NYT Revenue Down

New York Times Chief Executive Janet Robinson, speaking at a Goldman Sachs conference on Wednesday, cited tough economic conditions, saying advertisers were less confident about making upfront commitments.

She said print advertising revenue was feeling the sharpest pinch, forecasting a drop of about 10 percent in the quarter. Digital advertising revenue is likely to be down 2 to 3 percent, she said.

The company said in July that advertising revenue was expected to decline in the 4 percent range.

Newspapers have been hammered by declines in advertising revenue for several quarters as marketers spend money in other media, especially digital. New jitters that the economy could face another downturn only add to the industry’s woes.

Source

I will grant with a down economy and probably to get worse, a revenue drop off was in the cards. NYT won’t be the only industry leader to see this happening.

But sometimes it is what is not said that is critical –

She added she believed the paper was “in a good position right now” due to the paper’s Web subscription plan guaranteeing revenue from “a loyal audience” who “think the news that we have is worth paying for.”

Notice that there is not a smidgen of up sell that digital viewership is growing. None. Just “loyal”. I take that to mean that the results from the digital property is not growing at all or is in minor decline. Which is running counter to the trend. Amazon and B&N are cleaning house in the digital space. More likely the NYT online is having the same morbid results that HuffPo is having.

Not a good sign.

HAL Rescues Samsung From Apple?

Apple has had an ongoing battle with Samsung over their Galaxy Tab being too much like the iPad. Well here is the most unusual angle. Samsung is throwing up a `prior art` defense against Apple from a most unlikely source — Hollywood.

Did you catch it? The items that looked like video screen IN the table? Well if you look closer that really is a pad like device with a flat panel screen and a few controls on the front. Another words, a black iPad.

Pretty thin gruel you say? Well I might tend to agree except for the fact that defenses for enforcement of patents has been thinner still in many cases. There is a chance that Samsung might prevail. If they do that opens up the iPad/tablet market by leaps and bounds. It would also deal Apple a mighty blow. This also raises an interesting question. If Samsung prevails what happens to many of the Motorola patents that Google bought? I suggest the reader refresh themselves with the old StarTrek series with any away team segment in it. Is that communicator a flip-phone Captain Kirk is holding? TOS was circa 1965, predating the first Motorola phone by nearly two decades. Its something to watch.

HT: Consumerist.

XBMC and Post Channel Cable

Folks the days of channel programming as a component of the entertainment complex is rapidly drawing to a end. You see I finally have a media box running XBMC operational. Not a real big shucks, for the geeky, but there is a considerable amount of configuration work that has to be done post install.

Some 600 channels delivered via the Internet. No channel provider need apply. All those channels are on-air programming. RTE1 & 2, BBC 1,2,3, SyFy, Several Russian channels as well which is delighting my wife.

But those are still channels Dog. Granted. But I can go over to YouTube and download free movies. Add them to my library. The same with several other feeds that can be found. Work is already afoot by the team to integrate XBMC with NetFlix. The short story of all this is, the free tech already exists to automate your viewing pleasure without spending a dime.

Like the networking and telephony fields, the intelligence is moving to the edge of the network for entertainment as well. Centralized channel deploys will be a thing of the past. A very smart movie studio is going to figure this out.

I could see a XBMC addon provided by the studio. You install it, enter your provided identity code and have access to that studios back list of movies for $5mo. $50/year to have access to the MGM or WB back list. I would go for it at that price. Don’t have to include DRM either. Codecs exist that lock the stream route so it can’t be copied without all the pain of true DRM.

You will excuse me, my wife wants me to turn up the volume.

The Path for Newsies …

… in the tablet market. I read with some interest the idea that my compatriot posted below. The topic of course the idea that NYT or CST develop their own tablets. —

For the love of God, please stop trying to make your own tablets.

The Tribune Co., owner of the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, the Los Angeles Times and several other newspapers and television stations, is reportedly the latest media giant to be seduced by the sweet siren harmonies of multitouch gestures and brushed aluminum. “More than half a dozen current and former Tribune employees” confessed to CNN that the Tribune’s CEO is smitten with the idea of a tablet of his very own, first requesting “anonymity for fear of losing their jobs or of souring relations with a former employer.”

