A few links from the past week or so.

The Guardian Launches a New US Homepage

The Guardian revealed a new url for the US – guardiannews.com – marking the start of its digital operation in New York. The new venture – headed up by Janine Gibson, formerly editor of guardian.co.uk – will create a hub for Guardian readers in the US, combining the innovation and energy of a start-up with ground-breaking journalism and the backing of the Guardian brand.

Google Propeller Social News Sharing App to Compete Against Flipboard

Google is creating a social news sharing app for iPad and Android that will compete directly with Flipboard, named 2010 iPad App of the Year by Apple.

What media companies can learn from Walmart

Media companies and content creators may not see themselves as having anything in common with a giant retailing entity, but the reality is that they need to understand the behavior and interests of their users or customers (which they call readers or listeners or viewers) just like Walmart does. Why do people click on certain stories and not others? How long do they spend on a page and where do they go after they leave? That’s the kind of information that tools like Omniture and comScore can provide — but real-time tools like Chartbeat and the new analytical offering from Twitter can add another element that provides even more data about activity and intent.

Hearst To Convert All Sites to HTML5

Hearst Magazines is aiming to improve its digital strategy through the integration of HTML5, the company announced plans early Tuesday to implement the platform on the majority of its websites through out the fourth quarter of 2011 and into 2012, according to Mark Weinberg, vice president of programming and product strategy for Hearst Digital Media.

Facebook to delay IPO until late 2012

Facebook will delay its initial public offering until the end of next year so employees can focus on developing products for the social networking website, the Financial Times has reported.

Philly papers offering subscribers $99 Android tablet

A Philadelphia newspaper publisher is trying to steer more people to its online editions by offering a $99 Android-based tablet with a two-year subscription.

News Corp shareholders lodge complaint against Rupert Murdoch

A prominent group of US banks and investment funds with substantial investments in News Corporation has issued a fresh legal complaint accusing the company of widespread corporate misconduct extending far beyond the phone-hacking excesses of News of the World.

Infographic: Social Gaming by the Numbers

The number of people playing social media games is shocking. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on it every year and that number is expected to top a billion. Social Media Gaming is as Astounding as Social Media Itself. Online social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace have become unexpectedly successful new additions to the Internet, and their success is partly attributable to the unbelievable success of social gaming.

Johann Hari apologises over plagiarism and hands back Orwell prize

The award-winning Independent columnist Johann Hari has apologised for plagiarising the work of others to improve his interviews and will take unpaid leave of absence from the paper until 2012. Hari also apologised for editing the Wikipedia entries of people he had clashed with, using the pseudonym David Rose, “in ways that were juvenile or malicious”, saying he was “mortified to have done this”. He admitted calling “one of them antisemitic and homophobic, and the other a drunk”.

Bagehot – Unethical journalism: The depressing tale of Johann Hari

Allegations of quote-stealing and factual embellishment by Mr Hari have been swirling for months, at first in the blogosphere and then in the mainstream media. I have not posted about the whole sorry saga to date because—at the end of the day—a hack is only a hack, and the press already spends too much time talking and thinking about itself. But something about the weasel wording of Mr Hari’s apology today sticks in the craw. I have also been depressed to see a chorus of well-known journalists leap to Mr Hari’s defence, arguing that what he did was silly or foolish, but is not really his fault.

So you’re a daily newspaper guy and you think people have always paid for news. Fair enough. Some of your readers probably do pay for news.

But if you want to charge for your news online you’re going to need to know roughly how many people are willing to pay for it so you can figure out a business model.

And you’re going to want to know how many people will pay for news on its own since they can get all the other bits you publish – the weather and crosswords etc – really easily and affordably elsewhere.

Here’s a simple way to figure out how many people are willing to pay for your news.

1. Count how many people currently subscribe to your newspaper. Add to that the number of people who buy it from a retail outlet. Write down the number. That’s how many people are paying for your newspaper.

