Howard Owens

I've been wondering when somebody would introduce a video player/RSS aggregator package.  Here's Democracy Player.

I just downloaded it and it looks pretty promising.

It looks like a Mac OS X thing.

YouTube has announced the winners of its first awards effort -- the UGC awards for 2006.

OK Go's "Here it Goes Again" is probably my all-time favorite music video. It's great to see the band-produced piece get some official recognition. But it wasn't the most popular music video (it won for most creative). That honor went to this inexpensively produced piece.
Check out the other winners -- this is what people are watching.

Craig Newmark has said, " ... there's no substitute for professional writing, no substitute for professional editing, and no substitute for professional fact checking ..."

He's been public about his appreciation for journalism in a number of ways, and in fact he's invested in things like New Assignment.

Many people seem to think Newmark's craigslist is destroying journalism as we've known it. I've been critical of this notion, but there's no doubt that craiglist is one of the disruptors hurting the newspaper business.

Earlier I responded to Scott Karp's call to save newspaper journalism (not necessarily newspapers) through volunteerism.

In later reading over the comments to Scott's original post, a notion struck me: Why not use volunteerism through craigslist to promote the value of newspaper websites?

Surely, Craig wouldn't object. Newspapers have traditionally been the glue that binds communities together. They are valuable institutions that do important civic work. Given Craig's pronounements on the value of community journalism, a grassroots campaign to promote the good things on newspapers' websites would be something he would applaud, right?

Now, technically, linking out to a "commercial" web site is a violation of the TOS, but given posts on craigslist like this, this and this, that doesn't seem to bother Craig or his staff too much.

In that spirit, I posted a little something that Bakersfield.com is doing as a valuable community service: a mash up to report potholes.

Note the example here: Not a general, "hey, this web site is great," but a specific service that fits within craigslist's sense of community value.

So, if you value local community journalism, go find something on your local newspaper.com and post a bulletin about it on your local craigslist. Support your local community.

There's a notion among many newsroom people that, "Damn it, what we do is valuable and important and people should pay for it." Of course, I've argued, free markets don't work that way. If people don't perceive the value, they won't give you money just because you have a high opinion of yourself.

This morning, Scott Karp is suggesting that newspapers need to in fact throw themselves on the mercy of their readers and say, "Donate to the cause."

Imagine that you decided to post your classified listing with your local newspaper rather than with Craigslist because you knew it would support the work of local journalists who help make your locality a better place. AND, imagine, you also chose the local newspaper listing because you knew knew that your listing would be more likely to reach civic-minded people like yourself. Imagine how much more (smugly) satisfying would be to conduct your personal commerce in such a community

My question is: Will people donate their paid classifieds to a business that maintains 20 percent profit margins? And then there is that whole love/hate thing people have with media. There is also the issue of declining readership, especially among young people.

Just who will the donors be? Probably the same people who already see the value of newspapers and because of that perceived value, buy ads now.

Besides, I'm not a big fan of newspaper companies begging for hand outs. Either we have to figure out how to better serve our communities and operate more effectively as digital businesses, or we don't deserve the community's support.

Much of Karp's thesis though is based on a faulty premise: That craigslist is killing the newspaper classified business.

As I've written before, there are many efficiencies in digital distribution that are cutting into the newspaper classified business, but to declare victory for craigslist or any other classified competitor is a gross overstatement.

While Karp might be right that newspapers have not done a good job of marketing their value to the community, I think we've also done a poor job of explaining just how effective newspaper classifieds are, especially when those ads are also put online. In most communities -- with the possible exception of San Francisco -- a newspaper classified ad is still the most effective way to advertise a job opening, a house for rent or a car for sale.

Of course, newspaper classifieds are vulnerable to disruption because of the high price, but it's also true that most of the ads going to competitors like craigslist are ads that traditional newspapers never would have gotten in the first place. Criagslist is much more of a threat to alt-weeklies than MSM dailies.

Newspaper classified revenue is dropping not because of craigslist, but because of the bevy of new choices. Not all of the online alternatives are free, but they are often less expensive. That hurts, but the main point is: Newspapers have lost their monopoly. That's the biggest change brought on by digital, distributed media.

Newspapers have not necessarily been good at recognizing nor adopting to the new reality, but I agree with Karp that Phil Bronstein statement that "the news business 'is broken, and no one knows how to fix it.' ('And if any other paper says they do, they’re lying.')" shows a complete lack of imagination. I doubt any of my colleagues who have been toiling in newspaper new media departments for the past decade or so agree with that statement. I think the answers are all out there. It's just that no one newspaper has yet put all the pieces together yet, and that's largely the fault of companies that felt it more important to donate online profits to corporate bottom lines rather than reinvest that revenue in staff and products to grow the business.

