This post is long overdue but a wanted to say a quick thank you to all the folk that have linked to my blog in recent months including: Adam Parker, Andy West, David Phillips, Ged Caroll, Headshift, James Cridland, Mark Pinsent, Michael Litman, Neville Hobson, PersonalizeMedia, Porter Novelli’s Digital Week, Seventy Seven and Tom Hume.
And thanks to you for stopping by and browsing. Your attention is very much appreciated.
Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales is raising funds again from users. It’s an annual occurrence. Wikipedia’s free-to-access crowd-sourced encyclopaedia is a noble cause and extremely useful. I’ve chipped in again and would happily pay a subscription.
Wikipedia’s fundraising efforts demonstrate that however worthy a community or social project it needs assured finance if it isn’t to rely solely on volunteer effort. And even then there are basic costs that need to be met.
Yet we’ve entered a period of almost dot com-like exuberance where social projects are launched almost daily without a business model based on financial return or indeed any of the alternative economic metrics outlined in Chris Anderson’s book Free.
Ultimately I think that Wikipedia’s fundraise shows that there no such thing as free – just different ways financing a project.
Someone always has to pay.
Twitter has announced a contributors feature announced on its blog that could help firms wanting to use Twitter as a customer service channel.
As corporate Twitter accounts tend to be managed by several staff members, recipients have no idea who is running the account and responding to their tweets.
The new feature will allow companies to tag tweets with the name of the person wrote the Tweet.
The feature appends the contributor’s username to the tweet byline, making the business to consumer communication more personal; e.g. if @Twitter invites @Biz to tweet on its behalf, then a tweet from @Twitter would include @Biz in the byline so that users know more about the real people behind organizations.
The service develops the concept launched by CoTweet in August and as Twitter seeks to commercialise its business it’s a service for which business would be willing to pay.
Dear Meltwater Customer,
You may or may not be aware that the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) recently decided to extend its hardcopy licensing regime to cover links to newspaper website content. The NLA believes that you (our customer) need a license from the NLA in order to click on the links you receive from the Meltwater News Service. Meltwater strongly disagrees with this and has announced today that we are taking the NLA to the UK Copyright Tribunal to challenge what we consider to be a “link tax” without legal basis.
The NLA, originally formed in 1996, was created to license and collect revenue from the copying and clipping of print media. Now the agency is attempting to enforce licensing agreements on Internet links. The NLA is targeting both companies providing media monitoring services and the customers subscribing to such services.
Meltwater is pursuing this legal action after the NLA threatened to sue any online media monitoring company who fails to sign up to its new content licensing agreement by January 1. 2010. We have been in good faith discussions with the NLA for several months now, but have been unable to come to an agreement. While Meltwater respects the copyright of the NLA’s members, the licensing scheme seeks to control the receipt of links to freely published online content, even though such rights are not granted to copyright owners under UK copyright law. Therefore, Meltwater has decided to take this matter to the UK Copyright Tribunal because we believe that the NLA’s licensing scheme has no basis in UK copyright law.
It may take 9 to 12 months for the Tribunal to come to its decision. In this period, Meltwater will continue to serve you with links to relevant news stories and we will continue to do our very best to meet your needs.
For more information regarding this issue, please refer to our press release and the FAQ in the attached PDF.
If you have any questions regarding Meltwater’s challenge to the NLA’s unreasonable licensing scheme, please feel free to contact me at jorunn.ekestad@meltwater.com.
Thank you for your understanding and continued support.
Kind Regards
Jorunn EkestadDirector Client Relations UK
Here’s another contrary story about media audiences. Conventional wisdom says that people are switching off the TV and radio and moving to the web. Wrong.
The hard numbers tell a different story. Audiences are fragmenting from terrestrial broadcasts to digital broadcast. Where there are falls they are so small that they could be dismissed within a margin of error.
Radio listening in the UK is close to saturation with 89.2 per cent of the UK population tuning into the radio each week. Listener numbers are up year-on-year for Q3 at 45.7 million but down from 46.3 million in Q2 2009.
Listening to radio via a digital platform has risen 11 per cent year-on-year with 17 million people tuning in to radio via a digitally enabled set each week up from 15.9 million in Q3 2008.
There are no real surprises in the TV market.
TV audiences are fragmenting from terrestrial TV to other platforms. Audiences are down almost one per cent year-on-year with the greatest falls seen by ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. BARB lumps non terrestrial channels into a catch all category called Other Viewing. This was the only category to see year-on-year growth (6.74 per cent).
The Ad Contrarian carried a typically brutal analysis in a recent post called The Death Watch Continues (via @nbishop).
“It’s been 5 years now. All the pundits and media geniuses have assured us TV is dead. All the web maniacs and new age marketing gurus have promised us it’s dead. All the social media snake oil salesmen and ad agency bozos have guaranteed us it’s dead. Apparently, the only people who aren’t convinced of this are the viewing public.”
It’s a different story in the newspaper industry of course.
UK aggregator NewsNow today said that it would pull links to the sites of NLA members from its paid-for subscription services rather than sign-up to the NLA web licensing scheme.
“We believe that other organisations who privately agree with our position have reluctantly signed the NLA agreement under pressure. However, we are not in a position on our own to fund a extremely costly legal case on behalf of the entire industry,” said Struan Bartlett, managing director, NewsNow
NewsNow said that “the legal basis for the NLA’s claims that a licence is or was required remains unsubstantiated. It also took issue with the NLA’s reporting requirement to hand over customer details to the NLA.
“We see this as a slippery slop towards and free-to-access web site demanding licence fees from any organisation for circulating or cling on links,” said Bartlett.
