Ged Carroll

Category: online | 線上 | 온라인으로 | オンライン

The online field has been one of the mainstays since I started writing online in 2003. My act of writing online was partly to understand online as a medium.

Online has changed in nature. It was first a destination and plane of travel. Early netizens saw it as virgin frontier territory, rather like the early American pioneers viewed the open vistas of the western United States. Or later travellers moving west into the newly developing cities and towns from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

America might now be fenced in and the land claimed, but there was a new boundless electronic frontier out there. As the frontier grew more people dialled up to log into it. Then there was the metaphor of web surfing. Surfing the internet as a phrase was popularised by computer programmer Mark McCahill. He saw it as a clear analogue to ‘channel surfing’ changing from station to station on a television set because nothing grabs your attention.

Web surfing tapped into the line of travel and 1990s cool. Surfing like all extreme sport at the time was cool. And the internet grabbed your attention.

Broadband access, wi-fi and mobile data changed the nature of things. It altered what was consumed and where it was consumed. The sitting room TV was connected to the internet to receive content from download and streaming services. Online radio, podcasts and playlists supplanted the transistor radio in the kitchen.

Multi-screening became a thing, tweeting along real time opinions to reality TV and live current affairs programmes. Online became a wrapper that at its worst envelopes us in a media miasma of shrill voices, vacuous content and disinformation.

  • Online ad and tech data points

    Over time, I pulled together online ad and tech data points. It happened because I have had to compile data and visualise it based on desk and primary research. I thought that these slides may be of use to other people. So I have compiled them here. As I have time, I will try to update them with new data.

    There are here as JPGs and as a presentation on SlideShare which I have linked to at the bottom of the presentation.

    I decided to take a macro view looking at major email and OTT messaging platforms using monthly active users as a measure of adoption. This took a long slog of time to do as I had to go back and trawl quoted MAU (monthly active user) numbers from the dawn of the internet for people like Hotmail and Yahoo!. The numbers came from a wide range of sources.

    What’s interesting in this graph is how the internet dot.com time felt like a rocket ship, yet saw a gentle rise in user numbers in comparison to later smartphone based services like WhatsApp, WeChat et al. Google didn’t manage to cash in as big despite owning Android, but instead acted as a spring board for new players.

    Communications service adoption (active users)

    Brandwatch had a set of snapshot numbers that are rather different to the ones I had from my research

    Platform numbers snapshot

    The IPA Databank is an amazing source of quality planning information and work around the optimum number of channels in advertising campaign. The data is in sharp contrast to the 300+ channels that Machine Zone’s CMO Gabe Leydon claims that they work with to have an optimal communications mix.

    Optimum number of advertising channels

    My former boss Salim Mitha used to constantly go on about how online was underspent in comparison to the amount of consumer attention that it received. More up to date data shows that its channels like OOH (out of home) and radio which are currently underspend with online rapidly coming to parity between time spent and percentage of advertising budget spent.

    Audience time spent vs. advertising spend share

    Of course audience spend does not take into account the context under which the audience experiences the brand.

    I also have additional information on the health of the media industry and adoption of wearables in the statistics attached. More on consumer behaviour here.

  • Starboard threat + more news

    Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer downplayed Starboard threat – Business Insider – thinking about the Starboard threat, she didn’t see that Microsoft could use its money to leverage a more friendly board. Mayer has quite rightly looked to better monetise search. I don’t agree with a lot of what’s she’s done but her instinct on this was right. More on Yahoo! here

    Those Entry-Level Startup Jobs? They’re Now Mostly Dead Ends in the Boondocks — Backchannel — Medium – looking at this, even Silicon Valley doesn’t value Cluetrain Manifesto

    Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley – The New York Times – Mr. Grove contrasted the start-up phase of a business, when uses for new technologies are identified, with the scale-up phase, when technology goes from prototype to mass production. Both are important. But only scale-up is an engine for job growth — and scale-up, in general, no longer occurs in the United States. “Without scaling,” he wrote, “we don’t just lose jobs — we lose our hold on new technologies” and “ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.

