We do — that was that state of digital media when paidContent launched in 2002. Other weird things were happening back then too: People still got much of their news from television and newspapers, and they learned about major events after they had already happened.

There have been some huge shifts since 2002: Tablets and smartphones are now ubiquitous, lots of people read on their digital devices, and just about everyone is part of a social network or three. This summer is the tenth anniversary of our launch. In an effort to gain some perspective on the past decade in digital media, I’ve been reading back through paidContent’s archives — a collection of over 80,000 posts.

Since I was only a freshman in college when paidContent came to life, I often didn’t know, as I read through the stories from the early days, how things had begun or how they turned out. As I watched them unfold, I wanted to grab our readers’ arms and give them advice (“Don’t buy that Zune!” “Invest in Facebook!” “Go for the good Twitter handle now!”). But I also realized how difficult it is to predict success.

Some takeaways from my trip through the archives:  Some companies — AOL and Yahoo come to mind — have been consistently bad at predicting what consumers want. And a couple of companies, namely Apple and Amazon, have been very good at it. Also, being a native digital company helps, but it’s no guarantee of success (what up, MySpace?). And after all these years, it’s still not clear what content customers will pay for, or how much they’ll pay.

Streaming and Moviebeaming

What do analysts, CEOs and bloggers have in common? None of us can predict the future. Roger Ebert joked in 2002 that “on-demand streaming movies on the Web, like HDTV, are five years in the future — and will be for at least another 10 years.”

If Disney’s Moviebeam had been the only game in town, Ebert probably would have been right. When it launched in three cities in 2003, customers paid $6.99 a month to use a device that could hold 100 movies and plugged into the back of a TV set. They also had to pay for each movie they watched– billing was done via the phone line. The company went through various unsuccessful iterations before India’s Valuable Group bought it in 2008. It was never heard from again.

Netflix almost went down the same road. It had a plan to release a Moviebeam-like “proprietary set-top box with an Internet connection that could download movies overnight.” But instead, it decided to forge ahead with streaming — starting with a complicated “quota hours” system in 2007 and moving to unlimited streaming in 2008. By 2010, the majority of subscribers were streaming something, and the company began offering streaming-only subscriptions, though CEO Reed Hastings said that same year that the company would keep shipping DVDs until 2030. (We’ll see about that.)

ABC was the first network to sell episodes of its shows on iTunes, back in 2006, and to stream shows free with ads on ABC.com — and later on AOL. But by the time premium subscription service Hulu Plus launched in 2010, the platforms getting the attention were devices with built-in access, like Internet-enabled TVs, Blu-ray players, and tablets.

Return of the living dead

Speaking of AOL: It’s something of a miracle that the company still exists. In 2000, when it merged with Time Warner, it was valued at $350 billion, and the next year, more than 24 million people in the U.S. were paying for its Internet access service. By the end of last year, that number had dwindled to just 3.3 million subscribers. Here’s a quick recap of some of AOL’s miscues over the years:

• AOL Voicemail ($5.95 per month)
• A teen service called Red (featuring “a talking head—using the image of an actual employee—that uses software to answer users’ questions”)
• A digital music partnership with Burger King
• A reality show called “Gold Rush”
• Social networking site AIM Pages
• Going free
• The hyperlocal Patch blogs

Though AOL was once a high flier, no other company ever liked it quite enough to buy it. Google bought a five-percent, $1 billion stake in AOL in 2005, leading analysts to wonder if Microsoft missed out. That resulted in a $726 million writedown in 2009. Time Warner bought back Google’s stake and finally spun off “the albatross” in December 2009.  AOL is still promising a bounceback. “The executive team expects a profitable content business by next year,” CEO Tim Armstrong said in May 2011.

Yahoo hasn’t fared much better. The company launched Yahoo Platinum in 2003; for $9.95 a month, subscribers got access to audio and videos.  The program was dead by October of that same year. It later tried a Twitter-wannabe microblogging service (“Meme…where you share everything that you find that’s interesting,”). Perhaps the smartest move Yahoo ever made was not buying AOL.