We need to get our own house in order before we start asking for outside help.

UPDATE: From a somewhat different starting point, Howard Weaver makes relatively similar points. Rather than quote any part of it, just go read the whole thing.

UPDATE II: Also read Kyle Redinger on why newspapers are not dead.  More facts, less rhetoric.

As content increasingly becomes a commodity, and is unbundled from traditional packaging, former content providers need to become platform providers, according to John Hagel.

From my experience, if you want to transition from a content business to customer relationship business in the media industry, you need to start focusing on content platforms. In a traditional content business, you rely on professionals to deliver content that is meant to be experienced exactly as produced. Content platforms still rely on professionals, but the role of professionals in a platform business is to catalyze further contributions by a growing range of third parties, including audience members. A platform is meant to be built on and will rapidly evolve over time. A product, once produced, never changes.

As I have written before:

Products are designed to be used on a standalone basis – you buy it and you view it or listen to it in the specific way the content creator intended. Platforms are designed to be built upon – they create opportunities for the original creator, third parties or the customers themselves to extend, enhance and tailor the content in ways that the original creator never anticipated. Offered as a platform, content can create far more value than any equivalent standalone product.

Good post from Howard Weaver.

The crushing “destructive technology” change for the music business came when it became possible to buy (or steal) a single song rather than pay $17 for a CD filled with other music you didn’t want.

The biggest “destructive technology” change for newspapers is the fact that websites can be refreshed constantly while printed papers get updated once a day.

At a party a few years ago, when I first met her, Cathy Seipp explained to me that she refused to start a blog because she didn't want to give her work away for free. She made her living as a writer, and the idea of putting her well crafted prose onto a blog that generated no revenue seemed like a bad idea.

I suggested that to her that there were any number of things she could write about that wouldn't infringe on her paid work, and such a blog would help spread her fame. She would make more money, I suggested, if she blogged.

Eventually, she did start a blog.

For more than three days now, since her death on Wednesday, "Cathy Seipp" has been the #1 search term on Technoriti. Right now, she's bigger than MySpace, YouTube, Twitter or Paris Hilton.

That's a fine tribute for a blogger.

UPDATE: There's pictures of Cathy here and here. I should also note that I'm sure Matt Welch was a much bigger influence than me in getting Cathy to blog. Matt has photos here. And looking back on my posts, I was obviously wrong that she needed to switch to MoveableType and get her own domain.

Did Google buy YouTube as a defensive strategy, knowing that it might get sued, but that such a suit might prove essential to its survival?

But the third point is the most important for Google. If YouTube were to lose a lawsuit for hosting intellectual property, it would severely weaken Google’s position in a variety of current and future endeavors. Any aspirations Google has of some day crawling and indexing video content (nope, they don’t have this technology yet) would now be in a legal limbo. It would also potentially re-introduce new arguments against their Google Image Search. And their book search program might suffer a similar fate once the YouTube precedent settles in. Google, being a company that spiders and indexes (stores) massive amounts of copyrighted information, would now be in serious legal jeopardy.

Think about how the web would change without search.

If courts were ever to decide that Google's massive databases of stored content were a violation of copyright (even though what they actually serve up as a result set is just a slice of whats stored), then search as we know it would disappear. The net as we know it would be radically different. It would be a lot harder to find and share information. We would still have hyperlinks, and that's important to the network economy, but search is what makes the web efficient.

(via John Battelle)

David Lazarus apparently hasn't gotten the message:

I've said it many times, but it's worth repeating: Newspaper readers don't pay for content. They never have. They pay for delivery. They won't pay for newspaper content online because they're already paying for delivery via their computer and their broadband fees.

I can't see many newspaper.com managers who are growing significant revenue now with free content putting all of that at risk to experiment with a questionable pay model.

BTW: I think it displays the depth of Mr. Lazarus's cluelessness about our industry that he apparently doesn't even know who Dan Gillmor is.

There was "citizen journalist" Dan Gillmor letting me know that I got everything "almost precisely wrong" and that I sound "pathetically whiny."

Previous posts:

• It’s hard to conclude that TimesSelect is a success
• News has always been free, and always will be
• Readers have never paid for newspaper content

UPDATE: William Hartnett has an excellent take on Lazarus and his unwillingness to address the substantive criticism of his position by industry experts and instead dismiss his critics as opinionated bloggers.

Web video ads are magic.

In essence, there's just something special about that "play" button. The report found users click the "Play”" button at considerably higher rates than they click image ads, and typically play those ads for two-thirds of their full lengths.