2. For the next three months:

• Don’t publish any crosswords or sudoku
• Drop the puzzles page and comics
• Ditch the weather
• Leave out the sports results
• Don’t run the lottery numbers
• Can the Features section
• Kill the movie reviews and listings
• Nix the TV guide
• Axe the stock market and currency tables
• Run the classifieds and retail display ads in a separate, giveaway section

3. In three months time count how many people are still subscribing to your newspaper. Add to that the number of people who are still buying it from a retail outlet. Write down the number. That’s how many people are paying for your news.

Over to you whether you try this as a thought exercise first or put it straight into practice. (Warning: this exercise causes extreme anxiety in circulation managers. Keep defibrillator handy.)

A couple of interesting observations in this June 30 post from Jeff Sonderman on Poynter.

He cites Forrester Research (via TechZone360) showing that tablet owners read newspapers less often than they did before owning a tablet.

Almost one-third (32 percent) of tablet owners say they read printed newspapers less often, according to the market research company’s survey of 210 U.S. adults who own tablets. Interestingly, 8 percent said they read newspapers more often now, while 60 percent said there was no change.

He adds that:

Another recent survey of tablet users found that 58 percent preferred the experience of reading on their tablet over the experience of reading a newspaper, and 57 percent preferred it over a magazine.

The takeaway for news organizations is that a significant chunk of tablet users are unmistakably and measurably moving away from printed products. So the question is, will newspaper and magazine publishers find ways through apps or websites to maintain a relationship with them?

Certainly many are trying to do so by rolling out their own apps with special designs and interactive features. Other publishers have taken smaller steps by creating replica editions that make their print pages viewable on a mobile device.

But publishers face a different kind of competition in the tablet market. On electronic devices, readers don’t have to choose branded, bundled editions. A new class of news readers and curators, such as Flipboard, Pulse, Fluent and Zite, are among the most popular iPad news apps.

Rest of the post is here.

In Ishinomaki, news comes old-fashioned way: Via paper
Washington Post |Andrew Higgins

Unable to operate its 20th-century printing press — never mind its computers, Web site or 3G mobile phones — the city’s only newspaper, the Ishinomaki Hibi Shinbun, wrote its articles by hand with black felt-tip pens on big sheets of white paper. “People who suffer a tragedy like this need food, water and, also, information,” said Hiroyuki Takeuchi, chief reporter at the Hibi Shinbun, an afternoon daily. “People used to get their news from television and the Internet. But when there is no light and no electricity, the only thing they have is our newspaper.”

China arrests blogger Ran Yunfei
Guardian | Reuters

Chinese police have arrested prominent writer Ran Yunfei for challenging the ruling Communist party, according to people close to the blogger. Ran, a writer and magazine editor from south-west Sichuan province who had been detained without charge for more than a month, was formally arrested on the charge of inciting subversion of state power, Wang Yi, a Christian activist in Sichuan and a friend of Ran said.

Times and Sunday Times hit 79,000 digital subscribers
Guardian | Dan Sabbagh

A total of 79,000 people pay to subscribe to the Times and Sunday Times online, on an iPad or via a Kindle, a gain of 29,000 over the past five months, according to figures for the end of February released by News Corporation on Tuesday. The figure is up on the 50,000 reported in November, suggesting that News Corp is making some progress with the much debated ‘paywall’ model, although it comes at a time when higher-priced print sales of the Times are falling sharply. The Times’s printed circulation – as measured by the number of copies sold in the UK and Ireland – has fallen by 12.1% or 58,421 copies in the past year

The Guardian is going large in the States, says Rusbridger
Guardian | Greenslade

Guardian News & Media is about to appoint a US editor, based in New York, as part of the paper’s revamped Stateside expansion. Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger told Yahoo! News bloggerJoe Pompeo: “We will be announcing an American editor shortly.” It is believed to mark a tipping point in the paper’s US digital operation with Rusbridger saying that the venture “will be significantly larger than anything we’ve done in the States before.”