Where did these companies go wrong? In 2010, former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin pondered that question in an interview with the New York Times . The AOL-Time Warner deal was “undone by the Internet itself,” he said. “I think it’s something that no one could have foreseen, and to this day, whether Apple is going to dominate entertainment or whether Amazon is going to dominate publishing, all the old business plans are out the window. How do you get paid for content?”

Know what’s cool? A billion dollars

In 2006, an RBC Capital analyst estimated that a certain social networking company would be worth $15 billion in a few years, based on “raw, unprecedented user/usage growth.”

Six years later, Facebook went public with a valuation of $104 billion. Too bad the analyst wasn’t talking about Facebook but about MySpace. The social networking company that Rupert Murdoch acquired for $580 million in 2005 sold for just $35 million in 2011.

Why did Facebook soar while MySpace — and other social networking services like Friendster — sank? It allowed people to build real connections using their actual personal information, and rolled out a product that was ready to scale and had good technology. Other companies realized sharing was important too — in 2005, Yahoo SVP Jeff Weiner called sharing “the next chapter of the World Wide Web” — but Facebook was able to implement it in a way that kept users coming back. The site surpassed Yahoo and AOL for “stickiness” in 2009, when Nielsen found users spending an average of four hours and thirty-nine minutes a month on Facebook.

Social has already disrupted some industries — witness the rise of Twitter and the way it has changed the way news is reported, with stories like Osama Bin Laden’s assassination breaking there first. In a sign of the importance of these emerging platforms, newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times are launching “Everywhere” initiatives to deliver news to readers where they are already hanging out.

Fast food and music don’t mix

Hard to believe it now, but there was real skepticism that iTunes’ 99-cent songs would be able to compete with peer-to-peer file-sharing services. “According to academics who’ve studied the economics of digital music distribution,” we wrote in 2003, the year iTunes launched, “the cost still seems too high to attract users of peer-to-peer file trading services.” The piece cited an economist who believed “the appropriate price of a downloaded song is 18 cents.” In fact, Real Networks dropped its song prices to $0.49 in an attempt to compete against Apple.

In the end, consumers choose selection and convenience over P2P networks. We called iTunes “a kickstart for the micropayments industry.” Was it? While Steve Jobs said in 2004 that Apple wouldn’t hit its one-year, 100 million songs downloaded goal, global digital music sales crossed $1.1 billion in 2006. In April 2008, Apple surpassed Walmart  as the largest music seller in the United States.

The company that arguably started the digital music revolution — Napster — didn’t survive. Once it no longer offered “free,” it was done, though it tried to reincarnate itself: launching a mobile music service, “Napster To Go,” with AT&T in 2004 (the one smartphone that supported it could hold up to 6 songs), partnering with Circuit City on a digital music store, getting itself acquired by Best Buy in 2008 ,and then being bought back by Rhapsody in 2011. Unfortunately, Rhapsody was already losing out to newer (and free) streaming services like Pandora and Spotify.

The partnerships with Circuit City and Best Buy, though, were probably the kiss of death. One of the big trends of the past 10 years has been brick-and-mortar retail stores’ consistent failure to compete effectively against digital-native companies. Best Buy wasn’t the only retailer to try to crack the digital-content business — and fail: Target and Sears both took a shot. And McDonald’s sold digital content over its WiFi network and even tried DVD rentals in its restaurants.

Do you like the feel of paper?

Just as digital music didn’t really take off until Apple introduced the iPod, the ebook revolution didn’t take place until the arrival of the Kindle. In paidContent’s early years, ebooks were written off as a failure in part because publishers couldn’t figure out what to do with DRM. (In 2003, “temporary electronic ink” that would disappear after a few months was floated as a possible solution.) Barnes & Noble decided to stop selling ebooks in 2003, and Yahoo stopped selling them in 2004.

Meanwhile, Amazon and Google were pushing forward. Google launched Google Print – now called Google Book Search, and still besieged by lawsuits seven years later. Amazon tested two now-defunct programs: Amazon Pages, which allowed customers to buy access to digital copies of select pages from books, and Amazon Upgrade, which bundled print books with online access to the complete work.

Customers weren’t biting. Then Amazon came out with the Kindle in 2007 for $399. Less than two years later, Amazon was selling more Kindle books than print books, and ebooks now make up over 20 percent of some big-six publishers’ sales. Barnes & Noble has had some success with its Nook e-reader and digital bookstore, but bankrupt Borders shuttered all its stores in 2011. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice suit against Apple and five big publishers for allegedly colluding to set e-book prices drags on.

Good thing Steve Jobs looked beyond ringtones

A Forbes survey back in 2002 found that “business professionals” would be willing to pay for “news content to be delivered to their cellular devices,” and some media companies tried early mobile experiments. Verizon offered a cell phone version of the Yellow Pages — which, at $19.95 per year, gained 15,000 subscribers in three months. But starting in 2004, everyone decided the future was in ringtones. A $4 billion global business by the end of the year, one company projected.

So, so many ringtones. You could buy them from Rolling Stone or from an ATM-like device called E2Go. A fall 2004 marketing campaign let you mix your own ringtones on Levi’s website. Billboard launched a top ringtones chart.

Could ringtones “prove to be a passing fad”? we wondered late in 2004. Luckily, yes — a new technology came along to shake up the mobile market. No, it wasn’t the $500 ESPN phone, but the iPhone, which came out in 2007. And by opening its platform up to third-party app developers, Apple got users ready for its next ecosystem-changing device, the iPad, in 2010.

Monetizing mobile

Advertising has always been a fuzzy business — how exactly do you measure engagement and success? Well, that’s still the big debate about advertising in the digital era.  ”If here’s anything that’s really holding back ad spending on the web, it’s the lack of good measurements,” Tim Armstrong, then Google’s VP of national sales, said in 2007.

Mobile advertising has also faced obstacles. In 2006, mobile carriers began allowing advertising despite fears of annoying customers. Customers were indeed annoyed – 79 percent of them found mobile advertising annoying, according to a 2007 Forrester study — but they could “see the potential benefits of mobile advertising and marketing to themselves,” particularly if they could get a useful special offer or coupon.

Further complicating matters for advertisers: The smartphone market is fragmented among different brands — marketers don’t want to spend the money to create different ads for Android and iOS — and there are two mobile ad universes: mobile browser and apps.

Nevertheless, mobile advertising has gained ground, crossing  $1 billion in the U.S. for the first time in 2011, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, totaling $1.6 billion for the year.

The next opportunity is social media advertising. And once again, it will be a challenge to figure out some standardized metrics. What’s a retweet worth, anyways?

Back to where we all began

Though micropayments worked well for music when Apple launched iTunes, the path to payments for written content has been rockier. In 2004, we wrote that “micropayments today are still characterized by a large number of competing transaction types” – including direct-to-bill, merchant aggregation, prepaid accounts and direct transfer – and “each of these face the current incumbent in digital content distribution: the flat-fee subscription model.”

Eight years later, it appears that the subscription model has won out. The iPad opened the door for magazine and newspaper publishers to create new revenue selling content on that platform, but the results have been mixed. When Rupert Murdoch’s “The Daily” iPad newspaper launched in early 2011, the company called it “the model for how stories are told and consumed.” We wrote, “The bet here is that while consumers are less and less likely to reach into their pocket for a few quarters to buy a newspaper, they might not care about the 14 cents on their credit card for a copy of an e-newspaper.” A year and a half later, The Daily has over 100,000 paying subscribers — but it’s living on borrowed time and may not get through the five years its publisher has said it needs to break even.

Writing for the web, of course, has been around for awhile. At the beginning of the decade, blogging was called “nanopublishing,” and the question was how blogs could support themselves doing it. All sorts of models have arisen. For example, Gawker tried a licensing deal with Yahoo, but that relationship ended a year later. The deal “garnered way more attention than we expected, but less traffic,” Gawker CEO Nick Denton said in 2006.

Some bloggers have stayed independent and make a living from advertising (or from their day job); others write their blogs under a newspaper, website or larger magazine’s umbrella — see the Dish’s Andrew Sullivan, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, WaPo’s Ezra Klein. Or, they go to work for the Huffington Post!

Magazine companies have grappled with whether to bundle digital editions with print subscriptions or charge for them separately. Time Inc. — which first put digital editions of its magazines behind AOL’s paywall in 2003 — started out charging separately, but today Time Inc. and Condé Nast print subscribers get the digital edition free. Hearst, meanwhile, is charging separately, and it said its digital business in the U.S. became “solidly profitable” for the first time in 2011.

Could there ever be a Netflix for magazines? Time tried it for print versions with its 2008 Maghound service. It failed, due to a lack of marketing and reader interest. Magazine publishers are trying again with joint venture Next Issue Media.

Many newspaper publishers, most notably the New York Times, tried paywalls at the start of the decade and then abandoned them – only to return to the model in the past couple years.  In its most recent earnings report, the NYT said it has 454,000 digital subscribers. Is that enough to sustain the newspaper in its 21st-century transition?  Probably the best answer to that came from  Vivian Schiller. But it was in response not to the NYT’s recent digital subscriber numbers, but to the NYT’s decision in 2004 to close the paper’s first paywall, known as TimesSelect. Schiller, then the SVP and general manager of NYTimes.com, was asked whether TimesSelect had worked.  “It did work,” she said. “It’s just a matter of as compared to what.”

Birthday cake photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Robyn Mackenzie].

TV photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Somchai Buddha].

Zombie hand photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [lineartestpilot].

Piggybank photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [cardiae]

Fast food photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Sergio Martinez].

Book photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [TrotzOlga].

Ringtones and apps photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [violetkaipa].

Cash register photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [titelio].

Magazines photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [bernashafo].

Read the full post on GigaOm…

This article originally appeared in GigaOm.

This article originally appeared in GigaOm.

Alisher Usmanov, who owns almost a third of Mail.ru Group, also owns a majority of DST Global, which took a stake in Twitter itself with a 2011 investment.

Twitter has two million Russian-speaking users after translating its site to Russian last year, according to Yandex (via RIA). But the example of China, where microblogs – or, “weibo” – have exploded, shows indigenous services have gained more traction than foreigners.

Weibo use rose 296 percent to 249.9 million there through 2011, according to China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) data published today (via Reuters).

The growth is beginning to usher in a new era of greater transparency in society, as well as creating a huge new business opportunity for market-leading operator Sina (NSDQ: SINA) and Tencent, although China’s government has lately instructed operators to police messaging.

If Russian groups like Mail.ru can replicate their success, they could have a hit on their hands.

Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has already endorsed the original Twitter when he appeared at the company’s San Francisco HQ in 2010 to send his first tweet on an occasion Biz Stone called “one of the most special days in the history of Twitter” (via TechCrunch). Some citizens used Twitter to protest the re-election of prime minister Putin but their messages were purportedly swamped by a pro-Putin botnet.

Mail.ru Group CEO Dmitry Grishin (announcement): “We are excited by the opportunity facing Futubra as microblogging is a fast growing segment which fits well into the Mail.Ru Group vision of the growth in internet communications. The focus in the near term will be product development and the building of new online communities.”

Indeed, each single online check of a user’s name and national ID number will cost a rumored 2 RMB (US$0.20). And so for Sina (NSDQ: SINA) and Tencent, the government-mandated checks could end up costing them hundreds of millions of RMB for their 250 to 300 million Weibo users.

But it was never going to come free. And it raises the complex issue of potential government ties to the company, called id5, that will process these real-name checks. That little-known company will be the prime beneficiary of these sixteen new regulations for microblogs. It is the government that charges the fee, but it’s id5 that will handle all the processing.

Sohu (NSDQ: SOHU) IT reports that the Beijing-based Time (NYSE: TWX) Weekly newspaper has tried repeatedly to question staff at the mysterious id5 about this, but journalists have been turned away.

If, say, 75 percent of Sina’s 250 million Weibo users turn out to be real people or companies – i.e. not spammers or zombie accounts – who wish to continue using the service, then all those checks would cost Sina a total of 375 million RMB (US$59 million).

Being Held Accountable For Your Tweets

The official line is that the real-ID clampdown will help stop false rumors (and maybe spam as well) spreading via the numerous Twitter-like services. But other analysts fear it’s a move to suppress free speech on these lively and increasingly popular sites. (Note that microblog users can still use cutesy and wacky nicknames – but Sina, Tencent, Netease (NSDQ: NTES) (NASDAQ:NTES), and all those other operators, will have every user’s actual name and number on file).

These charges have been levied before, and industry insiders believe that Baidu (NSDQ: BIDU) (NASDAQ:BIDU) had to pay up for its (failed and shuttered) microblog, Shuoba – but that the search engine giant ended up paying more than the rumored 2 RMB that it’ll cost in 2012. It’s not clear if the real-name requirement deterred users, or if Shuoba simply failed to take off because it arrived too late to be a contender.

Sina’s and Tencent’s shares have been stable since the new regulations were outlined on December 16th – but the full pain of implementation has not yet begun. It will be costly for the companies, and could drive some users away from using any Weibo platform.

Follow this developing issue on our ‘real-name’ tag as it becomes mandated on other areas of the Chinese web as well.

[Source: Sohu IT news (article in Chinese), via Bill Bishop's Digicha]

» This article originally appeared on Penn Olson, Asia Tech News For The World, and is reproduced here with permission.

This article originally appeared in Penn Olson.

More seriously, though, the two companies have a very different philosophy, so we won’t engage in the kind of “copycat” name-calling that we usually discourage. Whereas Twitter has been evolving very slowly, and espouses “simplicity,” Sina (NSDQ: SINA) has been throwing major new features at its Weibo platform – such as social gaming accompanied by a virtual currency – in an aggressive land-grab approach that’s more typical on the Chinese web where it’s necessary to seize users before a rival does pretty much the same thing.

And so, inevitably, the fast-changing Sina Weibo service – which is up against Tencent’s (HKG:0700) microblogging site that has the same generic ‘weibo’ name – is already doing some things that can be seen in Twitter’s latest redesign this week. And that’s no bad thing. Here are five key areas where it has grown more like Weibo (all five images can be clicked to enlarge):

Customized Brand Pages

Twitter’s brand pages get the same nice redesign as all users get, and seem to have only one differentiation in terms of layout: the option to customize the long rectangle above the tweets (see the area showing the sea of sugary soda in the picture below). Weibo’s brand pages have a vastly different look to those of regular users, allowing them to embed a corporate video at the top, and lots of other tweaks. It’ll be interesting to see if Twitter relents and permits more customizations in future for its branded pages:

Embedded Videos, Photos, and GIFs

Twitter now has much better support for embedding images in the site, obviating the need for so much clicking away. Of course, a lot of third-party Twitter apps have been doing this for some time, which is why a lot of Twitter’s core users prefer desktop or web apps – such as Tweetdeck, or Echofon – to the Twitter.com page.

Weibo, meanwhile, has had these baked-in videos and images er… baked-in since its roll-out last year:

Photo Albums

…And all those photos and GIFs will now be added into a ‘recent images’ folder on Twitter, just as Sina Weibo has been doing since a redesign earlier this summer. But Sina’s folders are more powerful, allowing you to add multiple folders, or view only your friend’s images in a highly visual stream:

Separate Page for Mentions

Twitter’s new ‘@connect’ tab finally gives all your important mentions the separate space they deserve, just like Weibo’s area for all your comments – yes, it has blog-style comment too – mentions, and retweets:

More Info in Side Panels

Finally, Twitter’s side pane now shows more information, such as suggestions as to who to follow, and some of the hottest trends. Of course, Facebook has been doing this for even longer, as part of the way it draws you in to the service:

Having said all that, I really like the redesign, and I like how it follows Twitter’s ethos whilst also adding some much-needed features.

The twitter redesign should be automatically showing-up for many people, but if not I believe you can force it to do so by downloading the updated mobile apps whilst signed-in to Twitter’s new preview page.

» This article originally appeared on Penn Olson, Asia Tech News For The World, and is reproduced here with permission.

This article originally appeared in Penn Olson.

I noticed UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s had bought ads on Twitter.com against searches for rivals like “Tesco”, “Waitrose” and “Lidl”.

Users searching Twitter.com for those brands saw Sainsbury’s Promoted Tweets, which Twitter recently started selling in the UK.

That is interesting because brand-squatting in keyword ad systems has been a contentious legal topic of late.

• Last year, the European Court of Justice ruled that Google (NSDQ: GOOG), as an advertising vehicle, was not culpable if companies breached trademarks by placing ads against rivals’ trademarks.
• But the court then advised Marks & Spencer individually be found liable for placing ads for its own florist service against Interflora’s brand name.
• A French court had ruled Google liable for trademark infringement when it allowed fake Louis Vuitton goods sellers to buy AdWords using the LVMH brand’s name. But the ECJ overturned that verdict.
• We recently reported how Lovefilm has bought Google ads for “Netflix” ahead of its rival’s UK and Ireland launch in Q1 2012.

Twitter told paidContent: “We comply with the laws of the countries in which we operate.”

paidContent contacted Sainsbury’s rivals to seek their opinion. Waitroise said: “We are aware of this. We’re not planning any action.” Others did not respond.

Sainsbury’s campaign, which was running on Twitter.com last week, has now ceased. Tesco has since bought Promoted Tweets using its own brand name…

Another company has had the same experience. “We noticed that a competitor was creating Promoted Tweets and bidding on our brand name as a keyword,” Mail Chimp’s marketer Amanda Lauter wrote back in July. “That’s not really a big deal in and of itself, since it’s the kind of thing that happens with Google Adwords all the time.

“But the content of these particular tweets was unsavory and misleading, and literally had nothing to do with MailChimp. So we did what any self-respecting brand would do, and started our own little ‘brand integrity’ Promoted Tweets campaign.”

The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority, which was recently granted regulation of online marketing, told paidContent it only regulates the content of advertisers’ own websites and can only investigate complaints made to it.

Tesco has previously asserted online rights it claims to trademarks.

We have recently been reporting Sina’s Weibo of China, which has surpassed Twitter with more than 200 million users, will launch an English-language version soon.

But now the company tells Technode: “It’s not about accessing the overseas market, it’s about (helping) the overseas companies to access the Chinese users.”

Weibo reports “good demand of overseas services which want to connect to Sina (NSDQ: SINA) Weibo’s service to entertain Chinese users“. Flipboard and Instagram will be adding share-to-Weibo integration while Flipboard will also be launching a Chinese version, the company tells TechNode.

So Twitter can rest easy that Weibo does not want to launch a competitive English-language service targeted at western consumers, which always seemed an unlikely proposition given the relative continental disparity and cultural differences in the respective services.

Weibo’s potential value to western businesses who want to break in to the fast-growing Chinese economy was illustrated when George W. Bush’s younger brother Neil recently started microblogging about his business interests on Weibo in Chinese.

Twitter is currently selling Promoted Tweets ads to western companies in the west and might have been able to take this opportunity to Asia; but Twitter is a relative unknown there with a relatively miniscule user base.

Any threat to market-leading Weibo on the business microblog marketing front comes from second-placed Tencent, whose own microblog service already opened up in English in September.

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Tyler Bleszinski cofounded the company. SB Nation has expanded aggressively organically and through acquisitions under Jim Bankoff, who started as an advisor and became CEO in January 2009 when it had roughly 1 million uniques. Internal figures from *Google* Analytics peg it at more than 25 million monthly uniques now.

It has had plenty of fuel, raising nearly $24 million from investors including Accel Partners, Khosla Ventures and Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) Interactive Partners. As important, Vox Media has invested in developing technology that is used to power the sites and their journalism; that’s one of the aspects that drew Topolsky, who can wax rhapsodic about the various elements. The company also provides a common sales platform. Vox Media has nearly 90 employees.

Bankoff plans to use both to expand beyond sports and tech but he isn’t ready to talk details. In a pre-launch interview, he said, “Our mission to empower talented web voices. Tomorrow we’re all focused on making sure The Verge gets off to a strong start. We definitely will be pursuing other verticals with the same mindset.”

In the case of SB Nation and The Verge, that would be young, tech savvy affluent males. The Verge launches with BMW, Sony (NYSE: SNE) and Samsung as sponsors. Marty Moe, an AOL (NYSE: AOL) vet like Bankoff, is publisher and gets founder credit with Topolsky. The about section on the new site sets an interesting tone when it comes to the way the company and the verticals are set up: “The Verge is a technology-focused news publication founded in 2011 by Joshua Topolsky and Marty Moe in partnership with Vox Media and its CEO Jim Bankoff.” Moe is also chief content officer of Vox Media.

The Verge, which went due to go live overnight, is the first big test of what Vox Media can do outside sports. Bankoff is banking on Topolsky and a team of nearly 30 full and part-time staffers to create a full-blown 24/7 personal tech site from scratch without having to incubate the expertise. To take advantage of the post-announcement momentum and build an audience, the team has been operating a blog called This Is My Next, which already has drawn 3 million uniques and more than 10 million pageviews.

Asked what would make The Verge different from all the other tech sites, Topolsky quickly replied, “The quality of the content — authoritative, trustworthy, great content. Not just ther quality but the breadth.” That includes in-depth reviews and longer-form magazine-style articles a la Wired. Other features include a products database integrated with the news, comparison tools, and an emphasis on community. The latter shouldn’t be confused with creating a site on user gen content, “This is not crowdsourced content. It’s curated editorial content we’re paying top dollar for,” Topolsky stressed. He compares the site to an app that will get constant iteration.

Zeebox, which paidContent exclusively previewed back in August, is so far available on iPad. It has gained Apple’s coveted “App Of The Week” status inside iTunes Store.

Appearing initially as a TV EPG, it shows users information, apps and further downloads about shows they are watching, creates live hyperlinks out of material discussed in shows and lets users both follow show-based social network chat and see what their friends are watching.

Taken as a package, there may be sufficient enough compelling features of Zeebox that many people will use it to stream TV shows’ Twitter hashtags rather than through other Twitter clients.

But Zeebox itself isn’t yet sure how any of this translates in to a hard business opportunity for it.

Speaking with paidContent, CEO and co-founder Ernesto Schmitt claims broadcasters and advertisers are keen to use Zeebox to drive up engagement while some TV producers are asking for their galleries to be fed Zeebox’s minute-by-minute data on TV show popularity.

But, though Zeebox will take an affiliate slice of custom it sends towards iTunes and to other downloads that relate to shows its app lists, Schmitt is non-committal on whether it will license its data back to broadcasters or sell in-app ads against corresponding moments in TV show commercial breaks, for example.

Indeed, Zeebox is a venture-funded startup. It is throwing out several interesting ideas that speak to the intersection of TV and social technology, without yet daring to fix its business in stone. For now, Rose and Schmitt just want to see good adoption.

Web, Android and iPhone versions are due later.