June 2008 Archives

Technology is one of the key drivers in today's media world. The mobile phone is one of the most interesting tools available to journalists. At the conference I will be talking about the arrival of the mojo, the mobile journalist who reports with only a mobile phone. You can follow my blog on the subject at http://globalmojo.org

SmartCompany.com.au is one of the most interesting online media ventures in Australia. Established in February 2007 by Amanda Gome, formerly a journalist and editor at BRW, it is targeted at entrepreneurs and owners of small to medium size businesses.

While the site initially had both free and subscription content, within the first six months they decided to make the site entirely free. The site reaches a highly targeted audience, so attracts good advertisers, and has excellent content and resources.

As part of SmartCompany’s media partner role in the Future of Media Summit 2008, SmartCompany is running a free webinar this Thursday where I will be presenting on Six Driving Forces Changing Media, in conversation with Amanda Gome - click through to register.

The framework I present in the webinar will be in the Future of Media Report 2008 (following the extremely popular Future of Media Report 2006 and Future of Media Report 2007), so this will in effect be a sneak preview for the webinar audience. I’ll put it up in summary form on this blog shortly after.

Other special content being developed for the Future of Media Report 2008 include a Future of Media Participation framework (I think this might turn out be our most popular framework yet) and a Future of Media: Strategy Tools spread. Coming soon!

Mark Pesce is one of my favorite media visionaries. Back in the late 1990s I was a big fan of Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), which was co-invented by Mark. I proposed using it as a tool for concept representation, among other applications. Mark has since focused largely on the media space, doing some great work. I wrote about a report on IPTV by Mark last year, and his insights at a conference on public affairs we both spoke at a month or two ago.

Mark will be speaking at our forthcoming Future of Media Summit 2008 in a couple of weeks on the Future of TV and Video panel, which will be run between Silicon Valley and Sydney. I’m particularly looking forward to this panel, which will uncover how existing broadcast and cable TV is intersecting TV and video on the Internet to form an entirely new landscape.

Mark spoke earlier this week at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York. A review of the event in The Huffington Post described Mark as “the best speaker at PDF”. A brief excerpt:

In the morning the digital ethnologist Mark Pesce gave a bracing corrective to crowd wisdom. Speaking from a sociological and philosophical perspective, Pesce talked about the hyper connectivity that the internet provides. We are being asked to believe this will help political campaigns, he said. We are asked to believe things and politics will be different. "Bullshit." Under an iconic image of Barack Obama, Pesce's PowerPoint presentation showed YES WE CAN HAS. In other words, the fact that Barack Obama now has over a million friends on Facebook (mentioned frequently at PDF) may not be such a happy portent.

We have just launched the Future of Media Predictions Markets, run in conjunction with the Future of Media Summit 2008. These will tap the collective wisdom of participants at the Summit in the US and Australia, as well as other media leaders globally. Anyone can participate in the prediction markets.

The predictions will be used during the Summit itself to help generate more pointed discussions and specific views, and to garner international attention and coverage for the Summit.

For those who haven’t come across prediction markets before, they mimic financial markets to aggregate a large group’s opinions on what will happen (see Wikipedia definition and Prediction Markets Cluster). Specific questions are posed on what will happen, and participants place bets on the outcome by buying and selling in the markets.

Our partner for the Future of Media Prediction Markets is Inkling Markets, one of a handful of commercial providers of prediction markets. Their clients creating public markets include CNN to predict the 2008 presidential elections, while many companies such as Cisco, Chrysler, O’Reilly, Procter & Gamble, and Wells Fargo are using their prediction markets for internal applications such as product development and sales forecasting.

In the Future of Media Prediction Markets we have just launched five markets:

* Which IPTV channel will generate the most revenue in 2009?

* Will The Bulletin be relaunched in Australia by 30 June, 2009?

If you have opinions on any of these topics, go to the Future of Media Prediction Markets and make your opinion heard!

Register on the site and you will be given $5,000 to place your bets on the markets. Either buy or sell whatever predictions you think are mis-priced. As the markets move with further participation (and maybe changing circumstances), you will make or lose money. As the markets evolve you can trade actively by buying and selling positions.

Let us know if you have suggestions for prediction market topics other than these initial ones. We’ll be expanding the range of questions as more participants join.

See you in there – may the best media futures trader win!

The Future of Media Summit 2008 is designed to have a far broader reach and impact than for just those who attend. Part of the way we do this is to get contributions from the speakers beforehand on the Future of Media blog and websites, setting the scene for deeper discussions on the day, and providing context for those who can’t make the Summit.

The CEO Panel on predictions for the future of media will be held at 1:20 – 2:00pm in Sydney, just before the Unconference session, and will be the final session at 8:20 – 9:00pm in Silicon Valley, over drinks. Panelists for this session include Mark Scott, Managing Director of Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Mark’s pre-event contribution is two papers:

* A recent op-ed on the role of the ABC in 2020 that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald.

* The ABC in the digital age – Towards 2020, about the ABC’s shift to digital media.

The ABC shares with a few other organizations such as the BBC and CBC the special issues of public broadcasters in a rapidly shifting world. The papers describe the evolving role of publicly funded media in a world awash with information, and the steps the ABC will take to fulfill that role, including the new digital channels it will implement.

