The WSJ used survey firm used GFK to poll consumers in 15 EU contries, Turkey and the US about Internet behavior and attitudes. Here’s how the results came out when people were asked about advertising vs. subscriptions/paid content attitudes (click to enlarge graphic):
Source: WSJ/GFK
Thirteen percent said they would pay and, perhaps not surprisingly, 33% said that “all Internent content should be free, without advertising.”
Recent comScore data points out that social media are having an increasing influence on shopping and consumer purchase behavior:
Social media (a descriptive yet still ambiguous term) is often treated like it’s a mysterious thing. It’s not. You have several major distribution points online where people are interacting — among them Facebook and Twitter. Reviews and recommendations (word of mouth) are being disseminated in many cases through these distribution points. People are getting the information and taking action accordingly. Twitter for example has become an important distribution point for deals and coupons.
People fundamentally want credible information about products (and services) — rather than ads and claims — and they want to save money. Consumers are finding this information on social media sites, among other places online. Makes sense.
Companies lag in figuring out how to utilize these tools and platforms effectively and w/o the BS/PR spin they’re used to conveying in the world. That’s the major “cultural” obstacle for them. They mostly don’t know how to operate in the world with authentic, direct communication, which is what the Internet now demands for success in social media.
But if you’re a company that just can’t overcome the caution inherent in most corporate cultures, and you don’t want to be “authentic,” you can always offer deals and discounts on Twitter as an alternative.
Before Android launched there were rumors that Google was developing its own mobile phone. Those rumors turned out to be “sort of” true as Google displayed Android, a mobile phone operating system. The company said it hoped that would spawn hundreds of mobile Android devices. Cut to a little over a year later and one financial analyst recently predicted that there would be roughly 50 Android phones in the market next year.
Almost every major handset OEM has or is launching an Android line. HTC, Motorola and Samsung, in that order, are the three leading Android OEMs so far. And PC makers such as Dell and Acer are making Android handsets as well.
By all measures Android has been a huge hit for Google — and maybe its most strategic product after core search — yet all Android devices and experiences in the market today still fall short of the integrated hardware-software experience offered by the iPhone. Android has features and capabilities that the iPhone does not — especially the ultra-masculine Motorola Droid. Yet there remain rough edges, flaws and awkwardness about the user experience. (I’m not suggesting the iPhone is perfect, but it’s still the best overall mobile device in the market.)
Google is clearly aware of all of this. The deep involvement of the company with Motorola and Verizon to bring Droid to market shows how it wants to realize its vision of what Android can be. To that end in late October rumors surfaced of a new “Google Phone” — a Google branded handset that would be sold directly by the public and designed/developed substantially by Google.
The rest of this post is at Internet2Go . . .
Here’s some additional detail from another post at SEL.
MediaPost rounds up some World Assn. of Newspapers data that shows print is healthy in the developing world, and Japan (which is very interesting). Here are the bullets from around the globe:
I’ll speculate that the culture of Japan as well as the Scandinavian countries appears to be a bit of a brake on the corrosive effect of the Internet on print readership. It’s not clear that one country’s experience can be applied to another for this reason.
The broader European market, which had formerly been seen as resisting the US pattern of print decline, is now suffering the same trends.
I had a brief call with Intuit this afternoon. We discussed a number of things, one of those was a TV campaign that has been running for “Intuit websites.” This is how Intuit has rebranded its Homestead acquisition.
I was also told that the campaign has been very successful so far. I’m not surprised. Despite all the offerings out there it’s not immediately clear to SMBs where to go to get a site built — to say nothing of a trusted source.
Here’s one of the commercials:
The timing of this is good, as SMB demand for online marketing is growing dramatically. There are very few known brands (save traditional media companies selling cross platform marketing) and TV or other national marketing has the capacity to establish a leader very quickly — provided the product/service is good.
Barry Schwartz, who runs web design and development firm RustyBrick in New York, received one of the Google “Favorite Places” decals. When he went to scan the QR, after having framed it, it brought up the wrong PlacePage — one associated with a nearby restaurant rather than his business.
