The life cycle of an Internet phenomenon, in five acts.

Read this.

Then watch this.

Then read this.

Then watch this.

Then wait a few months.

Then read this.

Fin.

Biz of the biz

Biz of the biz, Twit bits

Haven’t heard of Magnetar yet?

You will.

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Biz of the biz

A man is going to stride up a stage today and - with the world hanging on his every word - map out our nation’s economic future.

Unfortunately, that man won’t be Barack Obama. If recent past is precedent, the president’s passed his speechifying prime.

…you know, let’s ditch the pending comparison (as it’s been explored enough to be tortured).

Instead, I’ll assume…

Read more…

Biz of the biz

By the end of this year, tablets of all types will have a less than 1% market share, with 3 million to 4 million units shipping, Endpoint Technologies analyst Roger Kay predicts. “But Apple could blow that forecast out of the water,” he says.

-Baig, USA Today, 1/27

Biz of the biz, Textcerpts

The show hasn’t changed, we have. I’m not a big fan of Mr. Leno’s comedy, but he did a remarkable job of hanging onto Johnny Carson’s audience, losing just a little over 10 percent of the show’s viewers in his first 10 years, according to Nielsen. But as broadband Internet and DVRs became ubiquitous in recent years, “The Tonight Show” and much of network television disappeared into a thicket.

Ratings for “The Tonight Show” fell off a cliff the year before Mr. O’Brien took over in 2009, dropping to about 4.7 million viewers a night, from about 5.5 million, or 15 percent, in a single year, according to Nielsen.

-David Carr, New York Times, 1/18

Biz of the biz, Textcerpts

The world is richer with a solvent New York Times, even if I’m the poorer for it:

After a year of sometimes fraught debate inside the paper, the choice for some time has been between a Wall Street Journal-type pay wall and the metered system adopted by the Financial Times, in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. The [New York] Times seems to have settled on the metered system.

Sherman, New York Magazine, 1/17

This is famously take-two for the NYT - which is shifting gears, in part, to capitalize on the impending Apple tablet - and arguably is well-overdue, given the website’s amazing quality and huge readership paired with the paper’s broader financial concerns. As Joe Reader, I feel much more comfortable with the NYT shifting to a metered system than if the paper had imposed a flat pay wall, too. It’s a smart strategy in an era of widespread fractional purchases, with masses spending $1.99 on an episode of Glee or $5.99 on a Kindle version of a Dan Brown bestseller.

However, it still pales next to a solution that my uncle (an early entrepreneur on the Internet) argued for a decade ago: Why not have your credit card information embedded in your browser, and then have ALL elite sites minimally charge for viewing their best pages, with varying rates?  (So - for every nytimes.com breaking news story, $0.02 per hit; for Yahoo! fantasy football’s “best roster moves of the week” column, $0.05, and so on.)

Isn’t this feasible and palatable at this point? Obviously, there’s an easy avenue for piracy - someone copying the contents of the best page and posting them, free, on a message board or blog - but it also allows for some revenue on heavily trafficked pages, beyond ads.

Biz of the biz

The New York Times issued three news alerts on Tuesday - one as thousands died in Haiti, another when Google threatened an industry-shaking pullout of China, and a third after a comedian warned that he’d quit his low-rated TV show.

Obviously, it’s a fun story to follow; late-night comics like Kimmel are piling on NBC, and everyone I’ve talked to seems to have an opinion. The whiff of scandal and Conan deathwatch also have the Internet abuzz and driven Tonight Show ratings up, up, up.

But is this a real story, worthy of the NYT’s red-ball coverage?  If not, why do we care so much?   Read more…

Biz of the biz, Cultural catch-all

Odds are high Google could be left largely on its own in taking concrete steps to confront the Chinese government. Veteran observers of trade between the countries suggest that Google, and the U.S. generally, has very little leverage to press China to back down on Internet censorship or other issues.

-Jessica Vascellaro, Wall Street Journal, 1/13

NPR: Does Google violate its ‘don’t be evil’ motto? (November 2008)

Biz of the biz, Textcerpts