Comments for SteveOuting.com

Comment on ThankThis: Donate $ without spending $ by What If You Could Click A Button And A Sponsor Would Pay A Site Money (Without It Being Clickfraud)? | IT News Wire

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:56:24 +0000

[...] site to click a button to pay with their own money, the “ThankThis” offering from Twixa gets a sponsor to pay the money. Basically, any time you clicked the “Thank This” button (which looks similar to the [...]

Comment on This Sirius-ly sucks by nicorellius

nicorellius — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 16:31:11 +0000

I agree wholeheartedly with all you said… Sirius blows! I can’t get away, though, because I love Raw Dog comedy…

Comment on Micropatronage with ads, no cash by Steve Outing

Steve Outing — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 18:52:46 +0000

Matt: Oh, no! Thanks for pointing it out; fixed. Perhaps you could share what’s going on with that project currently?

Comment on Micropatronage with ads, no cash by matt

matt — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 18:18:38 +0000

just wanted to let you know the inamoon url is http://inamoon.com/ looks like you’ve got one extra o.

Comment on I now officially hate print magazines by Kelly

Kelly — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 14:30:19 +0000

I’m trying hard not to be too much of a cynic. I like trees too, but if all we had was paper and no computers, we would save way more trees and use much less energy, so I don’t really think saying the ipad is better because it saves trees and uses less energy is really valid. Apple is green washing, and well, most people believe it. Consumption is the problem, not printed materials. And just so you know, we are harming our environment when we buy iPads.

Comment on I now officially hate print magazines by Roger Plothow

Roger Plothow — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 15:37:46 +0000

Why aren’t digital versions of print magazines deeply discounted? Because there is little if no advertising revenue to subsidize the costs to produce the content! Even if you’re getting a replica on your iPad, the ad revenue is likely generated by bundling the buy with print, because advertisers aren’t buying online-only ads for this type of product. Why not? Because people don’t look at them.

Don’t blame the “idiot” publishers. If they could produce high-quality content and distribute it essentially for free via various digital means and operate profitably, don’t you think they would? They think … really hard! They work financial models and look for the digital tipping point. But they also understand that if revenues don’t exceed expenses, they’ll be thinking really hard elsewhere. I challenge you to pull up an Excel spreadsheet and tinker with some financial statement models. Determine how many digital subscribers it would take to support a high-quality magazine, assuming that 80 percent of revenue must come from subscriptions, with 20 percent from advertising (essentially the opposite of the print model). Or, convince advertisers to spend more on advertising that they know doesn’t work as well as it does in print.

While you’re saving trees and avoiding clutter, you’re not contributing a dime to the bottom line of the magazines you’re buying. That’s fine — it’s not your problem. But it would be helpful to consider the broader picture as you beat the drum (sorry — badly mixed metaphor, but I must get to work).

At least, however, you’ve admitted that you’re willing to pay for some of this. We’ve made good progress here.

Your mainstream conscience,

Roger Plothow
Ed & Pub, Post Register
Idaho Falls, Idaho

Comment on Ender’s Game and the intelligent ‘nets’ by Jay Woo

Jay Woo — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 00:01:50 +0000

“but there’s no problem with too much noise, trolls, spammers, and plain old stupidity.”

Yeah this guy had no idea what the Internet would be like.

Comment on Jakob Nielsen critiques the iPad’s usability failings by This Week in Review: Time’s non-pay paywall, free vs. pay in Britain and what to do with content farms | Mark Coddington

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 00:52:20 +0000

[...] that allows blogs and websites to embed the full text of Guardian stories for free. (Steve Outing demonstrated with a post on the iPad.) It’s an unprecedented move, and one that made for a pretty easy [...]

Comment on The Times vs. Guardian strategies: uber-dumb & smart by This Week in Review: Time’s non-pay paywall, free vs. pay in Britain and what to do with content farms | Mark Coddington

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 00:52:00 +0000

[...] Steve Outing and Poynter’s Bill Mitchell noted that the Times’ paywall is among the most impenetrable we’ve seen yet in newspapers: All non-subscribers can see is the homepage, and even the headlines are blocked from online news aggregators. New York’s Chris Rovsar took stock of what The New York Times (planning its own paid-content system next year) could learn from how the Times rolled out its paywall, and basically, it boils down to, “Whatever they did, just don’t do it.” He and the Press Gazette’s Dominic Ponsford ripped the Times’ paid-content strategy, criticizing it for not being RSS-compatible, not linking, and giving away desperate-looking freebies. (Rovsar and Ponsford do acknowledge that the site is cheap and pretty, respectively.) British journalist Kevin Anderson used the Times’ paywall as an opportunity to light into the thinking that leads newspapers to charge for content online in the first place. [...]

Comment on To Eric Schmidt: What happened to ‘Don’t Be Evil’? by Robert W

Robert W — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 22:15:43 +0000

Though I take my hat off to a company which has been sooo successful, Google is evil and will hopefully be re-privatised into smaller companies, which will offer much more choice and more jobs and be less evil.