The reason that I am writing this post is because I went to a presentation on the future of digital in 2008 and one of the speakers was Michael Kordahi, Microsoft Evangelist for Microsoft Surface which I have previously blogged about. One thing that stood out was how he said he had to bring his clients along with him for the journey, as he’s often so far ahead and in a different space. He does that with his blog and that’s what I am trying to do too!

Foursquare

An app that I’ve been using quite a lot in the last few months is Foursquare. I’ve actually been wanting to write about this for a while but I wanted to evaluate the service for a few months first.

Foursquare

I had signed up about 6 months before it was available in Australia and there were only a few Aussies on the network. I must admit that I sign up to a lot of services that I hear about on tech blogs. I’m one of those people that like to experiment.  I noticed a lot of them were tweeting about it on one day and some had added me – that’s when I realised it was available in Aus. There were a flurry of blog posts from local tech / internet peers in the few days after it was released in Australia.

I could see that there was a lot of potential. Foursquare is a location based social networks where you could update your location using your mobile.  I was already using my mobile a lot to update my status using facebook and twitter. I also noticed that a lot of my friends were updating with location based tweets/fb updates saying which restaurant they were at, which country they were travelling to, etc….. Everywhere I was going, particularly on the trains, out in the clubs/bars, people were accessing the internet on their smart phones and logging into facebook/twitter with location based information. It just made sense. I was already experimenting with Google Latitude, BrightKite, and then GoWalla so I could see the space was hotting up.

Where are your friends and what are they doing?

The thing I like about foursquare is that you can see where your friends are and what they are doing. Often when you are out, you might just miss them. The next time you see them you’re like “I can’t believe you were there! I was there too!” or “You just missed me!” or you call them and ask “Where are you tonight?”. With foursquare, I know exactly where they are (if they choose to disclose this information). I can find out new venues which my friends are checking out, and it encourages me to go there too.

There are also some other interesting outcomes. An example from last Friday, I was at the Arthouse for my high school reunion. One of my colleagues was meeting up with another friend at Arthouse. He saw on foursquare that I was there! So he walked around looking for me, and I found him!

You choose to follow people in your network and I try to find similar minded people and see where they hang out. I also like seeing who else has checked-in to a venue. So social networking is an important element in Foursquare.

Where are your friends?

Tips

You can also get tips at venues ala eatability. I love going to a restaurant, check-in to a venue and reading the tips other people have left. One of my favourite restaurants at the moment is Chat Thai, in Sydney’s chinatown. I read a tip on Foursquare to try out the strawberry blend. I did and it was awesome! If I eat something which I like, or have a tip on my favourite dish on a venue or even a bad experience, I will write about it on foursquare. I also leave tips which other people may find helpful. For example, at Museum station, I left a note saying that some of the entrances close at 8pm (it might be earlier), but thats useful for people to know.

Gameplay addiction – The checkins

Another element that is quite addictive and in my opinion makes it standout is the gameplay. When you enter a venue, you can checkin. You find the location using your phone – it will pull up a list of nearby locations or you can enter your own. After that, you choose to check-in to show you are there and it will notify your network. You get points for checking in. If you have 3 or more checkins, you can become Mayor of the venue. That is, if no one else is already Mayor. If someone else has more checkins, you have to have more than them to take over as Mayor.

In fact, I’ve been battling for control of Museum station for some time now! Another user had 10+ checkins at Musuem, so I decided to check-in twice a day (when I arrived in the morning and left at night). I became Mayor and then someone else overtook me. Now I have to get back on top again!! That keeps me coming back to Foursquare.

I’m currently holding down two mayor-ships (is that a word?). I’ve the mayor of Equilibrium (World Square Pub) and Bikaner Namkeen. I’ve actually reached super-user level 1, so I have the authority to edit and merge venues, which I intend to do with World Square Pub.

Player please! Get crunked! And more foursquare badges

You also get points for checkins, but I don’t really care too much about the points. What I do care about is the badges. There are different badges for various purposes. Your first checkin gets you the “newbie” badge. Then there are badges for 10 checkins, 25, and 50 (they must be unique venues). The interesting ones are “local” (3 x in one week), “crunked” (4+ checkins in one night), and my favourite “player please” (checkin with 3 members of the opposite sex).

If you want a good post about the check-ins which foursquare pioneered, read this from the Scobelizer, someone I respect who blogs about the social networking space and the web in general. He talks about how the other social networking services are going to start adopting checkins as well, including Facebook, Twitter and Yelp.

