What Are They Thinking? Microsoft C.E.O. Satya Nadella Sees The Future and It’s … Subscriptions

On Monday, Microsoft released Office 2016, its update to the most-used set of basic workplace tools. That long-awaited preview carries with it actual news of a fundamental change in the strategy of one of the world’s wealthiest and most profitable companies. C.E.O. Satya Nadella says the ...

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The Newsonomics of the Digital-Only Paywall Parade

How much do top-echelon journalists need media brands? How much do brands need top-echelon journalists? The timing of pay initiatives from Andrew Sullivan and from The Daily Beast will provide a great picture into those questions. One way we’ll see how that contest goes is in comparing the ...

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The Newsonomics of Google’s (Ad) Singularity

Add it up, and Google moves to its next stage. Paid search equals about half of digital advertising, and the Google absolutely dominates that business, with a still-astounding 82 percent market share. Since buying Doubleclick for a paltry $3.1 billion in 2007, it has moved to become the display ...

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The Newsonomics of Pricing 101

Let’s start with this basic principle: People won’t pay you for content if you don’t ask them to. That’s an inside-the-industry joke, but one with too much reality to sustain much laughter. It took the industry a long time to start testing offers and price points, as The Wall Street Journal and ...

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The Newsonomics of 1, 2, 3, 4

It’s 1, 2, 3, 4, as in: 1 brand 2 major sources of revenue, advertiser and reader 3 products: print, computer, and mobile 4G, as in the coming of faster connectivity

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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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Paywalls, Patch, Public Media & Pointcast Memories: 11 Conventional News Wisdoms We’ll Test in 2011

Conventional Wisdom #1) Readers won't pay for non-business content. Yes, we know that readers will pay for the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, and that Consumer Reports, which helps us save money, counts more digital subs than anyone else. While some smaller dailies have begun to ...

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The Newsonomics of Eight Per Cent Reach

That 92-percent “open” market — maybe 23 million businesses — tells us how early we are in this digital marketing movement. Commerce change is one thing. For those who care about the news, the big thing to watch is whether those dollars, as they move digitally, move to companies that produce ...

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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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Three Words to Remember: Social Media Optimization

Editors — gatekeepers — had long picked out stories for their readers. Now we’re picking out stories for each other, flinging them about the digital universe, into our e-mail inboxes, Twitter accounts and Facebook walls. The Google Buzz news just reinforces this wider phenomenon and tries to ...

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