The new product
How technology blog rumors are made.
Agency is the future of Media
Companies creating content for brands may be the future of media.
Marketers and Makers
Five tales about two world show how we rely on two equally important groups of people: marketers and makers
6 Stages of Cultural Impact
Measuring the cultural impact of a corporation in 6 easy steps.
Ruthless Efficiencies
As readers of this site know, I strongly believe that we are now in the middle of a major overall shift in economic trend that hasn’t been seen since the introduction of the paper bill in late 1700s england. Seen under this lens, I’m starting to think that there may be some truths to the claims that some of the traditional industries are making that their business is getting hurt by new technology. Their business is getting hurt but it’s not because of any particular evil on the part of Internet companies. The truth is that the reason those industries are starting to suffer from the propagation of Internet technology is that their traditional business models were based on inneficiencies in the market. The Music Industry Take, for example, the music industry. Traditionally, the music industry has been based on aggregating multiple songs on a piece of media. Every few decades, they would benefit from the introduction of a new technology (for example, shifing from LPs to 8-tracks, then to cassette tapes, then to CDs) as people had to basically purchase the same good over and over again when they upgraded their equipment. Then came the concept of a digital…
Metrics — Weighting the Metrics
Metrics weeks continues with a review of how to weight metrics. So far, I’ve looked into who, in a company could benefit from metrics. I then delved into two different types of metrics: hard metrics, which can easily be measured, and soft metrics, which cannot. Today, I’m going to try to figure out how this all weights out. Grouping the metrics In order to figure out weighting, I first started to think about how to group different metrics. For this purpose, I looked at things like the base value (which would give us a baseline as to how much a business is worth based solely on revenue and revenue growth), inventory (looking at things like traffic, reach, and output, because they all give us some data points as to the growth of monetizable assets in the future), consumer involvement (looking at info like links, subscribtions, and comments to define the value of customers), and growth potential (including some more fuzzy measure of potential growth and the advantages of the integration value). My reasoning for grouping things in this way was that it might make it easier to figure out weighting across those large catch-all categories (and, if there is any…
Metrics — Soft Metrics
A review of some of the softer metrics you might want to consider tracking on your site.
Modular by Design — Broadcast TV
The impact of modular approach can also be felt in the television business. Personal Video Recorders like Tivo have managed to break down television into its most basic set of modules: the TV show, attacking the concept of broadcasting in the process. The problem here is that television stations have been working on bundling several TV shows as part of a package. The science of primetime planning is predicated on the concept that people who watch one TV show may also take a look at shows that are broadcast before and after that particular show. Based on this concept, TV stations can prop up the audience of a particular show by broadcasting it at a time that is close to another more popular one. However, Tivo breaks down that logic by giving the user leeway in terms of what they see (only the content they want) and when they see it (when they want), distributing audiences over any time of the day. The Tivo approach is breaking the TV business model because it attacks the concept of primetime television. On Tivo, primetime is any time, which means that audiences become much harder to track and makes it impossible to assume…