Bradley Howard's Blog

Amazed at the SOPA protests

Jan 25, 2012 at 11:48am

I watched the SOPA protests closely last week with complete amazement.

In summary, SOPA is a proposed anti-piracy law in the US which would help prohibit illegal content on websites by imposing harsh penalties on sites that host it.

Protests were held by some of the highest traffic websites on the Internet including Google and Wikipedia and were reported by the TV news.

Remember that Google own YouTube, which allegedly hosts many videos of illegal TV broadcasts (broadcasters and content owners can upload it to YouTube if they wish).

That’s one aspect of SOPA. Another aspect is that many websites that show illegal content use advertising as a source of revenue. SOPA wants networks which provide this advertising to become liable for where they are used.

If you took the Google search algorithm and posted it online, Google would take you to court and try to shut down any sites that host the illegal content. Yet Google refuses to be held accountable for the thousands of allegedly illegal videos it hosts on YouTube. These videos are illegal because they are TV recordings and violate copyright. Either Google does, or does not respect copyright.

Google are rumoured to be bidding for the Premier League rights. It will be interesting to see if Google win the rights and then watch their lawyers report websites which contain illegal footage. Will Google remove these websites from the search results? Will Google remove their adsense and adwords accounts?

And the same applies to Wikipedia. Whilst I’m not suggesting that you actually do this, if you set up a website tomorrow and wrote a script to copy all of Wikipedia’s comments to your site, would you expect a legal letter from Wikipedia? Of course you would, because we understand copying content without permission is illegal from our school years onwards.

The value of content has been steadily fallen and the Internet has accelerated this. I don’t want people to copy my content illegally, and I respect the US for trying to help protect content.

Photo courtesy of KierDuros on Flickr

tags:

Rights, User Generated Content, content, football, google, wikipedia,

1 Comment

Why Publishers and Broadcasters need to change

Nov 11, 2011 at 8:59am

It’s been absolutely crazy busy at work for the last few weeks, mainly on the new business front. I’d like to add this is a report, not a criticism. Anyway, when it gets this busy at work I often remember Bill Gates’ book The Road Ahead where he discusses how future business will all be conducted by electronic systems exchanging data with each other.

The truth has turned out to be quite the opposite – customers want ever increasing levels of detail before signing up to a product or service.

I did get a chance last week to go to an interesting technology event run by Vizrt. The event was aimed at their large publisher and broadcaster customers – many of the broadsheets and tabloids use their system (or similar competitors) for creating content for their newspapers or TV news snippets. We were there because we work with some large publishers, integrating their systems together.

One of the speakers at the event was Morten Holst who is a Product Strategy Manager for Vizrt, and raised some interesting points which are paraphrased below.

Morten’s first point was to wake up the audience with the following video:

His point was that whilst the video is amusing – a baby who knows the iPad interface so well that she can’t use a paper magazine, and even checks her finger to see if it’s her finger that’s broken – this baby is going to be a consumer in ten years. Publishers and broadcasters need to wake up and realise their consumers are changing very quickly.

His next demonstration was a comparison of a web site 10 years ago and nowadays. I’ve used the BBC News website as an example below.

Look at the two homepages for a few seconds, and you can see many similarities. In fairness, over the ten years, not a huge amount has changed.

I’m not particularly targeting the BBC (it’s still my favourite news site). The point here is that publishing hasn’t actually changed very much in 10 years.

Now look at another entertainment industry over the last ten years. Look at the video below – if you can, try to watch it in HD.

Morten’s point here is that 10 years ago these kinds of graphics and sound effects were considered motion picture quality. Now they are considered the acceptable standard of computer games – this year’s Battlefield 3 (the video above), FIFA 12 and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 are good examples.

The video games industry has recognised a number of times that it needs to push the boundaries of user interfaces, presentation and design – think of an Xbox 360, the revolutionary Wii controller, then the revolutionary Kinect controller. To put that into perspective, the Xbox and Wii were launched within the last 6 years.

