The Newsonomics of emerging news video

[Each week, our friend Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of the news business for the Lab.]

The New York Times. Video. Three years ago, that seemed like an oxymoron, save the Times’ occasional forays into TV experiments. Now, Times TV pops up in front of us on airplane TVs and news video has become an emerging feature of Times sites. As Apple and NYT staffers plot behind closed doors in the Times building, we can expect that Times video will be a key element of the iPad NYT launch.

Behind what we see, though, are some critical developments in processing of digital video, the behind-the-scenes heavy lifting that often determines time-to-market, and business failure or success.

We can get a glimpse into that with the Times’ recently announced deal with Thought Equity Motion (TEM). Founded in 2003, the company now has an impressive list of customers: BBC, CBS (the current NCAA Vault, a March Madness-related product was co-produced with TEM), NBC and Japan’s NHK, among more than a dozen top brands in total. The New York Times, importantly, is the company’s first newspaper client.

Before we look at what TEM does for these companies, consider two big numbers here: 10.5 million hours and 10 percent. Read more

Ken Doctor | March 18 | 1 p.m.

Tags: BBC, CBS, ClipSyndicate, CSPAN, Grab Networks, Kevin Schaff, Mochila, NBC, NCAA Vault, New York Times, NHK, Thought Equity Motion, Voxant

The Newsonomics of new news syndication

[Each week, our friend Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of the news business for the Lab.]

It’s tough to get the printer’s ink out of news people’s veins. For many, journalism = printing, and in printing, each copy costs extra. It’s an analog, manufacturing mindset, and one to finally bid goodbye.

Of course, we all know how freely we can fling stories about on the web, but second copy value — and cost — has an evolving business model implication, as the news industry looks for new pillars of support. That business model implication is syndication. Read more

Ken Doctor | March 11 | noon

Tags: AFP, AP, California Watch, Center for Investigative Reporting, Chicago News Cooperative, CIR, Factiva, globalpost, King Features, LexisNexis, OpenTable, paid content, Phil Balboni, Politico, Reuters, United Media, Universal Press Syndicate, Yelp, Zillow

The Newsonomics of time-on-site

[Each week, our friend Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of the news business for the Lab.]

Parse out the numbers, and they’re quite puzzling.

The average news reader spends little time on newspaper-owned sites, from a 20 minutes a month or so on the New York Times site to eight to 12 minutes on most local newspaper sites. That’s minutes per month. Those numbers, as tracked by Nielsen and reported monthly by Editor and Publisher, are steady at best, showing, in fact, some recent decline. They are, literally, stuck in time.

Then, take the number of minutes Internet users spend on social sites. Nielsen’s January tally showed seven hours of usage a month on Facebook alone, in the U.S., blowing away all competition. That’s some 40 times more time spent on social sites than on any single news site.

Which is a bit deflating for those in the news business. So let’s try to get at what the numbers may be telling us. Read more

Ken Doctor | March 4 | 10 a.m.

Tags: business model, Daily Me, Facebook, Facebook Connect, New York Times, Nicholas Negroponte, Nielsen, Omniture, online advertising, Search Center Plus, statusphere, time on site

The Newsonomics of profit: Google’s and newspapers’

[Each week, our friend Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of the news business for the Lab.]

Last Friday, Google finalized a modest acquisition. It bought On2, a video compression company for $124.6 million. A few days earlier, it bought reMail, a company put together by Google alums that has perfected a better email app for the iPhone, price undisclosed.

In the few months before that, it bought social search startup Aardvark, display ad tech company Teracent, collaborative real-time editor AppJet, VoIP provider Gizmo — and, most significantly, mobile ad network, AdMob, the latter for $750 million, in November.

Basically, Google’s been buying up companies at at least the rate of monthly, as CEO Eric Schmidt had bluntly forecast last September.

Of course, Google can buy lots of companies. That buying power is a rare commodity these days, especially if you compare it to what newspaper companies can do. Read more

Ken Doctor | Feb. 25 | noon

Tags: Aardvark, acquisitions, AdMob, AppJet, Gannett, Gizmo, Google, Lee, McClatchy, Media General, New York Times, newspaper companies, On2, profit, reMail, Teracent

The Newsonomics of online marketing

[Each week, our friend Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of the news business for the Lab.]

Take two simple words: online advertising and replace them with “digital marketing.”

Within that simple word change, we see a world shift, and one of huge, fundamental importance to news publishing.

“Online advertising” has been a steep learning curve for text-based news companies, as well as broadcasters. They’ve built a small business on it, about $3.5 billion a year, according to the Newspaper Association of America. That’s after 15 years of transitioning ad sales from print to bundled, and lately, with McClatchy a leader here, to print, bundled and online-only. Still, that’s just $3.5 billion, compared to some $35 billion in print advertising.

Even with all the investment made, digital revenues make up no more than 15% of any local newspaper company’s total revenue. In addition, while some $23 billion was spent on online advertising (the fastest growing ad category in the country) in the U.S. in 2009, newspaper companies take in maybe 15 cents of every dollar there, compared to the 20 cents on a dollar they got of the old pre-digital world ad pie.

Online advertising is where the game has been played. Now it’s moving to digital marketing. The new definition targets two big shifts: Read more

Ken Doctor | Feb. 18 | noon

Tags: Chuck Richard, Google, marketing, McClatchy, mobile advertising, NAA, online advertising, online marketing, Outsell, search advertising, Yahoo

The Newsonomics of social media optimization

[Each week, our friend Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of the news business for the Lab.]

This week’s buzz is all about Google Buzz, the search giant’s entry into the status-update world. But the humming of social media — and its implications for news media — just keeps getting louder and louder. News people are in the social web, use the social web and write about the social web — but can they can make the social web part of their digital publishing businesses? That’s a big, important question, and one just dawning on many people in the news business.

First, let’s consider a number of datapoints:

— Nielsen reports that Internet users worldwide now spend 5.35 hours a month on social networks, up from just three hours a year ago. The social web is the new home page; remember how news sites all put up “make us your home page” buttons just a decade ago. News sites, of course, are lucky to break into double digits — 10 minutes — per month in usage.

— Facebook Mobile just announced yesterday that it busted through the 100 million user mark, up from 65 million in September.

— Bit.ly, one of the top “URL shortening service providers” — sends about two billion link referrals a month, largely given its Twitter stronghold. Question, of course, is how many of those may link to news or information; try, maybe, 20 percent, according to a recent Rutgers survey of social use that shows that 20 percent of posts in the statusphere come from “informers,” those that share news and information. The other 80 percent: the what-I-ate-today people.

— A recent study I did with Outsell said that 44 percent of news readers say they use social networks to share news and information. Of those, half use Facebook to do it; one in five use Twitter.

Read more

Ken Doctor | Feb. 11 | 10 a.m.

Tags: aggregation, Bit.ly, curation, Facebook, Financial Times, Google Buzz, Peer News, Pierre Omidyar, propensity marketing, search engine optimization, SEO, sharing, SMO, social media, social media optimization, Sports Illustrated, time on site, Twitter