FT Declares Independence (from Apple) Day

It sounds like a dream come true: cut costs and maintain control of the business. The risk: What will the FT -- which won't be selling digital subscriptions through Apple's stores -- miss out on? What about the lead generation Apple's 200 million registered (with credit cards on file) users can ...

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Nine Questions as the NYT’s Pay Fence Gets Ready to Go Global

Is part of the plan a backdoor Sunday paper/digital access new bundle? Three of the people I talked with on the day of the announcement had begun to run the subscribe-to-Sunday, get-free-digital access numbers in their head. At a $4-a-week introductory rate, that’s $208 a year. Which gets you ...

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NYT’s Good Timing on Pay Launch, Amid News Chaos

Here is the growing epiphany about these core readers: Not only do they pay you, they use lots more than the fly-by people, the non-core sent by Google, Facebook, Twitter and all manner of other referrals. More than 50% of the Financial Times traffic comes from about 10% of its unique visitors, ...

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Apple’s “New” Policy: Looking Beyond Digital Circ Dollars to Ads & Data

Digital circulation money, though it may the highest profile part of this story, isn't the most curious issue involved here. There are at least three big issues for media companies -- and you can put Netflix, Hulu and Rhapsody in the mix here -- surfacing here: Selling a customer across all ...

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The Newsonomics of 2011 News Metrics to Watch

What percentage of unique visitors will actually pay for online access?It’s going to be a tiny percentage — maybe one to five percent of all those uniques, the majority tossed onto sites by search. If it’s less than one percent, paid metered models may be of little consequence. At two percent, ...

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The Newsonomics of Tablets Replacing Newspapers

A few companies are now laying new strategy, based on private projections. They are forecasting that 20-25 percent of their print readers will migrate to the tablet within five years. (Remember, at the forecast rates, one in five Americans would have a tablet by 2014.) All admit that it’s ...

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The Newsonomics of All Access — & Apple

Put these three phenomena together — a multi-platform world in which the tablet becomes a prime part of daily news reading, reading that will be partly charged for — and you have the shiny new business model of 2011: all-access. I’ve written about all-access and exhorted those publishers with ...

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Apple & the News Industry: Accommodate, Negotiate or Litigate?

Negotiation is helped greatly by competition. Ironically, Google, the first big web middleman to drive the newspaper industry nuts, may prove useful here as its Android-powered tablets (Samsung, Dell and more) take on the iPad. Can Google strike a 10% deal with the newspapers, setting a ...

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9 Questions on Apple’s “iTunes for News” Store

Isn't Apple wanting 30% of fees for apps a little like [Sony CEO] "Howard Stringer demanding 30% of the revenue produced by TV shows running on Sony TV sets"? That's how a friend put it to me when we talked today. It's a confusing world, no doubt, but still Apple is fundamentally a ...

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Poor Circulation: Are Newspapers Ready for Tablet’s Prime Time?

Are newspaper companies at all ready for prime-time of tablet news-reading world?

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