His final point was about comparing printed content to digital content. If you read paper magazines, the photography is usually outstanding - full, double page and high quality. That same image will be shown as a 2 inch square on the web, and won't get a second glance.

The iPad is encouraging publisher's to think more creatively, by designing beautiful interfaces. In truth there's no reason the iPad can encourage creativity and a web browser can't. However the iPad has been disruptive enough in digital terms to make editors want to push the boundaries.

So, on to the future, Morten encouraged the audience to start pushing the boundaries, to stop doing things the same way because that’s how they’d always been done. The functionality has moved on enormously, yet the editors aren’t using the new features, yet.

tags:

BBC, Content Management Systems, Wii, XBox, content, games, kinect, subscription content, usability, website production,

1 Comment

How I would Yahoo!

Oct 26, 2011 at 8:43am

So, apparently Yahoo! is up for sale, and even better, Google are willing to help fund it's resurgence. This sounds so familiar – in 1997, Apple were having serious problems and Microsoft, their once main competitor, invested $150 million in the company, and now Apple is worth more than Microsoft!

Back to Yahoo!, it’s amazing how many people are so dismissive of Yahoo!’s (that’s a lot of punctuation) value.

Here are the high level stats:

Yahoo has over 500 million unique visitors each month, around the World, in over 30 languages.

In the UK alone, adults spend over 3 hours a month just on Yahoo! Mail.

To build that audience of 500 million would cost a HUGE amount of money (and time), so in my opinion there's never been a better time to Yahoo! Stock is set at a very reasonable price, and Google are willing to invest a significant amount of money.

Here’s what I would do if I took over Yahoo! tomorrow:

Focus

An Internet content portal above all else. In terms of competition, Google provide mail to compete with Yahoo! Mail however there is no one with similar a traffic size which provides the level of content as Yahoo!
Generate a cost/revenue model for services such as Yahoo! Mail and Flickr to see if it’s worth selling these on or keeping them and reinvesting.
Create a cloud development service model to compete with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft - turning a cost centre into a profit centre

Analytics

Work out where my users are coming from – is it mainly from PC manufacturer-set-browser-homepages which haven’t been updated for 5 years? In fact, I’d probably do most of my initial work on the analysis of who uses the individual Yahoo! services to ascertain the users’ value, or even try to derive an ARPU (Average Revenue Per User).

Innovation

Yahoo! strikes me as a company which is struggling to innovate. How many new services of note have their launched recently? I would look at why this has happened – have they all left to go to competitors? Internet companies need to have innovation at the centre of their philosophy, vision and corporate structure in order to keep users returning. I would reignite this passion for innovation immediately.

And finally, I think I’d rebrand Yahoo! to drop the exclamation mark! (Pun intended).

tags:

Microsoft, cloud, content, email, google, innovation, web traffic,

0 Comments

A look at New York Times digital revenues

Oct 25, 2011 at 12:33pm

The New York Times has announced some details of it's online premium subscription (i.e. cash payment) model.

Full details

Digital

Digital businesses include NYTimes.com, BostonGlobe.com, Boston.com, About.com, other Company Web sites and related digital products. In the third quarter of 2011, total digital advertising revenues decreased 4.5 percent to $74.8 million from $78.3 million. Digital advertising revenues at the News Media Group increased 6.2 percent to $50.3 million from $47.4 million due to growth in retail and national display advertising. Digital advertising revenues as a percentage of total Company advertising revenues were 28.6 percent for the third quarter of 2011 compared with 27.3 percent in the third quarter of 2010.

In the first nine months of 2011, the Company's total digital advertising revenues increased 0.9 percent to $242.9 million from $240.7 million. Digital advertising revenues at the News Media Group increased 12.2 percent to $162.4 million from $144.7 million. Digital advertising revenues as a percentage of total Company advertising revenues were 28.2 percent for the first nine months of 2011 compared with 26.3 percent in the first nine months of 2010.

