As part of the Fairfax role I’ll be presenting at the “Opportunities in Broadband & Next Generation Networks” conference. What a catchy title.
I’m taking the place of Nic Cola on Day two (with a different take), right after lunch, and will have fun explaining what we consumers will get from the media companies once we have decent speed internet.
I’m looking forward to it…
Also in the IFR, Chris Trotter reviews a book by Laurence Simmons belaboring the dearth of NZ intellectualism. Without reading the book I’d suggest that Professor Simmons starts reading in the new frontier of intellectualism. He may not see the turgidness of ancient times, but the new wave of influencer’s are now online and blogging. Norightturn, Kiwiblog and a host of others are emerging as the new intellectuals, with quality improving all the time.
In the USA the Daily Kos founder Markos Zuniga not only helped stir the netroots revolution, but also, with Jerome Armstong, wrote a highly influential book. Could this happen here?
So I saw in the Independent Financial Review (not online) that the NZ Government is handing out spectrum licenses to the radio industry for 20 years for $96m.
The pricing was based on estimated income for the radio stations based on a ‘cost per pair of ears’ approach.
As a radio station I’d be worried that those ears will be exposed to countless other stations broadcast through non-traditional means, while as a consumer I’m worried that the bandwidth could be put to much better use.
It’s astonishing to me that this length of time (20 years) is even contemplated, as the value of that spectrum is difficult to determine given the pace of technology change. Would we not be better off sometime in the next 20 years by using that undeniably valuable bandwidth for a more efficient method of data transmission?
Meanwhile I’m sure that technology will provide many alternatives to analogue radio. iPods and their ilk will increase in capacity so we can all have every song and program ever recorded (or thereabouts), while pervasive free internet (via any source) will mean that we can get streaming to any IP enabled device.
Pago has the right market identified, but just keeps falling down in execution. Here’s a reminder email from them, as rendered by Outlook via web access.
No logo, no <yourname>, no links as promised, no signature. How the mighty have fallen – ASB to me were always the leading edge of consumer IT, but with Pago they are dropping the ball.
Stuff now has RSS feeds – you can subscribe either by area (e.g. technology) or by Newspaper (Dom Post). Cool.
NZHerald already has feeds.
Hot from the US – the new new “de rigueur” search engine for the in crowd…
TVNZ ondemand launched and is covered on GeekZone Forums and by Mauricio. The streaming via a flash player works on my mac, albeit with very low framerate. I even watched a minute or two of Piha Rescue (not a show I watch, and nor are any of the others which are local shows only) in full screen mode on my 30 inch screen. Sadly it then went to permanent pause mode – probably network issues.
I tried again with the TVNZ news and country calendar and same result – about 20 seconds to 2 minutes in I encountered the dreaded permanent pause.
In OSX I cannot see the download functions talked about by the Windoze guys, which is good handling of the failure.
I also like the single ad before the show approach – I’m far more likely to watch just one short ad than a plethora on TV. I’ll stick with MySky and The Daily Show (Go C4) for now, but well done TVNZ – a good start. Next step is to lose the expiry dates and the DRM.
All said – I’d far rather read my news, but then I suppose I have to say that….
I’ve just been appointed Acting Head of Fairfax Digital, (Stuff), which will last until a full time appointment is announced.
You’ll continue to see posts on NZ online media on this blog, but as I am now an insider at Fairfax, as well as Trade Me, I’ll be very circumspect in commenting about both institutions. To be fair I’ll also apply the same treatment to competitors NZHerald.
Apparently Marketscape research released at the Online Publisher Forum in London, and reported on Online spin, said that 92% of the US spend in 2006 went to the “big four”: Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL.
In New Zealand things are very different – with MSN arriving at the party early with xtra, Google arriving very late, Yahoo! just arriving at the front door now, courtesy of xtra, and AOL not deigning to attend. Meanwhile MSN seems to have fallen asleep in the corner after being dumped by xtra. (Apologies for the murdered metaphor)
In New Zealand the big media spend, as far as anyone can tell, has been going to NZHerald, Stuff, xtraMSN and Trade Me – with a growing share now going to Google. Wouldn’t we all love to know how much is going to whom, but all we do know is that the total was $65m last year, excluding Google.
The xtraMSN spend looks to have switched to Yahoo!xtra – who, unlike msn, at least have ‘paying’ ads showing (though some have commented that the ads are sometimes Australian). I obtained the ratecard from Yahoo!xtra (I won’t publish numbers here as they do not publish it on their website) and I can tell you that their rates are astonishingly high versus other news sites. We are in interesting times.
Scoopit is awesome, but sadly their servers(?or my ISP link to them?) are getting crushed right now, and every night, making the service essentially unusable. They have a great opportunity to grab a really important piece of NZ media real-estate – it would be a shame to lose out because of infrastructure issues.