Opportunities for business

There are some exciting opportunities for business. Potentially they can send out location sensitive offers. If you happen to walk past a venue, they could push out a notification with an offer to entice you in e.g. free entree with every meal. Alternatively, offer discounts to people that checkin. I’ve seen examples in the US of offering discounts to people that are Mayors of venues.

I must admit I’ve become a bit of a mini-evangelist for foursquare. I have convinced several people from work to sign up as well as some of my friends and associates. Now that I’ve got a fair amount of people on the service, its becoming a lot more useful. So don’t delay, signup!

I’m out like threesquare,

Matt

They were able to create an interactive campaign and a live photo album. Watch it!

Calling up 3 times to chase it up?

Not knowing the cost of services you are purchasing?

Signing up to paid membership with benefits, yet not being able to fully understand what it is you are paying for?

Repeating your details every time to different suppliers, who are interconnected?

Lost in a sea of jargon and complicated concepts?

—————————————————————————

If these exist in your industry or company, it probably wouldn’t be very succesful (unless of course you are a monopoly).

Well this is my experience with the healthcare system and my private health insurance provider.

I sure I’m not the only one. I’m rather pissed off at my health insurance company and the general lack of communication and cohesion in the industry.

Accessible medical information online

Firstly, I am annoyed at having to repeat my details to every single supplier along the chain. From the various doctors, specialist doctors, specialist specialist doctors, hospital staff. Don’t they ever talk to each other – instead we’re handling around letters of recommendation, x-ray diagrams, medicine prescription slips, etc… Couldn’t we have a centralised database where we can access all our medical data in one place? If there was an emergency and you were admitted to hospital, they could easily pull up all your medical records. Or perhaps, I could stroll into any medical office to see a specialist and they would see all my details.

There are privacy issues with such an approach, but a user and supplier would be greatly convenienced if such facilities were available. I noticed that my health insurance supplier has a member log in available, but it still doesn’t tell me what benefits are available for my level of cover. Wouldn’t you think that this would be a very basic information request?

Instead, we are left to call up and be put on hold for 5 minutes or more, whilst listening to “we’re busy, please call back during quieter times” messages. What kind of business are they running?

I’ve come across several initiatives one of these being Google Health (y’all know Google is in everything), where the information is stored in the cloud. There’s also Glide Health which I saw during TechCrunch 50, where all the information is accessible from the platform – family medical history, past medical results, etc… I was quite impressed when I saw the demo.

Managing my health provider information and claims

Everytime I need information, I generally need to call up. In fact, it is written in the forms please speak to your “doctor, hospital, health care provider”. Why can’t these parties also collaborate in giving me information, instead of me making 3 separate requests? Well its, 5 actually because there’s another party involved. I have no doubt that these parties are NOT working together unless I give them the information. Rather there should be one central place where they can be notified of what is going on and I can see the progress.

Also, if I have to put in a request or claim, I need to chase it up – 3 times. No one within the organisation has been notified to progress the request either. Per above, there should be a tracker of all claims and requests. A bit of transparency and openness would do wonders for this industry, which thrives on people not knowing what they are paying for and charging them every month for it.

Making sense of medical insurance

There’s a lot of jargon used in this industry and when you speak to people on the phone, I do not feel that they are very good at explaining the concepts to you. I’ve read my policy and FAQ on the website, and its only having asked someone working in the industry and speaking to my health fund and doctor a few times that I have understood what is going on.

But I still don’t have a sense of how much I’m supposed to be paying, even though I’ve paid for most of it in signficant out of pocket expenses – cause I’m still waiting for one person in the supply chain to get back to me.

I could have done more research and asked around, but you don’t really have a choice in these matters. Sometimes you just need to get things done. I feel like the public (especially people like myself) need greater education on our health system and how it works.

And I’m starting to understand the divide between the public and private health insurance industry. With a private hospital, there is little waiting time if you have private health insurance and are willing to pay for the extra expenses. However with the public system, it is free or your health fund can cover you as a private patient in a public system. But the offset is that there is a waiting period. It could be anywhere from 3 to 6 months or longer.

I’m out like our health system,

Matt.

Youtube concert

At approximately 2.30pm on Monday AEST, U2 staged the first live streaming Youtube concert online. And I witnessed it!!

