• 390,000 digital subscribers overall.
• Growth rate of 20% fourth quarter over third quarter.

Those are the public numbers. We’re left to extrapolate the dollars. My extrapolation is that the run-rate for the Times’ new digital revenue is about $86 million a year. We take the 390,000 digital subscriber number and assign an average revenue per digital customer of $221 a year. At its four-week (or 13X a year) billing rate, that’s a little less than $17 every four weeks. Full all-access (tablet + smartphone + online) costs $35 each period, tablet access $20, smartphone, $15. So let’s take the differing price points, rolling intro offers (99 cents for the first month), special deals and cancellations into account. Let’s believe that it’s the lowest price point digital product (online + smartphone) for $15 each four weeks generates the majority of buys. Let’s then use a $17 average.

That produces $86 million a year, or more than eight times what the Times took in annually from Times Select; time to bury that ghost. If we compare it to some other Times’ yardsticks, it takes on more meaning:

• It’s 12% of the the New York Times overall circulation revenue for the year. That puts the annual circulation number in positive territory — up 3% for the year, and a lively 8% for the fourth quarter – reversing the 2010 trend.
• It’s $100 million less (about $186M for New York Times itself) than the amount of digital advertising revenue for the year. So it’s important, but the digital ad number still is more decisive in making up for the print revenue decline. Despite 10% digital ad growth for the News Media group (without About properties), the NYT property still saw a 3% decline in ad revenue for the year. One more way to look at it: the Times took in $22 million less in advertising overall in 2011, so new digital circulation revenue exceeded that decline by 4X.
• It’s 1.1% of the Times’ 33 million U.S. unique visitors, once we take out international buyers. That one percent seems like a tiny number, but it’s 34% of its print circulation. Anyhow, “total unique visitors” are getting to be close to an irrelevant number. Paid readers who also consume a majority or strong plurality of page views are the customers the Times’ care about.
• It’s four times ousted CEO Janet Robinson’s good-bye payout. That’s small consolidation to outraged staffers, dealing with their own 1% issue.
• It’s four times the dividend family members are hoping to see reinstated. The dividend paid out $20.8 million in 2008. Even they need to be kept happy to keep the Times out of public play, there are few new dollars to assuage them.

So, overall, the Times digital circulation seems to be an increasingly important part of the next-gen publishing model, but not an earth-shaking one. I think much of the story — and import — here is behind the scenes. As we look at the mechanics of selling digital access, we see a business model with birthing pangs, and one that may lead to anticipated and unanticipated healthy development. In talking with Paul Smurl, VP of paid products for the Times, this week, I picked up some related datapoints that help us understand what this first year may lead to:

• 70%+ % of the Times’ print subscribers have now “authenticated.” That’s hugely important. Several years ago, the Times began exhorting its print subscribers — through direct mail and e-mail — to sign up for online access to the Times, laying the ground work, intentionally and unintentionally, for the model of All Access that it introduced a year ago. In August, 2010 the Times had only 50% of Times subscribers registered. That didn’t mean that only 50% read the Times online. It meant that a significant portion didn’t read the Times online and that those who did, but didn’t register, didn’t associate much value with their print subscription payment. Why register, when anyone can go to nytimes.com and read for free?

Now, with three-quarters of print subscribers registered, the Times has climbed a major mountain. Paying customers increasingly see value in both print and digital. The Times can begin, as it has to link up print subscriber profiles (address, demographics, buying history, and more) with digital usage (what read on which device when and lots more). So through these initiatives, the Times is moving — as every smart publisher must — toward a single view of its reader customer. That view then informs the Times’ ability to better target advertising and to sell readers more digital and print stuff, like the New York Times Store. (And it’s all about stuff, as George Carlin timelessly reminds us.)

• Look beyond subscription sales. Hearst, Rodale, Conde Nast and other magazine publishers have led the way in producing new ebook specials. The future here — think of mining the NYT database — is game-changing. Smurl says he thinks of it as “SKU management,” a new discipline for a new publisher. Look for the Times to start with specials around events like the Olympics and the Oscars, feeling its way along as it figures out “cover price,” sponsorship and ad potentials.
• Compare old and new world costs of acquisition: It costs a lot for a newspaper to sign up a new subscriber. I’ve heard estimates from $50 to $200 per new customer. The cost of acquiring a digital customer can be as little as near-zero to a small fraction of the print cost. Here, we begin to get into the positives of the digital press shift; picking up new customers costs far less. CFO Jim Follo noted on this morning’s call that costs for the company will not decrease this (the first time in four years), and part of the reason is increased spending on digital marketing. The Times is pouring the limited cash it has in going to digital subs.
• Churn is less with digital than print customers: Skeptics opined that people might sign up, but then flee after sampling the paid digital product. The opposite appears true: Smurl says digital churn is less than print churn. Add together the low cost of digital acquisition and the lower churn, and you have a formula for much digital marketing experimentation in 2012 and beyond. Who is the Times trying targeting to buy? “Like-mindeds,” in Smurl’s parlance, those with curiosity, societal engagement — and education and income to match.
• About 12% of digital buyers live outside the U.S.: That’s a growing number. It’s an indication that the Times is becoming a global news medium. Of course, that’s always been true, in Internet times, but largely meaningless. It’s been hard to sell advertising outside the U.S. (other than the Times-owned International Herald Tribune’s traditional business) and, of course, there was no way to make money from digital readers. Now that’s changed. With only 5% of the world’s population (last week I focused on this upside in “The Newsonomics of the Global Media Imperative“), the Times has huge growth potential beyond its core market. By 2016, I wouldn’t be surprised if 25% of the Times’ digital subscribers — many with no access to print, remember — are non-U.S.
• Exploiting Sunday: It took about 12 seconds for Times’ readers to figure out the new subscription math, when the company when digital-paid last year. When they did the math and saw they could get the four-pound Sunday paper and “all-digital-access” for $60 less than “all-digital-access” by itself, they took the newsprint. Which stabilized Sunday sales, and the Sunday ad base. Then the Times was able to announce a near-historic fact in October: Sunday home delivery subscriptions had actually increased year-over-year, a positive point in an industry used to parsing negatives. Now, Sunday is emerging a key point of strategic planning. Keep the Sunday paper strong for at least several more years — and quite likely longer — and the Times gains a fighting chance to find a print/digital hybrid model to sustain its journalism.

In addition to his day job, Smurl has been busy over the last year talking to newspaper publishers, near and far, about going paid. Dozens of people have filed into the Times to see what they can learn, and apply. In addition to the tricks of the trade, Smurl finds itself offering quasi-spiritual advice. “You can’t be apologetic about charging,” he tells his often down-hearted visitors. “Sometimes it’s as much a motivational session as anything else,” he says. Today’s motivational lesson heard all around the media world is summed up neatly in four words: 390,000 paying digital subscribers.

Let’s elevate, for a moment.

Let’s take a NASA view of the media landscape, enjoying the clear, whole-earth picture of our struggling news planet.

The wide view would tell us that, although the U.S. often believes itself to be the straw that stirs the global drink, we make up but 5 percent of the world’s population. Our special friends in the U.K. make up only another 1 percent. While much of the world’s digital inventiveness and entrepreneurial investment is born in the U.S.A., the marketplace for digital news, media, and information products has been going increasingly global.

