2 posts tagged “media”
Here are my rough notes from this interesting Chinwag Live event on Tuesday.
Steve Bowbrick
This is an industry driven by hyperbole, and change is always massive, and disruptive. At least micromedia sounds small!Gerd Leonhard
Deal mostly with the issue of control: how can you make money from content if distribution is effectively free. Social networks are becoming the new broadcasters. In the future you'll be adding feeds for music, video as well as for web pages.Most companies are going to be 90% syndicated, as few can afford the investment to create a major brand. Traditional media says control = media. The new guys say attention or trust = money.
Google has this aura of openness, but their core, the algorithm is closed. Microsoft, which used to be closed, is now opening up. So it's not a matter of straight black/white comparisons.
Miles Lewis, Last.fm Europe
Have been at last.fm for 5 months, previously at Yahoo. Last.fm's homepage only has 3% of hits. Most traffic (40%) comes in from widgets, and none of those widgets have been written by Last.fm. We are about music and nothing but music. Taking that chaos of music has become a badge for our users. There was iPhone application within two hours of the iPhone reaching the market. No audio ads at the moment. How many users will bugger off if we add them? Don't know. Expect 50% of visits to be via widgets, some of which have 50,000 users, others have 3.
Mitch McAllister, Product Director, MySpace Europe
The whole genuinely is greater than the sum of the parts. When YouTube widgets first started popping up on profiles, we weren't sure what to make of it. We're expecting to see 50% of our traffic in the future on mobile or non-PC devices.
Neil McIntosh, Guardian Unlimited
Many of us are content creators as well as conduits to an audience. We are run by a trust. Meet audiences where they are. No one wants to be a channel. Issues for us: not just about our need to sell ads, also about context: what surrounds your content.
Umair Haque
I run the Havas Media Lab, a small media consultancy.Wrote a presentation called The Age of Plasticity. When we break things down and remix them, we get productivity gains. That's what micromedia is all about. Last.fm andMySpace have solved real problems, the music industry, which was incredibly shitty. We do ourselves a disservice by speaking of widgets as small and frivolous.I hate the 'monetization' word because you have to create some value before you can capture it. It's not just about shoving more shitty ads down people's throats. We in London think media is entertainment, but it's a hell of lot more.
MySpace should go to advertisers and brands and explore with them how they can reinvent their relationship with consumers; how to turn advertisting into listening.
I had to leave after just 20 minutes of this event, launching Adrian Monck's event, as I had a ticket to see Laurie Anderson at the Barbican, so I missed the contributions from Andrew Gilligan and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, and the audience questions.
Evan Davies (BBC, chair)
You can ask about trusting politicians, estate agents etc, but you wouldn't ask if you can trust the speaking clock...
Adrian Monck, Professor at City University
Premise of the book is that he got fed up with hearing about a crisis of trust (Paxman, Thompson)
This stops us asking the important questions.
Newspapers versus the newcomer in the '50s: television.
Had to convince advertisers that they had a special relationship with readers, and they chose trust as. Walter Cronkite turned out to be the most trusted man in America, even after he'd stopped reading the news for CBS.
The standards of truth and accuracy we expect from medical studies...[?]
Trust adopted by the BBC as a metric to replace authority.
Trust is very closely correlated with use. Google News is highly trusted in the US, but produces no news; it's just an algorithm.
Ofcom now poll on trust, even though some of them recognise that the polls are useless.
Want to get people away from talking about trust, because underneath this are lots of important issues about access to data and sources.
The claim that's got the most attention is that no one ever lost any readers or viewers by losing trust.
Trust is a balloon that we ought to burst and talk about some more important things.
Charlie Beckett, Director of Polis
Agree with Adrian to a great extent. We're all in favour of trust, but not sure what it means.
How can you check the veracity of Andrew Gilligan's pieces about Ken Livingstone? You can't.
TV presenters get high trust ratings because they look human and they talk to us.
We might recognise that our newspaper is highly biased, but we might trust it because it speaks to our circumstances and perspective.
I don't think mainstream media ever had a great reputation for truth.
Network journalism: journalists are going to have to get used to involving citizens in the process of producing news.
