Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

SEO Week: How Broadband Genie makes money from online content

Can you make money online through editorial content? In a series of videos filmed last year at UCA Farnham, Chris Marling explains how broadband comparison site Broadband Genie achieves £1 million in annual revenue through clever use of SEO and targeted consumer editorial content. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86zLGUemjs0 The Broadband Genie business model The Broadband Genie web site makes […]

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

What journalism can learn from internet marketers

Given the turmoil in professional media at the moment, there’s been a fair amount of talk about entrepreneurial journalism recently (ie if no one else is going to pay you for being a journalist, maybe you’ll have to figure out a way of making it work as a business yourself). As it happens, I’ve been […]

Friday, March 26th, 2010

Murdoch makes good on paywall promise

It seems Rupert Murdoch is actually going to start locking away his online newspaper content behind paywalls. From June he’s going to charge for access to the loss-making Times and Sunday Times. Will the gamble work? More informed commentators than I have argued strongly that it won’t (though that hasn’t stopped me doing the same). At […]

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

New models for online publishing

Here’s a sign of the times from Jason Preston’s Eat, Sleep, Publish blog. He writes: It’s increasingly difficult, and maybe impossible, to run a profitable content company on the internet if you’re paying for your content to be produced. Well, we kind of knew that, given how difficult it is to find paying freelance writing […]

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

"Dinosaur rages against approaching asteroid"

I loved this comment on Tim Luckhurst’s recent journalism-is-so-up-itself-it-believes-it’s-the-cornerstone-of-democracy opinion piece on the Guardian web site. “Dinosaur rages against approaching asteroid. Blog at 11.” There’s almost nothing else to say. But what the hell. One problem with the Luckhurst analysis is that he recognises the economic drivers that created the modern newspaper, but then tries […]

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

Should media sites ditch low-value readers? (Or boost the value of their content?)

Steve Yelvington has a very interesting post here on the whole “is Murdoch an idiot for blocking visitors from Google?” question (he thinks not). Perhaps more interesting is the argument it generates in the comments, which manages to be both slightly vitriolic and also well-informed – an almost unheard of trick normally. Whether the planned […]

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

Political debate? There's an App for that

A while ago, I posted on the possibility that journalism might have to move towards software development. The Atlantic this month flags up an iPhone App that offers policy points for (US) conservatives to use when they’re arguing about Obama’s healthcare bill. The Conservative Talking Points app will set you back £1.12 from the iTunes store […]

Monday, September 14th, 2009

More thoughts on paying for online content

In response to the news that Google is throwing its hat into the online content micropayment ring, Mindy McAdams counters with a suggestion for a small daily fee for website access, as opposed to, say, a small fee for individual article access. She imagines: a kind of token ID, sort of like a gift certificate code. […]

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

Coca-Cola Unbound

What a difference a grinding advertising recession makes. Only six months ago, culture secretary Andy Burnham said that a three-month consultation between the government and advertisers had “failed to produce a convincing case for product placement”. As ever, of course, the usual government terror of bad things happening to people because of the economy has […]

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

The newspaper online pay-wall debate rages on…

…largely in the comments section to my post a couple of days ago, oddly enough. Soilman points me to an interesting article in the Telegraph about Swedish peer-to-peer site The Pirate Bay and the general unwillingness of consumers to pay for content these days. Here’s what the Telegraph thinks: Why won’t consumers pay for content? The […]