The global digital media revolution is transforming how, in economic terms, we now think of the business. Global growth is no longer an add-on to the usual in-country business model; it’s becoming a major driver of business — and product — planning.

As we look at the newsonomics of the global media imperative, let’s pick out just a few of the many diverse datapoints on which we have to draw:

• The Financial Times, probably the single best model of print-to-digital transformation success, has announced that its digital business leader, Rob Grimshaw, is leaving Number One Southwark Bridge, astride the Thames, for New York City. Grimshaw is managing director of FT.com, and his business is truly global. The company, founded in 1888, now finds 31 percent of its readers in the Americas and only 23 percent in the U.K. — with another 13 percent now in Asia. For the FT, Grimshaw’s move is logical: Go where your customers are, and to the heart of digital innovation. (Talk to Europeans in the digital business, and they’ll tell you how America-centric, and West Coast-centric, the digital business is, somewhat to their dismay.) For the FT, even with its good number of American consumers, the U.S. is “an emerging market,” a belief held by Reuters as well.
• If you were to name the FT’s most head-to-head competitor (for time, and thus indirectly for money), it would be The Wall Street Journal. The Journal’s digital audience is now 30 percent international, and just last week in launched still another international local (in native language) edition, for Germany. The Journal’s crosstown rival, The New York Times, is moving globally as well. Already 12 percent of its paying digital subscribers are international, with the Times applying its pay strategies to its European operation, the International Herald Tribune. Last year, it also launched India Ink, focused on that country’s news and culture, with an on-the-ground team there. Expect the Times to move into China this year.
• Less than a year after launching its first non-U.S. site in Canada, Huffington Post last week added an Italian site, alongside its French one. It continues negotiating with publisher partners in several other western European countries, following up on Arianna’s meet-and-greets there last fall.
• The (second) British invasion of the U.S. continues apace (“The newsonomics of the British invasion,”), as the Guardian (reinvigorated U.S.product), the Independent (using Press+ to sell access to U.S. consumers), the BBC (staffing up editorial and ad pushes) and the Daily Mail, which announced a new U.S. push last year and said last week it is now moving on to India.

This isn’t just about news media. Netflix, in yesterday’s earnings report, tells us that almost 10 percent of its streaming business is now global, almost two million of 21 million streaming subscribers. That global growth — and huge upside — is balancing Netflix’s 2011 pricing stumbles.

For an even bigger picture perspective on the global imperative, let’s look at the four digital behemoths that are reshaping everything in their paths (get out of the way, if you can, or accede to junior partner status). Consider how much revenue each of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon earned from outside the U.S in the first three quarters of 2011, from my recent report for Outsell, “Getting it Right with GAFA”:

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

Yes, there’s lots of current political hullaballoo about “bringing jobs home to the U.S.,” but the truth is that much of the digital industry, as with their brethren in the Fortune 500, is now truly global. Look at those GAFA numbers and you have a harder time thinking of them as American companies, in the traditional sense of serving American customers.

Forget the 99 percent meme; think of the 95 percent (outside the U.S.) as the real opportunity for the companies formerly known as national. (And, yes, the global imperative further illustrates the difficulty that metro and community newspapers face in finding growth. Other than metro newspapers’ smartphone, tablet, and web city-guide potential for international visitors — $1.34 trillion spent by 60 million of them last year — the lure of global riches doesn’t do much to support community journalism in our far-flung land.)

It’s a stark fact for what once were nationally defined media businesses: If you don’t go global, you’re at an increasing disadvantage to your competitors — and who isn’t a competitor for audience or advertising? If you stay nationally focused, you’re trying to wring as much revenue out of a much smaller market, while competitors are building their top line and their capability to innovate with global revenues. So increasingly, I think we’ll see media companies that are either global or regional/local, with national ones more the exception than the rule. Yes, there’s a role that the English language plays here, as about a billion people worldwide may read English well enough to be eligible audience, and, that, too adds to the imperative to compete against other English-first media based in London or New York. Yet as proven with the Journal’s non-English editions, this is about more than language domination. We also see early signs of non-English products finding their way to English speakers, as Worldcrunch (“All news is global”) brings translations of top worldwide titles to the market.

There are lots of ways to play the global game. Many newspaper companies are putting out editions of their core product, aimed at in-country issues. Some are putting a new face on the same content. Then there are those truly becoming multi-national news and information companies.

You’d have to put Oslo-based Schibsted in that group. Now eighth overall by revenue in the global news industry, the company operates online classifieds businesses in 28 nations; in 20, that’s its main business. Those nations can be found on three continents and now include such populous growing markets as India, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia, as well as much of Latin America. That’s a truly global play that is supplying Schibsted with 49 percent of its profits, on just 25 percent of total revenues.

News Corp. — the leading company by news revenues worldwide — is certainly flexing its muscles, even if it contracts them for the time being in the U.K. amid scandal. Just in the last week, we saw the company’s moves in Turkey and Afghanistan, which aim to add to its presence on every continent. As a pipes (satellite and cable) and content company, the lines between the two will blur. Expect for instance, products like the innovative WSJ Live  (“The Newsonomics of WSJ Live“) to find carriage all over the world as digital distribution and monetization mature.

A lot of what we are seeing in the marketplace today is prologue. If you look at how small the non-home-market revenues are for many companies — in the low single digits — we see not global businesses, but national businesses with stronger global intentions.

What’s your signature content?

Quick: If somebody buttonholed you in an elevator, a school play, or a bar, and said, “Why should I pay you for that?” — what do you tell them?

Each passing week, it seems we’re further into the age of signature content. That only makes sense: If the death of distance is now old news, if everything is available everywhere at the touch of button or the swipe of a finger, then what makes any news or entertainment brand stand out amid this plague of plenty?

Closed systems — from three or four TV networks to less than a dozen big movie studios to a half-dozen major magazine publishers to geographically dominant newspapers — made signature content less important. Sure, big shows and big names have always driven media to some extent, but now, media without big names or big shows are going to get lost in the ether. Take Hulu’s announcement last week about Hulu Originals. You do have to wonder if Hulu’s fictional 13-episode “Battleground,” about a dysfunctional political campaign, will be bested by the Republican reality show in progress when the show debuts next month. Hulu is also bringing a Morgan Spurlock series for a second run, and probably will feature one other new program. The Hulu announcement joins Netflix’s own foray into signature content. Three years ago, would the thought of Netflix signing up Little Steven to do an original comedy series have crossed anyone’s imagination?

Hulu and Netflix both need to distinguish themselves in the market — not only from each other, but from Comcast, DirecTV, and Time Warner, among others. They need to buy protection as supposed masses consider cutting the cord on packaged services, Roku-ing and Apple-enabling Internet video onto their living-room screens. In movies and TV, we’re quickly morphing from a world of news and entertainment anywhere — get all of these things, somewhat haphazardly (Comcast Xfinity, for instance) on all of our devices — to one in which consumers ask, “What special do you have for me, in addition to my all access? Yes, All-Access, the cool feature of 2011, will quickly graduate from a wow to an expectation.

Why as consumers should we pay $7.99 (down from an initial $9.99) to Hulu Plus, when the same stuff (kinda sorta) is available through Boxee, or Apple TV, or Netflix, if I can find it? Why am I paying $7.99 a month (apparently the magic price of the moment) to Netflix for a catalog of films that is both voluminous and too often lacking what I want? Consumers are going to be asking that question a lot more.