The headline of the story he wrote says the decal was “hijacked” but Google probably just got the association/coding wrong.
I wonder how widespread these errors were. Does this qualify as QR code spam?
Update: Barry sent me this note a moment ago:
Just spoke to Google. Even though it is in their recommended QR scanners list, He told me not to use the BeeTagg scanner and try QuickMark for iPhone or Barcode Scanner for Android. Both worked correctly.
Apparently the problem was not a bug on Google’s end.
I was having a discussion with some people last night in a bar in San Francisco (where I do all my best thinking) and I was pointed to a provocative statement buried in a post about AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s recent UBS conference keynote. It’s from Peter Kafka at AllThingsD:
Q: Whither MapQuest?
A: MapQuest is still Top 20 search term. It has a large market share. The technology has not been focused on in a number of years. We’re changing that. Partners are inquiring about MapQuest, and I think what we’ll do is an operational partnership with them. We feel like its a “very, very valuable property.”
What we discussed was that, as a practical matter, this probably means Bing Maps will come in to “power” MapQuest the site. So rather than sell the property as was previously rumored, AOL will retain the brand and the traffic and outsource the back-end technology, as Yahoo is doing with search, to Microsoft.
What that also likely means, by extension, is that Microsoft will become AOL’s search and search monetization partner when the Google deal expires in 2010.
Who thinks I’m wrong?
There’s a new Borrell Associates report that takes aim at the coupon and circulars segment. The firm says that online coupons constitute 5% of all coupon redemptions but 20% of the total dollar value of coupons.
The total face value of the coupon market (not redemptions) on an annualized basis is more than $300 billion in the US.
The Borrell numbers are very large but here they are (via MediaPost):
Borrell Associates estimates that the $8.3 billion value of online coupons redemptions in 2009 (including via the Internet, email and mobile) will jump more than 50% to $12.7 billion in 2010 and to $22 billion by 2014.
The above chart appears in the MediaPost piece. However, there’s something strange about the traffic numbers. Here’s comparison data from Compete:
Freed of their prior stigma, coupons have now entered a new phase of life online and in mobile. Coupons have been shown to have the most direct influence on consumer shopping behavior. According to Retrevo: “20% won’t buy a gadget this holiday season, without a deal or coupon. 35% say a deal or coupon can help them buy a gadget the otherwise would not buy.”
Similarly the following comes from a RetailMeNot/Harris survey (8/09, n=2,175 US adults), showing how the absence of an expected deal or coupon affects behavior:
Mobile coupons are one of the forms of mobile advertising that consumers actively embrace:
Source: AOL-Universal McCann (n=1,800 smartphone users).
Traditional printed coupons see redemption rates of 1% to 2%, while online coupons see 10% to 15% and mobile often in excess of 20%.
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Related: More on coupons from the LATimes:
Coupon use peaked in 1992 with 7.9 billion coupons redeemed, according to Inmar Inc., a coupon processing firm. The practice has declined steadily since to 2.6 billion coupons redeemed in 2006, where it remained until late last year.
When 2009 comes to an end, the firm projects coupon redemptions will have gained 20% to 3.2 billion and remain strong even as the nation emerges from the recession.
Today, newspaper circulars still dominate, accounting for about 90% of the coupons distributed and more than half of those redeemed, but the Internet is rapidly making inroads.
Some new data out today from Vistaprint that reflects more movement toward online marketing among SMBs. Survey was online with 300 SMBs (presumably customers or site visitors of Vistaprint). Here’s the respondent base:
Small sample but terrific and directionally accurate data. Here are some excerpts. You can click to enlarge any of the individual charts. (The entire survey presentation is on slideshare.)
SMBs with websites (their average number is 38%):
Marketing used: present, past and future:
Marketing methods used more during the recession:
The following is perhaps the most interesting of all . . .