Online marketers should note the importance of getting their message across early on when creating videos. DoubleClick said most viewers stuck with the clips for two-thirds of their duration, meaning they typically watched about 19 seconds of each :30 video or 10 seconds of each :15 spot.

"It's a mistake for advertisers to assume that all they should do is take their television ads and move them to the Internet," he said. "I expect that the most effective video ads are the ones that compel the user to engage with them and initiate the advertising. Our clients are now mixed about whether their ads should play with or without user initiation... I think the best practice is to create the type of advertisements that users are going to request to see and initiate."

OK, maybe it's not wise to give video cameras to print journalists.

It leads to things like this.

Earlier I mentioned that we've rented our house on a rent-to-own basis.

Here's the interesting part of the story: Twice previously, I had placed placed rental ads on craigslist. In both cases, I mentioned our desire to do a rent-to-own arrangement. Prior to that, I had placed ads on craigslist for our FSBO effort. In total, the craigslist ads led to two flaky e-mails (not counting real estate agents). A month ago, we placed a week-long ad in The Bakersfield Californian, which included Bakersfield.com. It was a house-for-rent ad that included a line about rent to own. The result: more than 60 phone calls. Of those, we had at least five serious prospects.

Steve Outing writes often about how great craigslist is for him in Boulder.

So what's the difference? Is it that houses of the kind I have are not a high appeal item to the craigslist audience? Is it that Craigslist in Bakersfield is intrinsically under performing? Or could TBC's defensive measure of launching Bakotopia be paying some dividends?

I honestly don't know the answer. But I think it's important to note that craigslist isn't unbeatable, isn't unstoppable, and that newspaper classifieds still drive a tremendous amount of response.

Recruitment advertising has been hurt by online, but contrary to the dire predictions of industry analysts five or six years ago, the likes of Monster and Hot Jobs haven't killed newspaper help wanted ads. In fact, I remember speaking with a couple of classified managers a couple of years ago who said they were hearing from advertisers who tried Monster but found it less effective in reaching qualified recruits than the newspaper-provisioned ad (which by that time always included online). Since the initial Monster scare, newspaper recruitment advertising has held steady, from what I hear.

I can't say I'm optimistic about the future of newspaper classifieds (the single most important piece of newspaper revenue), but neither am I worried. The game isn't over, and I don't believe the killer app of online classifieds has been unrolled yet. I don't know what online classifieds will look like in five years, but I don't think there is a dominant model today. For all of the buzz around craigslist, it isn't the category killer some pretend it is, nor is Monster, nor any of the dot com auto or real estate verticals.

The classified environment is turbulent, and certainly, newspapers will never again rule the kingdom as they once did, but I wouldn't count newspapers out yet. The question is, can the business models, and business minds, adjust to lower volume, slower revenue growth and smaller margins?

Jean Yves Chainon thinks TimesSelect is doing just fine.

This means that about 217,000 online-only subscribers at the end of February were bringing the Times a potential $10.8 million in subscription revenue. Therefore it seems that the controversial TimesSelect pay-wall is starting to bear its fruits.

But lets put these numbers into perspective.

The New York Times Co. is expected to report $3.3 billion in revenue for 2007. Of that, about $350 million will come online.

So, TimesSelcect remains a drop in the bucket of overall revenue, and a mere three percent of online revenue.

Chainon says that since the Times went from a half-price subscription to a free subscription for .edu users just a couple of weeks ago, the number of .edu subscribers has tripled. What does that tell you about people's resistance levels to paying for online content?

Vin Crosbie noted recently that the Times has gotten only 1.6 percent of its online audience to pay for TimesSelect. That's not an impressive number.

As I write this, I haven't yet found a report on NewYorkTime.com advertising revenue, but this report says that About.com did more than $6 million in advertising revenue in February and more than $7 million in January. As far as I can tell, About's source of advertising revenue is banners and text links (visit the site and note: no banners on the home page). About is growing advertising revenue in excess of 20 percent.

About reports 44 million unique users per month, while the Time reports 13 million (PDF). The Times has other sources of online revenue besides banner and text ads (such as the verticals, real estate, autos and jobs), which accounts for a much higher multiple of revenue per unique user.

A straight comparison between the two sites isn't possible, but clearly audiences on this scale generate significant opportunities to grow non-subscription revenue.

So the question becomes: How much money is TimesSelect costing the New York Times? The lost advertising revenue could potentially exceed $10 million annually. It's hard to calculate for sure, but just in eyeballing it, it seems possible, if not probable. The disparity is certainly enough of a cautionary tale for other publishers considering pay models.

As I've noted in a number of previous posts: People don't pay for content, except in unique circumstances. They pay for delivery. On the web, publishers have marginal delivery costs, and consumers are already bearing the financial burden of computer, modem and pipe. It's going to be a battle to get readers to pay for general-interest content. I don't see it working. Ever.

