Law 10 – Media and Marketers Find New Ways to Mix and Match

“Everyone wants us to fast-forward to the end of the movie,” Webster notes. He has a sensible point. Given how each Patch rumor — two sites consolidated here, freelance budgets cut back there — is treated as forensic evidence, Webster is in relatively hardy form. He admits that Patch, with its fast expansion, took too much of a one-size-fits-all approach to site deployment, and was too “cookie cutter.” Some of the changes in budgeting — for instance, devoting some site budgets more to marketing awareness and less to paying stringers — derive from overall understandings of the market; others attempt to learn that needs in West Des Moines are different than in West Orange.

Commercial conversation, especially targeted commercial conversation, is the Internet’s next generation of advertising. The first generation of impression-based web ads has been a low-clicking disaster. These new ads — some better executed than others, of course — insult our intelligence less and provide what we could call a freemium ad experience. We’ll pay you for your time, they whisper, by giving you information or perspective you may find useful, and then you may want to buy something from us. The play goes well beyond the Journal and business/financial products, of course, to cars, real estate, furniture, and health. Of course, any news (or entertainment or social) medium has to offer a ready-for-prime-time tablet experience in order to qualify for such commercial conversation. Those that don’t — or only put up barely interactive, PDF-plus tablet products — won’t fool readers or advertisers

Consider how much revenue each of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon earned from outside the U.S in the first three quarters of 2011:

Google: 54 percent
Apple: 54 percent
Facebook: 38 percent
Amazon: 46 percent

The Infinity Stopper: The Internet has just gotten too big for its britches. It is spilling over into our bedrooms, through tablets and smartphones. It assaults us in elevators. It even threatens the passivity of our living-room TV experience, a particular hazard to our culture as Americans lead the world (save Serbia and Macedonia) in couch potatohood. The Infinity Stopper, though, handily offers to put a plug in some of that content, boundaries you know that any media psychologist will tell you are the must-have for 2012. Somehow, The Economist (“Yet Another Reason the Economist is Trouncing Competitors“) got one of the beta Infinity Stoppers and has been going to town with it, extending its limited print franchise into a limited (and quite successful) digital franchise. The simple secret of the Infinity Stopper: a beginning, a middle — and ta-da — an end to the stream of content. As infinity-loving tablet aggregator products now prolliferate (Google Currents and Yahoo Livestand joining Flipboard, Pulse and Zite), both The Daily and AOL’s Editions test out their own versions of the Infinity Stopper, offering a daily snapshot for infinity sufferers. Expect the sale of Infinity Stoppers to mushroom, as publishers just say “no.”

As leading-edge publishers move away from destination-only strategies, they seek to colonize other habitable web environments; Facebook now looks like the friendliest clime, allowing publishers to keep all the revenue from ads they are selling within their Facebook apps. In addition, Facebook is providing aggregated data on user engagement — active users, likes, comments, post views, and post feedback.