Time vs. money — where would you put resources if you had more of them:
These respondents would put more money into websites and TV (and direct mail), while email, social media and websites win in the time category (other than “none of the above”).
Allan Mutter offers a great capsule analysis of the predicament of newspapers and the historical forces that landed them there:
The collapse of the newspaper business most assuredly was aggravated by the downturn in the economy. But it is important to note that the sales decline was well under way before the economy cratered. It is a grave mistake to think, as some industry leaders apparently do, that the industry’s problems will be solved when the economy improves.
Without reproducing Mutter’s analysis or my previous discussions on newspapers, I’ll say this about the future . . .
Newspapers have basically lost the distribution game, similar to other traditional industries now competing online. Some local news-publisher brands have decent traffic and have built online audiences, but portals, search engines and aggegators of various stripes have won. This is about the scale of the Internet and the better user experience and greater efficiency that these sites can bring to end users.
As symbolic evidence of this the NY Times’ Saul Hansell just left to become the head of AOL’s Seed.com unit, managing the company’s more than 2K writers and freelancers. This is the “newspaper” model of the future and Hansell (perhaps wisely) sees that. Time will tell whether he helps maintain and boost quality or if he simply presides over a mountain of mediocre content designed primarily to generate page views for ads.
Portals such as MSN, Yahoo! and AOL are also moving aggressively into local news by doing deals with various types of publishers. MSN’s just announced deal with Hearst and NBC Local Media is one of several examples. Big branded news sites such as CNN and MSNBC have moved much more into local content. So this arena — once thought to be the salvation of newspapers (“hyper local”) — is being squeezed by larger online players, with the help of some of the affected entities. But it’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario because these larger sites control distribution and audiences.
If News Corp. pulls its content from Google, for example, that content simply “won’t exist” for many users. News Corp. will suffer not Google.
The thing that newspapers can offer that some of the online competitors cannot as readily is quality content, but that’s being undermined by layoffs and increasing reliance on wire services: AP, Reuters, AFP, etc.
The online world is “flat” and everyone is everyone else’s competitor. The distinctions between radio, print and TV don’t exist online. Period.
The audiences, with few exceptions, will continue to migrate toward these larger sites that can bring together a wide range of news and features content, with video and other functionality. MSN Local Edition is a great example. You can criticize it as incomplete or lacking depth but it will continue to get better.
There are newspaper publishers among the top news sites; however only the largest and most battle-tested of these publishers will make it as audiences consolidate around fewer and fewer major online players. Most news content creators will turn into feeder sites for these bigger players, making revenues very difficult to generate; they’ll get a fraction of what they used to get when they owned sales, content and distribution in the print world. That will require further layoffs and cost cutting in turn — the downward spiral.
At the bottom or low end, bloggers and specialized publishers (with different cost structures or very lean) will produce generally better vertical and “hyper local” content. They’ll be supported by larger networks or third parties, such as Outside.in facilitating distribution to the larger sites like CNN. However local “hard” news may suffer as bloggers and vertical publishers steer toward more commercial or feature oriented content and fluff/gossip, rather than covering the school board or police beat.
TV news and newly beefed up radio news online (such as NPR) will also fill the gaps left by the failing traditional newspapers. And the wire services will provide the national “commodity” news that is distributed everywhere. Reuters, for example, also recently redesigned to make itself more of a consumer news destination.
The argument that quality is being drained from news (or will be) because of the demise of traditional news publishers is partly correct but not entirely. Outlets such as NPR, CNN, Reuters, AFP, PBS, TV networks and others such as Pro Publica will provide ongoing high levels of quality to the range of news aggregators, portals and a few others that are becoming dominant. At the local level it’s more complex.
The decline of classifieds advertising for local publishers and their generally poor financial position will increasingly remove them from the realm of buyers of local online services, just as the yellow pages have been somewhat compromised in their ability to invest and/or buy local online startups. Thus the local ecosystem becomes weaker (this is an argument that Hearst’s Scott Wolfgang made to me a long time ago).
