Show me the money!!

Cynicism aside, I love it when Chris Anderson returns with some meat to fuel the tail. It's incredibly refreshing, and helps me keep focused on the future.

So this time around, I'll deviate from conversation on 'the tail', and focus on a slide that one of my comrades had cooked up a few years ago.
The title of the slide, of course, was: "SHOW ME THE MONEY!" (and I'm not sure if we should be thanking Jerry Maguire here, so to be safe....thanks, Jerry Maguire!).

These days, I'm officially scared of using the phrase 'business model'(we'll go into that another time), but Chris uses it, and he's entitled to, so I'll ride his tide on this one:
"What does the media business model mean?"

[Revenue models for INTERNET TV PUBLISHERS]
(with mild value-added categorization...)

ADS
* CPM ads
* CPC ads
* CPT ads
* Sponsorships
* Streaming Video Advertising

LEVERAGING THE KING
* Subscription revenues
* User generated (value)content
* Live events
* Licensing of brand
* Licensing of content
* "Souvenirs"/"Merchandise"
* E-commerce

SYNDICATION & REDISTRIBUTION
* Affiliate revenues
* Upgraded service/content
* Alternate output
* Custom services/feeds
* Listings
* API Fees

---

Have been reading a lot lately on Hollywood griping about how there's not enough money to be made on the Internet(which, frankly, is rubbish) and Bollywood running around looking for eyeballs, pretending like that's the real scarcity(which, more obviously, is also rubbish).

So I figured the above(with much thanks to Michael Cader, Fred Wilson and Chris Anderson) could go some way in laying out some ideas for how to make money(ahem...monetize).

Disclaimer: we're still talking monetization. The profitability equation involves a longer, deeper strategic analysis, and it took us seven maids with seven mops sweeping for a few years to build the profitability road map.
Which we are happy to share with our patrons.

A word to the Page boys @ 1-800-DO-NO-EVIL

Okay you freakshows...I don't care how much good you're doing in the world and how much evil you're avoiding, but I'll tell you this....you totally got on my nerves with this e-mail.

My account is exactly how I want it to be, and you're being utterly sneaky about getting me to open this e-mail by using the word 're-instate'. Did you know that I didn't use my other blogger account for over 5 months, and never got an e-mail from you that it needed reinstatement? Or that my Gmail account sometimes goes unused for over a month(because I'm an e-mail freak and have 20 other e-mail addresses...different strokes for different folks...whatever...)?

So if you're offering to help, send me an email with a subject line: "Do you need help with your Adwords account?"...not "Reinstating your Google Adwords Account".

I know you'd love to have me spending ad dollars on your Adwords program, but as a matter of fact, I'm busy doing my own research on why my last few ad campaigns brought me a shit load of clicks, cost me hundreds of dollars, and gave me 100% spam e-mail ratio. (All the sign ups that came from your ad clicks were spam).

So, pretty please, with sugar on top, get your s**t together, and quit scaring us.

Citizen, 2.0

It occured to me while "drinkin' my coffee and eatin' my muffin'" this morning....
We have successfully created a persona for Citizen 2.0: a hyper-connected, fully-networked, socio-participant of the digital age.

This is great news, in so many ways. And writing about all of them could take up a lifetime(or a few hours, if the question was posed to the blogosphere..)

So, let's talk about Citizen Journalism 2.0, seeing as it relates quite well to the new media democracy.

In my feeble, humble, modest, opinionated opinion, CJ 2.0(shorter, cooler...) is not about empowerment. In fact, it's about informing. It's goal isn't to enable the masses to produce, but to help the masses stay better informed.

The traditional argument here is that conventional(mass) media brings with it its own set of biases, perspectives, and commentary, which could(dangerously) be used to sway audience perceptions of ground reality.

One of our news channels ran a feature last night, on the aftermath of the Benazir Bhutto assassination. An integral part of the feature was an opinion poll, the results of which clearly showed that 48% of Pakistan felt that Musharraf and his cronies had *something* to do with Mrs. Bhuttos assassination. Now...who knows, right? It could've been Mush, it could've been Al Qaeda, it could've been Nawaz Sharif. But what left me scratching my head afterwards was: "what possible good could come out of an opinion poll on who had something to do with the assassination"??! I mean, this was neither here, nor there. Opinions of people are rarely based on reason, and in a country where emotions are astray after the assassination, I completely fail to see the point in asking for peoples opinions. And not to let the something slide.....what's THAT all about? We're not just speculating about complicity, but we're also speculating about the vaguest degrees of complicity.

But news channels have been producing crap like that for as long back as we can remember. It's a big rush....not just to find news, but also to make news. It's their bread and butter, and it's a business...like any other. Journalism is being fronted by a corporate institution that is forced to keep its economic interests in mind.

How could journalism possibly stay pristine and un-adulterated? The only answer is the Internet. And the only way to understand how it all works on the Internet, is to actually use it. There is little risk, a lot of reward, and no whip lashes if you fail. And if you are being honest + consistent about your messages, there is no failure.