Publishers, distributors, aggregators, and networks all want more money, and they’ve seen — courtesy of tablets and All-Access — that consumers are now more ready to pay for digital content than ever before.

Forget “content wants to be free.” Now content wants a fee. And everyone from Time Inc to The New York Times to the Memphis Commercial Appeal to Hulu’s co-owners (Fox, Disney, and Comcast) see gold. They see another digital revenue stream, in addition to advertising or to cable subscription fees. Yet they are increasingly believing they’ve got to up the ante (and Hulu is raising new funds to buy original programming) to compete and to win those consumer dollars.

News companies — at least one in ten U.S. daily newspapers and many consumer magazines — are rapidly embracing digital circulation revenue and All-Access. Yet results have been quite uneven. That makes sense: Consumers will pay for digital news, feature, and entertainment content, but they don’t want to overpay, and they’ll increasingly be forced to make choices. Buy this; let that go.

Let’s be clear. Paid media is paid media, and the original-programming pushes of the video companies have great meaning for news and magazine companies, global to local. For them, the calculus is similar. News and magazine brands can launch new products, though that’s out-of-their-DNA-tough for many. So they’ve focused primarily on sub-brands, many of which are people. These are the faces of news and magazines; many of these have become hot commodities over the last several years (“The Newsonomics of Journalistic Star Power“) as companies try to distinguish themselves — and give readers and viewers a reason to pick them out of the crowd.

How, though, can media companies afford to pay a premium for branded, promotable talent, talent that may open consumers’ pocketbooks? That’s easy: spend less on other content. So we’ve got the rise of user-generated content, obtainable free or cheap, and all kinds of new syndicate action from Demand Media to startup Ebyline (and maybe NewsRight), all trying to make it cheap and easy to get more medium- and higher-quality content more cheaply. What’s old is new again — as a young features editor, I got regular visits from syndicate and wire salesman, ranging from high-quality to the Copley News Service, that sold its stuff by the pound.

Another prominent model no news or magazine company can afford to ignore: The Huffington Post. Back to the early days when Betsy Morgan first teamed up with Arianna, HuffPost has worked this evolving content pyramid. At the top, a few highly paid site faces, many opinionated faces (some paid, most not), and then low-cost aggregation, much of it AP, headlined with the site’s recognizable swagger.

Then, of course, there’s the old standby: staff cutting. We’ve seen lots of staff cutting. In fact, these days, while we see some announcements like Media General’s big Tampa cut, most of the bloodletting is less public, but no less real. If you need to pay more to stars, and ad revenues are still declining, staff cuts of less than premium content (and those that produce it) make economic sense (“The Newsonomics of the New News Cost Pyramid“). It’s the new news math.

These newsonomics of signature content are getting clearer. Netflix is planning to spend 5 percent of its expenses — or $100 million a year — on original, Netflix-defining content. Hulu is spending about a quarter what Netflix’s total, or $500 million in total, on all content licensing this year. We don’t know how much of that is for original content, but observers believe “Battleground” will cost $15-20 million for its 13 episodes. With its other forays, it will probably spend closer to 10 percent of its content budget on original content.

Curiously, many newspaper newsrooms constitute only 10-20 percent of the overall expenses of a daily newspaper company. So we’re starting to see some new, and old, arithmetic play out here.

Simply, Andy Forssell, Hulu’s SVP of content, explained the cost/benefit ratio to Variety: “…having an original scripted series that hasn’t been seen anywhere else yet is considered the best tool for standing out with either advertisers or viewers.”

As usual, we see the bifurcation of the bigger national brands — those with more audience to gain and more money to spend — and local news brands. While many local newspapers have cut to the bone, with too much of the tissue in the form of experienced, name-brand metro and sports columnists cajoled or drummed into “early retirement,” we see increased branding of stars at places like Time, The New York Times, Fox News, and ESPN. The sports network may be the classic business model of our age, and in its anchors and top analysts — many initially lured from daily newspapers — it has shown the way for many years now.

At the Times, consider business editor Larry Ingrassia’s build-up of business columnists, from veterans Gretchen Morgenson and Floyd Norris to new(er)bies Andrew Ross Sorkin, Brian Stelter, David Carr, Ron Lieber, and David Pogue. And the Times more recently picked up James Stewart from archrival Dow Jones.

At Fox News, Roger Ailes has cannily built the most successful cable news operation not on the interchangeable blondes that provide so much fodder for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but on O’Reilly and Hannity.

At NBC, the news franchise is so built around Brian Williams that his well-received newsmagazine “Rock Center with Brian Williams” is synonymous with its host.

At Time Warner’s CNN and Time, we see the building of a worldly franchise on Fareed Zakaria’s clear-eyed, no-nonsense view of our times.

And then there’s the more local and regional press. Newspapers have long believed that it wasn’t any one or a half-dozen names that sold the paper. They’ve believed the news itself was the star, and the daily information report was the brand. That may be still be true of the Times, the Journal, the Financial Times, the Guardian, and a handful of other national/global news organizations — all of which have substantial, multi-hundred newsrooms that produce branded, unique products. It’s less true of regional and local dailies, many of which still present too much commoditized news in national, business, entertainment, and sports coverage, and have bid goodbye to many faces familiar to readers. Those that have retained familiar faces must do what they can to keep them; all need to recruiting more.

Then they may have a good answer to the question, in one form or another, consumers and advertisers will increasingly ask: What’s your signature content?

It’s an emerging issue of our time and place. They know too much about us, and we know too little about what they know. We do know that what they know about us is increasingly determining what they choose to give us to read. We wonder: What are we missing? And just who is making those decisions?

Today, in 2012, those questions are more pressing in our age of news deluge. We’re confronted at every turn, at every finger gesture, with more to read or view or listen to. It’s not just the web: It’s also the smartphone and especially the tablet, birthing new aggregator products — Google Currents and Yahoo Livestand have joined Flipboard, Pulse, Zite, and AOL Editions — every month. Compare for a moment the “top stories” you get on each side-by-side, and you’ll be amazed. How did they get there? Why are they so different?

Was it some checkbox I checked (or didn’t?!) at sign-in? Using Facebook to sign in seemed so easy, but how is that affecting what I get? Are all those Twitterees I followed determining my story selection? (Or maybe that’s why I’m getting so many Chinese and German stories?) Did I tell the Times to give the sports section such low priority? The questions are endless, a ball of twine we’ve spun in declaring some preferences in our profiles over the years, wound ever wider by the intended or (or un-) social curation of Facebook and Twitter, and multiplied by the unseen but all-knowing algorithms that think they know what we really want to read, more than we do. (What if they are right? Hold that thought.)

The “theys” here aren’t just the digital behemoths. Everyone in the media business — think Netflix and The New York Times as much as Pandora and People — wants to do this simple thing better: serve their customers more of what they are likely to consume so that they’ll consume more — perhaps buying digital subscriptions, services, or goods and providing very targetable eyes for advertisers. It’s not a bad goal in and of itself, but sometimes it feels like it is being done to us, rather than for us.

Our concern, and even paranoia, is growing. Take Eli Pariser’s well-viewed (500,000 times, just on YouTube) May 2011 TED presentation on “filter bubbles,” which preceded his June-published book of the same name. In the talk, Pariser talks about the fickle faces of Facebook and Google, making “invisible algorithmic editing of the web” an issue. He tells the story of how a good progressive like himself, a founder of MoveOn.org, likes to keep in touch with conservative voices and included a number in his early Facebook pages.

