Lance Wiggs

Woosh made a $24m loss on operating revenue of just $10.4m. Operating revenue (which is net sales) was actually down slightly on the previous year, while EBITDA was $12m. Clearly some interest and depreciation in there, which they say is related to network investment.

Despite a claim that it will break even this year, these are lousy numbers  – expenses are double the income, income is falling and meanwhile there is a whole bunch of capital being spent. Shareholders should be looking pretty hard at the business case for continuing, and remembering that price advantages will be eroded as the telcos wake up to the potential of IP via cell-phone.

For all that I’m glad Woosh is around – it’s a great service if you stay in the city centers.

The good news is that NZHerald is loading super quickly today. The not so good news for APN is that they are using Google ads instead of more lucrative display ads.

I’d be really interested whether they are generating real revenue out of those Google ads, but I suspect not after looking at the advertisers. Qantas is present, but the rest of the ads I saw are very small players – and they may be shocked by their increase in traffic and fees.

This has to be a temporary thing while APN fixes the ad server issue. I can’t find another decently sized newspaper that uses Google ads exclusively – not even Google News.

Smart nimble advertisers will use this as a quick way to get cheap exposure in the NZHerald. The threat to incumbents is that this will kick-start Google ads in New Zealand… Or is this sign of an incipient partnership with APN? now that would really throw the market..

With the coming of Yahoo!xtra to New Zealand, will we see the entry of Yahoo! personals? There is an Australian version already, and it seems a gimme to at least give it a serious try in NZ. The Australian site states that it is a place to find Kiwi’s as well, but there are not that many Kiwi profiles there, and the nz.personals.yahoo.com url does not work.

The Kiwi dating market is divided between NZDating and FindSomeone, and it will be pretty hard to make serious headway against their critical masses. There is a little overlap between NZDating and FSO – just 18% of Findsomeone browsers go to NZDating (which is the bigger site by UB’s and PV’s), and 11.6% of NZDating browsers to to Findsomeone.*

The reason is that the two sites target and attract different ends of the market – FSO attracts those looking for serious relationships, while NZDating attracts, in general, a more transactional bunch. They are both good sites.

Yahoo! Personals appears to target the masses, and the site is pretty slick. However the pricing in Australia is steep by NZDating standards – $25 for one month down to $13.75 per month for 6 months. So they fit between the two incumbant sites, and would have to attract people from both sites for critical mass.

Dating is not a winner-take-all market, but you do need critical mass, and you do need a source of new members. Critical mass is hard to generate in the small cities and towns of little New Zealand, while attracting new members requires great word of mouth experiences backed by advertising spend. It will be a hard road for Yahoo!

*Net Neilsen, November 2006.

three new bits of information 1: T’s and C’s for NZShop les through Ferrit states that DVD’s ‘usualy ship 5-10 days’ after order, which implies that NZShop does not hold inventory. Good move.

2: a quick search of the companies.govt.nz website shows that NZShop has been around since 1995, which is pretty cool, and that NZShop’s address is in an industrial area. Amusingly google maps shows it to be a vacant lot, which means it is a new building..

3:  One of the directors is also about, it seems, to launch a price comparison site – priceme

My woes with NZHerald and Safari continue. It seems that if the wrong ads are served then the page just will not load.

Good ads:

Fly Buy’s perfect present generator – Flash, but static

Bad ads:

Everything else, including “Emirates” flash horror, Rialto Channel, “Big Wednesday”, Ferrit… Even “Velux” – seems to be a static GIF, but the property page where it resides just will not load.

The Effect:

It changes – but basically the effect is to block access to the sections of NZHerald that have the dodgy ads. Today that means everything except for the front page is unviewable – unless I reload the page incessantly. Given that I read all of my news & blogs via Safari, that means that NZHerald is dropping off my radar. Remember that pretty much everyone that reads the Herald also reads Stuff, and that Apple owners are a pretty interesting and influential demographic group…

In the US the universities led the Internet charge. The same in NZ, afaik. I recall at Massey in the late 80’s, a friend introducing me to the mysteriously cool “internet” and “email”. Sadly, on the surface at least, things have changed for the worse here.

One of the most basic tests to assess the cluefulness of a website is whether it needs the “www” to resolve. Sadly massey.ac.nz and canterbury.ac.nz do not resolve. These are our supposed internet pathfinders and the educators of our future IT talent.

The rest of the universities work – waikato.ac.nz, vuw.ac.nz, lincoln.ac.nz, auckland.ac.nz and otago.ac.nz.

More promisingly waikato.co.nz,  vuw.co.nz, and aut.co.nz also work.

Otago.co.nz goes to a regional tourism site – a bit iffy but seemingly semi-legit.

But massey.co.nz is “bad host”, and stunningly lincoln.co.nz goes to a domainz ‘future site’ page and canterbury.co.nz and auckland.co.nz resolve to dodgy link spammers. No doubt there is a lot of history around these, but seriously – for Auckland and Canterbury regions and Universities not to have control of their own .co.nz domains is truly terrible. (forgive me if I don’t link to the link spammers)

It gets worse – http://www.otago.govt.nz, and the similar Canterbury and Auckland urls also do not resolve – so there is nothing there!

So three pleas….

1: Everyone – please lose the dependence on typing the redundant “www” by making your website resolve correctly

2: Regions and Universities – please take back control of your domains in all suffixes.

3: and Kiwi Advertisers – please drop the “dub dub dub”. It’s aggravating, demeaning and redundant.

APN and Fairfax are joining forces to commission a review on the way Print Readership Research is done in New Zealand. They are looking their own requirements, and that of their advertisers, rather than at changing vendors.

Good on them.

It would be doubly interesting if the review could somehow relate online readership to print readership – and give us all a way to have metrics that are directly comparable.

If I read Stuff online one day and buy the Dominion Post the next then how am I counted?  One reader total? One reader for each medium?

How do we track how much we are reading as a population? – the theory being that people are reading more news as it migrates online. Can we track overall readership of individual articles or different bylines no matter what the reader is looking at? An how does this all relate to advertising?

Could we create online equivilent ‘readers’ – and categorise online UB’s as readers based on, say, the amount of articles read or time spent reading in a period?

Then the question is how much reading online (1 article? 5 articles? 5 minutes?, 10 minutes) is equivalent to a daily newspaper reader? For that matter – how much of the newpaper do subscribers actually read now – do we know?