And they say summer is slow?
After last week’s flurry of announcements from AOL and Google, could I be blamed for starting the week expecting fewer announcements from media behemoths?
On the heels of the Google vs. DemandMedia speculation comes the news that Google has debuted a “one-click tool” to allow easy online checkouts for paid content–essentially a PayPal for the paywall.
Newspapers are worried.
And yet, they have some of the most enviable resources in the online space: professional journalists and opinion leaders with fact-checking chops capable of producing nuanced, in-depth and often tide-turning prose.
Yahoo, AOL and DemandMedia could be seen as potential competitors, but only if newspapers chose to relax their standards of journalistic excellence.
First it was Yahoo, then AOL and now Google is starting to encroach on DemandMedia’s “demand” content creation space.
The Financial Times reported yesterday in “Google shadow over new media groups” that the dominant search engine obtained a patent for “technology that could position it to compete with a new breed of digital media companies that are generating story ideas for the internet by mining online search data.”
While perusing my twitter feed this morning, a particularly compelling link caught my eye. In fact, the link was retweeted so many times it was virtually impossible to miss.
The Wall Street Journal’s Digits Blog reported “Internet Is Set to Overtake Newspapers In Revenue.” It’s a little surprising that this link would be so “hot,” since the writing has been on the (Web) wall for quite some time.
In discussing the various ideas that might ultimately “save journalism,” we’ve seen ideas ranging from the ever contentious paywall (or in the New York Times’ case, “metered models”), to DemandMedia-style monetization, to hyper-local news and citizen journalism.
These last few days some of the big media names have begun to think way outside the proverbial “box,” seeking to reinvent themselves as more than just search engines, websites, or publishers. First, Yahoo bought Associated Content and proclaimed its quest to become the world’s biggest content provider, a move which positioned Yahoo against Demand Media.
CM Summit kicked off Internet Week in New York, and Perfect Market was in attendance to soak up inspiration from innovative thinkers in online media.
Perhaps the most exciting part of the Summit for this New York Times junkie was the conversation between John Batelle and Arthur Sulzberger, chairman of that celebrated publication. The conversation started out, unsurprisingly, with a discussion of paywalls or, in New York Times parlance, “metered models.”
22 June 2010 By Admin
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