Exactly three years ago, Charlie Rose interviewed Marc Andreessen, the creator of Netscape and Facebook board member. In his trademark rapid-fire talk, Marc shared his views on Facebook. (Keep the February 2009 context in mind: the social network had 175 million users and Microsoft had just made an investment setting Facebook’s valuation at $15 billion.)

About Mark Zuckerberg’s vision:

The big vision basically is — I mean the way I would articulate it is connect everybody on the planet, right? So I mean [there are] 175 million people on the thing now. Adding a huge number of users every day. 6 billion people on the planet. Probably 3 billion of them with modern electricity and maybe telephones. So maybe the total addressable market today is 3 billion people. 175 million to 3 billion is a big challenge. A big opportunity.

Indeed.
About monetization:

There’s a lot of confusion out there. Facebook is deliberately not taking the kind of normal brand advertising that a lot of Web sites will take. So you go to a company like Yahoo which is another fantastic business and they’ve got these banner ads and brand ads all over the place, Facebook has made a strategic decision not to take a lot of that business in favor of building its own sort of organic business model; and it’s still in the process of doing that and if they crack the code, which I think that thy will, then I think it will be very successful and will be very large. The fallback position is to just take normal advertising. And if Facebook just turned on the spigot for normal advertising today, it’d be doing over a billion dollars in revenue. So it’s much more a matter of long term (…)  It could sell out the homepage and it would start making just a gigantic amount of money. So there’s just tremendous potential and it’s just a question exactly how they choose to exploit it. What’s significant about that is that Mark [Zuckerberg] is very determined to build a long term company.

In another interview last year, commenting on Facebook’s generous cumulated funding ($1.3 billion as of January 2011), Andreessen said the whole amount actually was a shrewd investment as it translated into an acquisition cost of a “one or two dollars per user” ($1.53 to be precise), which sounded perfectly acceptable to him.

Now, take a look at last week’s pre-iPO filing: Marc Andreessen was right both in 2009 and in 2011.

Last year, each of the 845 million active members brought $4.39 in revenue and $1.18 in net income. Even better, based on the $3.9 billion in cash and marketable securities on FB’s balance sheet, each of these users generated a cosy cash input of $1.53 dollars.

How much is the market expected to value each user after the IPO? Based on the projected  $100 billion valuation, each Facebooker would carry a value of $118. Keep this number in mind.

How does it compare with other media and internet properties?

Take LinkedIn: The social network for professionals is fare less glamorous than Facebook, a fact reflected in its members’ valuation. Today, LinkedIn has about 145 millions users, for a $7.7 billion market cap; that’s a value of $57 per user, half a Facebooker. A bit strange considering LinkedIn demographics, in theory much more attractive than Facebook advertising wise. (See a detailed analysis here). Per user and per year, LindkedIn makes $3.5 in revenue and $0.78 in profit.

Let’s now switch to traditional medias. Some, like the New York Times, were put on “deathwatch” by Marc Andreessen three years ago.

Assessing the number of people who interact with NYT brands is quite difficult. For the company’s numerous websites, you have to deal with domestic and global reaches: 43 millions UVs for the Times globally, 60 millions for its guide site About.com, etc. Then, you must take into account print circulation for the NY Times and the Boston Globe, the numbers of readers per physical copy, audience overlaps between businesses, etc.

I’ll throw an approximate figure of 50 million people worldwide who, one way or the other, are in some form of regular contact with one of the NYT’s brands. Based on today’s $1.14 billion market cap, this yields a valuation of $23 per NYT customer, five times less than Facebook. That’s normal, many would say. Except for one fact: In 2011, each NYT customer brought $46 in revenue, almost ten times more than Facebook. As for the profit (a meager $56 million for the NYT), each customer brought a little more than a dollar.

I did the same math with various media companies operating in print, digital, broadcast and TV. Gannett Company, for instance, makes between $50 and $80 per year in revenue  per customer, and, depending on the way you count, the market values that customer at about $50.

