There is a conventional wisdom in the media industry that micropayments for online content don’t work, but Greg Golebiewski of Znak It says that this isn’t true, and that media companies need to experiment with the model. Read more »
Flipboard has become a leading player in the digital news-consumption field, and now it wants to hand the same filtering and curation tools employed by its editors over to users of the app, to create their own magazines. Read more at GigaOM »
In buying Summly, a mobile news-consumption app created by teenaged entrepreneur Nick D’Aloisio, Yahoo gets to inject some much-needed fresh thinking about mobile content, and also shows it is serious about change. Read more at GigaOM »
How can media companies and publishers monetize their content when advertising continues to decline and paywalls are not filling the gap? This is one of the major themes we’re going to explore at paidContent Live on April 17 in New York. Read more »
Freelance writer Nate Thayer touched off a debate this week about media outlets wanting to publish content for free — but the reality is that the economics of content have changed forever, and the supply of free content is almost infinite. Read more »
A blog post by Nick Carr about the future of the printed book touched off an epic comment debate between the author and media theorist Clay Shirky about whether the book format itself will die out and be replaced. Read more »
Media companies are looking for new revenues through selling things. Meanwhile, more commerce sites are starting to publish. Is it easier for content to transform into commerce — or vice versa? Read more at GigaOM »
Prismatic founder Bradford Cross doesn’t come from a traditional media background — he is a data scientist who specializes in machine learning — but what he is doing with content recommendations says a lot about how the media business is evolving and what the future might look like. Read more at GigaOM »
In a bold first-day speech, the BBC’s new boss says the corporation must stop thinking that online innovation means repurposing broadcast content and instead ‘create genuinely digital content for the first time’. Read more »
Twitter has argued that it doesn’t own a user’s tweets, but at the same time the company wants to control what users do with their content so that it can monetize the network. There’s an inherent conflict there that is becoming increasingly difficult for Twitter to avoid. Read more at GigaOM »
Twitter’s ongoing evolution from open platform to global media company has all kinds of ramifications for the social-media industry and for businesses, but it also has implications for users. This is my attempt to look at why I have a love-hate relationship with the service. Read more at GigaOM »
As we consume more and more content via real-time streams that come to us through Twitter and Facebook and newer platforms, how does that affect advertising? Everyone wants their ads to look like just another form of content, but that’s a lot harder than it sounds. Read more at GigaOM »
The purchase of the sports-blogging site Bleacher Report by Turner Broadcasting unit fills a content hole for the Time Warner unit, but it is also a validation of the user-generated-content model behind the sports-blogging network, and a sign of the disruptive effects that model can have. Read more at GigaOM »
The Huffington Post has dropped the price of its iPad magazine to zero, and News Corp.’s The Daily has chopped almost a third of its staff — more evidence that the dream many publishers had about the iPad being their savior is still far from reality. Read more at GigaOM »
Though the U.S. travel industry brings in $2 billion a year and employs 100 million people, Rafat Ali says there’s no one website where industry execs and business travelers can go for information. So he’s launching Skift, a website focused on travel news, data and services. Read more »
It has become obvious by now that Twitter is building a digital-media business, powered by a rapidly-growing advertising platform. But trying to capture more of its users’ attention is going to bring it into conflict with the media companies who are providing all of its content. Read more at GigaOM »
Publishers may see Next Issue Media’s virtual newsstand as a solution to their digital problems, but it doesn’t fit the way growing numbers of people consume content. For them, the newsstand is already an anachronism, and recreating it in digital form isn’t going to help. Read more at GigaOM »
Twitter’s new feature, which shows enhanced content for certain media partners such as the New York Times, is another example of how the service can be both a partner and a competitor for media companies in the ongoing battle for users’ attention. Read more at GigaOM »
While we in tech land tried to read the tea leaves of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s recent cryptic comments on the future of Apple TV, the media world saw the uncertainty around his statements as, “causing a boatload of angst and anticipation,” according to Variety. Read more at GigaOM »
The pitched war between content owners and technology companies doesn’t have to persist if media companies would acknowledge and adapt to the new realities of digital distribution, famed venture capitalist Fred Wilson told attendees at paidContent 2012. Read more »