Telegraph runs ‘national newspaper first’ scratch and sniff page
Print Week | Adam Hooker

Telegraph Media Group (TMG) included a scratch and sniff competition page in Saturday’s edition of The Daily Telegraph, which was printed in line with the rest of the paper. According to TMG, the competition was the first time this technique had been used in this way by a national newspaper. The scent, which is developed as a liquid and inserted into tiny capsules mixed into the ink, was applied only to the relevant page in a special eight-page travel supplement.

Facebook effect lifts UK online advertising past £4bn
Guardian | Mark Sweney

Facebook helped the UK online display advertising market grow by more than a quarter to almost £1bn last year. The Internet Advertising Bureau’s annual report, compiled with PricewaterhouseCoopers, attributed a 27.5% year-on-year surge in online display advertising to £945m to advertisers moving into social media.

TVNZ trumpets big earnings boost, but TiVo failure and equity loss take gloss off
StopPress

TVNZ’s half-year numbers have been released and while the national broadcaster is understandably chuffed with a 136 percent increase in operating earnings for the six months to December, there are also a couple of fairly big wounds to lick after a $14.8 million TiVo misfire and an 18 percent drop in taxpayer equity.

Ad revenue piggybank swells by $92 million
StopPress

The numbers have been crunched by the Advertising Standards Authority and an overall advertising revenue increase of $92 million for 2010 is welcome news for an industry that has grown accustomed to big declines over the past few years.

Arab spring: an interactive timeline of Middle East protests
Guardian

Ever since a man in Tunisia burned himself to death in December 2010 in protest at his treatment by police, pro-democracy rebellions have erupted across the Middle East. Our interactive timeline traces key events.

IF OUR GOAL IS TO BUILD NEW COMMUNITIES OF TRUST AND HOPE, DATA WON’T DO: IT LACKS BOTH A SOUL AND A STORY
Out with a bang | Rick Waghorn

At some stage in the none-too distant future, we will have mapped every toilet, grit-bin and post-box; will have charted the movement of every library book, grit lorry and food hygiene official. And then what? People, by contrast, are infinite; there is no limit to the variations possible within the human story; that’s what makes for interest, for engagement and for community. We do not gather round camp fires populated by data streams; we gather round camp fires where people gather with warming stories to tell.

BBC World Service to sign funding deal with US state department
Guardian | Ben Dowell

The BBC World Service is to receive a “significant” sum of money from the US government to help combat the blocking of TV and internet services in countries including Iran and China.

A few catch-up reads sitting in my Instapaper feed.

How French Site OWNI Profits by Giving Away Its Content

MEDIASHIFT | Mark Glaser

A French site,OWNI.fr, has found an unusual business model for a site with no ads and no subscriptions — that’s also profitable. How do they do it? Their main business is doing web development and apps for media companies and institutions.

The Week grows as other magazines weaken

NEW YORK TIMES | Jeremy W Peters

The Week embraced magazine journalism at its most functional and stripped down. Small photographs. Graphics with no bells and whistles. One-hundred-word news bites in unadorned prose and synopses of opinion columns, all culled from what was written the week before by other news organizations around the world. The Week’s formula has worked, and it is testing the tenets of what many editors have come to believe their readers wanted. The Week is both profitable and growing steadily, something few news magazines can claim today.

A WordPress for news orgs: Knight gives Bay Citizen, Texas Tribune $975,000 for open-source CMS

NIEMAN JOURNALISM LAB | Lois Becket

The Knight Foundation announced a new $975,000 grant to the Texas Tribune and the Bay Citizen, two young nonprofit news organizations, to build an open-source publishing platform designed specifically for news outlets. The new CMS, to be built with Django, will be both SEO- and social media-friendly. More importantly, it will include revenue-raising tools, including ways to manage subscriptions and levels of membership; compatibility with customer service programsand ad networks; and a credit card function for smoothly integrated donations.