He then describes how Facebook, as it watched his actual reading patterns — he tended to read his progressive friends more than his conservative ones — began surfacing the conservative posts less and less over time, leaving his main choices (others, of course, are buried deeper down in his datastream, but not easily surfaced on that all-important first screen of his consciousness) those of like-minded people. Over time, he lost the diversity he’d sought.

Citing the 57 unseen filters Google uses to personalize its results for us, Pariser notes that it’s a personalization that doesn’t even seem personalized, or easily comparable: “You can’t see how different your search results are than your friends…We’re seeing a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones.”

Pariser’s worries have been echoed by a motley crew we can call algorithmic and social skeptics. Slowly, Fear of Facebook has joined vague grumbles about Google and ruminations about Amazon’s all-knowing recommendations. Ping, we’ve got a new digital problem on our bands. Big Data — now well-advertised in every airport and every business magazine as the new business problem of the digital age to pay someone to solve — has gotten very personal. We are more than the sum of our data, we shout. And why does everyone else know more more about me that I do?

The That’s My Datamine Era has arrived.

So we see Personal.com, a capitalist solution to the uber-capitalist usage of our data. I’ve been waiting for a Personal.com (and the similar Singly.com) to come along. What’s more American than having the marketplace harness the havoc that the marketplace hath wrought? So Personal comes along with the bold-but-simple notion that we should individually decide who should see our own data, own preferences, and our own clickstreams — and be paid for the privilege of granting access (with Personal taking 10 percent of whatever bounty we take in from licensing our stuff).

It’s a big, and sensible, idea in and of itself. Skeptics believe the horse has left the barn, saying that so much data about us is already freely available out there to ad marketers as to make such personal databanks obsolete before they are born. They may be forgetting the power of politics. While the FCC, FTC, and others have flailed at the supposed excesses of digital behemoths, they’ve never figured out how to rein in those excesses. Granting consumers some rights over their own data — a Consumer Data Bill of Rights — would be a populist political issue, for either Republicans or Democrats or both. But, I digress.

I think there’s a way for us to reclaim our reading choices, and I’ll call it the News Dial-o-Matic, achievable with today’s technology.

While Personal.com gives us 121 “gem” lockers — from “Address” to “Women’s Shoes”, with data lockers for golf scores, beer lists, books, house sitters, and lock combinations along the way, we want to focus on news. News, after all, is the currency of democracy. What we read, what she reads, what they read, what I read all matter. We know we have more choice than any generation in history. In this age of plenty, how do we harness it for our own good?

Let’s make it easy, and let’s use technology to solve the problem technology has created. Let’s think of three simple news reading controls that could right the balance of choice, the social whirl and technology. We can even imagine them as three dials, nicely circular ones, that we can adjust with a flick of the finger or of the mouse, changing them at our whim, or time of day.

The three dials control the three converging factors that we’d like to to determine our news diet.

Dial #1: My Sources

This is the traditional title-by-title source list, deciding which titles from global news media to local blogs I want in my news flow.

Dial #2: My Networks

Social curation is one of the coolest ideas to come along. Why should I have to rely only on myself to find what I like (within or in addition to My Sources) when lots of people like me are seeking similar content? My Facebook friends, though, will give me a very different take than those I follow on Twitter. My Gmail contact list would provide another view entirely. In fact, as Google Circles has philosophized, “You share different things with different people. But sharing the right stuff with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle.” The My Networks dial lets me tune my reading of different topics by different social groups. In addition, today’s announced NewsRight — the AP News Registry spin-off intended to market actionable intelligence about news reading in the U.S. — could even play a role here. (More on NewsRight: “Nine Questions for the Cusp of 2012“)

Dial #3: The Borg

The all-knowing, ever-smarter algorithm isn’t going away — and we don’t want it to. We just want to control it — dial it down sometimes. I like thinking of it in sci-fi terms, and The Borg from “Star Trek” well illustrates its potential maniacal drive. (I love the Wikipedia Borg definition: “The Borg manifest as cybernetically-enhanced humanoid drones of multiple species, organized as an interconnected collective, the decisions of which are made by a hive mind, linked by subspace radio frequencies. The Borg inhabit a vast region of space in the Delta Quadrant of the galaxy, possessing millions of vessels and having conquered thousands of systems. They operate solely toward the fulfilling of one purpose: to “add the biological and technological distinctiveness of other species to [their] own” in pursuit of their view of perfection“.) The Borg knows more about our habits than we’d like and we can use it well, but let’s have us be the ones doing the dialing up and down.

Three simple round dials. They could harness the power of our minds, our relationships, and our technologies. They could utilize the smarts of human gatekeepers and of algorithmic ones. And they would return power to where it belongs, to us.

Where are the dials? Who powers them? Facebook, the new home page of our time, would love to, but so would Google, Amazon, and Apple, among a legion of others. Personal.com would love to be that center, as it would any major news site (The New York Times, Zite-powered CNN, Yahoo News). We’ll leave that question to the marketplace.

Lastly, what are the newsonomics of the News Dial-o-Matic? As we perfect what we want to read, the data capturing it becomes even more valuable to anyone wanting to sell us stuff. Whether that gets monetized by us directly (through the emerging Personals of the world), or a mix of publishers, aggregators, or ad networks would be a next battleground. And then: What about the fourth wheel, as we dial up and down what we’re in the marketplace to buy right now? Wouldn’t that be worth a tidy sum?

There’s an algorithm out there, we can be sure. It’s got all the components of business success for news-creating companies, each value carefully computed and relational to the others. Yet, approaching 2012, the algorithm hasn’t been found. We have but shreds of numbers, beacons of numerals that portend models, but can’t prove them out.

2011 has been a remarkable year. We can point to three major phenomena that profoundly changed the news landscape this year. Each offers up its own half-formed metrics for that magic formula in process, and each has dramatically changed the possibilities of news, each largely positive:

• The transcendant transformative age of the tablet: The first real replacement device for print swept aside doubters, netbooks, and much conventional wisdom before its second birthday. More than one in 10 American adults owns one, with that number likely to more than double in the next two years. Those owners are readers, spending lots of time with news, single brands, and longer stories.  (“The Newsonomics of the Missing Link“)
• The dawn of digital circulation: Forget “paid content.” Forget “paywalls.” It’s the back-to-the future age of circulation: paying for news and magazines that we depend on, no matter how they are delivered to us. All-Access reinforces our relationship with news and magazine brands we like; ubiquitous access (print, online, tablet, smartphone, soon connected TV) allows us to justify paying for convenience as much as the content itself. Publishers are still experimenting with how to get the paid proposition right, but those that do now have a potent second digital revenue source — and that’s a business advantage digital-only competitors lack.
• Social curation joins editorial curation: We knew that Facebook, in particular, and “social” more generally — including Twitter, LinkedIn, most-emailed lists and our own individual sharings — were changing how we all decided what to read. Now, though, social curation is being built into the best publishing models. Why should each of our own personal quests be a virgin start-from-scratch idea when many consumers/searchers/researchers/shoppers (some of them people like us) have tread there before? So social intelligence, gleaned from mountains of data, is becoming a required part of the companies’ product development and consumer experience. Facebook is in the catbird’s seat as that world develops.