U2 is easily one of the world’s best known bands. It’s probably not the first band to stream a concernt online, but the first of the major bands to do so and to such a large audience. I’m by no means a huge fan of U2, but I wanted to be part of this historic and momentous event. Plus I got to watch a concert for free!

I tuned in for about 2 hours and watched it in between doing work. I had it streaming in the background and witnessed an awesome concert unfold. They played a lot of songs that I was familiar with but didn’t know the names of and got me reacquainted with a lot of their music.

There was a bit of lag at times (about 3 or 4), but overall the streaming was smooth and there were heaps of different camera angles. Considering that there were in excess of 1.3 Million channel views, that was a pretty impressive job by Youtube. Their cloud servers must have been running at max capacity!

Monetisation Streams

As I was watching it, I was talking to my friend @dacheah about the monetisation possibilities. I feel that this was a public demonstration of Youtube’s streaming capabilities. This was a free concert, but imagine how much advertising, publicity, and album sales were made in the lead up, during the concert and post concert.

On the right side of the streaming video, you could purchase a download of the album off iTunes. Or donate to Bono’s Red charity or find out new information about their new album. These are just the direct actions you can take. By using iTunes it allows people to make an immediate purchase and receive the album on demand, an even cheaper distribution method.

But what happened indirectly?

They were able to bring in people like myself who aren’t big U2 fans into their music. Created new fans and advocates of the brand.

Given all that is happening in the music industry with the profileration of free downloads and pirating, there needs to be alternative money stream. Stream the concerts for free and entice people to purchase singles, albums and merchandise.

However, I think the biggest play would be to charge people access to live streaming concerts. This could be Youtube’s monetization model, have people pay $5  -10 to watch a world class concert. You could potentially have a subscription service as well, whereby people pay a yearly fee and get access to number of online streaming concerts. I’d also pay for this.

The ability to use streaming online video is now quite easy. We used it for our basketball game via Livestream (formerly Mogulus).

Back of the Envelope numbers

Using some general online stats that only 10% of people would pay for an online service, lets assume that 130,000 of the 1.3m viewers would have tuned in @ $5 a pop (lower end of the scale).

$5 per viewer x 130,000 number of viewers = $650,000  Revenue

Video Costs

1. Streaming costs

Youtube offers branded channel but their not cheap. If you advertise more than $80k with adwords, you can get it for free. They also have free accounts as well at the public level. But I feel that its going to be bundled together with streaming, storage space  similar to how Livestream and Ustream do it. Let’s do a yearly calc based on Livestream current costs:

1 Channel with 25GB streaming, HD up to 1.7 MPS: $350 a month

20 premium channels with 200GBs streaming, HD up to 1.7 MPS : $1,250 a month

I assume that there will be an option in the future for premium users for 1 Channel with 200 GBs available for larger concerts. It could possible use Google App Engine or Amazon EC2 which will bring the cost down. However, lets go with $1,250 since this is a publicly available cost. Give that 130,000 viewers watching video could potentially smash the server, lets multiply the cost of streaming by 5 fold to be ensure there is enough capacity to handle the extra traffic.

I’ve chosen a yearly fee because the band will want to maintain it and possibly do a number of concerts.

$1,250 per month x 5  x 12 months = $75,000

Note that this is a variable cost because it can be cancelled or use more/less bandwidth. But you will probably want to retain it and the more concerts you do, the more the cost will be spread.

2.  Camera crew for 2 hour concert

Camera crew will be needed for full day to prepare, stream and record,  dismantle stuff. This staff is in addition to existing sound crew. I don’t want the regular sound crew worrying about online streaming in addition to the concert as well.

This could be you streamed online....

Lets say 5 are needed – one in the booth to check video, three camera people to give different shots (upclose, in the crowd, pan wide), maybe an extra sound guy. That’s 5. I use 8hrs for a full day required for a 2hr concert.

$80 p/h  x 8hrs x 5 staff =  $3,200

3. A couple of IT and social media guys

On standby to monitor streaming, computer/servers crashing, social media feedback, commenting, drive traffic – 3 staff. I’ve chosen the figure $120 an hour to get more quality staff with experience.

$120 an hour x 8 hrs x 3 staff = $2,400

Total costs

$75,000 streaming + $3,200 camera crew + $2,400 IT staff = $80,600

$650,000 Total Revenue – $80,600 Total Cost = $569,400

That’s approximately $570,000 profit.

