The Newsonomics of ARPU, Counting Revenue per Visitor

If close to right, the value of a unique visitor is 3.5x greater for the Times than for HuffPo, in advertising. It’s 4x greater for the Guardian than Mail Online.

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Reed Hastings’ Six Lessons for the Newspaper Industry

"It costs us about a dollar, round-trip, to send DVDs by mail. It costs us less than a nickel to deliver by streaming." Netflix now spends $600 million a year on the postal service [note to Jim Cramer: short USPS now!] and lots of hourly labor checking DVD quality. In the new world the costs ...

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Google’s Snip Machine Makes Local Sites Snippy

Is the FTC looking at the trinity of Google's ad play: Paid Search (AdWords) + Online Display (DoubleClick, acquired in 2007) + Mobile (Ad Mob, acquired in November)....Digital media aren't bought silo by silo; they are bought to reach a set of would-be customers, across platforms and ad type.

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Google’s Fast Flip Dips Publishers’ Toes in Google’s Own Ad Revenues

Fast Flip, Google's hardly secret visual news search product, just made its debut today. It's a premiere that tells us lots about the swirling tradewinds in which the company now finds itself. It also marks two important milestones, one about the slow replacement of news search 1.0 and one ...

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Nine Questions: Philly.Com Gets Risque, Anti-Trust and Newspapers, Senior Niching, craigslist Killers and the Sweet Science of Content

What is Christine Varney taking from her newspaper industry talks? Obama's new anti-trust chief has drawn a lot of attention for her interest in Google's books deal, and beyond that, to Google's great search dominance. Varney has also been meeting with news industry people, management and ...

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Amazon’s Rookie Entry into the Blogosphere

Tech Crunch's Erick Schonfeld broke the news of the flimsiness of the Amazon's vetting process on Thursday. He showed how easy it was for anyone to claim and register anyone's else content, doing so with NYTimes.com's Bits Blog. Good post. It hit directly on the easy invitation to copyright ...

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Google and Newspapers: Fairplay, Fair Share and Fair Use

I think it's time we get beyond this tired storyline and confront the realities of the moment. Just as God didn't ordain that newspapers should drive 25%+ profits from their daily monopolies, God didn't set the pay-out rules that drives current web business models. It's time to re-boot the ...

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Regional Dailies Give Business Away

We can add still another franchise – business news – to those being abandoned by the daily press. I’ve seen slimming of business pages, some announced grandly, some never acknowledged but painfully obvious to newspaper readers. Once-robust sections of eight pages have trickled to six or four, ...

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