Those three game-changing phenomena offer major drivers of change — but not models. For publishers, the near-term is just getting harder and harder; witness Media General’s major cuts of this week in Tampa (16 percent workforce reduction) and elsewhere. Major cuts are happening this month and into January, as publishers gird for another 5-12 percent decline in ad revenues. Continuing profitability can only be achieved by cutting.

Publishers, publicly or not, are embracing the Digital First mantra of John Paton and Clark Gilbert, the industry’s dynamic duo, who put on another show at BIA/Kelsey this week. Everyone’s into the deconstruction/reconstruction of their companies; some are faster, more adroit, and more public about it.

As that reconstruction moves forward, the new magic formula may seem simple: reconfigure costs and revenues. Yet, working the in-between — most publishers still depend on print for 80 percent of their revenues — is hardly formulaic. Building the new cost structure and the new revenue structure, in tandem, with changing audiences and advertising spending habits, is the fixing-the-moving-car-at-65 MPH scenario publishers face.

With that speeding car in mind, let’s look at some of the numbers that will go into that magic formula, when it’s finally perfected. Mix, match, blend, and extrapolate:

5-15 percent: That’s the percentage of many news sites monthly unique visitors that drive half or more of their pageviews. That’s a jaw-dropping number, and one that news companies are just beginning to acknowledge — privately. Why be quiet about it? Look at the annual reports and quarterly financial disclosures of the public companies; they trumpet uniques and pageviews. Yet in the age of news ubiquity, we’ve reached near-infinity in pageviews and of ad inventory. Is there much meaning left to one random web visitor hitting one random web page, courtesy of Google or Facebook, some time in any given month? Not much. Yet, that’s what most people still point to publicly. Privately, the question is the 5-15 percent. These are your customers. How much will they pay for access? How much more valuable are they to targeting advertisers, given you know much more about their reading and shopping habits? The metric needed: How much does a core customer yield annually, and in a lifetime? Then: How do I most efficiently find and convert more of them?

35 percent: That’s the percentage of print readers who will transition to tablet-only by 2014, believes one prominent news company, which is using that forecast in its business planning. High? Low? What’s your number?

$544 a year: That’s a Newspaper Association of America number (from 2009) for the revenue value per unit of Sunday circulation. What will a tablet customer be worth, combining subscriber and ad value? Get that answer right and you can try to accelerate, or slow down, your readers’ embrace of the tablet.

10-20 percent: That’s how much of national news company traffic now comes from mobile; Facebook already says that 35 percent of its use comes from mobile. Yet, in the U.S., only three percent of digital revenue comes from mobile. That’s a huge gap — the audience is way ahead of the money — and it will be closed over the next several years. In fact, in the age of expected anywhere access, “mobile” will disappear as a category. Big issues for publishers: dividing what kinds of revenues can be wrung from tablet (now lumped into “mobile”) and from the brain extensions in our pockets and pocketbooks, the smartphone.

One billion: That’s one estimate of how many smartphones will be shipped worldwide in 2016. It’s a continuing curve upward from the almost half-billion shipped this year. U.S. smartphone penetration is about a third of cellphone owners; so there is lots of headroom for growth. (Singapore’s the first to cross the 50 percent threshold.) Big challenge for news and magazine companies: coming to terms with how to make money on that little screen: advertising, sponsorship, All-Access subs, and more.

63 million: That’s the number of smart TVs that will be shipped in 2011, up from 43.6 million in 2010. 2016 forecast: 153 million. Smart TV is just the next screen, joining the tablet and the smartphone, providing us ubiquity. When WSJ Live (“The Newsonomics of WSJ Live“) — the company’s model-breaking tablet product launched this fall — it included launch partners Samsung and Vizio, leading smart TV makers. This is the beginning of the next wave.

$2.75: That’s the average ad CPM, or cost-per-thousand rate gotten, at one top 15 news sites. Average rates have been going down and are likely to continue doing so. High-targeted and high-branded (combine the two, and you’ve got the best of both worlds) audiences continue to outpace average sites and average inventory. It’s less and less good to be average.

22 percent: That’s the third-quarter increase in U.S. digital ad revenue. Digital ad growth accelerates as print declines more rapidly; in the U.S., it is now surpassing newspapers to become second only to TV. Worldwide, expect the industry to hit $80 billion this year. Within that ad spend, publishers have access to less than half: Paid search continues to be about half the market, with publishers getting only a tiny slice of it. Display/banner ads — publishers’ strongest suit — account for 23 percent of the total. Video is growing 42 percent a year. Performance-based business models (as opposed to selling impressions) now command 64 percent of the market. (Most data from IAB.) So, in all the areas of growth, news and magazine publishers are weakest. Despite uneven digital ad results reported by newspaper and magazine companies, it’s not that the money isn’t there — they just haven’t transitioned their businesses enough to compete for it.

$13 billion: That’s the amount of retail ad revenue the newspaper industry in the U.S. took in for all of 2010, and it’s down this year. Retail makes up roughly half of all newspaper companies’ ad revenue. In a new, circle-the-wagons attempt to hold on to it, ShopCo, a consortium of eight of the large newspaper companies, is building out a new local shopping portal. FindnSave, tested first by McClatchy, should be up in 250 larger markets by the middle of next year. Will it be good enough and big enough, to satisfy both consumers and merchants? (“The Newsonomics of Google’s retail push“)

25 percent: So if a reader drops print and embraces the tablet, and digital access overall, how much savings can a news company achieve? It no longer has to print and deliver a paper, but it still has the costs of maintaining a staff, maintaining distribution, and maintaining a plant. So maybe it costs 25 percent less to fulfill that customer’s access? In this long interim with hybrid digital and print reading, how much of their production costs can companies cut out? The long-term question: At what point can the news industry make a major shift, as most reading becomes digital and a minority of it in print?

56.7 percent: That’s the percentage of downloaders of the Guardian’s new Facebook app who are under 24, with 16.7 percent 17 or younger. For a news industry decrying the lack of young readers and focused on aging baby boomers as the core audience, the Guardian’s early experience is phenomenal. It’s well and good to sell All-Access to long-time print readers; it’s essential to bring in new ones, and Facebook looks like a great bet.

7: Daily means seven days a week for newspapers, right? MediaNews is dropping Monday printing at some Northern California papers. Michigan remains the epicenter of the non-daily daily. Following the 2009 cuts in metro Detroit, Advance is now going digital-first with smaller papers there, with several becoming three- and four-day print “dailies.” The idea: keep 85 percent of print ad money and radically reduce print costs. Publishers take a very deep breath and hope they aren’t cutting the print cord too soon. Expect to see more of such day cuts in 2012 and beyond. It’s a hybrid strategy, and as we see its impacts — on print ad revenue and on digital reader and ad transition — we’ll have new numbers to plug into the model.

> 1 percent: Google now makes 54 percent of its revenue outside the U.S., as does Apple. Such international orientation is a major differentiator in the economy of the day, and not in the publishing and digital industries. Even The New York Times, with impressive global reach, gets only a percent or two of its revenue internationally. In the last year, we’ve seen The Independent (through Press+) selling U.S. access, PBS launching a British channel, and the Guardian relaunching an American foray. Digital media knows no national bounds, but monetizing outside home countries has been difficult. Breaking through this barrier could create significant upside for top publishers.