This should piss off a lot of journalists -- Jim Cramer says, "fire them all."

Here's a rough transcription of Cramer's interview (I didn't try to capture every word or the questions, but I'm confident this is very accurate for what it does capture):

Advertisers want a certain cohort – 18 to 35. That cohort has stopped reading newspapers.

What’s happen is advertisers can’t reach who they want (though newspapers).

People running news organizations who tend to be in their 40s, 50s and 60s, continue to make deals without recognizing the tremendous demographic shift away from newspapers.

They keep thinking that if they change content, if they become more forward in their content, but this has directly to do with it’s not the means that people get information anymore. Newspapers are very typewriter versus word processor.

They’re not businesses. They’re not businesses. They’re not businesses. A business is something that grows and throws off cash flow. When a business shrinks and has diminishing cash flow it’s not a business.

I think that GM is a declining business, but we accept the fact that GM is a business.

I think what they have to do is fire everyone. Now there’s a sense that there is some shred of journalism at these places. So the New York Times has a $500 million newsroom, so maybe you cut that to $100 million. You fire a lot of people.

When you’re in trouble, what you do if your Bethlehem Steel, you have 100,000 people, you cut it down to 10,000, because what you want to do is get ahead of it on the expense side.

These guys don’t know how to grow the rev. Now the thing the business guys, the CFOs, will realize is that this journalism stuff is just crap. We don’t need it. It’s obvious that it’s costing a lot of money, but what they don’t recognize is that the only reason they’re read is because of journalism, but journalism is the most expendable part of their businesses, so they have to cut it out.

Who cares (what it means to the 4th Estate). It’s just another business. You can do it on the web. Look, I’m very accepting of the world and this is Wall Street Confidential. Am I at the American Society of Magazines where I say, “woe is me”? No. I could give a, I’m trying to make people money. I need them out of Gannett and get them out of the New York Times. I love journalism dearly, so what?

Cramer's contradictions above should be self evident (it's not a business, but is a business; people read papers because of the journalism, but it's the most expendable part of newspapers, etc.).

News is not a product like steel, where if you start selling less, you start producing less. You can't produce less news and expect to make more money. You might save money, but there is always a point of diminishing returns. Somehow, I don't think the New York Times would survive as a shopper (I mean, if you cut all the journalists, what do you have left but a bunch of ads?)

Clearly, Cramer hasn't thought deeply about this issue or kept abreast of industry trends. The situation is far more fluid and dynamic than his facile analysis suggests, and his prescription is hardly a cure for what ails the industry. His short term thinking is the caricature of the ugly American investor. It's not, I don't think, the thinking of a calculated investor, who is looking at long term prospects. Unfortunately, as we've discussed before, the newspaper industry hasn't done a good job over the past decade of articulating a long-range plan.

The house is rented. The movers start packing us up on Monday. Billie and I fly away on Thursday. The cats follow the next day. It's been a long process, but we're finally leaving Bakersfield.

I've invited a bunch of my Bakersfield buddies to join me for one last beer at the Alley Cat tomorrow (Friday) at 5:30 p.m. If you're in Bakersfield and would like to join us, feel free (and if I absent-mindedly left you off the invite list (or didn't have your e-mail address), apologies).

It's a different way to find out a friend died -- I'm looking at my Gmail account, and in the list of fellow gmailers who are online, Matt Welch has a note under his name: "Cathy Seipp, R.I.P."

Cathy passed away yesterday.

Catherine Seipp, a writer and media critic who became known in the 1990s for her pointed coverage of the Los Angeles Times in Buzz magazine, has died. She was 49.

Seipp, a nonsmoker who was diagnosed with lung cancer five years ago, died Wednesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, her family announced.

Cathy was an incredible person and I wish could have gotten to know her better, but I'm glad I got the chance to know her at all.

UPDATE: LAObserved as a round up of blogger tributes. Also, I'm seeing a lot of inbound traffic from Technorati, where you can find many more fine tributes to Cathy.

Can Hyper-Local Work?
Chris DeVore, COO, Judy's Book; Mary Lou Fulton, VP, audience development, The Bakersfield Californian; John Geraci, co-creator, Outside.In; Ryan Massie, senior project manager, Ask.com; Ian White, CEO, Urban Mapping

First question is, "how are you measuring success?"  Geraci said that since they're aggregating a network of placeblogging content, one reader counts as success.

Fulton:  Local has to be about more than geography. Local is more complex. You shouldn't define the future by old categories lifted from outdated directories or classifieds. Instead, look at how people are tagging their own content.

People are different on what sites they're on.  The soccer mom on one of our sites is going to review a restaurant very differently than a user on Bakotopia.

