content evolving

Demand Media’s RPMs and Revenue Per Domain

Demand Media’s Q1 Revenue Beats The Street; Up 48 Percent To $79.5 Million.

By now, you’ve read about Demand Media’s results– they beat analyst’s estimates.  Calendar Q2 2011 will be much tougher though.

There’s some good data in their filing– RPMs and revenue per domain.  They grew their RPMs from around $10 to $15 on owned and operated sites.  For their network business, RPMs declined a bit but are around $2-3.  Revenue per domain is about $10 per domain– no surprises.

Overall, +1 to Demand Media for this transparency.

via ecpmblog.wordpress.com

The Incredible Shrinking New York Times

Unless the New York Times Company can figure out a way to turn around the print newspaper circulation revenue (highly unlikely), this shrinkage will continue. Even if the online paywall is wildly successful, it will not replace the circulation and ad revenue the company will lose as print subscribers cancel.  And as the print business shrinks, the print cost structure that supports it will have to shrink, too.

Here's the chart. The blue line is news division revenue. The red line is news division expenses. And the green bars, on a different scale, are the news division operating profit.

via www.businessinsider.com

Why More Marketers Are Underwriting Access to Paid Content | Digital - Advertising Age

The more media companies ask consumers to pay for digital content, the more brands are stepping in to foot the bill. And while consumers and marketers seem to love the arrangement, it could cut into the pool of advertising dollars and does nothing to wean consumers off the idea that content is always free.

PLAY BALL: Volvo is offering free MLB games to Apple owners

Last week, Volvo began offering free streamed baseball games to the millions of Americans who own Apple devices through a partnership with Major League Baseball's advanced media division. For one month, the automaker is covering MLB fans' $25 subscription fee for live game video, marking the first time MLB has offered free access to all its games.

The move comes just weeks after Ford Motor Co.'s Lincoln brand stepped in to offer free passes to 200,000 of the people most likely to encounter The New York Times' new digital paywall, opening up $150 worth of paid content. More recently, Microsoft has begun underwriting a month of Hulu Plus's $7.99-a-month video service for people who downloaded the latest version of Internet Explorer.

While the moves may not be training consumers to open up wallets, they are encouraging sampling, bringing bigger ad dollars to publishers and, for brands, generating buzz and goodwill.

"Advertisers have been underwriting media for a very long time; this is just another way to engage with consumers," said Connie Fontaine, manager of U.S. Lincoln marketing communications, who brokered the Times deal.

via adage.com

Swimming upstream into contentville

Last week, Netflix surprised few in announcing that it was producing original content. Media change but no matter what the medium, distribution companies eventually have to swim upstream into content creation. There is no long-term business in aggregating someone else’s content — unless you’ve got a great hardware business — and much like HBO many years ago, Netflix had to create proprietary content or it was as much in danger of being “Blockbustered” by someone else much as it did to, well, Blockbuster.

via www.quid.pro

Shortly after their announcement, Showtime started pulling Dexter and Californication. Let the games between premium content creation and distribution begin.

7 Reasons a Marketer’s Content Strategy May Fail « iMediaConnection Blog

You’re still writing for everyone: Wrong. The days of “one size fits all” generic content are over. Niche and even micro-niche content is the level of detail you need to be thinking about. Sure Facebook may give you the impression that hundreds of thousands of Fans are following your every post, but appearing in their news feeds and being content that they actively engage with are two entirely different things. You need to get more targeted.

Your content has no editorial calendar: Sure everyone needs the flexibility to react to changes in the mood of the market or their customers, but content with no set calendar is a real rookie error. At a minimum, you should have planned content for at least a 90-day period. A calendar that you know ahead of time, how frequently you’ll be posting, where you’ll be driving interested readers to, which products you’re supporting. Spontaneity is great, just not when you’re talking content.

You’re not curating your content: Making your content work harder means actively curating it. Ensuring content is tagged, edited, parsed and filtered effectively. Your audience has precious little time to filter. Increasingly their expectation is that you’ll do that for them. Users, especially those in the niche audiences mentioned earlier, can’t and won’t stand for content that is marginally relevant. You need to be curating it if you want to ensure maximum relevance and engagement.

You have too many goals for your content: Content can do a lot of things for your business, but it can’t do everything. The same piece of content can’t deepen a relationship, market a new product, increase loyalty and turn a prospect into a sale. If you set too many goals for your content, it will fail at all of them. Keep content single-minded. Now. And always.

