% of households, which means we're much less attractive to advertisers. We're not going to keep making $30 million from ad revenue, because advertisers often need a "critical mass" of households reached in order to make a deal. This isn't a linear relationship- 50% of households doesn't mean 50% of ad revenue, it could mean 0% because we don't have the scale to make an ad deal worthwhile for the advertiser.
So now we've only got $70-85 million a year, which means we have less money to spend on programming. Program quality suffers as a result, and so the next year maybe only 25% of households are willing to subscribe. We're now in a downward spiral.
TL;DR - unbundling has the unfortunate side effect of reducing program quality for specialty channels. Only the cheapest shows (ie, crappy reality shows) or the ones appealing to the lowest common denominator (ie, CBS's entire lineup) might survive in the long-term.
The channels have to put advertising in place to support themselves; They do not get that subscription money, and they wouldn't under a 'pick and choose' model anymore than they do now.
I'm not sure how it is in Canada, but in the US about 70% of a cable channel's revenue does come from cable subscription fees, and about 30% from ad revenue. They do get that money from the Comcasts and Time Warners of the world.
This is nothing but an attempt by a few self-interested college professors to apply the "It's Science (tm) so it must be True!" concept to the current zeitgeist of class warfare nonsense.
"psychologist Paul Piff of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues devised a series of tests, working with groups of 100 to 200 Berkeley undergraduates or adults recruited online. Subjects completed a standard gauge of their social status, placing an X on one of 10 rungs of a ladder representing their income, education, and how much respect their jobs might command compared with other Americans."
And we honestly expect this to be a representative sample of "rich people"? How many CEOs and entrepaneurs have the time to fill out online surveys and then report to UC Berkeley to roll dice and steal candies from a jar? The survey is essentially attracting the same sort of people who click on "WORK FROM HOME AND EARN $10,000 A DAY!!!1!!" banner ads, not Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. That these people are self-identifying their wealth and social status further introduces significant bias into the experiment.
"The team's findings suggest that privilege promotes dishonesty. For example, upper-class subjects were more likely to cheat. After five apparently random rolls of a computerized die for a chance to win an online gift certificate, three times as many upper-class players reported totals higher than 12—even though, unbeknownst to them, the game was rigged so that 12 was the highest possible score."
We've just established that the selection criteria for identifying "rich people" was flawed. It's not surprising to me that the people who would lie in an online survey and say that they're "rich" would then lie again to try to win a prize.
"Piff says the study may shed light on the hotly debated topic of income inequality. "Our findings suggest that if the pursuit of self-interest goes unchecked, it may result in a vicious cycle: self-interest leads people to behave unethically, which raises their status, which leads to more unethical behavior and inequality.""
Self-interest leading to unethical behavior? Like, perhaps, a college professor with an agenda perverting the scientific method by creating a horribly flawed, biased study and trying to pass it off as fact?
Studies into the gut flora and how it impacts various aspects of our health is an exploding field. Diabetes, Ulcerative Colitis, Crohen's Disease, and c. Diff are all conditions that studies like this one are increasingly linking to imbalances in the gut flora.
Amazingly, actually fixing the imbalance seems to be both attainable and relatively easy in some cases- but the current strategies are... a little gross:
Basically you get poo from a healthy donor (usually a family member) with a "balanced" flora, screen for parasites, mix up a poo-enema, and squirt it up your butt. Seriously. In theory, the influx of properly balanced bacterial colonies replaces the depleted strains. At the moment this is not an FDA-approved therapy (obviously), and doctors in the US won't touch this except for a few small trials for specific illnesses, but some doctors in Australia have been experimenting with this for c. Diff with some impressive results (http://www.cdd.com.au/). This has the potential to be an extremely easy "fix" for variety of diseases that could significantly improve quality of life for many, many people; as a sufferer of Ulcerative Colitis myself, I'd be more than happy to squirt some poo up my butt instead of taking a cocktail of drugs with all kinds of unpleasant side effects for the rest of my life.
Sadly, the gross factor is probably turning off a lot of serious research. It'll be interesting to see if any of the US drug manufacturers can put this into a pill form, thus becoming incentivized to fund all the trials necessary.
Sooong actually created three of them- Data, Lore, and B4 (their older brother).
There was also an entire episode dedicated to Data's attempt to reproduce himself; he created a child-like android based on himself, but he wasn't able to get it quite right and it died. He never tried again. http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Lal
Additionally, there were several attempts by the Federation to study Data in depth in order to create more Soong-type androids. Data refused, in part because he would no longer be unique: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/The_Measure_Of_A_Man_(episode)
You: Where is the nearest pizza place? Lwaxana Troi phone: Pizza? Dreadful! I know a lovely little bistro just ahead- the cook has the most FILTHY thoughts about me but he makes the most delicious chocolate cake. Chocolate is an aphrodisiac, you know...