According to these accounts, the Tribune would like to partner with Samsung to produce a modified Android tablet, even though Samsung already makes a popular and quite capable Android tablet, and the Tribune Co. to date has no tablet-optimized Android apps for its newspapers. (Is any part of this making sense yet?)

Source

The author of the piece goes on to recount tech companies better than NYT that flat out failed in the market place. So like the author, I agree that I do not hold much hope for a newsie to get it right. Considering that NYT’s paid for website is not doing all that well I don’t consider they have the track record to pull it off. However —

There is a route that a news publisher could go and still have their tablet narviana. The core of this idea is you don’t build one, you subsume one. It would go something like this:

• Contract out the development/construction with an already existing design and merely brand the thing as yours. That has been a tradition in the consumer electronic marketplace for years. The are multiple OEDs (Original Equipment Development) in Taiwan and China that can make this happen using existing systems.
• STICK WITH EPUB AS YOUR BASE FORMAT! Don’t go off trying to create a new standard. You container yourself and give up the opportunity to cross sell other products if you don’t. As short a life as ePub has had as a format it has already become the dominant format. So much so, that Amazon in its next release of Kindle will support ePub internally. Nuf said?
• Work with a good design house to develop a in-house style using CSS and some embedded fonts. Same reason as the point above.
• Pull this all together as a bundle. Put your name plate on the frame. That ends the technical discussion. Period. End of story. Don’t buck the marketplace trends.
• But marketing. Take your bundle and do the cell phone mamba. The Telcos are the CPE model you want to follow. You offer your bundle at a discount for a 2-4 year subscription to your newspaper. Its delivered over whatever means is appropriate for your locale — WiFi, Cellular, etc.
• You then also cross sell with Amazon and Barnes&Noble books and magazines with your device. Work deals to sell extended coverage articles and commentary at .25¢s an article.

Do that and you will have an fair chance of make a transition technically. However I should caution that all the tech in the world will not make up for trash content. Too many papers today are a walled garden of mental trash. Seriously, when the primary reason that many people buy a paper is to read the `Page Six` gossip content? Well then you have become nothing more than a move up from The Inquirer.

Good night and Good luck.

Soc Med Bubble?

To give you some background, I not only play the markets but I co-founded an angel organization in Chicago that invests in start ups. We are starting to see a lot of deal flow that involve some aspect of social media. I subscribe to some angel email services from all over the country, and I see lots of companies today that want money to invade the social media space.

The answer on the bubble, it depends. I could make an argument that Facebook ($FB) at $100 billion is cheap. It is a legacy platform that other businesses are building off of. Facebook is sticky, even if you think it’s a time waster. A lot of this social media stuff just becomes background noise. There is so much of it you tune it all out and go with what you are used to. I think that is the appeal of Google+ for a lot of folks, you can tune out a lot of extracurricular noise.

Certain companies are trying to reinvent Facebook. They are riffing on specialized aspects of Facebook and compartmentalizing them. Small little apps that segment the market. Many of them are receiving money from angel investors. The bulk of them could be considered a bubble.

Companies that I like in the social media space integrate and work across platforms. They take the best aspects of social media and quantify it-or make it easier for us to interact with social media. It’s very hard to know who those companies are-or if you do invest, how they will pivot and grow. Help Scout is an example of a company that I would want to make an investment in if they applied to Hyde Park Angels. One of our companies, ReTel, developed the site favo.rs that looks really cool.

Source

So is Carter right that social media as a internet genre in a large run up bubble that is going to pop? I can’t hazard a guess. A lot of these social platforms I don’t know how far they have gotten to date.

Take Twitter. Its Hot, with a cap H. But I shake my head. You look at the traffic and anywhere from a third to a half include some tiny url link. So that implies they want to say more. So why pick `that` platform to say it when the container is ill suited for the content? Eyeballs. I remember when the big I was bleeding out of the universities and going commercial email was the Hot Ticket. Then as a medium it became part of the backdrop of everyday life. The thing is it retained its usefulness. I don’t know if Twitter will.

Lets take another service, FaceBook. Me I avoid it like the plaque. The user is the only thing on sale on that platform. That reason alone I will pass. But I can see the utility of it for others. Its like a nonstop class reunion on steroids. For the most part you are free to personalize the sandbox and your message can be as long as you want.

Long term though? Many Soc Med newbies will die on the vine. I’ll put my money elsewhere.