It looked like just more head-butting among the mammoths of our time: Google will match up with Amazon, said the Wall Street Journal last week: “The Web-search giant is in talks with major retailers and shippers about creating a service that would let consumers shop for goods online and receive their orders within a day for a low fee.”

Most of the stories played on that Goliath vs. Goliath theme, and of course that’s an increasingly familiar one as the businesses of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple overlap, intersect, and collide. Who is a bookseller? Well, Amazon, and Apple, and Google, kind of. Who is selling and renting media — well, who isn’t or preparing to do so? Who is in the hardware biz — all except Facebook? Who’s reaching for the digital ad riches, now generating $80 billion worldwide; Google, the king, and Facebook, the fast-threatening prince.

Yes, the Google/Amazon match-up over delivering goods is a good and real storyline. As big brains butt, it could be thunderous and landscape-changing. That landscape includes the news business, and you can almost feel the rumbles underfoot just with the word of Google’s move.

Let’s look at the newsonomics of Google’s would-be one-day-shipping program — let’s call it Google Tomorrow™© — and its wider impacts and strategic rationale. First, we’re talking about a lot of potential money. U.S. retail e-commerce is forecast to hit almost $200 billion this year, with the global total adding up to $700 billion. So there are many companies trying to get in the middle of it.

The idea of website-facilitated buying — and shipping — from fairly local retailers isn’t a new one by a longshot. Storerunner plied this territory, too early, a decade ago. Webvan, the best funded of the grocery deliverers went from brilliance to punchline in about 30 seconds. Shoprunner is currently out there, pitching the same idea as Google Tomorrow. Newspaper companies have been more steadfast, more the tortoise in the race for perfection of our emerging online/offline commercial world.

Companies like the Gannett-owned ShopLocal and independent Travidia, with its FindnSave product used by McClatchy and other news chains, have been building the know-the-local-retail-inventory, compare-prices-and-buy terrain for years. Unlike what Google may do, they don’t deliver one-click buying and delivery. They offer product selection, availability and then click off to retailer’s own sites for buying and shipping or store pickup. The idea seems like a great one, a merger of the best of online and offline, yet it’s been slow to grow. Every time I’ve checked out the sites, I’ve found the promise smart, but the inventories too uneven or the hierarchy of results skewed to preferred shops — not mypreferences. Consumers have clearly opted for Amazon over these kinds of sites.

The impact on the ShopLocals and FindnSaves is not what should concern newspapers, though. The big issue: retail advertising.

While the web has greatly damaged newspapers’ classifieds and national ad businesses, retail has been a relatively stronger area. Worth about $13 billion last year — or half of daily newspapers’ ad revenue — it’s a lifeline at this point in the tough print-to-digital transition. Retail is being challenged on several fronts, with the Sunday preprint business a big concern. In fact, both Google and newspapers are pursuing e-circulars to counter the inevitable print downturn in that area.

Wait a minute, you may say — that $13 billion is advertising money and Google, like Amazon, wants to make money facilitating actual commerce. But the division between advertising and selling is an old one, fast blurring. Think about where we’ve come from the era of impression-based (newspaper, TV, radio, magazine) ads into the era of pay-per-click, pay-per-lead, pay-per-acquisition, and more.

Retailers don’t want to advertise; they want to sell stuff.

Give them new routes to sell stuff, and deliver it more cheaply than they could before, and they’ll migrate their ad/marketing/lead generation dollars. So if Google can really make it easier to personalize, routinize and make more efficient the selling process, it will place itself between the seller and the buyer. As it does that, it replaces the newspaper as middleman, further reducing much of the revenue that is keeping newsrooms staffed, even if many of them are now half-staffed at best.

Is the replacement of newspaper as advertising-oriented middleman inevitable? Probably, but over a longer term. Since the dawn of the web, people have been chasing the perfection of commerce, and it’s been a tough slog with far more losers than winners. Amazon, of course, is the big winner, but with relatively small profits, a paltry $63 million in the last quarter on sales of $10.8 billion. While Amazon is perfecting commerce, it’s got a long way ago. Since it was born in 1994, four years before Google, it has built a one-of-a-kind business on customer obsession and brilliant analytics. Its recommendations engine is ready for the web hall of fame, and its latest foray with Prime membership (“The newsonomics of Amazon’s prime moves“) shows it knows how to build on its foundation.

Google lacks some of Amazon’s core strengths. It’s a mix-and-match technology company, famously trying lots of things and at times more quickly abandoninglosers. In commerce, Google is moving forward with a spate of moves. Google OnePass is a restyled content buying system, with some prominent publishers signing on. Add in Google Latitude, Google Local, Google Local Shopping, Google Shopper, Google Tags, and Google Places, all relating to local commerce.Google Offers is gaining steam and is working with publishers on syndicating local daily deals.

There’s an irony to such publisher partnerships, of course. On the one hand, Google is a “partner,” magnifying publisher businesses through its ad and search products. On the other, initiatives such as Google Tomorrow are a potential dagger to newspapers’ jugular. That’s the way of the web world. For Google, or Amazon, or Apple, or Facebook, any new initiative it takes on has its own internal logic. Should another industry — say newspapers — be wounded in the process, it’s just collateral damage. Given the size of these digital behemoths, as they decimate legacy industries, you can almost hear them say, “Sorry, did I sideswipe you? I didn’t feel anything.”

If everyone is a frenemy these days, and Google is taking on Amazon, media companies have to ask: Who is the frenemy of my frenemy?

One last point to ponder about Google Tomorrow. Consider it, in part, adefensive move.

If, in fact, selling and advertising are blurring, Google has to move more in the selling direction. Right now, it’s an ad company, pure and simple. About 97 percent of its revenue comes from advertising (and you thought newspapers relied too much on that revenue source). It has brilliantly moved to expand its digital ad dominance (now taking in about 40 percent of the dollars in the U.S.) by merging its paid search foundation with big acquisitions in display advertising and mobile. Just last week, the feds let it buy AdMeld, an ad optimizer — and Google’s 57th acquisition so far this year. Now, the Doubleclick ad management system offers a singular approach, incorporating in one place display, search and mobile, to the delight — and terror — of publishers and others in and around the ad industry.

The dominance is a sight to behold. Yet as digital innovation continues to disrupt everything in its path, the ad business is vulnerable, with companies, led by Amazon trying to eliminate the cost and friction of finding buyers. So let’s look at the Google Tomorrow battle plan as one aimed at Amazon surely, but with ammo that may hit newspapers as well — and one that may allow Google to find that big, elusive second revenue stream.

So what do we make of the three recently announced sales? In each case, there’s a strong, willful buyer, bucking conventional business sense to bull ahead into 2012.

In Omaha, we’ve got Warren Buffett, the man who said just two years ago: “For most newspapers in the United States, we would not buy them at any price. They have the possibility of nearly unending losses. … I do not see anything on the horizon that sees that erosion coming to an end.” Unfortunately, the owner of the Buffalo News, investor in and long-time (now retired) board member of the Washington Post Company, is right. The erosion was deepest — almost 20% in the depth of the recession — but the bleeding in higher single digits has continued since then and it will continue into 2012. The U.S. industry is literally half the size, in revenue, that it was five years ago.

So is the Oracle of Omaha’s vision now blurred? Doubt it.