Your content is static: If you’re not creating content that is malleable and can be augmented by your audience, then you’re missing a trick. Content that doesn’t change or evolve gets old real fast. You need to be thinking how you can let your users add layers to your content to keep it fresh.

Your content isn’t device-centric: Shockingly, the number of companies that merely port the same content from laptop to tablet to mobile phone, with no discernible difference, is astounding. Content needs to be relevant for the situation in which it’s consumed. Users with 45 minutes over lunch at their desk need content served differently than those on a 20 minute commute on a bus with their iPhone. Why do so few companies get that?

Your content is one-dimensional: This is definitely advice I need to follow myself, but content is more compelling when it crosses formats. Text is fine for certain situations. Video or audio is better for others. 140 characters can be too little or just enough. Regardless, if your content favors one content type at the exclusion of all others, then you’re going to miss the boat. Not all content is consumed equally; give your users the option of the content format that’s best suited for them.

via blogs.imediaconnection.com

Do you have a content strategy? Marketers need to think like publishers and publishers need to think like marketers. Here are some great tips to do just that!

The Age Of Relevance

he key element of the next big thing is the increasing significance of the Interest Graph to complement the Social Graph. While Facebook, Twitter, and Google are already working on delivering relevant content, a slew of startups are focusing exclusively on it.

Relevance is the only solution to the problem of information overload.

The above matrix is a representation of how the process of online information discovery has evolved over time.

via techcrunch.com

Brands Want to Own Their Media, but Find It's Harder Than It Looks | DigitalNext: A Blog on Emerging Media and Technology - Advertising Age

Content, you may have heard, is king again. And curated content at that. After half a decade's dalliance with crowdsourcing, user-generated content and giving up "control" brands once more have realized they have a responsibility and a right to tell their own stories.

There's just one problem. In those five or six years the rules of brand engagement changed and, for the most part, brand and PR managers along with the agencies they retain to help "tell their story" have little idea how to create editorial content in a social media culture that craves 24-7 information instead of the occasional disruption of an advertising or PR campaign.

At this very moment a legion of brand managers are scratching their collective heads wondering what they should be doing with their Facebook page and Twitter feed. The smart ones understand that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr et al are pure publishing platforms albeit with different levels of conversational feedback. And brands as diverse as Club Monaco, Nokia, Allstate and IBM have taken the plunge into producing "social media editorial" -- regular content via an online magazine, blog network or even video documentary aimed at demonstrating to their customers that, yes, they really can be interesting, informative and useful.

via adage.com

Marketers need to think like a publisher, publishers need to think like marketers.

AOL's Editions: A New Digital Magazine That Aims to Be "Like Pandora for Content" | Fast Company

AOL's Editions: A New Digital Magazine That Aims to Be "Like Pandora for Content"

BY Kit EatonThu Jan 20, 2011

Ahead of an as-yet-uncertain release date, AOL is teasing an upcoming iPad app that's designed to deliver news in a new, interactive way. By working out what content you like, Editions whisks everything into a slick magazine-style interface. Can it challenge existing apps like Flipboard, and help return AOL to relevance?

The early promos are no doubt a way to encourage excitement and to lead to more downloads--and AOL just might have a hit on its hands. If nothing else, the tech is fascinating. Instead of requiring users to customize their news feed inputs in the app, Editions relies on a more touchscreen-friendly "quick'n'easy" process wherein you grab icons that match your interests and then rearrange them into a priority-ranked list.

The app then "scours" the web for matching news, and rearranges the feeds into a graphically pleasing magazine-like UI. The scroll-through interface is, in essence, similar to how you really do flip through a regular mag or newspaper. The effortlessness is described by AOL as making Editions "like Pandora for content."

We know all this from the teaser website, and AOL's extraordinary promo video for the "magazine that reads you."

via www.fastcompany.com

As the medium evolves....

More Marketers Thinking Like Publishers

Brands, especially those centered around lifestyle interests or luxury, are increasingly becoming media companies,” said Steve Rubel of Edelman Digital, a digital communications and consulting firm.

via www.nytimes.com

We will only see more and more of this type of behavior, especially as Content is becoming a powerful qualified lead gen tool for retailers.

Top 10 Web Design News Sites

In Today’s time almost every designer has a design blog and as a reader its hard for you to keep an eye of each and everything happening in design world. You can’t check every blog everyday, but design news sites makes it easy for us to keep an eye on everything that’s happening in design community. In this article I create a list of top ten web design news sites that will help us to stay updated with latest web design news.

via psdtohtmlguide.com