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Almost all of my TV viewing is via time shift via the internet or Sky+. But I’m in a minority in the UK. The web is failing to make a significant dent on traditional TV viewing habits. At least that’s what the latest numbers from BARB and Nielsen tell us.
According to TV number crunchers writing in the latest bulletin from BARB (PDF), time-shift viewing accounts for less than 6 per cent of total view in July 2009 up from 1.2 per cent in July 2005.
BARB doesn’t monitor internet TV viewing habits but a recent Ipos Mori survey commissioned on its behalf calculated that 10 per cent of adults had watched TV via the internet in the last week for approximately an hour and three-quarters. Scaled across the population this gives a viewing time for all adults of 0.17 hours or approximately 10 minutes per week. The average viewing figures for traditional TV over this period was 26 hours per week.
The situation is more extreme in the US according to Nielsen’s Three Screen Report. Figures issued for Q3 for the previous 12 months show that almost 99 per cent of all video content watched in the US was via tradition TV. DVR and web TV watching is growing but has yet to make a significant dent in the overhaul viewing numbers.
Several people in my network commented last night on Sunday evening how Twitter has been used as a conversational channel during X Factor series. TV producer Gary Hayes writing in The Guardian last week (via @markpinsent) suggested that in future social media will drive TV audiences.
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Here’s a really neat seasonal online campaign by Ladbrokes. Its taking bets on where it will snow on Christmas Day. I’m going to put a tenner on my postcode in Northumberland at 11-4.
Help us countdown to Christmas. The Speed gang has devised a Twitter media quiz to entertain and delight you during the last 12 working days before Christmas. Follow @speedcomms and at midday each day we’ll tweet a media question from 2009.
Each day one of the correct responses will be picked and random and the respondent will receive a fantastic prize from the fairies atop the Speed Christmas tree. The answer to the day’s question and the winner will be announced via @speedcomms.
Festive prizes naturally include plenty of booze, chocolate and maybe even a turkey!
David Phillips is an author, lecturer and agency PR man. If you haven’t read the book he co-wrote with Sunderland University’s Philip Young called Online Public Relations then shame on you.
Phillips has brought a fresh perspective to the NLA debate by challenging the ownership of original content. It’s a debate that Phillips has supported with a real time case study.
“I went to this page in The Times, analysed it to get the semantic concepts. Looked for those concepts in Bing.com and found that loads of other people and publication wrote this story in similar terms long before The Times.”
“When The Times vanishes behind its firewall will this mean that it will pay all the other sites for the news it plagiarises from them as well as suing all the sites that use the same story after they publish offline or behind the firewall?”
“Who, then is going to set up the counter organisation to the NLA to get their money back from newspapers who borrow/plagiarise content from the online community?” asks Phillips.
Its Flat Earth News revisited. Phillips works from the premise that very little is original. And so we very quickly get into a debate about how original content is created and how you credit the originator and the organisations that circulate a story.
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The PR industry trade associations are standing firm on the issue of business-to-business web licensing. Here’s reaction from the CIPR and PRCA on news that the NLA’s licensing scheme will go ahead in the New Year.
“I can think of no other organisation that would charge you for improving the lifeblood of their business. Member schemes usually involve a reward, not a fee. […] I find it hard to accept that my members should pay fees for increasing the readership of content that is available free of charge.”
Kevin Taylor, President, CIPR
“[Our] position hasn’t changed. For so long as content is freely available, I think this is an unfair and legally un-enforceable charge.”
Francis Ingham, Director General, PRCA
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New business starts and inparticular franchises are at an all time high according to Jonathan Guthrie writing in the FT last week, swelled by people seeking an alternative way of generating an income post redundancy.
Warwick Business School has identified a new category of entrepreneur, coined the necessity entrepreneur, who set up a business “because they have very few other economic options”.
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I have followed the NLA’s plan to licence the use of paid-for business-to-business web content from newspaper web sites since the NLA announced its plans in June (search my blog for content tagged NLA for more information). Since then publishers have started to raise pay walls and take on Google in a bid to monitise content.
Six months is a long time on the Internet and especially so for newspaper publishers running loss making web operations.
The NLA said today that the web licensing scheme will go ahead from 1 January 2010. Press clipping agencies, web aggregators, PR agencies and client organisations that track web clippings on newspaper web sites will need a licence. Free consumer services will not be affected.
In September the NLA said that the move will generate an estimated £2 million and while this won’t make a significant dent in the £1 billion production budget of the UK newspaper industry, it will ensure that publishers recover a contribution from the after market for web clippings.
In a press release issued today the NLA said that it has reached agreement with almost all press cutting agencies but that it still needed to agree terms with “a small number of paid web aggregators”.
“Newspaper publishers, which own the NLA, have written to the remaining aggregators to express their full support for the NLA’s initiative. The letter makes clear that the publishers and NLA will pursue non-compliant aggregators with technical and/or legal measures as necessary.”
In agency-land any move to implement additional costs will be inevitably be challenged but the ongoing debate about monetising newspaper web content will help the NLA’s case.
The PR industry has responded badly to the NLA web licensing proposals because it has a mindset that content from newspapers web sites is free. And that’s true for now but its starting to change.
We have no way of knowing whether paywalls will work and how newspapers will manage their relationships with search engines. We’re only beginning to see some early indications.
In the meantime the NLA is proceeding with its model to recover revenue for its members.
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Here are two really cracking posts from the Speed blog network.
In a story that will bring a cheer to anyone that has tried to contest a parking fine Laurena launched a personal Twitter campaign against Lewisham Council. It was successful and her fine was overturned.
Clare has an itch. She thinks the ongoing Katie versus Pete saga is an orchestrated campaign aimed at driving the profile and earning power of the tabloid duo. Now thanks to a planning exercise she has the evidence to support her claim: 1+1 equals a lot more than two.
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