Goodbye Pageviews
One of the slides in our New Media Landscape report released earlier this year was “AJAX Killed The Page View.” AJAX is a web technology that allows content to be updated on the page without a whole new page loading. You can see this in action when you use services like Gmail. The problem with AJAX is that it hurts companies who provide better functionality (AJAX technology) by lowering their pageviews, which is the basis for a great deal of online revenue. Comscore just issued a press release that they are aware of this and adapting their measurement for the future by releasing a figure called “Visits,” which will measure frequency based on time, rather than full page views. This will certainly help sites with lots of cutting edge functionality or content that minimize page views over time (for example, video). Only time will tell if this will become the standard for advertisers, however.
Interesting New Music Service Launches
Imagine a combination of Last.fm, streaming radio, satellite radio, a media player, and a digital song player like the iPod. That’s the broad business plan of new music service Slacker, which launched this week. The idea is to take a collaborative music filtering service like last.fm, and deliver it in revolutionary ways, including mixing it with your own digital song collection via its player and presenting the music via an actual hardware device.
With founder members from companies like Musicmatch, Rio, iRiver, their digital music pedigree is pretty strong. But the question remains: Is this a replacement for radio or simply a time waster for those who like to discover new music?
Google Moves Into TV
As long expected, Google has started moving into selling advertising on television. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Google is testing television advertising in Concord, California. This follows Google development or testing of advertising products for newspapers, magazines, and radio.
Consumer Generated Content That Doesn’t Suck
The big buzz this year is consumer-generated content, including several well-publicized campaigns to have “average” viewers produce TV spots for large-scale consumer products. As many have noted before, many of these “amateurs” have worked in the film or televisions business, and the winning spots in these contests had the slick look and feel of your average agency-produced spot. Is this what they really had in mind?
The Discovery Channel had another idea. They recently encouraged viewers to produce parodies of their existing programming such as “MythBusters,” “Dirty Jobs” and others. They aired a number of the parodies on the channel and have posted them on discovery.com for users to watch on demand. They’re sloppy, uneven and some of them are really funny. The bottom line is that they dared to let “real” viewers have their say.
What about other media? How about asking fans to do a spoof of your content? Or how about getting them to produce original bits to win a prize? And, taking a cue from the big consumer product companies, what about getting listeners to produce commercials for an open-minded client? After all, if it’s good enough for the NFL, Unilever and Frito-Lay, it should be good enough for a local advertiser.
YouTube made $15 million Last Year
According to Bear Stearns analyst Robert Peck, YouTube generated $15 million in revenue for all of 2006. This is considerably less than most tech observers had been estimating for the company. Still, Google knew it was buying reach not profits, so the news isn’t entirely surprising. The real news will be when Google figures out a way to filter out copyrighted material and make money on what’s left.
Music Testing By PPM
At the recent Country Radio Seminar, Coleman Research presented their findings on the impact of new music on a station in the PPM world. Coleman overlaid a station’s (KILT’s) playlist with Arbitron’s PPM results for the station to try to get some indications of the impact of playing new songs on audience flow. The presentation is available from Coleman research.
The results showed interesting differences on audience flow by daypart, song tempo and number of historical spins. There’s still a lot to be learned, but it’s fascinating to look at the ebb and flow of the audience. Note, however, that knowing what happened is not the same as knowing why. In his conclusion, Jon Coleman seemed to be warning not to overreact too much to individual data points. We’ll let him have the last word, “The ratings needle is moved more by dramatic programming and marketing changes than by just the music.”
Higher Fees For Streaming
The Library of Congress’ Copyright Royalty Board announced the new rate structure for streaming music fees for the period covering 2006 to 2010. These changes will affect all entities that use the statutory license to stream non-interactive programming. That means that terrestrial radio stations that stream their signals or internet-only radio stations will be paying higher rates, effectively immediately. In fact, the changes are retroactive to 2006.
The new rates have not officially been released, but what’s leaked out shows the per song fee going up by about 50% in 2007, compared to 2005. And by 2010, the fees will have increased by about 250%.
What does this increase mean for terrestrial radio? Will companies and stations take the short view that this is costing more money, or will they take the long view that listeners expect stations to stream? NPR has made the initial statement in the matter, filing an official appeal that uses strong language on the unfairness of the rates and what they could do to streaming music on the Internet.
