Nick May <nick@kyushu.com> writes:
> On 28 Dec 2005, at 01:28, Michael(tm) Smith wrote:
>
> > Or how about the Guardian[1]?
> >
> > [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian
> >
> > That Guardian has been the winner for six years in a row of the
> > British Newspaper Awards for Best Daily Newspaper on the World
> > Wide Web.
>
> ... and the site loses money hand over fist,
Care to cite some source for that info? Provide any real data? I
have a hard time quantifying "hand over fist".
> and the company is losing money (I think),
You "think"?
> or at least - not doing terribly well - on the newspaper side
> of things.
I also have a hard time quantifying "not doing terribly well".
> The Times, The Indie and the Telegraph have all moved to a "pay
> for some content" model.
Exactly what is the "some" content that they charge for? Certainly
not their main daily news content, which is what I thought we had
all been discussing up to this point.
> Even the Graun has "paid" access methods.
The fact that it has such does not seem relevant at all to whether
they are charging a fee for users to read their main daily news
content.
> High quality journalism is seriously expensive. Keitai suffer
> from lack of screen real estate on which to put ads
Really? Is the screen size really that much of a liability when it
comes to advertising? Do you have any data on that?
I could imagine that a study with real users might just show that
the screen size helps to give the ads even greater prominence.
In a keitai browser the ads are in a single column, and I must
scroll through them to get to the content I want to read.
In a PC-based browser, it is much easier for me to miss and ignore
ads, because they're typically placed in the left and right
columns and top and bottom of the page -- parts of the page that I
(and I think most other users) have now grown accustomed to simply
ignoring.
When viewing pages in a mobile browser, I find the ads pretty hard
to miss or ignore. I'm certain that I'm more likely to remember
them when viewing them on a page in a keitai browser than I am
when viewing exactly the same page in a PC-based browser, where
the ads are typically in page parts that I reflexively ignore.
> and the like making a business model for a keitai-only site
> rather difficult.
So who was talking about making a businees model for a keitai-only
site? What I had pointed out was that users now have full browsers
with which they can view the exact same sites they can view on
their PC-based browsers.
> In fact there are very few "web only" general news sites that deliver
> high quality news reports that is other than a re-write of agency
> reports, or a rewrite of other "real news organisation's" reports.
So who was talking about "web only" general news sites? Not me,
that's for sure.
The two sites I mentioned and the ones you mention above are not
"web only" news sources. They are the online arms of "real news
organizations", not secondary sources.
--Mike
--
Michael(tm) Smith
http://tokyo.metblogs.com/
http://sideshowbarker.net/
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/890
Received on Wed Dec 28 08:06:42 2005