Rest In Peace, Blender

Blender down, now Maxim stands alone...

Alpha Media Group closed Blender magazine today, eliminating about 30 jobs and reducing its portfolio of titles to Maxim alone. The April issue of Blender out now will be its last.

The decision, delivered to Blender staff in a meeting this morning, came as part of broader changes that also included the departure of Alpha co-CEO Glenn Rosenbloom and the integration of editorial staff for Maxim and Maxim Digital.

The remaining CEO, Stephen Duggan, said in a company memo that the company was closing Blender with great sadness. "Since 2001, Blender has provided unmatched music coverage and entertainment news in its unique voice to a profoundly dedicated audience of music enthusiasts," Mr. Duggan wrote. "We are particularly grateful to the sales team and to the tremendously talented editorial staff for their hard work and commitment to Blender."

Joe Levy, who was editor in chief at Blender, was named editor in chief of the combined Maxim editorial operation. Jim Kaminsky, Maxim magazine's editor in chief, is leaving the company. Ben Madden continues as group publisher. Jay Woodruff, editor in chief of Maxim Digital, was named chief content officer at Maxim. After the changes, Alpha will continue to employ 134 staffers.

WSJ Blundered Into World Of Paid Content

The WSJ blundered into its paid content strategy, a move the usual suspects (Michael Wolff, Wired) lamented would reduce the Journal to irrelevancy. "I made the site paid because I was ignorant, “ says former Dow Jones CEO Peter Kann. “I didn’t know any better. I just thought people should pay for content.”

It's worked well for 'em though. And in my opinion, it doesn't hurt that most subscribers can go ahead and expense it on the corporate AmEx.

But - if you already provide free content - good luck getting people to pay at this point in the game, according to this article.

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-wsj-can-charge-for-online-content-and-other-papers-cant-2009-3

Attack Of The Belly Fat Ads

Short of advertisers. Desperate for revenue. Sold out to direct marketers.

These ads, which typically link to sites with names such as Becky's Weight Loss or Helen's Weight Loss, often use the same exact creative -- a before-and-after photo of a woman's belly -- and tout some secret to getting rid of a gut. Users, of course, have to click on the ad to find out more.

Online advertising start-up Rubicon Project estimates that different versions of the "belly fat" ads are now being served by half the ad networks in the U.S., sometimes accounting for as much as 30% of an ad network's total revenue.

It's all part of a larger shift toward direct-response advertising as brand dollars become harder to come by. The belly-fat ads may be unappealing and jarring on some of the higher-end sites that are running them, such as MSNBC.com, but they work, and can bring more revenue than a display ad sold on a cost-per-thousand-viewers basis.

And they won't die:

But here's the bigger problem: The process of blocking belly-fat ads for publishers that don't want them is proving particularly difficult for ad networks. The creative gets placed by numerous corporations using different tags, URLs and toll-free numbers, making them hard to track and stop automatically.

And when ad networks have unsold inventory, they'll often tap another ad network to fill it, giving belly-fat ads another side door onto websites that might not want them.

http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=135115

Digital mags on the rise

As a disclaimer, this is PR verbiage from digital mag publisher Zmags, but some good numbers on online traffic to magazines' websites:

Don’t worry. Your magazine did not become irrelevant and your readers did not quit on you. But readers are moving online as there is so much more to get there. While titles are closed down Magazine Publishers of America found that website traffic to US consumer magazines rose 11.1 percent in last quarter of 2008 compared to last year. In addition, time spend on the titles websites increased 34.4 percent.

Important to notify here is that you do not have to go all in, when offering digital magazines. Most of Zmags customers offer digital magazines as a supplement - rather than a substitution - to hard copies. Digitize your magazine and making it available on your website is an easy way to extend your scope and get more readers.

http://blog.zmags.com/index.php/digital-magazines-on-the-rise/

Recession SEO

If you're not SEOing to "cheap ____________", you're not SEOing at all, these days:

http://www.dmnews.com/Search-shift-fuels-recession-friendly-keyword-strategy/article/128409/

Tweet You, Pay Me

Maggiano's Italian restaurant says, add us as a friend, and tweet about us, for a chance to win $100.

http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-payola-now-with-extra-cheese-2009-3

In an informal count, it seems about five to ten Twitter users are tweeting Maggiano's message every minute. Or about one every ten seconds. Maggiano's now has 1,037 followers, and is gaining dozens per minute. That's thousands (tens of thousands?) of ad impressions that Brinker International is getting for its $100 gift card (and whatever it's paying someone to run the company's Twitter account).


Remember that thing about social sites creating so many highly disposable ad impressions you'll never be able to sell them...?