Paid digital subscribers to The Times digital subscription packages, e-readers and replica editions totaled approximately 324,000 as of the end of the third quarter of 2011. In addition to these paid digital subscribers, as of the end of the third quarter of 2011, The Times had more than 100,000 highly engaged users sponsored by Ford Motor Company's luxury brand, Lincoln, who have free access to NYTimes.com and smartphone apps until the end of the year, and approximately 800,000 home-delivery subscribers with linked digital accounts, who receive free digital access. In total, The Times had paid and sponsored relationships with over 1.2 million digital users as of the end of the third quarter of 2011.

Source: The New York Times Company

My interpretation

In the last quarter, there were 1.2 million registered users, of whom 324,000 paid something, and 100,000 were paid for by Ford (a great subscription model as long as there are no catches for either party) and 800,000 were covered by their print subscription. In other words, they have a churn of about 25%.
The site has 45 million unique visitors per month as of January 2011 - it's interesting that they use comScore to quote that 45 million. ComScore use an estimated data model, as opposed to NYT using their own actual data.
Anyway, 45 million unique users and 324,000 have paid something - that's a conversion rate of less than one percent, however paid for content is still very much in its infancy.
Those 45 million users probably don't include Smartphone users or e-readers (hats off to ComScore if that can get that data, however I suspect they can't).
Doing some extremely rough sums, subscriptions are 99 cents for the first 4 weeks and then $3.75 per week thereafter. Let's ignore the special offer price and let's assume Ford pay a full $3.75 per user. Ignoring the print subscribers who get the digital edition for free, that's a total revenue of $1.59 million per week. Let's assume NYT earned this revenue throughout the entire quarter (12 weeks), that's a total of $19 million for the quarter.
Digital advertising across the group (and this includes a number of other websites and newspapers) generated $74.8 million.

Lessons to take away from this quarterly statement

The premium digital content model still has a way to go - advertising still generated four times the revenue as subscribers.
'Wholesale' or 'sponsored' user bases are key drivers for the number of paid for subscribers - Ford pay for 100,000 users and NYT have 324,000 paying individual subscribers. Think of the effort that goes into the Ford deal compared to the direct to consumer sales effort.

tags:

analytics, business, content, digital media, ecommerce, economy, freemium, news, sponsorship, subscription content,

1 Comment

Free news is [probably] fake news

Aug 4, 2011 at 9:26am

In case you missed it, there was a news story that developed over Twitter yesterday where a "Canadian research company" announced that users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser had a lower IQ than users of other Internet browsers.

The story was found to be a fake after a few hours, and highlighted my concerns over citizen journalism.

In the past, we tuned into TV news services such as the BBC, CNN or ITN as well as newspapers and radio stations. We knew whether a media agency was biased towards one political persuasion or another, and made up our own mind how much to "rationalise" the news.

With "citizen journalism" where anyone can tweet 140 characters and be taken genuinely for other users to retweet and spread the message, our news sources have become unknown, which means we probably shouldn't trust them. The public's insatiable appetite for instant news means that news sources can't be verified before shown on international news stations. The Internet Explorer story has highlighted this.

The problem facing news agencies is the requirement for second-by-second news and how to monetise quality, authentic reporting. Otherwise the news industry will become more unmoderated, unverified and will lead to more extreme and fake reporting.

Photo courtesy of Chris Metcalf

tags:

User Generated Content, content, news, politics,

1 Comment

iPad review - at last

Jun 23, 2011 at 9:19am

I've been pretty vocal about not-seeing-the-point of an iPad and so Alex Day at Endava lent me his iPad for a few weeks to see if I'd change my mind.

I'm now ten days into iPad ownership (more like borrowingship) and here are my thoughts.