"Ratings and recommendations are much more powerful when you're aligned with your community."

DeVore: To force people into a geolocation doesn't really match the way people live their lives and how they consume information and shop.

The original idea behind Judy's Book: If we can get people to create local content about local businesses, we thought businesses would see that we had their customers talking to each other that they would like that. We grossly under estimated the inertia and the value of feet on street, that merchants would just roll over and use self service on a site they've never heard of. Hindsight  is 20/20 and "duh, of course they won't."

New model: Aggregating offers. Answering the question: "What's on sale near me?"

"Nobody cares about us, nobody cares about our brand.  We are in the landing page business.  Google is the front door to our business.  We would love for people to fall in love with our brand and come to our site, but we're a small business with limited resources and our best chance of success is to get traffic to our site though Google."

Geraci: Content providers should want their information everywhere in the ecosystem. The way YouTube and del.iso.us and Flickr  works is not by taking the information and lcoking it down and saying, you have to come to my site to create the content and then come back to view it. They are giving users the tools to create content and share it and play with it however they want.

"Some of the criticism we got was that pot holes aren't very interesting, but if the pot holes are in your community, they are very interesting."

Fulton: "We've talked about the importance of search for distribution, but people are very important means of distribution. "

Massie: The top query on ask.com and Ask Local is "things to do" … it's not about businesses or events, it's "things to do."

Peter Krasilovsky, who is sitting next to me at the moment and is program director for the conference, also has some posts from the conference on his blog, Local Onliner.

Notes from keynote by Peter Horan, president, IAC Media and Advertising, Inc.

In the late 1990s, there was a lot of funding of locally focused sites, such as City Search and Sidewalk. There were projections for big revenue, but "to date, we haven't gotten as much traction in local as we thought.”

To date, the local model has been to be brand-driven media. What's happened over the past five years, especially with search, is the notion of intention-driven media.  Today, people go to search, get a list of links and I'm on a mission. "I'm not in a casual surfing mode. I'm not browsing. I'm on missle lock trying to get something done. When I'm in that mode, I'm impatient and I want to be in control.

"We live and die in a five second window. A customer is sitting there waiting for the page to load with a finger on the back button."

Successful web sites create value by organizing content and services. They give users a smooth click stream from the question to the answer.  Brand aids in the process, but it doesn't drive the process.

Web usage isn't about reading. It's about doing. The litmus test for local is usefulness.

Consumers want useful, interesting, actionable and accessible.  Merchants want easy, predictable, affordable and comfortable.

A bad assumption that has driven local site business models is that people will change their behavior, that a merchant who has been buying yellow page ads for years, will suddenly change his advertising behavior just because its offered.  "That's scary to a small business.  They're risk averse. It's not money coming out of the boss's wallet. It's their money."

The three cornerstones of success:

• Relevance: Readers are on a mission looking for a complete solution that help them get the job done.
• Resonance: Readers shop for authorites who see the world the way they do … do these people look like me, act like me, like the places I like?
• Actionable: Readers want to act on information quickly.

A lot of business models today are predicated on the idea that everybody is going to create their own ads. That's not going to happen.  Newspapers and yellow pages have an advantage because of their large advertising forces.

Three things necessary for success:

• First, scale. You need enough traffic to pool readers around local merchants;
• Second, you've got to own something, either content or services, that bring people to your site;
• Third, you need an interesting product that readers will want to use.

The headline: Down And Out In The 'Burbs: Turns out it's tough to make local work on the Web.

Well, yes. It's difficult to make any content model work on the web, and it's even tougher for a start-up business just because starting any business is hard and fraught with multiple points of potential failure.
The Jon Fine column is primarily about the woes of Backfence, but at least he covers some hints about what works.

It's easier for sites driven by a talented, semi-obsessed writer or two, likebaristanett, to gain traction: Readers return for a stylish voice or a dependable hit of news.
Gannettt, is now enabling anrampingng up local participation on its sites. It's easier for a local daily to promote these efforts than a new face with a new name.

Speaker: Ralph Kunz, vp of multimedia experience, Nokia

The highlight of Kunz’s presentation was a demonstration of his map-search enabled phone. The phone is GPS and navigation enabled, allowing users to pin-point their location, find nearby locations and get navigation directions.

"We believe there is an opportunity to change the rules of the game," Kunz said.

Initially, the application will be available on high-end Nokia phones, but next year Nokia will start releasing low and mid-range phones with the mapping system.

In a year, Nokia expects to have 180 million devices in market.

Kunz's talk in a large part a pitch to yellow page providers to partner with Nokia to supply content and advertising to the application.