Social media policy, ur doin it rong

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/feb/25/ryanair-socialnetworking

Blogger finds fail on Ryanair website, blogs about it. Ryanair employee leaves comments on his blog that are fairly inflammatory. Blogger inquires if they are authentic, receives this response from Ryanair’s corporate communications (!):

"Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again.

"Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel."

SFChronicle may shut down

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE51O03Y20090225

It's hard out there for a print.

Your Ad Impressions v. Lent

Do you think anyone would give up visiting your site for Lent?

Apparently it's happening to Facebook: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123509424821028985.html

Web 2.0, UGC Fail

Restaurant review site Yelp is, apparently, now willing to bury the bad reviews of your restaurant - for a fee.

What good is user-generated content to the end user if it's censored to hide all but rave reviews?

The phone calls came almost daily. It started to get creepy.

"Hi, this is Mike from Yelp," the voice would say. "You've had three hundred visitors to your site this month. You've had a really good response. But you have a few bad ones at the top. I could do something about those."

Even worse, this article almost sounds like Yelp is doing it Mob style, moving the worst reviews to the top and trying to extort payment. Way to tank your site in the name of a business model.

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/news/yelp_and_the_business_of_extortion_2_0/Content?oid=927491

Math Is Tough

Wow... half of marketers forgo analytics?

Marketers will continue to invest significantly in online marketing this year, but less than half (47%) actually use analytics to measure their campaigns, and one-fifth only have a ‘basic’ website, according to the sixth annual marketing survey from Alterian.

Depressing. You'd think nowadays you'd want to focus more on ROI, not less.

http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/frustrated-by-difficulty-half-of-marketers-forego-analytics-7993

Mobile

Learned it from Twitter: Omniture customers in Japan log more pageviews from mobile handsets than the personal computer.

I'm a heavy browser on my phone, but still nowhere near that point.

Yahoo - GROWING search share?

...wha?

After years of steady decline, Yahoo's domestic share numbers (YHOO) had increased for five months in a row. Well, the good news continued in January, with Yahoo's share jumping a half-point to 21%, per comScore.

Google's share, meanwhile, dropped a half-point, to 63%. You don't see that every day.

http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-search-share-rises-againand-google-falls-2009-2

The Value Of Omniture Testing

Best Buy experimented with Omniture (either multivariate or A/B testing; wish they went into more details in this article) to determine the financing plan that converted best among their customers:

In trials, Best Buy offered financing at different levels: $499, $699, or $999. Every time a customer signed up for payments, Omniture (OMTR) tracked purchase details and homed in on the answer: $499. Within weeks, the software cranked out data that the store's own systems, with their antiquated databases, couldn't have matched.

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/feb2009/db2009028_712098.htm

EW Scripps writedowns

Saying "print is dead" is like kicking a dead horse, I know. EW Scripps reported huge losses, nearly $50MM in writedowns.

For every tunnel, though, there is a light. The bright spot:

In the case of its online newspapers, there was one glimmer of good news: Revenue from pure-play advertisers who only purchase ads on the company’s newspaper websites more than doubled to $3.7 million, suggesting that most newspapers move away from print upsells should help them draw more ad dollars on the digital side.

(Emphasis mine.)

http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-earnings-ew-scripps-posts-loss-on-48.8-million-in-writedowns/

Micropayments

Micropayments for journalists - would anyone pay?

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/blnk/

Banner Blindness

Interesting hypothesis - Sarasota County voters failed to make their choice in one particular contest because it was at the top of the page, and all the time we spend on the Internet leads us to disregard the top third of anything we see on a screen as if it's ad space:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness-ballot-design.html

Comparing ad impressions to Zimbabwe's currency

This article compares the tremendous glut of available impressions on the www to the printing of currency in Zimbabwe that has rendered it pretty much worthless, and suggests we need to start worrying less about the # of impressions we can create and more on things that can generate real value (interactive pieces, mini-sites, partnerships)… selling high-quality ads people are engaged with rather than an ad tied to 438,035,802,232 pageviews.


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123483323444195983.html


Epic burn: “Indeed, the Web is likely heading for a shakeout on a scale unseen since the dot.com bust. Those that could struggle include newspapers or magazines still trying to establish a strong online brand.”

Mapquest vs. Google Maps - A Lesson In User Experience

A look at MapQuest's rapid loss of market share in the last year vs. Google Maps, all the ways MapQuest has been outclassed and how they can fix it.

A few examples of suggestions:

- Find your one-line "voice", or mission statement, in the market
- Recover your organic traffic with creative and niche SEO
- Get local
- Get mobile

http://www.businessinsider.com/mapquest-a-symbol-of-everything-thats-gone-wrong-2009-2