Full story here

USA TODAY newspapers feature AT&T QR codes

USA TODAY and AT&T are working together to help to provide an enhanced experience for news consumption, which includes printing QR codes onto the pages of the newspaper in order to allow readers to use their smartphones so that they may gain further information relating to the content and the latest news.

Readers of USA TODAY can now use their devices in combination with a QR code scanning app – such as the free AT&T Code Scanner – to be redirected to additional interactive multimedia content. The partnership between the newspaper and telecom companies lets readers enhance their experience by bringing the best of both worlds together; the excitement of the mobile device news experience that is up to date and interactive, with the comfort of reading a traditional printed newspaper.

Over the next few months, these QR codes will continue to be printed into every section of the newspaper. Furthermore, the barcodes will also have a featured spot in the USA TODAY Sports Weekly, in addition to certain additional publications.

According to the USA TODAY executive editor of content distribution and programming, Chet Czarniak, the newspaper is very proud of their ability to include themselves among the first American publications to use the interactive barcodes on a daily basis. He added that they are looking forward to being able to provide an enhancement of the overall experience through the partnership with AT&T.

Czarniak said that “This initiative furthers our goal to bridge digital and print by providing our readers easier access to special features.”

In a bid to boost its digital revenue, the Los Angeles Times has struck a deal with Arkadium, a major online game developer, to add more than two dozen games to that section of its website.

This will add diversions like Mahjongg Dimensions, complete with Twitter and Facebook integrated, to a vertical of the site that already includes activities such as Crossword puzzles and Sudoku.

The audience of the Times’ site has grown substantially this year, reaching more than 17 million unique visitors a month. However, for many newspapers, the problem at the moment is that even increases in online traffic have not let to increases in advertising revenue.

Also Read: L.A. Times Rocked by More Turmoil: Top Editor Quits With Cuts Looming (Updated)

Whether games are an effective method of changing that remains unclear, but this deal is a small step in trying to widen the digital revenue stream.

“Given the ever-rising popularity of casual games, adding Arkadium’s titles allows us to further engage latimes.com’s users and entice previously untapped gaming enthusiasts to visit our site throughout the day,” Jennifer Collins, the Times’ Vice President for Digital Revenue Products, said in a statement. “We are also creating a previously unavailable opportunity for our advertisers to reach Southern California’s casual gaming audience and in the process establish another digital monetization platform.”

Collins statement makes the two motives quite clear -- that these games bring more users each day, and that those customers stick around and get sucked in by advertisements.

The Times hired Collins in late November as part of an overhaul of its digital revenue team. Both she and Andrea Nunn were hired while three other employees were promoted to either fill new spots or replace individuals who left.

At the time, John O’Loughlin, the Times’ chief revenue officer and executive vice president for advertising sales indicated that the Times was looking for new methods to court advertisers on mobile, social and other platforms.

 

 

 

 IPads, and tablet devices in general, continue to look like a big opportunity for newspapers and magazines. From Marketing Charts. Full story here

 

Bigger Screens Promote Print, Video
Resulting from what Nielsen analysis identifies as the iPad’s larger screen, iPad users show substantially higher download rates for print and video content than iPhone users.

Most notably, 39% of iPad users regularly access book content, more than three times the 13% of iPhone users who do so. In addition, 33% iPad users regularly access TV shows, three times the 11% of iPhone users who do so. And the 32% of iPad users who regularly access movies is virtually three times the 12% of iPhone users who regularly access movies.

A smaller percentage of iPad users regularly access magazines (25%), but this figure is still three times the 8% of iPhone users reading magazines on their devices.

The two groups display virtually identical rates of regularly accessing mobile radio (21% of iPad users and 22% of iPhone users). iPhone users are more likely to regularly access news (53% to 44%) and music (51% to 41%). In all of these cases, screen size is less important or irrelevant to the content experience.

6 in 10 iPad Users Pay for Apps
Application providers who do not offer paid iPad apps may want to start. Six in 10 (63%) iPad users have paid to download an app. In addition, only 5% say they only download free apps, suggesting a high willingness in this group to pay for applications.

Again likely reflecting the iPad’s larger screen size, the two most popular paid iPad apps are games (62% of paid iPad app downloaders have downloaded a game app) and books (54%). Other popular paid iPad apps include music (50%), and shopping and news/headlines (45% each).

Nielsen also notes that 4% of US households currently own tablet computers (a category including, but not limited to, the iPad).

iPad Users Skew Younger, Male
iPad owners skew younger and more male than owners of many other portable computing devices, according to other recent Nielsen data. Sixty-five percent of them are male and 63% of them are younger than the age of 35.

In terms of likelihood to be male, the only device researched by Nielsen that even approaches the iPad is the Sony Playstation Portable (PSP), with 62% male ownership. In terms of age, iPad owners skew slightly older than iPod Touch owners (66% younger than 35) and PSP owners (68% younger than 35).

About the Data: The Nielsen Company recently surveyed more than 5,000 consumers who already own a tablet computer, eReader, netbook, media/games player, or smartphone.

Here is something you don't hear very often - I think the French Government might be right.

From PaidContent.org.  Full story here

French authorities have finally got some kind of ruling against Google (NSDQ: GOOG) - but it turns out to be rather toothless.

The competition watchdog, L’Autorité de la Concurrence, in an opinion expressed to the finance minister, says Google is “dominant” in search advertising (no surprise there - Google’s search share in Europe is far higher than in the U.S.).