Nokia’s maps will feature sponsored icons and advertising information related to location-based businesses and services.  Nokia also expects users to generate location-specific content, such as restaurant reviews and feedback.

Notes:

In 2007, there will be 3 billion mobile devices in the world. Just a year ago, industry experts predicted the 3 billion mark wouldn’t  be surpassed until 2010.  With price reductions, we’re seeing bigger market penetration.

And more people are expecting their phones to be more than phones. For example, sales of digital cameras peaked in 2006.  As digital camera phones improve, people are replacing separate cameras with the phones.

Kunz said the same thing is starting to happen with MP3 players.

In a survey of Nokia S60 yeas, 51 percent said they want map-based search.

Nokia's new app is pre-installed on phones and gives users the ability to rapidly find information and locations.

Nokia is seeing 26 percent month-over-month growth in search queries, and 65 percent of users click on map links from search results.

Most maps applications today sit on a server and stream map panels to browsers and mobile devices. With the Nokia device, the maps and information will be stored on the client devices, so that users can access map information even when they are not connected to the network.

"We are interesting in providing a platform for content partners."

"Branded content is important to get people lured in."

Keynote speech from Nick Grouf, cofounder chairman and CEO of Spot Runner:

Background of Spot Runner: Founders saw what was happening with Google AdWords and Overture. "It proved to us that small local advertisers don't have a lot of money to spend, but in the aggregate, it’s a large market."

Grouf also said that it proved that small business owners are very comfortable with self-serve platforms, which interestingly contradicts what other speakers and hall way discussions have been saying – small business advertisers don’t have the patience or personal bandwidth for self service.

Spot Runner specializing in inexpensively building video advertising and using a rich set of data to make target buys and low price points in local TV spots.

For local advertisers, TV is the Holy Grail, but advertisers think TV is too expensive and creative is too expensive.

But in all but one market, a 30 second spot can be purchased for less than $200, and in some markets for as little at $10.

"We told that to local advertisers and their jaws dropped, but then there was a horrible moment. They said, ‘It doesn’t matter. We can’t afford the creative."

To address the cost factor, Spot Runner created a list of advertising categories and then went about shooting a number of template commercials for each category. The canned videos can then be personalized.

The creative costs $500 and can be ready within 24 hours, compared to a typical ad agency that can cost as much as $500,000 and take weeks if not months to produce.

Here’s my observation: The real estate example Nick showed was no better than a similar spot from Digital Media Communications, which could cost the advertiser about $100.

Spot Runner started out looking for a solution for small businesses and found that large businesses are interested in their targeting capability for more efficient, targeted buys.

Grouf talked about working with the real estate industry. Historically, only 4 percent of real estate advertising goes to TV. Corporate leaders came to Spot Runner and said, “help us move our advertising out of dead tree media.” Spot Runner helps real estate corporations create TV ads that protect the brand image, but can be used inexpensively by local real estate offices.

Take Away: Spot Runner is a case study in out digital makes advertising more efficient, driving down prices and creating disruptive opportunities on the low end.

Not much from the 2:45 p.m. session on local advertising video.

Perry Solomon, vp business development FAST search and transfer: We’re moving from a broadcast model, from a streaming model where everybody sees the same thing at the same time, to a model that is more personalized, more about community, more wisdom of the crowds, as far as what video gets pushed to the top.

John McQueenie, TurnHere: We think video is transforming local experience online. The ability to tell stories visually on the internet is a sea change. It used to be that you could only get your video seen on TV or in the movies, but now it’s available to everybody.

Tech: Smart Solutions for Local Media

Steve Barth, EVP, MediaSpan, online services; Elizabeth Osder, senior director, social media, Yahoo!; Ira Silbertein, Chris Jennewein, VP interactive, San Diego Union-Tribune; Patricia Lee Smith, executive directive, strategic marketing Seattle Times.

Jennewein: I’m optimistic about newspapers. Newspapers are doing quite well, but not doing a good job of telling the story. We’re very close to the tipping point where online can be the driver of new revenue growth.

Jennewein: I don’t think newspapers are going to become yellow page providers.  Newspapers will concentrate on some key categories, such as local entertainment.

Osder: In building community, there is usually some spark, something magic happens, and the community begins to take off, but there’s also usually someone in the engine room talking to customers, inviting them to participate.

Jennewein: Craigslist has plateaued. They’ve started changing for some postings and takes away some of the perceived non-profit glow. The company for all its perceived internet friendliness isn’t really internet friendly. For example, Oodle can’t crawl craigslist. Things like that are not internet friendly. “On the internet being able to do something like serve up a headline and link is standard practice and if you don’t do that then you’re not part of the ecosystem.”