Buffett is an American hero, generously giving away more than half his fortune through the Gates Foundation and making the common sense point that those Americans who are among our wealthiest can, and should, afford to help out their countrymen in the time of great distress (witness just today’s New York Times’ story on the intense, and long-lasting, pain of permanent unemployment). His company, Berkshire Hathaway, is buying out the employee-owned Omaha World-Herald for $200 million, including debt assumption. Why? Warren Buffett understands the link between news and democracy, especially in his home state of Nebraska, where the paper sets a lot of the agenda with its coverage. You’ve got to believe that the World-Herald’s management, facing the same dismal picture as all metro publishers, looked for the whitest knight around, and turned to Buffett.

In Chicago, a buyout group led by two business leaders,  Michael Ferro Jr.and  John Canning Jr., is in talks to buy the Sun-Times group, which bought the paper out of bankruptcy (alas, Chicago doesn’t win the prize for city with most bankrupt dailies; that goes to L.A., which has had three) two years ago.  The reported price: $11 million plus assumption of debt. Both Ferro and Canning have been deeply involved with the Chicago News Cooperative, former Trib and L.A. Times editor Jim O’Shea’s effort to provide independent, high-quality news in Chicago.

Meanwhile, last week, the San Diego Union-Tribune’s most recent sale (we need flow charts to follow the now-rapid movement of some properties) was announced. Local businessman and developer Doug Manchester are buying the paper, and its underlying real estate, for about $110 million from Platinum Equity (“San Diego’s Union Tribune: Out of the Private Equity Pot and Into Local Political Fire“). John Lynch, the CEO-to-be once the sale closes, wasted no time in laying out the paper’s quasi-journalistic instincts:

“Lynch said he wants the paper to be pro-business. The sports page to be pro-Chargers stadium. And reporters to become stars.

“It’s news information, but it’s also show biz,” Lynch said. “You get people to tune in and read your site or the paper when there’s an ‘Oh wow’ in the paper.”

He wants that sports page to be an advocate for a new football stadium “and call out those who don’t as obstructionists.”

“To my way of thinking,” Lynch said, “that’s a shovel-ready job for thousands…”

“We’d like to be a cheerleader for all that’s good about San Diego,” Lynch said. “Our motivation, both of us, was to do something good for San Diego.”

Expect the newest U-T to support the new owner’s business and (conservative) political interests, and do so with relative national impunity. When Sam Zell talked about bringing some pizzaz to the Tribune, he won lots of coverage. But that was the Tribune, with a half-dozen substantial metros. This is San Diego, though the second-largest city in our largest state, off in a corner of the country far away from media watchers.

Reporters with whom I’ve talked rightly ask if these three deals in the making are a trend. Yes, of sorts, we’d have to say.

First, let’s consider how little money is changing hands in these deals. We could say that Warren Buffett’s $200 million offer is generous; that’s almost twice what the San Diego quasi-monopoly daily is selling for. If someone had told you 10 years ago that the World-Herald would sell for twice the Union-Tribune, you would have laughed them out of the room. U-T owner Helen Copley was courted by the royalty of Old Guard ownership, from Knight-Ridder and Tribune among others, letting her know they were ready to open their wallets to the tune of well over $500 million when the will to sell struck her. It never did and when she died, her family sold, to pay taxes and in panic, in the depth of the recession to Platinum Equity, which swooped in and is now making some decent profit ($80 million+) on the deal.

Important to the trend/no-trend question is price. These are fire-sale prices, mere pocket change to the 1%. So for reasons of altruism, preserving local voice and journalism or bolstering one’s own personal or business agenda, the price is right.

Given that, will we see more sales to motivated, individual (yes, we know Berkshire Hathaway bought the World Herald, not Buffett, but we also know who made the decision) buyers? Probably.

If and when the squabbling Tribune debtholders and bondholders ever release the hostage company out of bankruptcy, several Tribune cities have would-be owners queued up, if management wants to sell. When will the new Digital First get its properties in sufficient financial order, so that owner Alden Global Capital can begin to make its exit? At what point do companies like Gannett, Gatehouse and CNHI start to let it be known that individual properties may be bought? That’s an unknowable question at this point, but with ad revenue headed further down next year, selling something to somebody — it is appears there are buyers here and there — becomes a more intriguing option.

Interestingly, we’ve heard little from would-be “community trust” buyer groups. There was much talk of community-oriented, non-profits, with some support from the Newspaper Guild, a couple of years ago. Maybe, it’s fatigue, felt by everyone in and around the business, save apparently a few bright-eyed businessmen. In the tumult of the last two years, the voices have gotten quiet. The intriguing start-up models of MinnPost, Texas Tribune, Voice of San Diego, CNC and Bay Citizen don’t seem to have ignited a wildfire of imitation across the country. Only AOL — with HuffPost city sites announcing rapidly and Patch outposts in place — seems to making a substantial local play.

It’s an odd environment out there, with all kinds of characters still to come out of the woodwork.

Those Pew research numbers — 11 percent of U.S. adults owning a tablet, tablet news-reading numbers off the charts — make everybody even hungrier.

Yahoo is the latest to try to get in on the growing banquet of reading riches, with its long-awaited Livestand tablet news product launch Wednesday. It joins the summer-launched AOL Editions news aggregator and sets up the next one to join the dinner party, Google Propeller.

It will take awhile to plumb around Livestand and figure out what’s what, what’s where, who’s in the product and who’s not. And yes, it earns the sobriquet of would-be Flipboard-killer, with a lot “less” — less busyness (which some readers will like), less elegance, less apparent news variety and fewer flips — than the market leader.

As a tablet news aggregation product from the No. 2 U.S. web property, it demands to be taken seriously. In addition, we’ve got to place it into some kind of context among Flipboard, Pulse, Ongo, Editions, and coming Google products, as well as the dominant single-brand news sites that have enjoyed fledgling tablet success.

With the launch of Livestand, we see the beginning of Aggregator Wars 2.0, to be fought on a tablet near you.

Livestand pushes the question: How are we going to receive news and features via the tablet, through individual apps (paid or free) or through an aggregator? And how are publishers going to monetize their content and audiences, as those audiences move dramatically from newspaper, magazine and broadcast to the tablet? A Pew data point: “A majority, say the tablet takes the place of what they used to get from a print newspaper or magazine (59 percent) or as a substitute for television news (57 percent).” (See “The Newsonomics of the Missing Link,”)  So let’s look at the Newsonomics of Livestand.

We start with this proposition: The app world Steve Jobs bequeathed us broke the old web paradigm. Where most news sites have seen no more than 35 percent of their traffic coming direct (the majority coming from Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the sideways web), apps reasserted singular brand access. The Digital Dozen — the leading global and national news brands — quickly took Apple’s early invitation and have building out news products ever since. They love the fact that readers come directly to them; those that are charging for digital access find tablets (and smartphones) tailor-made for single-brand, All-Access subscription plans.

On the other hand, the Livestand proposition says: You want more, and we’ll provide it. That aggregator’s creed has been enormously successful on the web — five aggregators take in 67.7 percent of the U.S.’s digital ad revenue — and they’d like extend that winning formula to the tablet. Alas, the tablet is not the same as desktop or laptop web (or the smartphone), so how easy or hard will the aggregators’ extension attempt be? Here’s what I’ll be watching for as the tablet aggregators go forth:

How high — or low — will the walls go?

