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Don’t Dismiss Social Media’s Impact on TV Ratings Yet
NBCUniversal says social media is “not yet a game changer” in influencing television viewing. But its impact is far from insignificant.
Should Comcast and Time Warner Cable Be Allowed to Merge?
There are fears that the tie up of the cable giants will only increase their monopoly power. While this is true, it’s not all bad news for customers.
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The Future of News
The diminishing pool of unbiased news networks should stick to what they do best.
Net Neutrality: Time for a Bandwidth Market?
Letting the market price internet bandwidth is not a bad idea.
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Multi-Homing on Social Networks
Facebook is not going to become irrelevant just because its users also browse other social networks
Will the Cable Bundle Survive?
Recent talk of the decline of the cable television industry may be premature.
The Price of Wise Forecasting
Crowds are better at predictions than individuals. But when everyone is doing it, the need for individual experts remains.
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Google Under Attack -- Again
Patent wars loom for Google and its Android operating system. Can it defend itself this time?
Big Data vs. Don Draper
Big consulting firms with Big Data are trying to muscle in on the advertising business. But do they have the creativity to compete with agencies?
Hollywood Innovation Overtakes Piracy
Movie industry innovation is more than keeping pace with revenue drains caused by piracy.
Global advertising spend in 2013
Roughly half way through the year, estimates seem to draw a coherent picture about the size and the various components of the total 2013 advertising spending in the world. Total spend is some half a trillion dollars. About a third of this comes from the US and most of the growth is from the emerging economies.
Contradictions about Facebook
Lots of data and commentary came out about Facebook these past few days. One set concerns the membership base. Here, the worry is about peaking membership numbers and an aging user base. Not only seem older users be more interested in Facebook than before but younger ones appear to disengage with it.
Video on demand: some news
Video on demand is the hottest topic in media nowadays. Many see it as the next technology ready to disrupt further an otherwise already disrupted traditional media landscape.
Evolution of Video Game Industry
This is a really cool chart that appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek (Dec. 10-16, 2012). It shows the share of new game releases for the different game platforms (PC, XBox, Playstation, iPad and their various sequels) for every year between 1975-2012. The chart is complex but closer examination reveals a few fascinating facts
Google News in Europe
It seems that European legislators really want to go after Google, especially Google News. Recently, Germany has introduced a proposal that would force Google to pay a fee when showing a snippet of a news story among the results. This move comes after the similar French proposal mentioned by Miklos in a previous post.
Traditional media and user-generated content
Traditional media outlets started to regulaly publish content form the web. CNN’s so-called “distraction page” is shown below…
Google and France (and Europe)
Today, the French government announced that it will introduce legislation requiring Google to pay a fee to French media sites for listing their content pages. Google promptly responded that in this case it will stop listing French media sites in his search queries. CNN’s report on the conflict can be read here: http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/21/technology/google-french-links/index.html?iid=obinsite.
Honesty’s price: CNN and Media bias
A recent article in The Economist (Sept 21, 2012), “Unbiased and unloved” reports the stagnation of CNN’s viewership relative to its competitors. According to data from Nielsen, from 1998-2012, CNN’s daily viewership in the US has been relatively flat averaging 0.5 million viewers while its competitors, Fox News and MSNBC show steady growth. More painfully even, in the last few months, there is a decline for CNN while its competitors benefit – as expected – from the election period. Fox News has over a million daily users while MSNBC has just passed CNN at over 0.4 million.
Virtual Worlds dying – but slowly
Out of curiosity I have done some online search about virtual worlds. I have also visited INSEAD’s Second Life (SL) location and while there, I was wondering around SL’s mainland, something I have not done for 3 years now (!). To my astonishment there was more life on Second Life than I expected. I had a particularly interesting time in a rock club where the music was exceptionally good and the DJ had a great line…. The club had a good dozen people dancing, quite some turnover and good looking avatars and all of this at around 9 am EST on a Tuesday. The SL mainland was certainly more active than 3-4 years ago when the virtual world fell off the Internet publicity cliff and sunk into the unknown.
Facebook’s stock price
Today’s 8pm News on French TV reviewed the evolution of Facebook’s stock price – an interesting move from a rather ‘business unfriendly’ medium. Or was it, maybe, jealousy the motivating factor? “See those 20-year billionaires in the US; their success is all bogus….”
Olympics on new and traditional media
There is an interesting conflict between new and traditional media when it comes to global sport events, the biggest of which being the summer Olympic games. Old media buys broadcasting rights and airs events punctuated by advertising. As long as events are aired in real time there is no problem.
Is Wikipedia biased?
A very interesting study about Wikipedia appeared in the recent issue of the American Economic Review (Greenstein and Zhu, 2012). The article tries to establish if Wikipedia is biased in a political sense? Are articles more left or right leaning? The question is interesting because Wikipedia is the prototypical medium built entirely on user-generated content. But Wikipedia is not just a social network where personal information constitutes the overwhelming majority of uploaded content. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia meant to summarize the collective knowledge of mankind.
Oracles again
There is a good article in The Economist, June 9th, 2012 about expert advice. The article provides evidence that such advice remains very highly on demand despite clear evidence that it’s quality is bad. One of the key reasons mentioned is that people need psychological reassurance: “we believe in experts the same way our anchestors believed in oracles; we want to believe in a controllable world and we have a flawed understanding of the laws of chance.” ends the article with a quote from a recent author (Philip Tetlock: Expert political advice).
Google’s Knowledge Graph
Google has just announced that it will completely reshape the presentation of its search results. Instead of listing websites where people can find the answer to their queries, it will present data, links, pictures, etc. from its own databases, some 500 million “items”. The redesign is said to represent the biggest change in search for the last five years, not just conceptually but also in terms of business impact.
SEC considers civil case against Egan-Jones, an independent CRA
Egan-Jones is a relatively young, independent credit rating agency (CRA), one of few such institutions where investors pay for the agency’s services not the institutions whose securities are being rated.
Social publishers: a new paradigm for online media
Many of my recent readings of the business press give the impression that a consensus seems to emerge among professional content providers (also called “content mills”) – online newspapers (e.g. Huffington Post, The Business Insider), online tabloids (e.g. BuzzFeed) or blogs.
Freedom and the Internet
The Jasmine Revolution that has affected many of the Arab countries showed how big a role the Internet in general and social networks in particular can play in promoting political freedom.
Credit Rating Agencies
Last week has been rich in news about Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs). Both the Financial Times (March 23, 2012) and The Economist (March 17, 2012) had articles on CRAs commenting on how the industry is being reshaped after the scandals triggered by the global credit and fiscal crises. I have followed this industry for over a decade now but I keep being surprised how little progress has been achieved in fixing it.
Are Telecom service providers social networks?
My recent interaction with Telecom service providers has been frustrating – to say the least. Telecoms face the very typical situation of declining industry life cycle. Their revenue model is “fee for service” and the service is becoming a commodity. They are under intense pressure to become more efficient in their traditional business, which makes it hard for them to concentrate on revolutionary change in their business models. In essence they spend all their energy on process innovation instead of business model innovation.
Facebook’s value again
My colleague, Hernan Bruno did a great job (see https://blog.insead.edu/2012/02/what-does-a-100bn-valuation-for-facebook-mean/) estimating Facebook’s value from data broadly available on the company as well as sensible assumptions about growth, retention, discount rates and other relevant parameters.