Facebook Is the Largest News Organization Ever

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW | Joshua Gans

Facebook is delivering on the first task of the news organization. Some Facebook friends might express opinions, but more often they are reporting facts. What is more, because these facts are reported to social connections, they are actually accurate. Nothing binds one to the truth more than the accountability of an ongoing personal relationship. Do you ever hear it exclaimed, “I heard on Facebook that your train broke down and that turned out to be an exaggeration”? Facebook knows this. The company even calls it a “News Feed.” And it is peppered with other news stories coming from mainstream outlets your friends have shared. You can read it like a newspaper (postpost.com) or a magazine (Flipboard for the iPad). Even the games, jokes, surveys, and other attention-grabbing activities on Facebook have a long provenance in newspapers, which are full of games (crosswords and Sudoku), jokes (the comics), and polls. These are a long-standing part of the news experience.

Who owns newspaper companies? The banks, funds, and investors and their (big) slices of the industry

NIEMAN JOURNALISM LAB | Martin Langeveld

In January, I detailed how a hedge fund named Alden Global Capital, which played a role in the shakeup at MediaNews Group, also had significant holdings in newspaper groups Freedom Communications, Philadelphia Newspaper Holdings, Journal Register Company, Tribune, and the Canadian newspaper firm Postmedia Network — all firms with current or recent bankruptcy status. After noticing that Alden also owned, as of December 31, 3.91 percent of Gannett’scommon stock, I surveyed all of the U.S. public newspaper companies to see whether Alden pops up elsewhere as well. It turns out that, other than Alden’s stake in Gannett, there’s little crossover between the principal investors in the public companies and those that have picked up the “distressed opportunities” created by trips through bankruptcy court.

A grab bag of who’s saying what about the NY Times paywall, details of which were announced in a post by New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr on March 17:

Today marks a significant transition for The New York Times as we introduce digital subscriptions. It’s an important step that we hope you will see as an investment in The Times, one that will strengthen our ability to provide high-quality journalism to readers around the world and on any platform. The change will primarily affect those who are heavy consumers of the content on our Web site and on mobile applications.

How it works, according to the Times:

• On NYTimes.com, you can view 20 articles each month at no charge (including slide shows, videos and other features). After 20 articles, we will ask you to become a digital subscriber, with full access to our site.
• On our smartphone and tablet apps, the Top News section will remain free of charge. For access to all other sections within the apps, we will ask you to become a digital subscriber.
• The Times is offering three digital subscription packages that allow you to choose from a variety of devices (computer, smartphone, tablet). More information about these plans is available at www.nytimes.com/access.
• Again, all New York Times home delivery subscribers will receive free access to NYTimes.com and to all content on our apps. If you are a home delivery subscriber, go to http://homedelivery.nytimes.com to sign up for free access.
• Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit. For some search engines, users will have a daily limit of free links to Times articles.
• The home page at NYTimes.com and all section fronts will remain free to browse for all users at all times.

Slate’s Jack Shafer says the pricing is confusing…

Should I stick with my pricey Times print subscription, which will give me access to NYTimes.com, or should I try to save money with a purely digital subscription? But which one? There are three of them! Or should I read my 20 free articles a month and then mooch what I can from Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Bing? What if I want the crossword? If I want to read a digital subscription on both my iPhone and my iPad I’ll have to pay twice? I’ll bet this confusion is giving Señor Slim headaches, too, and he’s the richest man in the world.

… but says it could yet work for the Times: “The pricing scheme and process by which the paper evicts its millions of squatters doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to increase revenues appreciably. If it does that, I’ll be happy to call it a success.”

Cory Doctorow says “this won’t work”:

Quick: How many links did you follow to the NYT last month? I’ll bet you a testicle* that you can’t remember. And even if you could remember, could you tell me what proportion of them originated as a social media or search-engine link?