These early tablet aggregators are walled gardens, to borrow a portal metaphor from the pre-Google web. Yahoo says it has assembled about 100 content sources (it’s unclear if that number includes Yahoo-owned brands) that provide whole content for the company to host within its HTML5-driven app. They range from Consumer Reports and Forbes to Scientific American, the NFL, and Surfer, a magazine that may have benefited most from the launch PR. For national and global news, you’ve got AP, Reuters, and Yahoo’s new top partner, ABC, along with a few others. There are some link-offs, but not too many, with the product strongly advantaging Yahoo’s own content and that of its third-party partners. Of course, Yahoo is a significant content producers, given the hundreds of content creators it employs, and sports a mind-boggling array of sites.

Flipboard, too, is a walled garden, but looks to have — it’s hard to measure — more wildflowers among its partners. That $60 million venture startup now has 50 content partners, with more diverse global/national news (The Economist, USA Today, The Guardian, BBC, The Daily Beast, and lots more) than Livestand, and seems to offer more links to non-partners as well. For instance, News Corp.’s All Things D (a free site) is a partner, with full content on Flipboard. The Wall Street Journal (a mostly paid site), which is not a partner, can still be found if you troll through the business section. Flipboard, of course, can lay claim to another overused portal metaphor of the ’90s: “We’re Switzerland.” That’s true to an extent; it doesn’t create its own content, and says it can therefore better aim at just pleasing readers. Yet, it, too, must find a business model to survive.

Right now, Flipboard looks stronger in news, with a good set of feature content. Yahoo looks like it covers the major bases in news — through wires and ABC — and is heavier on feature sites.

Raise the content wall, and you can provide a more, whole (no need to link off) experience, with better benefits to key partners, but create a more limited experience for readers. Lower the wall and provide more content, and you will need to link off more and have a harder time showcasing partners and building a business model.

Who will figure out the ad model?

Tablet aggregator news products are, by their nature, dependent on advertising to be successful. Livestand enjoys the advantage of being part of Yahoo, with the country’s second-highest levels of digital ad revenue, though its sales are in decline. Just this week, it bought ad-matching company Interclick for $270 million to bolster its arsenal. In addition to display, one big hope with Livestand is video ads, a significant growth sector. It seems to have launched with fairly little ad support, a surprise for a product long-planned and backed by Yahoo. Flipboard, too, is hoping to break the code, or more precisely, to have its content partners do it. Surprisingly, though, only about a half dozen of its 50 content partners are actively selling ads on the site. Yes, tablet advertising is fetching ad rates 5-10x higher than online ads at single-branded sites, but they are a work-in-progress at Flipboard, despite the interstitial beauty of the ads. Publishers says they need more audience volume before they start selling in earnest. That points to an early challenge: Publishers may enjoy the relative non-competitiveness of Flipboard, as compared to Yahoo, but they see Flipboard as an experiment, one to help gather data on reader usage — and maybe a long-term revenue play.

In the end, publishers’ direct participation in these products — and they are being cautious now — will directly depend on how well they can monetize their audiences on aggregator sites compared to on their own sites. Their analytics are much better now than they were five years ago. They’re experimenting with Facebook sites and Apple’s Newsstand and seeing if the new Kindle catches Fire. If aggregator-related ad revenue is good, they’ll play. If not, the aggregators will be left with uneven, feature content, or their products will be composed of a lot of link-offs — not an experience that makes use of what the tablet does best.

Where’s local?

Yahoo is quite strong in local news aggregation, given its five-year-old partnership with more than half the industry through the Newspaper Consortium. It has pitched partners on joining Livestand — I’ve heard of one near-comic presentation that turned off newspaper publishers — but I don’t see much local in the product. That’s probably due to publisher wariness — why cede audience to aggregators or to Yahoo’s product development timetable? Local would be a great differentiator for Livestand — especially given its deeper relationships with newspaper companies. It could also be valuable whenever AOL’s Editions patches its local Patchs into its mix. An aggregation that reaches from global to local makes reader sense; who will deliver it?

Ironically, local should be a green field for the tablet news aggregators. While the big national and global news sites have established powerful app platforms, most local news publishers are way behind the curve, and falling farther behind every day. Yes, sites from The San Francisco Chronicle to The Dallas Morning News to the Memphis Commercial Appeal to The Boston Globe have put up live (non-replica or replica-plus) tablet sites, but they are in the minority. By the count of the Newspaper Association of America, there are only 87 U.S. daily newspaper apps in the iTunes store, and many of those are replicas.

If aggregators can aggregate local on the tablet faster than local publishers claim their own tablet turf, they’ll be a long way down the road in the battle for local digital ad dollars, a battle coming to the tablet in 2013.

Who will provide the best routes to digital subscriptions?

With more than 150 news titles and dozens of consumer magazine titles going digital-paid, figuring out the link between free aggregated content and paid, full digital access is a must. If the aggregators can feed the paid digital access business, publishers are more likely to buy in and provide more content. Flipboard’s Economist partnership, with its lead-out to Economist products, services, and games, is the model to watch. Could aggregators work with publishers to jointly authenticate paid customers? Sure, they could, but it’s a significant tech challenge.

Where does Ongo fit in this?

It’s easy to forget Ongo, which seems to have gotten little traction in the popular mind, or in audience or revenue. A consortium put together by Gannett, The New York Times Co., and The Washington Post Co., it suffers from at least two on-the-surface issues. Number one: It charges $5.99 a month for some subset of news company content, with upcharges from 99 cents to $9.99 for each local title, many of which don’t even have digital paywalls of their own. Number two: While it’s improved its poor launch design, it’s still nowhere as flippin’ cool as either Flipboard, Pulse, or Livestand.

Who or what are our gatekeepers?

So how do these companies decide what to show us? That’s a fundamental question we don’t have to answer when we open up The New York Times, Financial Times, or BBC. We know editors have used their judgment to decide what to include and how to play it. On the tablet, especially, it’s a witch’s algorithmic brew of editorial, business, and social curation. Business considerations — what do we own? — color Livestand and AOL’s Editions. There’s some traditional editorial curation going on at all the aggregator sites, but it’s hard to see or navigate. What’s being picked by editors, driven by business deals or by our social graph, when we sign in with Facebook or add our Twitter list to filter the news? We don’t know at this point, and we don’t have handy levers to adjust the mix.

The wizard behind the curtain appears to be in charge of our news experience. That’s both pleasing and anxiety-making: Am I missing something? Just how did this page get in front of me? Those questions will color the single brand vs. aggregator experience on the tablet. I may be willing to trade single-brand certainty of news judgment for some aggregating algorithm, or I may not. Down the line, we’ll end up with much more knowable and personalizable systems that let us harness both editorial and social intelligence, but we’re not there yet.

Will Livestand work? I think the answer is that it will take all of 2012, at least, for news consumers to sort out the competition. The big issue Yahoo faces is habit. It would love to translate the Yahoo News web habit to the tablet, but it’s clearly not a one-to-one transfer, as Google News will find. As The Daily (80,000 paid circ or so) has found, it’s really hard to change or establish new reading habits. There, incumbents like the Times, Journal, the BBC and Guardian have built strong one-click news habits, verified by the Pew study that found that “90% of app users went directly to the app of a specific news organization, compared with 36% that went to some sort of aggregator app like Pulse.” Those early habits will get harder and harder to displace. My guess: We’ll each pick a single news aggregator to complement our top two to three top single brand choices. Those will be the buttons, the apps, on the first page of our iPads — and the second page won’t matter much.