Not trying to troll, I'm legitimately unfamiliar. Doesn't organic waste biodegrade in a landfill anyway? The article mentions reducing the carbon released by landfills- aren't we just shifting that carbon to a different facility?
The high-quality soil produced does seem like a sweet plus, but the "jobs created" claim seems silly (wouldn't it destroy an equal number of landfill jobs?)
I'm disappointed that seemingly most Slashdotters couldn't even be bothered to read the article HEADLINE, let alone the summary or, god forbid, the article itself.
Let's not overhype what's occurring here. FTA: "You now have two ways you can sign in and stay with us and keep your contributions and earned badges."
They're only dropping support for other single sign on type logins, probably all of which had been provided by a 3rd party like Gigya. Standard old-fashioned site registration/login is still supported.
I work for a major TV network website; we have single sign on via Facebook and also offer signup via the rogue's gallery of Twitter, LinkedIn, mySpace, etc in addition to a standard old-fashioned signup. Literally 99% of our signups come from either Facebook or standard registration. We'll probably drop support for the others as well, as they're not worth the dev resources or the fee we pay to Gigya.
Do-Not-Track opts you out of receiving targeting advertising. That's completely separate from something like, Google Analytics, which tells businesses how their sites are being used and measure traffic.
Asking businesses not to collect analytics data is like asking a shop owner to wear a blindfold and earmuffs when you come through the door.
The warheads we have now are not the same kind of warheads we dropped on Japan. Back in the day, the strategy was to fly one large bomb over a city and drop it. The idea behind this was that since you don't have pinpoint precision when dropping a huge bomb from a plane, you make the explosion huge so that aiming is irrelevant. These days, we'd launch a laser-guided ICBM loaded with a dozen smaller warheads, which can each be targeted to where they'd do maximum damage (but without the impressive, city-leveling power of something like Fat Man).
You're probably still correct that we have significantly more than we need, but it's not a totally apples to apples comparison.
Listen to any gold bug discuss the intrinsic value of gold, as if it has some inherent value beyond what people will pay you for it.
Intrinsic value- I do not think it means what you think it means. If no one will pay me money (jewels, food, ammunition) for gold, it is still useful to me. I can make conductive wiring, heat sinks, and pretty decorations out of it. I can use it to treat some forms of cancer.
This is in contrast to something like a dollar bill or a Euro note- if no one will pay me for it, I can use it for... toilet paper? Bedding? I do remember hearing stories about people burning Marks for fuel in the Weimar Republic days.
Slashdot Mirror
...If the League of Legends community is any indication.
Seriously, those guys suck.
Despite our advances in digital cable delivery, the analytics aren't there. Ad deals are still bought and paid for around Nielsen ratings, which is based on the same sampling methodology they've been using for decades.
There may come a day when we have the same analytics on TVs and cable boxes as we do online, but that day hasn't come yet.
Not trying to schill for the cable companies (although they do pay my salary), because I, too, think the current model sucks ass. But we can blame Nielsen and advertisers for this mess- not the telcos, and not the cable networks.
I know I'm a few days late replying but yes- I completely agree. It seems crazy to me as well.
Some advertisers are smart- they know exactly the narrow, niche audience they want to reach, and are willing to pay a premium for it because they're betting those customers will be more profitable in the long term. Most advertisers, however, are not. When their target is simply "People aged 25-54" rather than "Wealthy female northeasterners who like outdoor sports", it doesn't matter how engaged the audience is.
The main issue is measurement- despite all our advances in digital technology, Nielsen ratings are still based on a panel of a few million homes that act as a model for the entire nation- essentially the same methodology as in the 1950s. When the advertiser has no way of really knowing who's seeing their ad anyway, the incentive is just to blast it out to as many screens as possible and hope it sticks.
Let's put $80 billion in perspective (data mostly courtesy of XKCD http://xkcd.com/980).
$80 billion is:
4 new subway lines in NYC (~$17 billion each)
9 aircraft carriers (Gerald Ford class, ~$9 billion each)
Less than Apple's cash on hand (~$97 billion)
Slightly more than the F-22 Raptor program (~$67 billion, now halted/wasted)
Slightly more than President Obama's 2011 high-speed rail proposal (~$53 billion)
About half of the International Space Station (~$138 billion)
Less than half of the Apollo moon landing project (~$192 billion)
3 Manhattan Projects (~$24 billion each)
80 Instagrams
In the grand scheme of Humanity, $80 billion is a trivial cost if it could help solve the world's energy concerns. At least in my opinion.