News and journalism are not dying, but the ability to make a good living as a journalist is getting much harder. Consumers largely won’t pay for “commodity” news content as the pay walls go back up. So there will be more bankruptcies, more consolidation and more failures on the horizon. The post-newspaper apocalypse is grim for journalism as a career and bad for certain types of content and coverage but consumers may hardly notice in major markets. Most of their news will come from big portals, which will be able to put together enough content from enough different sources to be sufficient for most readers and audiences. There will also be a few other big news brands that survive. Vertical sites and blogs will satisfy enthusiasts’ needs for niche or specialized coverage. Many of the top tech blogs are being run by former traditional journalists.
In a few non-metro local markets maybe traditional news publications will continue to survive or even thrive. But it will be very hard for individual municipal/metro editions to make it: they won’t have enough traffic to generate great ad revenues and their audiences will largely be unwilling to pay subscription fees. Even the NY Times, which will survive, will be subject to many of these trends.
I had a friend say to me just yesterday that he considers his subscription to the print NY Times to be a “charitable contribution.” There you have it.
Facebook has simplified its privacy settings but the default settings, which will be “chosen” by many or most, expose almost everything to the public. The cynics will say this is about APIs and better competing with Twitter going forward. Here’s what they look like:
Here’s what I then did:
There’s much more discussion on Techmeme, in particular from the EFF.
To Facebook’s credit the company is forcing you to confront these settings very directly when you sign in and not simply making an announcement (that many wouldn’t see) and compelling users go find the privacy controls.
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Related: Also this little blurb is from a quick note from Mark Mahaney at Citi about some trends on FB:
Facebook Shows Hyper Local Targetting Ability — A trend that Facebook is seeing is more users are asking their networks for recommendations, like, “iPhone or Droid?” or “Any recommendations for Chinese Food in San Francisco?” Search for items in Facebook should eventually allow users to sift through relevant recommendations. Facebook can help a camping company or outdoor equipment retailer target all people in SF who went to Stanford, and showed interest in kayaking or camping as an example of hyperlocal marketing.
Within this quick set of comments is the dual future of FB and local: recommendations engine for consumers, ad platform for SMBs. In some ways FB might be much more, MUCH more “disruptive” (to use the overused word) to YP than Google has been.
I’ve long said that eBay’s presence on the Craiglist (CL) board, given the auction giant’s ownership of Kijiji was a breach of fiduciary duty in every sense — ethical and legal.
Indeed, eBay’s motivation to buy the stake may have been two-fold: buy CL or if not possible then “go to school” and use inside information to better compete with CL both in and out of the US market. As I said in mid 2007, having a seat on the board of a company you’re directly competing with would seem to be a significant violation of eBay’s fiduciary obligations to Craigslist (even if the board member had nothing to do with Kijiji, etc.).
The latter is consistent with what Bloomberg appears to be reporting:
An EBay Inc. lawyer said confidential information the online-auction company gleaned from its part ownership of Craigslist Inc. was used to help start up a competing classified-advertising Web site.
Brian Levey, an EBay vice president and one of its in-house lawyers, said today that EBay received the information because of its minority stake in Craigslist and used it to develop the rival Kijiji site in 2007. Levey testified in a trial over EBay’s claims that Craigslist unfairly devalued EBay’s 28 percent stake in the company.
CL may have acted improperly in diluting eBay’s ownership interest but eBay pretty clearly has “unclean hands,” which will compromise their ultimate position in the litigation.
I wrote up the announcement that Milo.com was out of beta with 1 million users over at SEL (also a bit of broader context and perspective too). Here’s a TV segment featuring Milo.com’s Jack Abraham:
Beyond the fact that it’s always interesting to see and hear entrepreneurs, the most interesting thing about this video is the way the whole thing is positioned and explained by the host of the segment.