People frequently visit the NYT without meaning to, just by following a shortened link. Oftentimes, these links go to stories you’ve already read… but which may or may not be “billed” to your 20-freebies limit for the month.

“This means that lots of people are going to greet the NYT paywall with eye-rolling and frustration: You stupid piece of technology, what do you mean I’ve seen 20 stories this month? This is exactly the wrong frame of mind to be in when confronted with a signup page (the correct frame of mind to be in on that page is, Huh, wow, I got tons of value from the Times this month. Of course I’m going to sign up!)

Which means that lots of people will take countermeasures to beat the #nytpaywall.

And sure enough, a few people have put their minds to beating the paywall already, including this guy and whoever set up the FreeNYT twitter account.

PaidContent predicts 500,000 readers will pay up.

Ken Doctor crunches the numbers for Nieman Journalism Lab:

It’s a high price, a gamble, and a big hedge — see Test 5 below — against print subscribers migrating too quickly to the tablet. Since it is not charging print subs, it’s going to be an uphill battle to get non-print people to pay a minimum of $195 a year for something that was free, and it eschews conventional wisdom that $9.95 a month is a consumer limit on many digital items. The lack of an annual offer is glaring, and makes it far less friendly to expense accounts for business readers. (Update: The Times just let me know that there will be an annual offer, although the size of the discount is still TBA.)

Doctor spells out five tests for the paywall, and makes a good point here about ‘the bumpers’: “It’s the bumpers — those who do run into the fence and don’t pay up — who are the big concern of the Times.”

If they are bumping, they’re consuming a significant number of pages per month. They’re news readers. So figuring out their behavior after they bump is key.

Do they use another browser or account to get more articles? Do they go off to competitive national/global news sites? Which ones? Do they come back the following month and bump again? Or do they say “forget the Times — I’m going elsewhere” and mean it? This is the group that offers the Times the greatest potential of new digital customers.

The Nieman Journalism Lab also has a round-up of reactions from Steve Brill, Jonathan Stray, Megan McCarthy and others.

Steve Yelvington says ‘it’s not a paywall” but “rate-limiting. Light usage is free; heavy usage brings a request for payment. A paywall, by contrast, is a dumb, blunt instrument that separates content from the general public, prevents sampling, inhibits linkage and sharing, and usually is the product of an unhealthy arrogance.”

There is actual science behind all of this… The configurations and threshholds that you’re seeing are specifically intended to leave the vast majority of visitors untouched, while focusing on the much smaller audience that already sees high value in the website and has demonstrated that through heavy, frequent usage.

The upside is worth thinking about. Gordon Crovitz was quoted by BusinessInsider.com: “We estimate the N.Y. Times should be able to generate $100 million in new revenues with this approach.” That’s based on a mathematical model that includes some key assumptions. The only way to discover whether those assumptions are valid is to test them in the real world.

Felix Salmon at Reuters thinks the message is “weird: that access to the website is worth nothing. Mathematically, if A+B=$15, A+C=$20, and A+B+C=$35, then A=$0.”

Meanwhile, at least where I live in New York, a print subscription which gets you the newspaper only on Sundays costs $19.60 every four weeks — and it comes with free access to the web and tablet versions of the newspaper. Which creates the slightly odd proposition that if you want to use the NYT’s iPad app, you’re marginally better off subscribing to the print newspaper on Sundays and throwing it away unread than you are just subscribing to the app on its own.”

By my back-of-the-envelope math, the paywall won’t even cover its own development costs for a good two years, and beyond that will never generate enough money to really make a difference to NYTCo revenues… I just can’t see how this move makes any kind of financial sense for the NYT. The upside is limited; the downside is that it ceases to be the paper of record for the world. Who would take that bet?

Emily Bell is quoted in an NPR piece saying that the overwhelming majority of visitor readers to The New York Times website will still have free access — all but about 5 percent. ”They’re very sensible not to put the wall across the front of the house,” Bell said. “The New York Times is trying harder to make sure it’s still part of the Web.”