I haven’t included advertising costs, but this could be done in conjunction with their concert promos i.e. a URL at the bottom of the concert poster, twitter updates / facebook updates, email, radio. The cost of this should not significantly increase current advertising spend.

Of course not all bands are going to have this kind of fan base like U2. Smaller bands can cut costs by hiring less staff, opt for a smaller online account, but I dont see how they couldn’t take advantage of this.

Plus you also need to add in the profit from ticket gate receipts, album sales, tshirt sales, iTunes downloads, etc….

Final Thoughts

Online streaming simply provides an additional revenue stream for music bands via concert. I’m sure some bands and event planners are concerned that people might not turn up to a concert if shown online for $5 instead of a concert ticket price of $130. But nothing beats seeing something live.

However, there is going to be a significant number of fans that can’t afford the ticket price, cannot make it due to work / commitments or are simply living overseas. Surely this can be monetized! Your providing them with the chance to also participate in the concert, be a part of the crowd, and sing along.

Side note: Youtube has also introduced paid search for video,  and the videos shows up as a sponsored link. There is also Google Music Search, which produces results for all the different music services.

I’m out like Mogulus,

Matthew Ho.

Check it out here.

I’m going to Vietnam soon and will blog about it over there. I’ll also post up pieces of writing I’ve done in the last couple of years, as well as travel tips.

I’m out like the travel bug,

Matt

Now, I’ve just seen the demo video and I really dig it!

A service that lets you find “Any moment from any film ever made”. That’s a very powerful tagline. Kinda like the Bill Gates vision “A computer on every desk”.

Watch the entire video for the demo and the questioning.

FYI the guys on the judging panel are:

- Scobelizer (Robert Scoble) is a huge tech blogger, former Microsoft guy

- Sean Parker, founding president of Facebook and co-founded Napster, Plaxo and Causes. And now joined Yammer!

- Reid Hoffman, once an aspiring Academic and Rhodes scholar (i think), founder of Linkedin and mentor to many of the top web 2.0 CEO’s

- Dick Costas, founder of Feedburner, Head of Google Social Products, and now COO of Twitter

- Mike ?, he used to be chief engineer at Mozilla Firefox, now Chief Engineer @ Facebook.

As you can see, its the who’s who of Silicon Valley.

Essentially they:
1) Aggregate short form video (less than 4 mins)
2) Allow people to metatag and categorise
3) have monetization models so you can buy the video or download or rent it

There are valid questions around legals, getting buy-in from the studios re content and also discovery.

Discovery is a good point, because that’s how I find a lot of interesting content on youtube from browsing other videos. I also think its going to be an incredible challenge getting the studios on board. But they did it with Hulu via a JV.

Ultimately, the guys behind it are right suggesting that it reinvigorates our love of movies. By me watching that scene from the Big Lebowski, I wanted to go to the video shop and rent it immediately. It might encourage others to go find the torrent, but they were never going to buy it anyway.

My other question is that can’t Youtube do all of the above? Youtube’s biggest problem at the moment, is that the most watched videos and biggest traffic driver is amateur videos. Not professional. If the anyclip guys have figured out a way to automatically tag, categorise and scale it, that could be a winner.

I’m out like long form video,

Matt aka Inspiredworlds

I met the Chk Chk Boom girl, Claire Werbeldoff at the Adknowledge Social Media Conference. She’s a nice person but an accidentally superstar. Said some crazy things and gained international fame via youtube and viral. The question is whether she can maintain the momentum.

I’m out like chk chk boom,

Matt

]]> http://inspiredworlds.com/2009/09/29/chk-chk-boom/feed/ 0 http://inspiredworlds.com/2009/09/13/this-video-looks-kinda-insane/ http://inspiredworlds.com/2009/09/13/this-video-looks-kinda-insane/#comments Sun, 13 Sep 2009 05:02:36 +0000 Matthew Ho http://inspiredworlds.com/?p=755 I will never understand why people do sports like this….it must the rush, the adrenalin, overcoming your fears and the risk involved. I cringed when I saw some of those injuries.

Anyhow, this is pure co-incidence – but at work we did a creative exercise where we created online display ads for a fictious energy drink, Fuqu. Then I came across the new Redbull website. I really like what Redbull is doing with its video content. They are positioning it with an adventure / extreme sport image. Redbull is associated with skateboarding, BMX riding, flying planes etc… It’s very cool.