Notes from the “Heavy Hitter” panel, which includes Jacob Aqrauou, GM of classifieds for Ebay; Gordon Henry, CMO of Yellow Book; Chris Jennewein, VP interactive for the San Diego Union-Tribune; Chris LaSala, senior manager of strategic partner development for Google; Michael Mathieu, president of Freedom Interactive.

On lead generation:

Mathieu: Most small to mid-sized advertisers are not really interested in clicks. They want somebody to call them up. The phone call is more important to them than all the technology we bring to the table.

Henry: Advertisers want leads, which is phone calls and people in the door. Clicks don’t resonate with them. It’s not that they’re indifferent to the data, but at the end of the day, they want conversions.

LaSala: Advertisers who are used to working with the yellow page industry are trained to think about phone calls. What happens on the internet is that doesn’t happen. People don’t go online with the intent to make a call at that particular time. They have a different intent. They are looking for information. They are doing research. We need to find a way to education businesses that a person using the internet is doing research and that they do it at all times of the day and night.

On video:

Mathieu: Freedom is on three different tracks. On the newspaper side, we have newspaper reporters using video and still cameras to report in a multimedia fashion; on the television side, we are getting news stations beyond just the five and six o’clock broadcast. The are doing news updates five or six times a day with web centric content; and, the third piece is Freedom is trying to connect more to the community through video with their content.

LaSala: “We bought YouTube.” (laughter). Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information, and much of that information now is video. YouTube created a platform to share video, so it fits well with our broader mission. We’re still figuring out, but it’s a tremendous opportunity.

Jennewein: Over the next five or six years, newspapers will overtake TV in many of the news functions. When you have a couple hundred reporters with video cameras, you can produce a tremendous amount of video content. Right now, not all of it is good, but the quantity we can have a numbing ability to cover the community.

Henry: In the past, video was hard to get and expensive to produce, but that equation is changing. Video can now be put online at a much lower price. I think sales reps get it. I think advertisers get it.

Just a couple of notes from Hillary Schneider’s presentation:

Local search on the web has grown 28 percent over the past year. For Yahoo!, local search intent has risen from 11 percent of all Yahoo! searches to 14 percent.

On Yahoo!, 116 million people per month do local searches.

Local ad spending:

• National advertisers, there are 17,000 business spending $22.4 billion on local buys
• Regional advertisers, there are 85,000 businesses spending $48.3 billion on local buys
• Local advertisers, there are 22 million businesses spending $33.6 billion on advertising.

Schneider said, that what we need to understand is what local advertisers are looking for, what their intent is, and at what will make online advertising compelling.

On the newspaper consortium:

• Newspapers bring high quality local content, offline distribution, local community and local sales.
• Yahoo! brings leading edge technology, online reach, platforms and products, national sales.

During Q&A, Hillary said Yahoo! is very happy with UGC. It helps them power the algorithms of how they deliver advertising.

Safa Raschtchy, a senior analyst with Piper Jaffray, opened with a series of quotes, including:

"We never know here the consumer is going to be any point in time so we have to find a way to be everywhere. Ubiquity is the new exclusivity" -- Linda Kaplan Thaler, CEO of Kaplan Thaler Group

What we're going through right now is a user revolution.

It’s best to look at this from a consumer point of view.

• Users have more than 30 choices now of what media to consume
• Consumers know "what I want, and I don’t want somebody telling me what I want and how to get it."
• TV is becoming boring for them.
• Newspapers are no longer popular.

That doesn’t mean TV and newspapers are going to away, but their dominance is slipping away, Raschtchy said. He also said, “These are just not predictions, but based on research that we’ve done.”

We have to accept the fact that consumers don’t really like advertisements – not the sophisticated and educated consumer. To them they are disruptive."

"Consumes know what they want. They don't like traditional media and they’re highly energized. They say, "Don’t tell us to buy something. I know what I want.'"

Raschtchy talked about emerging themes in media. One of them is "communitatinment." As an example he used the teen who spends two hours IM'ing with friends, which includes sharing songs and videos and links. Rather than spending two hours watching a movie, today’s net savvy, young consumer spends his or her time in social entertainment.

User-generated content sites are also increasing in popularity. In April 2005, only 3 percent of web traffic went to UGC sites. Now it is 31 percent. "This is not a fad, folks. This is here to stay."

I don't have time to dig into this right now, but YouTube is hosting a user-generated video awards project. Good idea. Though my first thought is: How do you define UGC. For example, just glancing at the nominees, I see they include OK Go. Yes, the video was shot very much in a UGC way, but it's still a professional production. And Lonelygirl15 is a group production by aspiring filmmakers -- so is it pro or UGC?