But Bell argues that the Times squandered money and energy better spent creating other revenue streams instead. “That is the real tragedy of it — that it’s become a dominant strategy for people to examine and pursue,” Bell said. “It’s too expensive and it returns too little and it actually hastens decline.”

And here are a few representative tweets on the subject.

The Business Insider has written a post revealing its revenue and profit and talking about what digital media businesses look like. It’s a fairly courageous post, I think, and worth a read: a mix of reality check on how long it takes to build an independent digital media business and an accounting of it being worth the effort.

Media organisations – old and new – are notoriously coy about sharing their performance figures which makes it difficult for newcomers to know how well they’re doing by comparison or to be realistic in their goals. So I for one am grateful for this shared information.  Every little bit of data helps.

A couple of pull-outs:

On the future of digital journalism

We’re happy to tell you that the future of news is bright. And not just because companies like Bloomberg LLC, FOX News, CNN, Reuters, Dow Jones, and many other traditional news organizations are absolutely coining money right now (and will continue to coin it long after a handful of over-indebted newspaper companies go bust.)

The future of news is also bright because some new digital news businesses are finally becoming real. Not all of them, of course.  (There’s always a ton of carnage at the birth of an industry.) And not wildly profitably, of course.  (We can only marvel at FOX News’ $700 million of annual operating profit.)

But real.

On digital journalism businesses

A few months ago, at a conference, I finally had the pleasure of meeting Pete Cashmore, an entrepreneur/editor responsible for building another successful digital media business, Mashable.   At the conference, Pete and I got to lamenting the fact that building media businesses takes so much longer than building technology businesses that both of our sites cover. ..

Since Pete started building Mashable, for example, Facebook has gone from 1 million users to 600 million users, Groupon has assembled 50 million subscribers who pay it $2+ billion a year, Zynga has built games that are used by 100 million people a month, and Twitter has gone from a pet project to a platform that supports 300 million subscribers worldwide.

Measured against that growth, our 8 million uniques and Mashable’s ~12 million seem pretty lame.

So when Pete and I are asked, “Is the digital news business a great business?” we have to say no–at least not in the way that Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, and Twitter are great businesses.  But they’re real businesses.

On Revenue

We only did $5 million of revenue last year ($4.8 million, to be precise, of which most came from advertising). And, yes, $5 million of revenue is pretty puny in general. It’s less than a single big network news anchor gets paid in a single year, for example. But $5 million of revenue is a lot more revenue than we did three years ago ($39,495). And we’re a few years younger than those other digital guys mentioned above. [Huff Po, Gawker, NY Times]  And we’re on a similar trajectory.

Read the post here to find out about Business Insider’s staff, salaries, and 2010 profits.

For those interested in the future of long-form journalism and public affairs reporting, a good post this week on the Nieman Lab blog from Lois Beckett.

It reports on a conversation held at Berkeley School of Journalism between former New York Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati and author and former New Yorker writer Mark Danner.

It notes that Marzorati thinks there is plenty of appetite among readers for long-form journalism online. (I agree).

For him, the crisis of the form isn’t the audience, but the expense: Who is going to pay for  the necessary months of reporting, fact-checking, and editing — not to mention the legal protection that intensive pieces often require? (Marzorati has said previously that Times Magazine cover stories regularly cost upwards of $40,000.)

At one point the question arose of what Marzorati would do if someone gave him $10 million or so to set up a long-form journalism organisation. Here’s what he said (from an edited transcript):

GM: You’d have to start by attracting some big-name authors. One of the things the Internet has reinforced is the individual brand of a writer, and it’s to those writers that people go. I was having this discussion with Michael Lewis. He publishes his pieces in Vanity Fair, but most of his readers don’t read Vanity Fair — they just read it because he’s attached the link to a tweet and sent it out.