So now that I've downed my muffin and my coffee, I'm thinking about the right approach to citizen journalism, in 'my' world of Internet video.

Someone mentioned fearless.weareindia.tv.
And some folks I talked to about the idea got really excited. And that these excited people are real world journalists, got me spurred.

It's not like we can stay back and let this take its due course. We need to be on the ball, jumping up and down until we make this happen. So we will.

Stay tuned.

And I think to myself, what a wonderful world...!

Steve Jobs unveiling the world's thinnest notebook at Macworld, San Francisco.

Words fail me.

Oh, would you please just let this guy be?

Duncan Riley, I love you man...but ya really have to remember that Zuckerberg is 23. He has some very big responsibilities to live up to now, and giving brilliant interviews may not be what he's out there to do. And how do you turn down an interview from 60 minutes, anyway?! Did he go ask for it, or did they come get him to parade him as the cute, pimply, arrogant, bratty founder of Facebook.com?

Yes, his answers totally got on my nerves too, but then I don't think Lesley Stahl should've been asking him dumb shit questions like: "Have you changed your lifestyle? Are you buying the things you should be....". C'mon, Microsoft just valued him(well, FB) at fifteen billion good United States dollars, and if the man wanted to go out there and buy a new pair of shoes, it's really nobody's business but his.

And you know what...I don't think the statement about the Brin-twins(or the Page-boys, depending on how you look at it) was a question either.
Lesley said: "You seem to be replacing Larry and Sergey as the people out here who everyone's talking about"- it clearly was NOT a question and more of a comment(based on god-knows-what, because I've heard speak of Zuckerberg, and I've heard speak of the Google-Twins, but I've never heard speak of one replacing the other. Except in certain circles where the booze flows like water and .....enough said).

I think he was bang on in asking if it was a question because to the casual observer, it seemed, at its holiest, a very casual and personal observation.

All in all, I thought the interview, barring a few odds and ends, was a really stupid one, and 60 minutes ought to re-think its Q&A strategy...these meaningless questions leave us completely uninformed, and talking about all the wrong things.

Speaking of wrong things, I think that "Beacon" perspective of yours was a real cheap shot. You quoted him out of context and Red Bull is no excuse, mate.
What he said was: "I actually think that this makes it less commercial. I mean, what would you rather see? A banner ad from Bloomingdale’s or that one of your friends bought a scarf?" implying that Beacon's less commercial(and a lot more personal) than a banner ad.
Sure...maybe having it show up on news feeds isn't such a brilliant idea, but I think it's an interesting step to monetization. Sure....maybe it ought to be an opt-in service, instead of an opt-out one, but in even its opt-out state it beats all the other opt-in services I am sometimes faced with, including the page on which your post resides, showing me a shit load of ads right where I would hope to find navigation links to different parts of TechCrunch. How come I can't opt out of that? I think it's 115% useless to me and would rather the space be used to guide me around your website better.

Now, I'm just going to not click(obviously) on any of those dumb ads, and leave Techcrunch, whereas if I just found out that my buddy just got himself a pair of sneakers, at a steal, and it showed up on your site as a very personal ad, I'd be clicking on that ad, brother. I may not have bought sneakers, but you bet your patookus that I'd be on Nike.com browsing their "Facebook deals" section.....and no way the "Rackspace Managed Hosting" ad on your page claim that sort of reach. And FB-Beacon can.
So let's not speculate about the privacy implications(and you -are- speculating about the implications) without giving the technology the necessary leeway to grow.

Plus, I really think we need to re-think the reasons we yell about privacy- if a youth could be outed and harassed as a result of having seen Brokeback Mountain, then I think it's a matter of the youth having to be secretive about his sexual preferences, and that's the real issue we need to solve.

And I don't know about the rest of you, but if I know I'm getting a gift, or get a hint that I'm about to be gifted something, I just stay quiet and wait it out until I actually get a/the gift, or not.
If Shannon Lane found out about the ring(despite Sean's valiant cover up attempts...and now I'm suddenly curious...!), then her natural reaction ought to have been to feign ignorance(while feeling that warm Christmas glow inside). Why would she be instant messaging Sean about it instantly?

Unless, of course, Sean screwed up and the ring WAS for someone else. And sensing the instant heat, he pulled a "wasn't me"...and Shannon's bullet went 'n hit Zuckerbuerg on the shoulder. How's that for speculation?

So I think all of ya'll(and that includes you, dear FSJ) in the blogosphere need to totally chill out and let this guy be for a bit. Granted, he makes mistakes, and granted he's too young to be a CEO, but at least he's thinking about trying something new. Will FB be the next Friendster? I don't know. And you don't know. And when we don't know, we ought to observe, and maybe comment on.....not assume, and definitely never misrepresent.

Because we have some real problems of our own. Like how I had to "right click" and Add "blogosphere" to the dictionary, and if you haven't figured yet, I'm on blogger.com....the center of the blogosphere if there was one.

Parting words of wisdom for Mark Zuckerberg: get a pretty PR lady involved and make that 401 mouths to feed. Will save you a lot of heat, and you can get right back to your "operashunal shtuff". ;)