AgendiZe, which describes itself as an “engagement platform,” has integrated online booking/scheduling into its suite of tools and services. According to the release out this morning:
AgendiZe Online Scheduling allows customers to do much more than just book appointments online. Customers can see headshots and pick from specific service employees; choose exactly which service they want; and even pay for reservations, deposits or services online. Moreover, since AgendiZe Online Scheduling is a part of the AgendiZe Engagement Platform, users can also Share their appointment info with friends via SMS, social networks or chat; Save it to their calendar or mobile device; schedule a reminder phone call and much more, making it easy to remember their appointment and inform others about it.
There are a range of other companies in the market that offer booking including Book Fresh, Booking Angel and several others. Early experiments to create a Pay-per-Booking model in the local directory segment failed or were false starts. Of course restaurant booking and hotel booking online are wildly successful. Fixed fee billing or adding the capability in as part of a service package is a better model for several reasons.
AgendiZe has a dizzying array of what I would call “social marketing” tools and capabilities and works with numerous directory publishers in North America and Europe. The company is now trying to push beyond the directory industry into new market segments.
As part of past research with Canada’s Yellow Pages Group (2008-2009), AgendiZe found that users were “time shifting” their business contact behavior. In other words they were doing research and then subsequently calling the SMB they’d selected; it wasn’t happening in the same session. The AgendiZe platform and tools, embedded on publisher sites, captured and facilitated these interactions. Here’s a kind of summary of how users interact with the AgendiZe widgets/tools on publisher sites:
Some 70% of all user actions are to “save for later” or to “set up reminders”; only 20% of users want to “Contact Now” (ie. Click-to-Call or Chat) and only 10% want to “Share” (ie. Facebook, Twitter).
The new online scheduling will be very successful in some verticals and not used in others. There’s a bit of a learning curve for SMBs, but consumers are already conditioned by travel and OpenTable to use online booking.
For existing customers and recurring visits (e.g., Salons) it’s a great tool provided that there’s no per-transaction charge for the SMB. This is one reason why a fixed fee or subscription is the right model for most SMB segments. While they’ll pay for new business generally speaking SMBs don’t want to pay for their own customer. But in a subscription model online booking becomes a CRM tool to facilitate repeat visits or appointments.
The coupon site that could, 8Coupons, is going national. The site began trying to sell SMBs in New York into mobile couponing directly. Yikes.
The founders quickly discovered that was too much heavy lifting and so shifted into a PC to mobile couponing approach that focused on the top 8 deals (“Ocho Loco“) in the market. The company started allowing users to post deals, which they did, rather than relying on direct sales to merchants exclusively. (There’s also merchant self-service.)
These top 8 deals reportedly see a 22% redemption rate according to CEO Landy Ung. She also told me previously that that were seeing NY area merchants sometimes posting coupons and linking back to MerchantCircle pages where those coupons were originally created.
The new “Ocho Loco” model became quite successful and so now the site is expanding nationally. It’s going to work with partners to aggregate and distribute their content. The press release explains the new details further:
Location Based: When a user visits 8coupons.com, the map on the homepage will automatically populate the Top 8 most popular deals based on his or her IP address. This ensures that anyone who visits the site will see the deals that are most relevant to them specifically. The Top 8 deals will change dynamically as the user moves the map around to different locations, zooms in on a specific street, or narrows down the deals by sub-categories such as restaurants, entertainment, beauty & spas, services and shopping.
More Deals: The deals on 8coupons.com now come from several different sources.
- Exclusive Mobile Coupons – Since launching in 2007, 8coupons.com has offered a self-service mobile coupon platform for small-businesses in New York City. The platform is now available nationwide, and to celebrate, 8coupons is offering an opportunity for any business to try the service free for 100 days (an $888 value!). Businesses can sign up here and use the promo code “MobileCoupons” at checkout to receive a credit of $888.
- User Submitted Deals – Consumers can use this form to tell everyone about the specials at their local bar or their local sandwich shop (or accountant, or dentist, etc…). To date, there have been over 100,000 user shared deals on 8coupons.com.
