If you mouseover the “PayCheckr” widget above, you’ll see an early version of a donation and payment model for digital content that I find intriguing. You can create your own beta PayCheckr widget and play around with it now, as I did with the widget above, though this is a “lite” version and the customization…
TREND-SPOTTING FOR WHAT'S NEXT TO IMPACT NEWS & MEDIA
I’ve been in touch with Twixa.com and its CEO, Kurt Huang, for some time while he and his team have been developing a new revenue widget for online publishers. You can see it on this post, next to the Tweetmeme (“Retweet”) button at right: ThankThis. Click on the button and you can financially support this…
The other day I received two envelopes of coupons in my (snail-)mail box. The first included the same kind of untargeted assortment of color-printed discount coupons from local businesses that I’ve received for decades. OK, not entirely untargeted; after all, they were for businesses in my area. But the sender knew nothing about me other…
Today I received an e-mail promotion from an electronics e-retailer that I’d purchased from before. The after-holidays sales promotion looked interesting, so I clicked the ad to go to the site. I spent very little time there, didn’t see any deals I couldn’t live without, and clicked away. About an hour later, in comes another…
I spent Monday and Tuesday this week participating in the “Upgrade to Digital” workshop at the brand spanking new Boulder Digital Works at CU facility in downtown Boulder, a bleeding-edge training program to teach advanced creative, tech, and business digital-media skills. (Disclaimer: I attended on a free pass since I’m working on building a digital-media…
My latest Editor & Publisher Online column has been published: “Real-time, Relevant Ads Matched With Real-time News? What a Concept!.” This is a really interesting topic, as we’re closing in on being able to match ads in real time contextually with news events as they quickly grow popular. I interview the CEO of OneRiot, a…
Google Fast Flip launched this week as a public Google Labs beta, and I’ve been surprised at some of the skepticism about it. The main complaint is that it takes a step backward by displaying screen captures of popular articles from a selection of media websites and makes them the entry point to finding the…
I’ve got yet another “micropatronage” service to tell you about. But while the other ones I’ve written about in recent months have the online user voluntarily ponying up some cash to support the websites and blogs that they visit or like, or the articles they value most — Kachingle, Contenture, Inamoon, Payyattention — this one…
I can’t imagine this is new, but it’s the first time I’ve gone to a restaurant and received a coupon at the table prompting me to use my cell phone to get a free item. Last night when my family and I went to Beau Jo’s Pizza in Boulder, we each got the coupon above….
I was disappointed in Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote speech to the Newspaper Association of America today. (Audio here, courtesy of Bill Densmore. Transcript of Q&A portion of Schmidt’s session, thanks to Poynter.org.) Oh, it was a fine speech and Schmidt educated some of the backward-thinking publishers in the audience, no doubt, about what’s ahead….
No doubt you’ve heard the “big” news that the New York Times has added an advertising spot on the front page of its print edition. Shocking, eh? The New York Post in covering the news says in a graphic accompanying its story, “New York Times Publisher Arthur ‘Pinch’ Sulzberger is smashing the paper of record’s…
On BusinessWeek.com, Ben Kunz writes about the trouble Twitter is having coming up with a business model. He suggests a bunch of possibilities, but finds problems with all of them. I don’t get it. It strikes me that the best model is incredibly simple, and powerful: Insert a “TwitterAd” entry every 50 entries or so….
Dan Pacheco and the Bakersfield Californian have an intriguing project (funded by the Knight Foundation) called Printcasting. It’s a niche publication initiative that works in both print and online, and addresses “long tail” content and advertising. (OK, that description sounds a bit dull, but it’s a cool concept.) For my ReinventingClassifieds.com site, I’ve written up…
Widgets should be a huge part of most media companies’ strategy in the years ahead, as a way to spread their content around the web widely. (aka, the Distributed Web.) Here’s an interesting widget example from Pulse360 that comes with built-in advertising and revenue sharing, so that there’s incentive for lots of websites to carry…
Here’s more good advice from Newspaper Next 2.0 (American Press Institute). As the report points out, in most newspaper markets, less than half of local consumers are frequent newspaper readers and as little as one-quarter or less of local businesses are newspaper advertisers. The latter figure is the result of most newspapers 1) not having…