Indeed, measured by trends (double digit growth), global reach and hype, Facebook or LinkedIn are flying high while traditional medias are struggling; when Facebook achieves a 47% profit margin, Gannett or News Corp are in the 10% range.

Still. If we pause at today’s snapshot, Facebook economics appear out of touch with reality: each customer brings then times less than legacy media, and the market values that customer up to five times more. And when News Corp gets a P/E of 17, Gannett a P/E of 8, Facebook is preparing to offer shares a multiple of 100 times its earnings and 25 times its revenue. Even by Silicon Valley ambitious standards, market expectation for Facebook seems excessive: Apple is worth 13 times its earnings and Google 20 times.

Facebook remains a stunning achievement: it combines long term vision, remarkable execution, and a ferociously focused founder. But, even with a potential of 3 billion internet-connected people in 2016 vs. 1.6 billion in 2010 (a Boston Consulting Group projection), it seems the market has put Facebook in a dangerous bubble of its own.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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We’ll look at the other side of the coin in a moment, but first let’s give credit where it’s due and admire the obverse: I’m delighted to see Facebook going public, just deserts for Mark Zuckerberg and his group of very smart techies.

If you have the time and inclination, take a walk through Facebook’s SEC S-1 filing in preparation for its IPO, you won’t regret it. Pay particular attention to the manifesto Zuckerberg calls The Hacker Way and allow this aging geek (I’ll soon be 28) to sing its praises. Consider this verse:

We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.

Where others have stumbled as they shuffled, Zuckerberg and his gang have raced to create a technical giant. The infrastructure required to support 845M “monthly active” users that upload 250M photos each day might not be Google-size (yet), but it’s definitely Google-class. To show off this plumbing, Zuckerberg & Co. took a few pages from Apple’s (and Google’s) stylebook: They stuck to a simple, clean UI, unlike Myspace and their pavement pizza chic.

Facebook’s success isn’t just a sweet retort to Zuckerberg’s critics, it’s a confirmation of what makes Silicon Valley tick: techies, geeks, and nerds. While the technoïds aren’t always right — far from it — the great ones end up making and running great companies. The establishment bluestockings may roll their eyes at the hoodies and bare feet, but look at what happens when the suits take over. Look at HP, Yahoo!, or Cisco; regard Apple during its dark age

It wasn’t very long ago, I recall gleefully, that the kommentariat cluck-clucked disapprovingly over the founder’s “obvious’’ immaturity, his tactless management style, his poor public-speaking manner. But when you read Facebook’s S1, you’ll realize how good a negotiator Zuckerberg must have been early on. Since its inception, the company has raised about $1.5B, an unusually large amount for a start up, and well above the threshold that usually translates into management castration as investors demand a bigger share of the spoils, ransom for their assumption of greater risk.

Instead, Zuckerberg got investors to go for the radius of the pizza as opposed to the angle of the slice, their ownership percentage. Zuckerberg may own “only” 28% of Facebook, but he manufactured agreements that give him effective control of the company with 57% of voting rights

Some will downplay the achievement: ‘He must have gotten good advice’ . Of course…but he followed it. When you’re in charge, the quality of the advice is no excuse for bad performance; conversely, good advice shouldn’t be used to dismiss good results.

Speaking of which, in 2011, the company’s revenue was $3.7B, with a tidy $1B profit and $3.8B in cash – to which they’ll be adding at least $5B in the upcoming IPO. This is a nicely profitable company. The Washington Post’s Wonkblog put Facebook’s performance in graphic perspective:

Take a look at the number of employees: a mere 3,200. With 3.7B in revenue, that works out to $1.2M per worker. Turning to cash per worker ($3.9B / 3,200 = $1.2M), Facebook is about as rich as Uncle Apple’s $1.3M cash per “full-time equivalent” employee. It’s a remarkable achievement for any company, and unheard of for one so young.

But it’s not all roses.