- Sponsored listings – 8coupons.com has partnered with Valpak, Money Mailer, and RedPlum’s SuperCoups as well as with several local bloggers and content partners to add over 50,000 local deals across the country.
Coupons, wither mobile or online only, are extremely popular and successful as a marketing tool with consumers. It’s also one of the few forms of mobile advertising that consumers are highly receptive to.
Local data provider and content management platform Localeze is now starting to deliver updates to its 85 partners on a weekly basis — “one step closer to real time,” reads the press release. The company’s competitors update on a monthly or less frequent cycle.
As people are increasingly whipped into a frenzy by the concept of “real time” this move should gain notice and interest. But more importantly more frequent updates should improve the accuracy and quality of the database for publishers and end users.
And rather than simply being a “data provider” Localeze has moved to become a “content management” partner for businesses with multiple locations. While it manages data for multiple-location businesses, Localeze gets SMB data and updates from partners which it then syndicates to its entire network.
There are many interesting and creative things coming out of Localeze and I’ve been told more are on the immediate horizon.
I think “real time search” is meaningful in some contexts and not others: news (broadly defined) is one of several where people want the most up-to-date information. However I’m ambivalent about how Google has so far implemented RT search on its SERP (in the middle of the page):
But here’s a nice use of it: Tweets from the LeWeb event — as a news ticker:
However, is the above better than “watching” on Twitter itself or a Twitter client? No.
In the local context user-generated content is more important than “real-time” content. The two are overlapping because most of the people creating the RT content are users.
On a mobile device I may be interested in communicating in real time with people who are out and about or determining the “hot spots” and things to do in real time (e.g., Citysense), but the use cases are not that broad in my view. While I might want to know where my friends are “right now” I don’t need to see Tweets that just happened about the restaurant I’m about to go to.
We can lump product inventory into the RT category — and that’s meaningful of course in a local context.
Krillion and Topix announced a deal in which the former will provide a new “e-circular” on Topix pages that correspond to local stores (mostly big box) in specific geographies:
[T]hat dynamically presents real-time deals on local, in-stock products to the thousands of people that visit the Topix local news and community forums each day. The new e-circulars, which are powered by local product search leader Krillion, are automatically matched to the ZIP of any local content page, and exclusively feature popular ‘best buys’ from local retailers that have that product in stock at that moment.
Here’s what it looks like on the Topix site:
If you click through on any item you go to the retailer’s site directly. Clicking on the “powered by” link takes you to a Topix-branded page for the zip that shows all the available deals:
Obviously I think this is valuable information and desired by consumers (see my earlier Google Products post). Another interesting thing here is the use (in PR materials) of the phrase “real time” in connection with this data.
I think product inventory information could hook into this buzz-worthy trend and be comprehensible to consumers. Generally I don’t believe that consumers have a handle on (or care yet) what “real time” means. But it does mean something where product inventory is concerned: “where can I buy that today?”
Many people touted “hyper-local” news as the salvation of journalism and newspapers in particular; it’s not. It’s a compelling feature of a larger offering. That’s what the major news sites now see clearly:
According to the press release:
As part of its investment, CNN Worldwide entered into a concurrent multi-year deal to use the Outside.in for Publishers aggregation and curation platform to power hyperlocal news across all of CNN.com and its related properties. The first implementations are expected to be completed in Q1 of 2010.
Blogs, real-time content and more localized news (broadly defined) are becoming must-have features for larger news organizations. Companies such as Outside.in and Topix are in strong positions to provide that content to these third parties.
For its part Outside.in is pursuing a dual strategy as a recently redesigned local search destination even as it offers a range of tools and content syndication for developers and publishers.
Outside.in has raised an estimated $12 million including this round. While the site began as a heady, if unusable project, CEO Mark Josephson has put it on solid ground toward a viable business model and eventual exit.
Here’s a page (via Fred Wilson’s blog) that shows the integration of Outside.in on the NY Post site:
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Related: Here’s a recent interview with Outside.in CEO Mark Josephson on Media Bistro.
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