    Facing 35 percent ad-block rates, Future decided to drastically cut ad impressions | Digiday – interesting and probably smart approach to ad blocking

    Jean-Claude Biver: ‘The Watch Industry Is Not in Trouble, The World Is.’ | BoF – TAG Heuer has latched on to wearables

    Domo, Slack and Tableau: How the disruptors are already facing disruption | VentureBeat – not terribly surprising: easy rather than hard innovation with low barriers to entry. The barrier to entry is brand, marketing and user inertia

    The FTC Cracks Down On March 2015 Lord & Taylor Social Media Launch: Native Advertisers Beware! | Fashion & Apparel Law Blog – native advertising, not quite the wild west it had been

    Dynamic battery for the future developed by Japanese team  – A lithium-ion battery more than three times as powerful as normal that could be used in vehicles and power grids has been developed by a team of academic and corporate researchers in Japan

  • Microsoft in Yahoo! saga

    Microsoft in Yahoo! saga

    Re/code has an interesting article on how the Microsoft in Yahoo! saga continues to influence the sell off of Yahoo! assets by investing money in whichever bid coalition wins. This feels like a riff on Yahoo!’s history over the past six years.

    Careful balancing act for Microsoft

    The 2010 aggressive bid for Yahoo! was one of the factors in the departure of Steve Ballmer as CEO. A Microsoft-owned Yahoo! made almost as little financial sense as the Nokia handset acquisition.

    A later deal via active investor Carl Icahn gave Microsoft everything it wanted. Access to Yahoo! search inventory with no upfront payments. Under the Microsoft deal Yahoo! lost search market share and ad money. Microsoft’s AdCenter was not able to monetise Yahoo!’s search traffic as well as Yahoo! did. Search used to be responsible for half of Yahoo!’s revenue.

    Whilst Yahoo! now represents a smaller proportion of search traffic it is still lucrative for Microsoft. Microsoft’s advances in cloud services are still not as lucrative as search advertising.

    Microsoft will want to defend a position that on a rational analysis shouldn’t last. By loaning money, it gains leverage over a new management team.

    Cheap money to structure deal would be attractive for private equity groups. But it will be bad for the management team put in place and Yahoo!’s future prospects. The Microsoft in Yahoo! saga was at best a spoiling move.

    All just a little bit of history repeating

    Microsoft provided financial support for Icahn’s run at Yahoo! which saw the departure of Jerry Yang – and the sale of his position in the company. At the time of his overthrow, Yang was the largest single shareholder in Yahoo!.

    Six years later we can all see how successful that was.

    Problems that it won’t solve

    Yahoo! morale. There will be a right-sizing of  the workforce, private equity will be ill-prepared to retain the talent required to maintain and evolve Yahoo!’s services. They will also find it impossible to bring in talent in key areas (beyond senior executives). Yahoo!’s former chief product offer Blake Irving is a case in point of this. Expect Facebook, Amazon, Google and others hoover up the key technical talent Yahoo! needs to retain.

    Yahoo!’s international business seems to be a point-of-failure. Yahoo! has withdrawn from markets, particularly in Asia where market conditions should be much better. It has wound up businesses that it had recently acquired in the Middle East. Yahoo! Europe seems to have gone from bad-to-worse.  Expect Yahoo! to shutter more businesses and consolidate its business in North America.

    A highly leveraged Yahoo! still won’t have a mobile advertising solution beyond Flurry. Yahoo!’s own mobile apps consistently under-perform in app marketplaces. The mobile talent Yahoo! has gained will head for the door.

    Yahoo! still won’t work out how to sell millennial advertising. Tumblr is a good property, yet Yahoo! can currently monetise 15 per cent of advertising inventory on the platform. How will private equity solve this? Or will someone else pick it up at a fire sale? Microsoft is likely to try and stop any sale to Google (which would be a natural home).