It doesn't replace any previous gadget. The thought of taking an iPad into work, or not taking my laptop home to do some late night work is frankly ridiculous. To open a Word document or PowerPoint requires buying some apps and I doubt they support some of the features we use at work (track changes, comments and Sharepoint integration). So it doesn't replace my laptop for a moment.

I'm checking email much more often. One of the first things I did was to wipe the data (sorry Alex) and synchronise my personal email and work email. Which means the iPad alerts me when new calendar requests come in, etc. Now I realise why Alex lent it to me...

I've totally stopped having spare moments since the iPad came home. My wife and I charge our iPhones in the kitchen near the kettle, and every time I make a cup of tea, I'll play on the iPad for a minute or so, rather than wait around doing whatever I did before the iPad.

The one app that excels above others on the iPad is FlipBoard. Flipboard takes your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other accounts including favourite RSS feeds, and converts them into a beautiful magazine style format (see the screenshot above). It takes images from links inside Tweets from people you are following and shows them as part of the article. It is the neatest form of personalised content I have seen anywhere. Content publishers should take note of this app as a glimpse into the future of content publishing. When you look at the Flickr feed on FlipBoard you need to remind yourself that this is user generated content - the quality of the photos and the screen are excellent.

And while we're on the positive points, the battery is excellent. Alex's iPad doesn't have mobile coverage, just WiFi, which is fine considering it never goes outside of the house and office. I've only charged it twice in ten days. I guess that's why the device weighs the same as a hardback book.

Everyone in the family is playing much, much more games. Despite owning a Wii and Xbox (with kinect) and 2 Nintendo DSs (DSes?) the iPad is the preferred device, especially for Mrs H. The graphics and general playability are superb, and that's just on the free games we've downloaded.

And that's why in think that I don't get the iPad. I want it to replace my laptop and paper notepad, but it's not that type of device at all. It's not about productivity, it's about entertainment. It's a media device. It is a large iPod not a replacement laptop.

Yes you can convert it into a productivity tool, by buying £50 worth of apps and using the rubbish on-screen keyboard, which will probably give you RSI within five years, you can suffer whilst telling everyone you abandoned your laptop years ago. Ten years ago you were probably saying the same thing with a Palm V.

tags:

Endava, Facebook, RSS, User Generated Content, application review, content, flickr, ipad, laptop, twitter,

2 Comments

The best starters guide to online marketing

Jun 16, 2011 at 11:08am

If you're looking for a "How to" guide to online or digital marketing, I recommend the following graphic (care of Unbounce). I've sent this to many people by email and Twitter as the best starting point for any online marketing campaign. It doesn't necessarily need a large advertising budget behind it - it just needs some time.

There's so much information in the graphic that I've tried printing it on several A3 sheets but it didn't look particularly great. My brother-in-law (thanks to PhotoPaperDirect) has managed to print it as a 6 foot long print on a screen printer however there resolution isn't good enough to remain clear (it's OK, but not brilliant).

Unbounce – The DIY Landing Page Platform

tags:

User Generated Content, advertising, analytics, content, digital media, email, marketing, search, seo, social media,

0 Comments

Internet World

May 12, 2011 at 10:03am

I spent today at Internet World. In the morning I met a number of vendors who we currently work with (such as Sitecore and Telligent) and ex-colleagues from my IMG days (such as Ismail at Webcredible). In the afternoon I went to a number of presentations from Blue State Digital, Attensity, Hilton and Dixons.

The presentations were far more information than previous years. All the presenters seemed more willing than previous years to impart key information - such as uptime statistics, very specific keyword analysis on social media listening (which included some negative publicity on a key client) and so on. This isn't a complaint whatsoever - its a welcome observation.