The Kelsey “Drilling Down on Local” conference has started. John Kelsey opened with a speech that noted 80 percent of all purchases are made with five miles of the home, and more consumers are turning to the web for local shopping information. It’s a strong market growing stronger. Video is going to be an essential part of local web advertising.

Neal Potachek and Matt Booth from Kelsey then shared 7 predictions for 2007 through 2011.

Prediction #1: More than 50 percent of small business advertisers will include vertical or specialized directories as part of their advertising mix.

Prediction #1: Even though half of small businesses maintain a web presence, these businesses will have a disproportionate influence on the web over the next few years.

Businesses with web sites are growing and expanding their businesses. Revenue generation trumps businesses without web sites by a factor of two to one.

Prediction #3: Video will be integrated into small business web sites.

Sixty percent of consumers say they have watched an online video ad, and 57 percent who have watched moved closer to a transaction.

Prediction #4: Twenty percent of small businesses will advertise on mobile platforms.

There is a great deal of latent demand for information on mobile. Only eight percent of consumers say they have no interest in mobile web. Most people simply don’t have the access right now.

Prediction #5: Small businesses will embrace consumer and expert feedback.

Businesses that have consumer reviews online see twice as much traffic to their web sites and garner twice as many click-throughs as businesses that don’t have consumer feedback.

In the past 18 months, consumer feedback and consumer message board postings have increased 131 percent.

Prediction #6: Small businesses will embrace bundled buys.

In one survey, small business owners say that yellow page advertising reps should be able to handle all of a business’s advertising needs.

The market is becoming more fragmented and there are more advertising choices. Small business owners need more help sorting it all out.

Prediction #7: Connected software services are growing in importance.

Intuits new QuickBooks Point of Sale product is growing at a rate of 30 percent. The product allows small businesses to manage their inventory digitally and upload product information, photos and inventory to the web.

I mentioned the Shelby Star in a previous post. At the same time, I e-mailed the publisher some questions. He answered in the comments to that post, but I wanted to elevate the questions and answers to their own post.

Howard,
Thanks for your kind words about The Star's innovation efforts. I am happy to answer the questions you posed in an e-mail. If you have any further questions, please let me know.

Q. What equipment are you using for video?
A. We went with low end, consumer-brand video cameras (we tease ourselves about how when we FIRST started doing this, just as our innovation plans were taking shape, our first camera was a Sears floor model!) Most of the editing is done in Windows Movie Maker, esp. by reporters. Our interactive editor and webmaster use Adobe Premiere Pro.
We are really following the tenets of Newspaper Next and looking for "good enough" solutions rather than trying to shoot "60 Minutes" quality news video. That's a topic over which there is much disagreement, but the beauty of being a test tube is that we can simply try what we want.

Q. Are the reporters editing their own video?
A. For the most part, yes. Our crime reporter, Graham Cawthon, is a leader in this area.

IMPORTANT SIDE NOTE: While video is an important part of our new multi-media efforts, our partnership with the University of South Carolina's Newsplex, and with USC's Randy Covington in particular, led us to invest quite a bit of time and energy into moblogging. We bought high-end camera/audio/video cell phones for reporters (Samsung A990s, I believe) and reporters do quite a bit of mobile-blogging from various events. You can see a number of examples on our site from Graham's blog and others.

Q. What has been the newsroom response? What are the attitudes today vs. when you started?
A. We have been blessed to have reporters (and editors) who are not risk- and change-averse. Our reporters understand that the days of carrying around only a notebook are over. Reporters trained to report in print and on-line are positioned to sprint ahead of those stuck in the past. Plus, it's fun! New gadgets and stuff are just plain cool. Seriously, the Readership Institute's idea of "experiencing" the news is truly manifested, we believe, in multimedia, interactive content.

Q. What has been the community response?
A. It has been almost all positive. The only pushback we get is from older readers with computers who think we are moving tons of content from the print product to the web site -- of course, that's not true. One pleasant surprise has been the eagerness of law enforcement to share surveillance video -- we've had some good traffic hits on that. Also, getting lots more requests to cover events not just in print, but on-line as well. People, even in a market like this, get it. The world is changing.

Q. Has video helped you grow?
A. Tough to answer that one. Our page views grew by more than 80 percent in 2006. But our tracking system is poor (Freedom is helping us upgrade this and we should get better numbers soon). Individual videos, however, (esp. those involving crime) have seen as many as 5,000 downloads -- not bad for a 15,000 circ. paper. With a number of vidoes seeing 1,000 to 2,000 downloads.

OK, I've typed a ton and don't see spellcheck on here, so don't hold that against me! If you have any other questions, let me know.

Skip Foster
Publisher (for the past 20 days, previously editor for 9 years)
The Shelby Star
www.shelbystar.com