    Yahoo! still won’t have an effective play in social platforms. Flickr will still be a niche rather than mainstream product.

    A key goal for Microsoft would be to obtain search traffic from Yahoo! Japan. Since Yahoo! Japan is a joint venture with SoftBank, this won’t happen. Yahoo! Japan has already gone to court to keep Microsoft out of its business. The new relationship with a divested core won’t change this.

    Getting Yahoo! on Microsoft’s cloud would be a major coup, but would require major coding, something that private equity owners probably wouldn’t want to do.

    Yahoo!’s IP including core patents for paid search offer little opportunity for additional revenue. They can’t be used against Google and would be unattractive to sell on. Yahoo!’s contributions to open source software would be missed – PHP, Hadoop and the Debian distribution of Linux have all benefited.

    History as an indicator of failure

    This would represent the second activist shareholder owned board. The current one has been responsible for a catastrophic destruction of value. None of the acquirers have articulated a reason why advertisers should believe in them. Whilst a deal needs to maximise value for Yahoo! shareholders; if it doesn’t offer a plan that pleases customers – it will fail.

    A highly leveraged business will not be in a good place to cope with programmatic advertising which will likely reduce the cost of Yahoo!’s over-priced display ad inventory. The likely leverage also means that Yahoo! would make an unattractive long term partner for the major marketing groups. More on Yahoo! here.

    More information
    Microsoft Tells Possible Yahoo Buyers It Would Consider Backing Bids | Re/code
    Yahoo! – how did we get here? | renaissance chambara
    Reflecting on Yahoo!’s Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation | renaissance chambara
    Facebook: the Yahoo! patents case | renaissance chambara
    Why I am sunsetting Yahoo! | renaissance chambara
    The trouble with Yahoo!’s M&A scuttlebutt | renaissance chambara
    Thoughts on the Microsoft and Yahoo! search deal | renaissance chambara
    Yahoo! Japan and The Gordian Knot | renaissance chambara
    Yahoo!: some things I am worried about | renaissance chambara
    Barbarians in the valley | renaissance chambara
    The Steve Ballmer Post | renaissance chambara
    The Wall Street Journal Online bounced my comment | renaissance chambara
    A quick primer re @blakei @yahoo #delicious | renaissance chambara
    2010 MICROSOFT BID FOR YAHOO | NY TIMES

  • Tools part of my process – part two

    I posted part one in this two-part series of ‘part of my process’ posts on my blog. Part one covered Hemingway, Pinboard, Terminal and IFTTT. In this post I will cover tools that I use for content discovery and publication.

    Right Relevance

    Right Relevance is a web service that recommends content from social channels. It is based on areas of interest. Klout provides a similar function as part of its social measurement service. I could write a whole blog post about what’s wrong with Klout’s measurement approach. But their content recommendation function is alright. I have found from experience that Right Relevance tends to provide better quality recommendations.
    Right Relevance
    For specific subject areas there are ‘subreddit’ threads at Reddit. Certain subject areas like technology have special purpose sites: for instance techmeme and Slashdot. I have included some more geek orientated options at the bottom of this post

    Newsblur

    The way I explain RSS to my non-tech forward friends is by an analogy. RSS is the web’s analog of a ticker tape machine. In Western’s that is the machine which put incoming messages on a strip of paper. While outgoing messages went out in Morse code on a telegraph key. In the stock exchange or newsroom; continuous computer paper replaced the thin strip of paper. A teletype machine or computer printer would print messages as they came in.

    RSS sends updates from websites in a way that applications can collect the content up. Different services present it in different formats like an email type interface or digital magazine. Most people were familar with RSS from its use with Google Reader. When Google Reader shut down, it didn’t kill RSS. Instead a cottage industry of RSS readers sprang up to replace it.
    News blur - intelligent RSS reader
    My RSS reader of choice is Newsblur. Newsblur has several benefits. You can train it to filter your feeds based on author or key words over time. The unread posts can be uncovered with one click and read if you still need to.