As Zuckerberg’s Letter To Investors properly contends, Facebook can “change how people relate to their governments and social institutions” and “improve how people connect to businesses and the economy”. Making tons of money in the process is totally legit…as long as a key condition is met: informed consent. And “informed consent” mean just that: Information that a reasonably attentive individual — as opposed to an Apple patent attorney — can understand.

On this count, Facebook’s actions have been less than transparent. Perhaps it’s a consequence of the Hacker Way: Ship first, ask questions later. Or perhaps Facebook is betting we’re too lazy and ignorant to read the fine print, just like wireless carriers who try to dazzle us with their sleight-of-plan hoodwinks.

Furthermore, Facebook’s ubiquity and power raises the spectre of yet another Walled Garden: Is Zuckerberg’s company killing the Open Web by superimposing a proprietary lattice of connections between users, including companies that use Facebook to do business with its community? Many have noted that Google can’t really index the Facebook web. As John Batelle puts it:

Sure, Google can crawl Facebook’s “public pages,” but those represent a tiny fraction of the “pages” on Facebook, and are not informed by the crucial signals of identity and relationship which give those pages meaning.

(True. But does Google want to index Facebook? Behind the Open posture stands Google’s real aim: Bulldozing anything and anyone standing between their ad engines and their targets.)

Lastly, let’s consider the Web 2.0 proverb: If the product is free, You are the product. With that in mind, I couldn’t help wince at the opening of Zuckerberg’s Letter To Investors:

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

It reminded me of the Don’t Be Evil puffery in Google’s own S-1:

Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served — as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.

When I read those words back in 2004, I thought Google was either incredibly naive or a little too obvious in their do-good posture. Either way, we know what has happened: Google needs to be all things to all people, all the time, everywhere, on every device, in order to irradiate us with their advertising photons. Google’s motto should be Disintermediation R’Us. Instead, their mission statement reads:

Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

…all in the name of selling ads.

In his letter, Zuckerberg comes up with a similarly lofty sentiment:

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future.

I don’t mean to diminish Zuckerberg’s accomplishments. He’s built an epoch-making company, I’m delighted by the team of highly skilled technologists he’s assembled — a team that includes some dear friends of mine — and the tech culture they evince. He’s surrounded himself with sharp business people and extracted oodles of money from strong investors; he’s Bill Gates/Larry Ellison/Page+Brin caliber or above…and I’m thrilled to see the former naysayers now eating out of his hand.

So why not just say something like…

We help people connect in safe, convenient, and innovative ways. In doing so, we’ve built a business of historic proportions. We make money selling advertising that is finely tuned to reach our users in cost-competitive ways. Because we believe in Facebook’s unlimited potential, we will manage ourselves for the long term rather than for short-term profit. We have built an ownership and control structure to accomplish this goal.

There’s good evidence that the people who buy Amazon, Google, and Facebook shares are willing to let these companies run for the long term rather than for the next quarter. Smart people don’t need lofty mission statements to guide their investments, they watch what the execs do and decide if they’re using “the long term” as an excuse or if they’re really aiming for it.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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Let’s come back to the business model question. My January 15 column featuring a Simple Model for digital newspapers triggered a number of emails and comments, many  questioning my assumptions (my thanks to readers of the Monday Note who take the time to make insightful contributions to the discussion).

Let’s see if we can sort through the questions and come up with a few helpful answers.

1 / Advertising revenue. Let me set the backdrop here. My model projects what I’ll call a mature market. First and foremost, time spent vs. ad spending for print, web and mobile, which currently looks look this…

Source: Internet Trends, Mary Meeker, KPCB Oct 2011

… will have morphed into a graph showing more balance between categories. In my projections, ad spending converges to time effectively spent on various medias. Also, we’ll see a sharp rise of the mobile segment, and a sub-segment made by tablets will carry its specific business model (apps, subscription, ads).
This will happen at the expense of the print media, a sector that, considering the time people now spent on it, is still vastly over-invested. Dailies are bound to suffer more than weeklies (or Sunday editions) because their primary function (delivering news) collides with mobile devices. Having said that, newspapers will survive (after further shrinkage) thanks to an unabated base of loyal readers ready to pay almost any price for their favorite daily. This is the rationale behind recent price hikes (see Cracking the Paywall). In Europe, I see all quality papers priced at 2€ within two to three years and I don’t believe such prices will accelerate reader depletion. Holding print prices up might be critical for survival.