Online Spin is a site I’ve just found via Max Kalehoff at AttentionMax. This excellent article points to “six columns digital marketers must read”. Author Max (of the main and six other articles) summarises the articles, but for the impatient here they are:
Are Advertisers Suffering From Addiction?
Media Specialists Must Grasp Consumer-Generated Media
Ten Trends Transforming Marketing Measurements
You Must Market To Algorithms, Not Just People
People As Advertising: Risky Business
Dr. Joe Plummer On Consumer Engagement (OnlineSpin link is wrong, this one works)
Quotes you may like… (from the articles, in order)
” Earlier this week, Ad Age reported that McKinsey & Co. is telling major marketers in a new report that by 2010, traditional TV advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990.”
“when passionate audiences are actively participating and communicating with one another, sensitivity to surrounding advertising messages has potential to increase dramatically while tolerance decreases. ”
“..digital networks have made more <analytics> data more accessible–even sometimes to the point of open-source or free.”
““Marketing isn’t just to people anymore. You have to market to algorithms.” …..examples of algorithms that have significantly influenced his own purchase and life decisions: Google, blog search, car diagnostic systems and Amazon recommendation engines. ”
“Marketers must hold everyone in their food chain to high standards. And yes, their reputations are at stake, depending on how they handle this.”
“<go-to-market> silos are a figment of our imagination and historical behavior; they’re not real in the eyes of our customers. Which is why I think early on, when studies were coming in showing that people could be involved in several media at the same time, people said: ‘Oh my gosh, really? I thought their full attention was on whatever it was they were doing?’ Surprise, surprise!”
Someone gets it – eBay’s recommended browser types are IE 6 or later, Firefox 1.5 or later and, bless them, Safari 2 or later. Safari is the standard browser on the Mac, and an increasing number of people use Macs. Moreover those Mac people tend to be early adopters and (sooner or later) evangelists.
If you are a Safari user, then I recommend downloading the latest version of the Webkit, which is the nightly build of the engine of the Safari browser. It speeds things up a lot…
While some articles concentrated on the inventors not getting the benefits, to me the best part about Google’s purchase of Gapminder’s Trendalyzer is that we all get to benefit.
Just check it out – Track life expectancy versus GDP per capita over time by pressing the play button…
I (finally) changed the name of this blog to lancewiggs.com, so you 15 loyal readers (Hi Mum) can have slightly less weary fingers. The old elevatorfactoids.wordpress.com links and bookmarks will still work apparently.
When I added my name to the front page the googlability* of the site went up sharply. So now let’s see what happens to the Alexa rank (2.69m globally, 9,711 in NZ), google links (3 – and they are all internal) and (ahem) google ego searching (922 search results) numbers.
*Interestingly enough amongst the spelling corrections offered by Firefox for “googlability” is “nonavailability”….
Netguide are running their annual awards voting. Liv mention this in her new blog – so I’ve dragged out this partially written piece….
As Liv mentions, this year Netguide want voters to register for some dodgy website (Netguide Village – not linked) that you probably have no interest whatsoever in joining. So Netguide’s business model is to drum up business by giving out awards.
There is a special category for non-Trade Me etailers.
“Best Online Shopping site… NZ-based site providing consumers with online commerce and retail sales of any products or services other than online trading or auction sites.”
Never mind that a staggering percentage of Trade Me sales are through buy-now (i.e. not auction) and/or of new products. I’m guessing that New Zealand biggest ‘goods’ retailer (buy new things now) is Trade Me, while I’m pretty sure that New Zealand’s biggest ecommerce site (buy a service or good) is Air New Zealand.
Netguide are owned by ACP Media, owners of Autotrader, Property Press and sellmefree. All of these compete (poorly) against Trade Me verticals (TM Motors, Trade Me Property), which leads us to at least one answer to the wording of that question.
Now Netguide are not as misguided as Hitwise, who have a domestic website that makes no mention of their awards (and that barely functions in Safari).
The actual Hitwise awards website shows winners in a staggering 160 categories – and it is meant to be based on Hitwise measured traffic. But there is a catch – non-subscribers can only win, it seems, in one category. So you get ludicrous results such as Autotrader winning the automotive category – when they had 2.9% of Trade Me Motors traffic (NetRatings) in 2006. The Autotrader result is the very first one you see (on a tiny text pdf) and there isn’t much point in going further. Hitwise are, it seems, following the 1996 model of giving awards to all and sundry in the hope of drumming up business.
So both companies give out awards in the hope of helping their own business. That’s ok.
Both also make it harder for Trade Me to win. That’s not so fine, though to be fair Trade Me is such a monster on the NZ internet scene that it is good to allow other sites to shine through. Even so, the Trade Me vertical sites in particular (Motors, Property, Jobs) should be allowed to compete fairly at awards time.
Lance Wiggs 