    It provides three different views

    • Feed – the information as its provided in the the RSS feed. Depending on the feed this may contain images
    • Text – text only. Handy for when you need speed as it filters out formating and images
    • Story – what it looks like on the original site. This helps understand the context where other content is on a page alongside the main story

    Newsblur has a good in-browser interface. It provides integration with both Pinboard and Buffer. It also supports Reeder, a popular desktop RSS reader for OSX.

    Newsblur has a native application for both iOS and Android. A third party wrote a free native application for Windows phone. In the past there was also support on Symbian, Maemo and BlackBerry. You get a lot for your $24/year subscription.

    Buffer

    Buffer is the social publishing tool that I use. It provides similar benefits to Hootsuite, but is much more user friendly. Buffer also has a transparent pricing model compared to Hootsuite. It integrates in my process via IFTTT. Buffer has a native app for iOS and an in-browser interface. It integrates into sharing functionality within iOS and Newsblur. It is the end point in my automated plumbing for social content publication.
    Buffer social channel publishing and analytics
    It has good basic analytics built in. I use ‘The Awesome Plan’ which costs $102/year.

    Weiyun

    Weiyun is a cloud file storage and sychronisation service like Dropbox. The key differences being, it is only available in Chinese and it provides 1TB of storage for free.
    Weiyun - cloud storage and synchronisation
    Weiyun has Android, iOS, Windows and OSX applications.

    Here is a presentation hosted on Slideshare that highlights the tools discussed in today’s ‘part of my process’ post.

    More everyday tools in part three.

    More information

    Right Relevance website
    Klout – ignore the measurement, but stay for the content recommendations

    Reddit
    techmeme – curated by a mix of algorithms and an editorial team
    Hacker News – based on a community who find interesting geeky stuff around the web

    Newsblur (once you subscribe it provides you links to the different mobile apps)
    Reeder – a third party RSS reader for OSX which supports Newsblur

    Buffer

    Weiyun English interface
    How to use Weiyun

  • Refreshed Kindles

    If You Want To Keep Using Your Kindle, You Might Need To Update It Immediately | Gizmodo – will this break the reflashed Kindles that were popular in China? It also shows the impermanence of cloud content and the constant battle that companies face like Amazon with reflashed Kindles being put on to rival e-book stores in China. More on Amazon here.

    Downloading MP3s From Spotify is Easy But Feels Dated | TorrentFreak – which brings us to the digital equivalent of recording from the radio and not buying a recording. Expect the record labels to go apeshit

    Xiaomi founder says time for world to copy Chinese innovation, Technology/Digital News – AsiaOne Digital – Compared with their US peers which are chiefly driven by tech advances, Chinese Internet enterprises place tons of emphasis on user experience, marketing and rapid solutions, which are helping us gain unique edges

    What Obama doesn’t get about encryption | The Kernel – not exclusively an Obama problem either

    Video ads: What works and doesn’t work with younger users | VentureBeat – the author seems surprised that young people would be skeptical towards branded content. It was the same with generation X. Why would it be any different now?

    The FT is launching a new analytics tool to make metrics more understandable for its newsroom » Nieman Journalism Lab

    More Devs Now Use OS X Than Linux, Says Survey – Slashdot – and less than half use Windows

    Half of China’s Ad Spending Will Go Toward the Internet This Year, GroupM Says | Ad Age – (paywall) but measurement still an issue. Partly because highly regulated TV is so boring to watch

    Yahoo, Facebook in Ad Partnership Talks Over Tumblr — The Information – (paywall) that’s a shockingly low figure, but then I guess Yahoo! sales team won’t be selling to brands that care about millennials

    Nokia Technologies announces OZO Pioneer Program for innovative virtual reality content | TelecomTV Insights

    Ariadne Capital takes legal action against PR firm over Wikipedia edits – Business Insider – breaks the terms of service