But it did not rule Google that is abusing that dominance, instead saying: “This dominance is, of course, not wrong in itself: it is the result of a tremendous effort of innovation, backed by significant and ongoing investment. Only the abuse of such market power could be sanctioned against.”

The authority says it has reviewed the search advertising market and defined what would constitute anti-competitive acts within it. But it has stopped short of actually testing Google or anyone else against those definitions, saying: “The authority, which is acting in an advisory capacity, did not rule on the legality of such practices ... investigations are often long and complex.”

In other words, the authority’s determination in no way leads to a kind of “Google Tax” that some had been considering.

The authority’s most concrete ammunition is aimed at Google News, in defence of what it calls “the special case of the press”. Denouncing “a form of economic parasitism”, it says news publishers should be able to request exclusion of their material from Google News, separately from whether their sites are crawled by Google’s main search service. L’Autorité de la Concurrence says it is falling in with a recent Italian ruling on this.

Update: Google tells us: This has actually always been possible, and we made the process easier in December 2009 - here’s the announcement.”

It says it “welcomes” the consortium recently founded by eight French news publishers to jointly operate paid digital news kiosks - an opinion that will wipe out any notion that such collaboration might attract cartel concerns.

“The press is now facing the challenge of digital and it would not be overly serious to designate Google as the main cause of difficulties experienced by this sector,” the authority states.

Responding to the concerns of publishers, who fear Google robbing their advertising clients, the authority says the government should table amended laws that would force Google to give more disclosure on how much it pays out via AdSense, possibly via a third party.

 

This survey teaches us that people are moving from print to their tablet devices, in this case the IPad to read the news. But what is a little suspicious is that it claims that people are dropping their print subscriptions at an alarming rate- if they spend more than an hour a day reading news on their IPad.  And out of the 1,600 people surveyed they never actually say how many spend an hour a day reading news on their IPad.

From AdWeek. Full story here

Are iPad Apps Killing Newspapers? Survey Says…

Apple tablet–using respondents canceling paper subscriptions at alarming rate

Dec 9, 2010

- Lucia Moses

Are iPad apps the new newspaper killer? A new survey out today showed that print newspaper subscribers who are heavy iPad users are “very likely” to cancel their print subscriptions.
 
The survey by the University of Missouri’s Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute is one of the first deep dives into how people are consuming news content on the eight-month-old device and its potential impact on print readership.
 
RJI gathered responses from more than 1,600 iPad users online from September to November.
 
The survey showed that 58 percent of respondents who use the Apple tablet at least an hour a day for news are very likely to cancel their subscription in the next six months. One in 10 said they had already done so and have switched to reading digital newspapers on their iPad.
 
A potential positive finding for newspapers as they try to charge people for their digital content is, nine in 10 said they were likely to use newspapers’ apps to get news, rather than using a Web browser to go to the papers’ Web sites, most of which are free.
 
“These findings are encouraging for newspaper publishers who plan to begin charging for subscriptions on their iPad app editions early next year, but our survey also found a potential downside: iPad news apps may diminish newspaper print subscriptions in 2011," said Roger Fidler, RJI’s program director for digital publishing.
 
In a separate survey released today, GfK MRI found about equal amounts of adults reading newspapers and magazines via apps or mobile devices. Four percent of adults reported reading a newspaper via an app in the past 30 days, compared with 3.7 percent of adults reading magazine content this way.

 

Interesting article from MediaPost. I think they are right in their prediction of US News' future. Full story with interesting comments here

Killing Your Print Business Starves Your Brand

by Ari Rosenberg, Thursday, November 11, 2010, 12:00 PM

"News you can use" is no more.  In case you haven't heard, U.S. News & World Report, the former weekly magazine that rode this tagline into media departments with flair and confidence after Mort Zuckerman purchased it in 1984, has suspended its magazine business except for a few planned one-offs throughout the year.  The company will rely solely on its Web site to drive revenue moving forward. 

Its press release read like a suicide note. 

Even when pages were not included in a buy, the U.S. News print platform gave the brand a unique and credible point of differentiation when up against Web-only properties.  Now they are going head to head with sites that do online better than they do.  It would be like a diner, located next door to a Five Guys, changing its menu to burgers only.   

The number of U.S. News readers who follow this brand online once they stop getting the magazine, will be vastly smaller than the number the brand will abandon -- so overall audience will take a huge hit.  But the hardest hit will be the brand's perceived value.  It will become less relevant to consumers and less significant in an online ad market great at drowning brand value in exchange for cheaper prices.

Someone once shared with me an interesting and provocative perspective on the print advertising business.  He is the former president of The Onion.  At The Onion, he knew his advertising profits came from his brand's Web site.   He also knew he was losing money publishing a free paper distributed in multiple markets.   So why did he stay in the print business?  Easy. Publishing his brand in print became a marketing expense to help increase the brand's awareness, credibility, and value.  

The print platform of a content brand not only drives incremental traffic and subsequent page views to the brand's Web site (and related digital assets), it helps support higher CPMs online.  Removing this platform, and decreasing the overall number of advertising sales calls made on behalf of the brand, is an irrevocable mistake by U.S. News -- signaling an end, not a new beginning.

There is a restaurant in my neighborhood that I used to order business lunches from three to four times a week.    Once or twice a week, I would also order myself dinner.  Needless to say, I was a very good customer.  Two months ago, the restaurant stopped opening for lunch.

I have not ordered dinner from them since.

Consumer appetites are fickle. Once you stop serving your brand the way they are used to consuming it, they pick something else off the menu. 

U.S. News strategists will find this out as they starve this once-proud brand into obscurity.