Below are a few excerpts from the papers that are particularly worth highlighting in the lead-up to the Future of Media Summit:

Techcrunch has just published a very interesting analysis of valuations of social networks. Here is its methodology:

Our model takes Comscore data for available countries and regions. We’ve graphed each of 26 well known social networks with the data we have been able to collect. We’ve then calculated the average advertising spend (estimated by PriceWaterhouseCoopers in a recent report ) for each person online in each of those countries. For example, in the U.S., the total 2008 estimated Internet advertising spend is $25.2 billion. We’ve divided that by the number of people online in the U.S. according to Comscore (191 million), to get an average Internet spend per person of $132.

I have charted the figures of interactive advertising spend per Internet user from this data below.

Source: Techcrunch, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Comscore

An article in Forbes titled What Privacy Policy? quotes data from a study by the Ponemon Institute, summarized below.

What it shows is distinctly fairly different attitudes and perception from privacy and security executives at large organizations, compared to those of marketing executives.

At the Future of Media Summit 2008 held in mid-July in Silicon Valley and Sydney we’ll be looking at the future of privacy and targeted advertising. Broad behavioral advertising requires either dominant players that have the breadth of relationships that they can serve relevant advertising to many viewers wherever they go on the Internet, or sharing of detailed information and profiles between market participants.

Erica Smith of Graphic Designer has done some great map mashups of US newspaper layoffs so far in 2008 (4,490+) and in the last seven months of 2007 (2,185+), as below.

While you can pick out trends from the maps such as a big rise in layoffs in the North-East, this is more about underlining the trends in newspaper jobs.

One of the key topics at the Future of Media Summit 2008 on July 14/15 will be the future of journalism. I absolutely believe that journalistic skills and training are immensely relevant in the economy today. However many current newspaper journalists will have to adapt their skills to new jobs and roles, often outside traditional media. We will explore, among other issues, how this transition might happen.

US newspaper layoffs: 2008 to date

One of the most important developments underlying the transformation of media is the emergence of advertising networks, that sell advertising and place it across a wide variety of online media properties. Back in the Future of Media Report 2006, describing the role of ad aggregation in supporting the growth of the long tail, I wrote:

“… now anyone can publish online and get advertising revenue without having to sell [the advertising]. This is transformative in enabling the many of the “long tail” to move towards becoming viable – though small – media properties.”

Getting others to perform the advertising sales function means media becomes completely scalable. Certainly many of the ad networks are targeting major media properties. Sixteen of the 20 online advertising groups with the greatest reach are ad networks, with online four (Yahoo!, Google, AOL, and Microsoft) distinct online properties (more on this in a subsequent post).

In this world, Technorati, still the leading blog search engine, though far more precariously than before, is today launching an ad network, Technorati Media, according to Techcrunch. Techcrunch says:

Last Thursday’s Media Report on ABC Radio National features an extended interview with me on the state of Australian Web 2.0 and major online media (there is both a podcast and transcript available from the link). Some of the points we covered:

Major online media players

* The well-publicized challenges of NineMSN (the Australian 50/50 jiont venture between Microsoft and PBL Media) are partly company-specific, and partly a reflection of the difficulties of the incumbent position.

* Australia’s major media companies have done far better than their international peers in dominating online news (and other aspects of the online space including classifieds). Blogs and micro-publishing are now finally taking off, taking market share from the majors, leading to the major online publishers losing readers in a growing market. The long tail is the natural distribution of readers, and it has always been inevitable that the majors would lose their dominant market share.

* In media conglomerates that are experiencing revenue challenges in traditional channels such as TV, newspapers, and magazines, expectations for growth in the online business are often unrealistic, leading to disappointments when budgets are not met.

* PBL Media, which owns 50% of NineMSN, is 75% owned by private equity company CVC Capital Partners. Private equity companies, for reasons including their debt structure, are often biased to short-term over long-term revenue, relative to their listed company peers. This leads to pressures on management and staff, which can make attracting and retaining staff more difficult when other companies are enjoying participating in a rapidly growing market. The 50/50 ownership structure doesn’t make things easier.

The Future of Media Summit 2008 is now open for registration in both Sydney and Silicon Valley. After the great success of the Future of Media Summit 2006 and Future of Media Summit 2007, the third annual event is quickly rolling up!

See Future of Media Summit 2008 website for full details.

Note that there is an early bird offer for the Sydney Summit until June 16, then full price applies.

There’s too much to cover in one blog post, so I’ll be providing more detail on everything that’s happening in coming days and weeks. However some of the key features of the event include:

* Simultaneous events in Silicon Valley and Sydney merged seamlessly by video, online discussion, and cross-continental panels and conversations

* Highly participatory Conference AND Unconference formats at both Sydney and Silicon Valley events

* Discussions on global media strategies, future of journalism, future of privacy, and the future of TV and video

* Peer video discussions by participants across continents (world-first)

* Prediction markets on the future of the media before and during the Summit to tap collective wisdom of event participants and global media leaders

* Future of Media Summit blog for insights and discussion by all speakers and participants

* Detailed content and analysis, including the Future of Media Report 2008