Aram Zucker-Scharff

Content Used to Be King. Now It’s the Joker. :

Why I’ve decided to stop taking “content” gigs and other journalists should, too. 

The homepage is dead, the section home page is dead, the app is dead and the social web has won—even at NYT. :

Traffic to the New York Times homepage fell by half in the last two years, according to the newspaper’s internal review of its digital strategy. Here’s the very stark chart: That’s not necessarily a reflection of any problems at the Times but the reality of how news is now distributed on the internet. Homepage traffic is declining at…

The new reality: news is all push, no pull.

Forbes loses two more bidders:

The ranks of potential suitors for Forbes Media is growing smaller now that German media giant Axel Springer and Spice Global Investments have reportedly dropped out of the bidding. One insider, ho…

Latest estimate of Forbes actual value places it at $120 mil total, far below the asking price of $400 mil and still less than the latest rumored investment of $250 mil. 

For more:

• Rumor Mill Grinds Up Fosun’s Bid.
• Steve Forbes Vows to Keep Stake 
• The Newsonomics of Forbes Real Performance and Price Potential. 
• Bloated Sale Price for Forbes Media. 
• Time Inc. Out of Race for Forbes Media.

With respect to the awesome Ken Doctor who looks at Forbes’s estimates as very optimistic, I’d say that the rapid drop in bidders marks them as nearly delusional.

I strongly suspect, based on my experience in worlds like Forbes UGC machine, that no one bothered to do the math on the cost of people hours to manage BrandVoice and the rest of the freely (or sometimes not so freely) contributed content compared to the earnings on that content. 

Likely, the real issue is that the ROI on the human-hours involved in these UGC projects is in the negatives; leaving Forbes Media to pray that they can sell their pageviews for higher rates, or simply gain more, until they reach scale, something extremely unlikely in the current advertising climate, especially when one considers that not all inventory may end up being filled, a problem Tumblr is quite familiar with.  

explore-blog:

This PSA from the Internet Advertising Bureau, created by illustrator Dominic Owen and animator Will Samuel, is an essential form of modern literacy: A kid’s guide to how internet ads work.

Then again, the very necessity for such warnings demonstrates that the concept of ad-supported media isn’t, at the end of the day, in the public interest. As soon as we deem something a “necessary evil” perilous enough to warrant a PSA for our children, we also implicitly acknowledge the “evil” part.

(via swissmiss)