I don’t really drink redbull these days (as they are bad for your health!). However, their videos are very slick and their marketing strategy is very good, particularly with social media. Check out their facebook page and integration with twitter. Redbull sponsored athletes provide Twitter updates and the feed is aggregated onto the facebook page.

I’m out like major wipeouts,

Matt

I heard him speak at Social Media Club Sydney (SMCSYD) and also had the opportunity to have breakfast with him and some other Sydney bloggers. He also had a speaking engagement in Melbourne.

You can read about the events from David here and from Jennifer Frahm (the organiser).

Here’s a pic of the breakfast:

He spoke about buyer personas at SMCSYD – understanding who the buyer is and talking to them in their voice. I thought he was a really good presenter, fun and engaging.

The most compelling thing for me was the idea of giving content away for free. He gave an example of a dentist in boston writing an ebook of Oral sex and health which went viral. It was niche, eye catching topic and controversial and something people want to know about. He’s also a great example himself, as he gave away a few chapters of his current book, World Wide Rave. He also has a free ebook out as well (like the full thing). I actually read the free version of World Wide Rave, liked it, then went out and bought it.

I think a lot of organisations are very scared of using this tactic. They like to build walls around to capture data, and monetise. Don’t build the barriers up. Just give it away for free – don’t coerce them. It will generate more online buzz, be easier to share your idea and thoughts, and if people are interested in you, they will subscribe to hear you……..voluntarily.

I’m about halfway through the book and I got him to autograph it! Check it:

I also helped out in the online marketing of the event as my company, ND sponsored the event in Melbourne. A bunch of my colleagues contributed using our various skill sets from:

• online display ads: nextbrett
• Email marketing: James, Tiff, Me
• Blog: James
• Twitter @socialmediamc: James, Me
• Eventbrite & Copy: Tiff
• And Matt Edge who brought us all together.

If I have forgotten anyone, please feel free to shoot me =) I believe there is an interview video floating around somewhere, so hopefully it gets uploaded soon to the interwebs.

There’s some other bloggers who have blogged about it here:

Iggy Pintado

Justanotherprblog

Online Marketing Banter

Servant of Chaos

If there’s any other blogs out there, let me know and I will link through.

I’m out like World Wide Rave,

Matt aka Inspiredworlds

One of these is the content industry. We have seen recently that the Readers Digest filed for bankruptcy. News Ltd posted a $300m loss in the last financial year.

The World Wide Web can give you almost unparalled access to any kind of information that you want. Its changing the way that we read the news and how much we pay for it. If I can access information anywhere, will I be prepared to pay for it? Will users be prepared to pay for it? And how can publishers and content producers make money from it? How does this affect online services?

At the same time, it is also altering our view of online services.

I’ve just started reading Chris Anderson’s “Free” book which has inspired me to write this as well as the current debate around this topic. The problem is that everyone now expects everything to be free. Chris Anderson’s discusses this briefly, on the divide between the older generation (30+) who are skeptical about anything offered for free, and the younger than 30 (gen x & gen Y) who have grown up in this free era.

Free online services but at what cost?

We get email services for free – gmail, hotmail, yahoo, et al. And these are all really good email services. There’s almost an unlimited capacity of email storage now. Gmail offers 7GB storge for free (Seven! that’s right). Sidenote: You can actually upgrade to 10GB – 400GB for $20 – $400 USD.  Except the cost of free email is advertising. And most people are willing to put up with it.

Free wifi is available in many cafes, particularly in Starbucks in the US – but there is an expectation that you will buy a Starbucks coffee in exchange for the price of free internet access. Its really an economic cross subsidy. Give me one service in exchange for paying for another, which allows the provider to make a profit margin. Free internet means you will stay longer in the cafe, sipping more cups of coffee whilst browsing the internet.

Many internet services like Huddle.net, Yammer and countless others more offer you a good service for free. They try to entice you by giving you a basic version and hoping that a percentage of users will upgrade to the paid version (when the 80/20 rule kicks in). It forces these kind of companies to be innovative and their competitors as well. Because if I’m not using their service, I could easily jump onto their competitor’s service. 20% of the paid/enterprise customers are subsidising the 80% free customers.

This is the same thinking behind the next release of Microsoft’s office 2010. They’ll give you a web version for free, most likely stripped down. Because if your not using this, your going to be using Google docs which is free.