Key points from the presentations:

Blue State Digital

BSD (owned by WPP, and they work with one of our clients) ran Obama's digital campaign (13m subscribers, raised $600m donations from 3.2m donors, generated 1 million User Generated Photos of which many were used in campaign videos).
A lot of thought about "seizing key moments" e.g. when Sarah Palin attacked Obama in speeches they sent plain emails responding immediately to her comments. BH: Sounds great - but how do you stop crying wolf for everything that might happen to a brand?
Every piece of content needs to drive a next step action (for example share, submit, click for the next step, comment) and as a proof of practising what they preached, I noticed that even the PowerPoint had questions not bullets
BSD recommend to their client not to mass newsletters. Instead, personalise them and target them
The key takeaway was on a ladder of participation, was to create one and measure it for clients. E.g. What's the total number of consumers a brand reaches? What is the web traffic? How many email sends are there? How many emails are opened? How many Facebook fans on their page? How many people contribute in the on portal community?, and so on.

Attensity

Key take away was their methodology: Listen, Analyse, Relate, Act
Conversations happen over multiple channels, not just social media and not just web. For instance they have a travel client and they "listen" to Travelocity and Hotels.com. To put this into context, most social media listening tools focus on Twitter, Facebook and some blog networks.

Hilton

Surinder Phuller was excellent. Social media is about being open and transparent, and she got this more than most of the other social media speakers and other social experts that I've met in the last few months.
Her presentation was about using video content on social networks to improve sales
Their themes/ "targetted methodology" (you had to see it to understand) was to brand content, destinations, and specific hotels
It is an opportunity to sell ancillary services such as the spa or restaurant which historically has been very difficult within some hotel locations.
They sent Flip video cameras to all the hotels and asked local hotel staff to shoot them and upload them - not professional production teams
At first they sent the Flip cameras out and got poor quality videos back, e.g. "Here's my ballroom, isn't it lovely?"
She then worked on content plans with the hotels, training local staff with 12 month content plans with the above themes, such as asking staff at the Hilton Park Lane on their opinion of the Royal wedding
After the content plan the content improved to information about the local area and personal thoughts from staff members
The general aim was to get the hotel staff and their personalities into the videos, so you know that when you're going to stay at a particular Hilton, you know the individual staff before you get there

Dixons

Excellent presentation from Chris Howell, their IT Director
The presentation was all about customer experience - measuring it; acting on it; not hiding from the facts when the site has poor performance
Chris learned at Tesco what it means to be customer focussed, and his presentation was all about taking that to other companies
Chris raised an excellent point which is that the quote "Jack of all trades, master at none" is actually only half the quote. The full quote is "Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one". Definitely the topic of a future blog post!

If you have some time on Wednesday, it's worth popping down to Earls Court Two and hopefully the presentations will be as insightful as Tuesday's. Please let me know what you thought of the exhibition via the comments below or on Twitter (@bradbox).

tags:

Exhibitions, Hotels, Sitecore, User Generated Content, business, content, email, management training, social media, usability,

0 Comments

Personalised content getting confused

Apr 13, 2011 at 10:59am

At Endava we strongly believe the future of consumer websites is what we call 'B21' - a highly personalised web experience.

Our product stack and all web technologies are now based around the efficiency of getting data into our clients' systems, analysing it and finding the 'insight', and serving relevant content.

When I logged into Tesco.com this evening, the personalised recommendations for the house were rather amusing - somewhat 'religiously confused' - wondering whether to wish us a Happy Passover or a Happy Easter!

tags:

B21, Tesco, analytics, content, data, insight, personalisation,

0 Comments

6.1tn txts

Jan 9, 2011 at 9:25pm

Last year there were 6,100,000,000,000 text messages sent worldwide according to the International Telecommunications Union.

That's three messages every single day for everyone on the planet!

tags:

content, trends,

0 Comments

Tags

Amazed at the SOPA protests

Why Publishers and Broadcasters need to change

How I would Yahoo!

A look at New York Times digital revenues

Free news is [probably] fake news

iPad review - at last

The best starters guide to online marketing

Internet World

Personalised content getting confused

6.1tn txts

Bradley Howard

Other ways to find me: