Flux Research: Clyde on Business

How Many of Your Customers Own Tablets?

Often when writing about publishing and mobile opportunities, bloggers like myself will refer to stats regarding how much of a particular population has smartphones or tablets in order to make a case for developing mobile versions of one's website or services. But it's much more important to focus on the population of potential customers, since not everyone is going to be interested in your publication or service, and even more important to focus on your current customers, given the frequently high cost of customer acquisition.

Recently trade publication Packaging World conducted a survey and found that 46% of their subscribers owned a tablet, such as the iPad or an Android tablet, and 78% said they planned to own one by next spring.

Of the 46% who are current owners, "74% said they read work-related digital magazines on the devices. At the same time, 55% said they accessed work- or industry-related websites with their tablets."

I'm not familiar with the mobile solutions employed by Packaging World but, given that many customers with tablets, I'd certainly want my website to have a nice tablet version to keep those customers engaged and to let them know my company was keeping their needs as subscribers in mind.

Beyond the issue of specific mobile devices, this news brief is a strong reminder of the need to survey one's customers on a periodic basis.

Sometimes they'll surprise you!

Reviving This Business of Blogging

I'm experimenting a bit with This Business of Blogging which was actually a precursor to Flux Research.  I'm mostly going to be posting small news items and then digging in when it seems appropriate.  I thought about doing those posts here but I'm realizing that some of them would be off-topic.

If it seems like I'm having trouble focusing, well, yeah.  I am!

Basically I launched All World Dance earlier this year.  It has great potential but once I started writing for Hypebot I found myself pulled between two major topics with little crossover.  I then put AWD on hold while I sorted out music-related news sources and, once I dug in deeply, I realized I could start writing more about music startups at Flux Research and eventually would be able to hold my own with anybody covering that topic that I've seen to date.

But it became clear that focusing on music startups at FR would conflict with what I'm doing at Hypebot so I had to let that go.  Though not everything I would write would be in conflict, having to second guess myself really kills my flow so I'm regrouping.

Blogging is a big part of what I do.  I've been doing it for almost 10 years and shifts in blogging as a business have greatly informed my take on web business models.

So we'll see where this next step in my blogging career will take me!

Steve Rubel on Hybrid Media

In Battle Between Social and Mainstream, Hybrid Media Will Be the Winner

"There's an emerging class of media brands that are smart, scrappy and unmatched in their digital DNA. Call them hybrids. They're digitally native and entrepreneurial. They use social and search to their fullest, yet many of them have a traditional ad-sales network that resembles their legacy-laced brethren. Hence the descriptor."

"In a world with too much content and not enough time, hybrids are the future of media. They're a planet of quick, agile ants that's challenging the apes for dominance. It's where marketers will increasingly focus their time, energy and money with a mix of paid and earned strategies. That doesn't mean the media stalwarts or social networks will fade, mind you, but this is the breakout group to watch."

Politico: Publishing Success Includes Print, Digital & Events in a Lucrative Market

Politico Ad

Frédéric Filloux recently spoke with Bill Nichols, managing editor of Politico, about how a DC-based political publication, web/mobile/print plus events, is employing 200 people and is apparently profitable.

The blog post is well worth a read to get a take on Politico's products and attitude featuring a fast-paced, in-depth approach that isn't afraid to ask click-inducing questions like, "Is Rick Perry Dumb?," while striving for authoritative coverage. However, from what I see, most of the headlines are fairly mundane, it's the quick and in-depth part that seems key.

Filloux lays out Politico's multiple revenue streams. Note that all such activity is focused around or will intensify during national elections aka the political publication version of the Christmas season for retailers.

Politico's Revenue Streams:

Website with 4 million unique visitors in July. "The value extracted from each visitor is quite high." [So far I've identified advertising and a paid jobs board as well as an offsite link to a Politico store on Cafe Press. Note that the website also operates in relationship to mobile versions and email alerts that offer additional ad possibilities.]

"Around half of its revenue is coming from the newspaper which sells high premium ads...published five days a week, only when congress in in session, and its 34,000 (free) copies are distributed at various strategic spots in DC." However, Politico also sells subscriptions both domestically and abroad.

"'Politico Pro', an in-depth paid-for service focusing on three critical (and lobbying-intensive) issues: energy, technology and healthcare. The price is $2,500 per month."

"An event department: get-togethers for the Happy Few with big political names, moderated by staffers. The guests don’t pay, but big sponsors do...Events will be organized not only in Washington but on the campaign trail as well."

"An e-Book venture with Random House. The concept: quick accounts, 20,000 to 30,000 words (80-120 pages), of the 2012 campaign."

Filloux states that "Politico’s method of squeezing money from every slice of its market looks logical and reproducible. But its unique ecosystem makes Politico's success difficult to replicate elsewhere."

On the one hand I agree, just as I would with most financial media successes that make money by providing info that can make money.

On the other hand, developing a strong product for a lucrative market that can serve as the basis for additional products that meet targeted needs while diversifying one's revenue streams seems like a pretty solid takeaway from Politico's success.

Of Related Interest:

Monday Note
Web + Print: A Powerful Combo

Columbia Journalism Review
Jim VandeHei Talks Politico Pro

Adweek
Can Politico Win Again?

Tapjoy Webinar: Making Money on Free Mobile Games

Making Money on Mobile: Best Practices & Tips for Driving Revenue
on Mobile Games

I'm posting what looks like a great webinar about making money with free mobile games with a bit of hesitation. I haven't had time to watch it all. It's marked unlisted on YouTube. And it has some technical annoyances including over 2 minutes of waiting before anything starts, an opening mic echo and occasional interruptions as people enter the webinar.

Yet it seems quite thorough and otherwise a good introduction to mobile game monetization at a time when free game apps are beating paid apps for revenue (based on Apple App Store data).

If you encounter problems with the video, here's the original post and here's the video link.

A related slideshow on virtual world sales is also available.

Also of interest from Flurry Blog:
Freemium Mobile Gamers Spend Most Money on Items They Don’t Keep
Consumers Spend Average of $14 per Transaction in iOS and Android
Freemium Games

SeeClickFix Describes Revenue Streams

How SeeClickFix Works

SeeClickFix's co-founder Ben Berkowitz discusses the revenue streams for their service for citizen communication with municipalities, designed to identify and resolve local problems like potholes, in an interview with Street Fight:

"First, there are our media partners. We have 800 local news sites that are partners. The basic SeeClickFix widget is free. The partner gets the content and we get 100% of remnant advertising that appears on the widget. About 85% of our media partners have the free widget. We also sell an ad-free widget, which about 15% of our media partners buy."

"Our second revenue stream is non-remnant advertising—on both the website and the widgets."

"Our third source of revenue is the software dashboard we sell to municipalities and community associations for managing their 311-type customer-response services, like fixing potholes. We have about 60 clients. The biggest ones are Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Medium-size cities include New Haven and Hartford in Connecticut, Richmond, Va., Raleigh, N.C., and Corona, Calif."

Is There A Market for Booktrack: Soundtracks for Books?

Power of Six Booktrack Demo

As a hardcore fan of the traditional book format, Booktrack strikes me as disturbing and ludicrous. Soundtracks for books? Get out of here!

But if we consider the growing ranks of people who use multiple media at once, those who don't find reading alone to provide enough entertainment and those in commuter settings that might want audio with their reading, perhaps there is a market for this strange new beast, perhaps even a new market that hasn't been attracted to reading prior to sound effects!

If such offerings are a success, we can look forward to Booktrack becoming a new platform for music licensing as well.

Update: Paul Carr eviscerates the whole concept and I can relate to that.  On the other hand, it's striking me that this is potentially a great business idea for children's books though I can think of some problems with that as well.

Paid Content: TheStreet.com vs. The NY Times

I was reading a piece by Sean Callahan at BtoB Magazine's website on a boost in traffic at TheStreet.com's sites and found this nugget from TheStreet.com's CEO Darryl Otte about how they deal with paid content:

"You get basic markets coverage and business news free, and then to get actual access to trading ideas and the thinking of top investing professionals, it's behind the paywall. You get a sense of the markets and some trading ideas for free, but the real kind of hardcore investment information is behind the paywall. And the paywall is not binary—you pay or not. There are grades of service. Entry level pricing is a couple hundred bucks a year, and there's $5,000 a year."

He contrasts this with the NY Times paywall which takes a metered approach and starts charging after a certain amount of ad-supported content has been consumed which Otte says didn't work for TheStreet.com when they tried it.

Part of the problem with the Times' metered approach is the ambiguity and the fact that the paywall has been easy to slip past. What I always felt they should do is keep their normal coverage free and monetized with ads while building up new paid content verticals in areas of strength. Rich business content is something that people will pay for if they think they can profit from the knowledge.

The Times Select experiment, featuring columnists from the NY Times, did better than I expected but not well enough for the Times to continue. So perhaps they could have developed new verticals in areas where there is an audience for great writing and deep thinking, such as politics or the arts. And since, unlike business content, such work can remain meaningful over time, new features could have been connected to older content through smart digital design.

It just seems like the NY Times is more focused on figuring out how to charge for what they already do when they could be developing new products and putting their expertise to work. Lucky for TheStreet.com that they weren't burdened by the Times' outdated corporate culture. It's tough to get past all that history!

Update: And tough to get past all that success.  Print advertisers still pay a lot more for, arguably, a lot less as this look at some NY Times' stats via Business Insider attests.  It's tough watching that fade and tough finding new approaches in a deeply disruptive environment.

Hypebot Music Industry Blog: Music in the Cloud, Patronism, QR Codes, Storify

My most recent music industry posts at Hypebot:

Music in the Cloud: Battle for the Celestial Jukebox

Patronism: Reinventing Musical Patronage

Music Marketing with QR Codes: How to Get Started

How to Use Storify to Share Story of Musical Events

Steve Buttry: Revenue Streams for Newspapers

Steve Buttry makes a great point in a post that considers some of the already well-known possibilities for newspapers to make money. He notes that newspapers don't need new ideas, they already have plenty. They just need to start trying some of them! From my perspective, journalists on the whole have written more and accomplished less in the area of business model innovation than any other industry, even the music industry. And that's saying a lot!

Here are Buttry's suggestions for a closer look with plenty of details on his post:

Develop the must-have driving app for your community

Offer commissioned life stories instead of formulaic obituaries

Daily deals

Direct transactions

Local search

Calendars

Social media

Blog [ad] networks

Mobile applications

Location

Data

Memberships

Community funding

Direct content sales

Archives

Of course, some of the above refer to opportunities that newspaper companies have missed. I've never seen an industry so busy dropping the ball.