CNN President “Really Afraid Of” Social Networks
March 14, 2010
Over the years, there have been more than a few arguments about whether online news sites are killing newspapers. Now, due to some almost startling comments made by the president of CNN, it looks like the next round of old media-new media disputes might concern social networks and cable news organizations.
According to the AFP, Jonathan Klein's remarks on this subject were in no way ambiguous. He said at Bloomberg BusinessWeek's 2010 Media Summit New York, "The competition I'm really afraid of are social networking sites. That's an alternative that threatens to pull people away from us."
Klein then explained, "The people you're friends with on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter are trusted sources of information. . . . Well, we want to be the most trusted name in news. We don't want the 1,000 people you follow in Twitter to be the most trusted sources for you. . . . So I'm far more worried about the 500 million people on Facebook than I am about two million people watching Fox."
That's an interesting take on the power of social networks. It implies - at the very least - that CNN anchors are going to spend a whole lot more time referencing Facebook and Twitter from now on. An ad campaign and new apps could follow, too.
On a broader scale, Klein seems to be saying that social networks' users can easily - even unwittingly - make or break major corporations.
Americans Favor Online News Over Newspapers
March 1, 2010
The Internet is now the third most-popular news platform, behind local and national television news and ahead of national print newspapers, local print newspapers and radio, according to a new survey out today.
The survey of 2,259 U.S. adults, conducted jointly by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the Project for Excellence in Journalism, found 59 percent of respondents gets news from a combination of online and offline sources on a typical day.
The Internet and mobile technologies are at the center of how people's relationship to news is changing. One-third (33%) of cell phone owners now access news on their mobile phones and more than a quarter (28%) of Internet users have customized their homepage to include news from sources and topics that are of interest to them.
Nearly forty percent (37%) of Internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or shared it via postings on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
In addition, people use their social networks to filter, assess, and react to news. They use traditional email and other tools to exchange stories and comment on them. Among those who get news online, 75 percent get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites and 52 percent share links to news the same way.
The survey also found the typical online news consumer routinely uses just a handful of news sites and does not have a particular favorite. Overall, Americans have mixed feelings about this "new" news environment. Over half (55%) say it is easier to keep up with news and information today than it was five years ago, but 70 percent feel the amount of news and information available from different sources is overwhelming.
"Americans have become news grazers both on and offline - but within limits," said Amy Mitchell, deputy director for the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
"They generally don't have one favorite website but also don't search aimlessly. Most online news consumers regularly draw on just a handful of different sites."
Google Upgrades Ad-Serving Product for Publishers
February 22, 2010
Google has just announced a new DoubleClick for Publishers, a service it refers to as "the next generation of ad serving technology for publishers."
"For the past few years, we've been investing in a suite of solutions — AdSense, ad-serving technology and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange — to help online publishers make the most money possible from their content, whether they sell advertising directly through their own sales force, through an ad network such as AdSense, or a combination of both," says Vice President of Product Management Neal Mohan. "For major online publishers — including social networks and online communities, entertainment sites, e-commerce sites and news sites — managing, delivering and measuring the performance of ads on their websites can be a hugely complicated process. A publisher's ability to manage this process can have a significant impact on how much money they make from their online content."
The new release includes a new interface, redesigned to save users time and reduce errors, and more detailed reporting/forecasting data. Google says it has "sophisticated algorithms" that automatically improve ad performance and delivery.
DoubleClick for Publishers also comes with a new public API that publishers can use to build and integrate their own apps with the service. They can also integrate third-party apps created for the service into their own.
Doubleclick for Publishers comes in two different versions - one for large publishers, and one for small businesses. The latter is a simpler, free version.
All Google Ad Manager publisher accounts will soon be automatically upgraded to DFP Small Business.
Showtime For Real-Time With Google
December 10, 2009
Real-time search is, appropriately enough, going to become quite visible very soon. Google announced today that it's rolling out real-time features, and the comprehensiveness of this effort is almost unprecedented as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are all onboard.
Google's list of partners doesn't stop there; FriendFeed, Identi.ca, and Jaiku are also cooperating. Plus, standard blogs, news sites, and other Google properties (like YouTube) are contributing to the stream of information that'll become available following a standard search.
On the Official Google Blog, Google Fellow Amit Singhal explained how the arrangement will work. He wrote, "[I]mmediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we'll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page."
The effect has the potential to be useful and looks natural enough. (It's possible to click on the "Latest results" line and see a full page of real-time info, too.)
This should become available across the world over the next few days. If you wind up testing the real-time search function with a Google-related query, just get ready to see a lot of folks echoing one sentiment of Singhal's: "I'm tremendously excited about these significant new real-time search features."
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