Pricing for a specific deal is based on people reached, as measured by Nielsen, after the fact. Long-term relationships between a channel and an advertiser for multiple deals are based on potential reach, before the fact. An advertiser doesn't want to go to 9 different individual small channels to get the scale they need for a campaign- they want to go to one channel with the scale to accommodate them.
Ad revenue won't go up until we all move completely to digital and have better numbers than Nielsen's 1950s strategy for measuring TV audience. We actually do make higher CPMs for online video deals than on-air, but the scale isn't there to make it profitable yet.
I work for a major cable network- here's a hopefully better explanation of why we've stuck with the bundling model.
A cable channel gets its revenue from two main sources- cable subscription fees from the cable provider (~70%) and ad revenue (~30%).
Let's assume we have a cable channel that is currently bundled, and in 100% of households with TVs, with revenue of $100 million a year. We're getting $70 million from cable subscriptions, and $30 million from ad revenue.
Now let's say we switch to a-la carte, but 100% of households still want to subscribe at a price that leaves us revenue-neutral. The cable channel says "great! we're still getting $70 million from subscriptions and $30 million from ad revenue. Everybody wins."
But, let's say only 50% of households would be willing to subscribe, but they're willing to pay double the price because they love the channel. We're still making $70 million from subscription fees. However, we're now only in 50% of households, which means we're much less attractive to advertisers. We're not going to keep making $30 million from ad revenue, because advertisers often need a "critical mass" of households reached in order to make a deal. This isn't a linear relationship- 50% of households doesn't mean 50% of ad revenue, it could mean 0% because we don't have the scale to make an ad deal worthwhile for the advertiser.
So now we've only got $70-85 million a year, which means we have less money to spend on programming. Program quality suffers as a result, and so the next year maybe only 25% of households are willing to subscribe. We're now in a downward spiral.
TL;DR - unbundling has the unfortunate side effect of reducing program quality for specialty channels. Only the cheapest shows (ie, crappy reality shows) or the ones appealing to the lowest common denominator (ie, CBS's entire lineup) might survive in the long-term.
The channels have to put advertising in place to support themselves; They do not get that subscription money, and they wouldn't under a 'pick and choose' model anymore than they do now.
I'm not sure how it is in Canada, but in the US about 70% of a cable channel's revenue does come from cable subscription fees, and about 30% from ad revenue. They do get that money from the Comcasts and Time Warners of the world.
Really wish I had mod points to mod this up. Excellent analogy.
This is nothing but an attempt by a few self-interested college professors to apply the "It's Science (tm) so it must be True!" concept to the current zeitgeist of class warfare nonsense.
"psychologist Paul Piff of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues devised a series of tests, working with groups of 100 to 200 Berkeley undergraduates or adults recruited online. Subjects completed a standard gauge of their social status, placing an X on one of 10 rungs of a ladder representing their income, education, and how much respect their jobs might command compared with other Americans."
And we honestly expect this to be a representative sample of "rich people"? How many CEOs and entrepaneurs have the time to fill out online surveys and then report to UC Berkeley to roll dice and steal candies from a jar? The survey is essentially attracting the same sort of people who click on "WORK FROM HOME AND EARN $10,000 A DAY!!!1!!" banner ads, not Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. That these people are self-identifying their wealth and social status further introduces significant bias into the experiment.
"The team's findings suggest that privilege promotes dishonesty. For example, upper-class subjects were more likely to cheat. After five apparently random rolls of a computerized die for a chance to win an online gift certificate, three times as many upper-class players reported totals higher than 12—even though, unbeknownst to them, the game was rigged so that 12 was the highest possible score."
We've just established that the selection criteria for identifying "rich people" was flawed. It's not surprising to me that the people who would lie in an online survey and say that they're "rich" would then lie again to try to win a prize.
"Piff says the study may shed light on the hotly debated topic of income inequality. "Our findings suggest that if the pursuit of self-interest goes unchecked, it may result in a vicious cycle: self-interest leads people to behave unethically, which raises their status, which leads to more unethical behavior and inequality.""
Self-interest leading to unethical behavior? Like, perhaps, a college professor with an agenda perverting the scientific method by creating a horribly flawed, biased study and trying to pass it off as fact?
Indeed. I hear both Playbook owners are absolutely livid about this.
Of things to never waste any brainpower worrying about in any way.