I use Huddle, a project management software and it gives you a certain amount of capacity for free. It’s quite convenient, and I am seriously considering paying for it to use in my church for project management. I just need to investigate how it would work with many users, etc… I would consider this, because I have used the free service and seen how useful it can be.

The CEO of Box.net, which offers a similar collaboration/storage solution, said this gem of a quote:

“Free is not a business model. It is a distribution and marketing tactic”.

I agree with this 100%. You cannot last in a business environment (especially in a harsh GFC climate like now) without thinking about how you will eventually monetize your business. Free can only last for so long. Really its for marketing purposes, to allow users to sample your services and provide stickiness. If your service isn’t good enough, I’m just going to go somewhere else. So it keeps these online service providers on their toes.

With Google, they provide such superior search services (bing who?), it keeps drawing you back. They surround the organic search results with paid advertising in the form of search engine marketing on the right hand side. And I am perfectly cool with this, as are many other people. It’s done in a way that is unobtrusive and occassionally offers relevant paid results. Not that I have ever clicked on them, but someone must. Right?

I remember hearing one of the google maps engineers who was asked why does Google provide the google maps API? It’s really comes down to advertising. The more you use google services, the more advertising you are exposed to. However is the cost of free……… advertising? In relation to Google services, yes. Because Google typically starts its services with free and needs a way to monetise its services. It’s really a advertising/media company which also has a side business selling enterprise apps =)

You can provide a free service, but there needs to be something else which is making money. Anderson uses the example of King Gillete who gave razors away but made money through the sale of blades. Wow you with one hand, take your money with the other.

Its the same example for VCR’s/Playstations/Computers, etc… Subsidise the sale of hardware, so you’ll buy the software. Its the software / videos/DVD’s which have a higher profit margin and you’ll consume more of once you have the hardware.

I actually think that they could offer the iphone for almost free or heavily subsidised. And make the money back through apps. I know there’s a group of people out there that refuse to pay for apps. But there’s enough people (a minority) that will pay, and scaled over the millions that own iphones, its enough to generate significant revenues for Apple and the developers that create those apps.

So what’s the deal with online news content?

If I want the latest news, I can jump onto news.com.au and read any of the articles. If they build a paywall around it, I’ll just go to New York Times. I’m really only one click away. Or more likely, I’ll just search in google and end up reading an article from Google news, which is the king of all aggregators. They suck in content, strip it down and spit it out.

You can’t simply just aggregate content. Because you’ll just be re-aggregated by someone bigger or some other new service. It’s a continual battle. You need to produce original content which draws people in and they want to share.

The news industry is very different to many other industries because of its dynamics which focus on content, editorial standards, readership/subscription model, rapid distribution of news, classified advertising, etc…

I spoke about it with David Meerman Scott about it briefly this morning and he had some thoughts around creating customised content based on the user’s preference. I think this idea is worth exploring. As I’ve stated before, the business model of the  news industry needs to change. The question is – to what? What will people pay for?

You can’t just give stuff away for free. Their is a cost involved. You need a cross subsidy or some way to generate income back in return – whether through advertising ala google, or a freemium model.

But give me the news that I WANT, on demand and I might pay for that. I see BBC news and also news.com.au moving to this model. They allow you to rearrange the content based on what I want to read. Allow me to select my preferences. Perhaps they can build some intelligence around my behaviour. Understand what I like to read, what is sticky to me, what engages me, what I share with my friends. What conversations I am having on facebook, twitter, etc… about your news article.

Feed that loop back in. Know that I am interested in sports, particularly basketball & football. Hip hop music, international affairs, quirky news articles, etc… Make sure these kind of articles rise to the top. Create me an igoogle type portal or a popurl interface.

I would consider paying for this type of service. Would I consider paying on a ala carte basis per article? No. I would pay a monthly fee and consume as much as I could. If it works for Pay TV, this could work for news as well. Even though there is free to air tv, people pay for premium tv services that offer a greater variety of shows, and latest movies. Give me somethign superior to what is free, and I believe users will pay. It works for huddle, yammer and other online services. Why can’t it work in the news industry (despite its different dynamics)?

I don’t believe that the news industry should solely rely on advertising to monetise content despite the advances of advertising technology. Consumers are sick of pop-up ads, pop-unders, take over ads, pre-roll ads, banners. That stuff doesn’t work anymore.

If you know me, I’m a big fan of Mark Cuban’s blog, and he’s also got some ideas around this which are worth reading.

I’m out like free content,

Matt aka Inspiredworlds