MD: Most of his readers are not paying readers —

GM: Those writers in some ways have transcended the publication. I think it’s going to be harder online to set up this kind of “publication” feel, this kind of magazine, front of the book/back of the book/feature well, that was there to serve advertisers — to some extent, anyway. That sort of thing will disappear.

You will have to at least start by building the brand around a handful of these writers, and then, how I would go about it, would be just: Surround, immerse each of these writers in social media tools. The writers would sort of be the hive, and the experience people would be coming for would be not only to read and encounter the writer, but also the community that this writer had created.

MD: So are we talking to them, paying to get onto the community, or paying for a Kindle —

GM: You’d probably give them different options. You could subscribe to all the people, you could subscribe to one writers. I’d probably use social gaming mechanics to actually get people returning to the particular place, by which I mean: You become the most important commenter on Mark Danner, you are recognized, because your comments are the most read of all the comments. We badge you. We give you the title and you are now badged.

This has an enormous effect on keeping people coming back. It’s the same thing as in those shoot-em-up Mafia Wars: You work your way up, you kill more and more mobsters. You keep coming back. You have a place in the game. You become a super commenter, your comments are flagged in some way. Maybe you do it in color shades. The blue overlaid comment is the one that’s the most read. Or you get badged by bringing other commenters to the site, bringing 20 of your Facebook fans to the site.

Much more of interest in Beckett’s post here.

I like Alan Mutter’s term ‘speed bumps’ to describe the way many of us behave when we hit a paywall.

He uses it in a piece on Editor & Publisher about the state of paywalls, and in particular about the new hybrid pay plans coming into vogue, such as the one the Wall Street Journal uses and the one the nytimes.com is moving to.

Because hope springs eternal among profit-challenged newspaper publishers, they are not giving up. Many have plans in 2011 to introduce what I would call “pay speed bumps.”

While these efforts may be slightly more successful than paywalls, they are being launched in an environment in which plenty of competitors – TV broadcasters, Patch.Com, and local start-ups, to name a few – will be perfectly happy to deliver the news of the day for free. So, publishers planning speed bumps will have to engineer them wisely.

Speed bumps, as everyone knows, are irritating obstacles in the road that cause you to slow down or risk shaking a few fillings out of your molars. They don’t keep you from getting where you want to go. They just make the trip slightly slower
and less pleasant. And, if you are anything like me, they encourage you to look for an alternate route.

Speed bumps are exactly like the complicated new approaches that publishers have concocted to try to get paid for the stories they export from their papers to the digital media. These complex plans are bound to confound consumers as never before, raising the question of whether the consternation and ill will they engender will be worth the modest revenue they bring in.

He goes on to describe three principal models – metered, hybrid and dueling.

Read the rest of Alan’s post here.

From Publicitas comes the following summary of a ComScore study looking into the main discrepancy “between server-based and panel-based data”. It “reveals that cookie deletion can lead to large overstatements in servers’ measurement of the size of online audiences. Without appropriate adjustments, site-server measurement of the size of website audiences in Australia can be inflated by up to 2.7 times the actual number of unique visitors.”

The report revealed the following findings for the Australian market:

* Approximately 28 percent of Internet users in Australia delete their first-party cookies in a month. Almost 37 per cent delete third-party cookies in a month.

* Because of the high rate of cookie deletion, a server-centric measurement system which uses cookies to measure the size of a site’s visitor base will typically overstate the true number of unique visitors by a factor of up to 2.7x in Australia.

* An ad-server system which uses cookies to track the reach and frequency of an online campaign will overstate reach and understate frequency by a factor of up to 5.7x.
* Comparing cookie deletion in Australia with other markets including New Zealand, the U.S., U.K., Brazil, France, and Germany found that each country saw third-party cookies being deleted by approximately 30-40 percent of Internet users. First-party cookies deletion was in excess of 20 percent in each country.