Studies into the gut flora and how it impacts various aspects of our health is an exploding field. Diabetes, Ulcerative Colitis, Crohen's Disease, and c. Diff are all conditions that studies like this one are increasingly linking to imbalances in the gut flora.
Amazingly, actually fixing the imbalance seems to be both attainable and relatively easy in some cases- but the current strategies are... a little gross:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_bacteriotherapy
Basically you get poo from a healthy donor (usually a family member) with a "balanced" flora, screen for parasites, mix up a poo-enema, and squirt it up your butt. Seriously. In theory, the influx of properly balanced bacterial colonies replaces the depleted strains. At the moment this is not an FDA-approved therapy (obviously), and doctors in the US won't touch this except for a few small trials for specific illnesses, but some doctors in Australia have been experimenting with this for c. Diff with some impressive results (http://www.cdd.com.au/). This has the potential to be an extremely easy "fix" for variety of diseases that could significantly improve quality of life for many, many people; as a sufferer of Ulcerative Colitis myself, I'd be more than happy to squirt some poo up my butt instead of taking a cocktail of drugs with all kinds of unpleasant side effects for the rest of my life.
Sadly, the gross factor is probably turning off a lot of serious research. It'll be interesting to see if any of the US drug manufacturers can put this into a pill form, thus becoming incentivized to fund all the trials necessary.
Sooong actually created three of them- Data, Lore, and B4 (their older brother).
There was also an entire episode dedicated to Data's attempt to reproduce himself; he created a child-like android based on himself, but he wasn't able to get it quite right and it died. He never tried again. http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Lal
Additionally, there were several attempts by the Federation to study Data in depth in order to create more Soong-type androids. Data refused, in part because he would no longer be unique: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/The_Measure_Of_A_Man_(episode)
Wrong Troi; Lwaxana is her flirty mother...
You: Where is the nearest pizza place?
Lwaxana Troi phone: Pizza? Dreadful! I know a lovely little bistro just ahead- the cook has the most FILTHY thoughts about me but he makes the most delicious chocolate cake. Chocolate is an aphrodisiac, you know...
Not trying to troll, I'm legitimately unfamiliar. Doesn't organic waste biodegrade in a landfill anyway? The article mentions reducing the carbon released by landfills- aren't we just shifting that carbon to a different facility?
The high-quality soil produced does seem like a sweet plus, but the "jobs created" claim seems silly (wouldn't it destroy an equal number of landfill jobs?)
The 7th looks the most promising
I'm disappointed that seemingly most Slashdotters couldn't even be bothered to read the article HEADLINE, let alone the summary or, god forbid, the article itself.
Let's not overhype what's occurring here. FTA: "You now have two ways you can sign in and stay with us and keep your contributions and earned badges." They're only dropping support for other single sign on type logins, probably all of which had been provided by a 3rd party like Gigya. Standard old-fashioned site registration/login is still supported. I work for a major TV network website; we have single sign on via Facebook and also offer signup via the rogue's gallery of Twitter, LinkedIn, mySpace, etc in addition to a standard old-fashioned signup. Literally 99% of our signups come from either Facebook or standard registration. We'll probably drop support for the others as well, as they're not worth the dev resources or the fee we pay to Gigya.
Do-Not-Track opts you out of receiving targeting advertising. That's completely separate from something like, Google Analytics, which tells businesses how their sites are being used and measure traffic. Asking businesses not to collect analytics data is like asking a shop owner to wear a blindfold and earmuffs when you come through the door.
The warheads we have now are not the same kind of warheads we dropped on Japan. Back in the day, the strategy was to fly one large bomb over a city and drop it. The idea behind this was that since you don't have pinpoint precision when dropping a huge bomb from a plane, you make the explosion huge so that aiming is irrelevant. These days, we'd launch a laser-guided ICBM loaded with a dozen smaller warheads, which can each be targeted to where they'd do maximum damage (but without the impressive, city-leveling power of something like Fat Man). You're probably still correct that we have significantly more than we need, but it's not a totally apples to apples comparison.
Listen to any gold bug discuss the intrinsic value of gold, as if it has some inherent value beyond what people will pay you for it.
Intrinsic value- I do not think it means what you think it means. If no one will pay me money (jewels, food, ammunition) for gold, it is still useful to me. I can make conductive wiring, heat sinks, and pretty decorations out of it. I can use it to treat some forms of cancer. This is in contrast to something like a dollar bill or a Euro note- if no one will pay me for it, I can use it for... toilet paper? Bedding? I do remember hearing stories about people burning Marks for fuel in the Weimar Republic days.