On this topic, this is the email I received from Jim Moroney, publisher and CEO of the Dallas Morning News:

• On May 1, 2009, The Dallas Morning News raised home delivery rates across the board by 40%. The price increase was even greater for the most geographically distant delivery.
• We doubled daily single copy price to $1.00 and Sunday single copy price to $3.00 in two steps each.
• Today we yield 93% of our retail rate, i.e., we are doing very little discounting. Lots of papers claiming to raise their home delivery rates and then turnaround and offer discount after discount. If the most valuable asset we have is the content we originate, as an industry, why do we keep deeply discounting it as if it were damaged goods?
• Our home delivery rate is $36.95 per month, making it the third highest priced metro in the U.S. after NYT and Boston Globe.
• In March, we made all access to what we distribute digitally paid access.
• Website, iPad and smartphone are $9.99 each per month. All digital access is $16.95 per month.
• So there is a lowly metro doing something akin to the NYT and FT.

Also, because of its unique advertising value proposition, I won’t sell short print media. In a nutshell, no one expects a Dior campaign to look as gorgeous on the screen of a computer or on the 4-inches display of a smartphone as it does on quality print. For such high-priced ads, print is likely to remain vastly superior for a long time — and should therefore be part of any well-rounded business strategy.

Coming back to digital media, in my view, a mature market also means a clean one. Today, many news websites URLs have very little to do with editorial. In places, the number of URLs whose only purpose is to gather “eyeballs” represents as much as 30% to 40% of all page views.
Look at what Le Monde does: when you look at a web page through Readability (an app that basically extracts relevant text), you see every verb appear in red and linking to… Le Monde’s grammar conjugation service:

That’s good for SEO shenanigans. Nothing is too petty to churn audience numbers (and Le Monde is no worse than its competitors)

To sum up, here is why I think prices on the internet are likely to go up in a near (2-3 years) future :

• a cleaner internet will yield a much better performance advertising-wise than it does today,
• inventories will have to be limited (read: closed down). No market whatsoever can withstand the type of unlimited supply we see today on the web. In our current oversupply situation, we often see more than half of the pages sold for a CPM below one dollar or euro,
• as discussed before, we can expect a strong adjustment on ad spending vs. time spent, it will benefit digital media,
• the ad market suffers greatly from current economic conditions (debt,  political tensions abroad, elections in several countries, uncertainties everywhere…) Those won’t last forever.

My mention of a $20 CPM sounded overly optimistic to many readers? It is by today’s standards, no doubt. But once a number of adverse factors are attended to, I think the $20 assumption will hold (and, by the way, I’m referring to revenue per page, not per module).

2 / Subscription revenue. Many are challenging my 10% transformation rate (one reader out of ten willing to pay $10 a month in my model.) Objection taken. Again, my projections go beyond today’s deflated market. It will take a while to get to 10% when a large site such as the New York Times is at 1% or 2%. And converting readers to pay something/somehow will require imagination beyond single pricing; I’m told large newspapers charging $15 or $25 a month are considering low-cost subscriptions plans as low as $5 per month to capture young readers and boost their conversion rate. From an editorial product perspective though, I’m a bit skeptical. What will such a downgraded offer look like: stricter paywall; low-cost apps?

3 / Mobile apps. Although I explored this issue in previous Monday Notes (see The Capsule’s Price and Mobile First, and a Mag), I should have been more forthcoming about mobile apps. My belief is this: overtime, thanks their greater ability to carry subscriptions and high yield ads, apps, not web sites, will be the path to decent ARPUs.

I will acknowledge another misconception in my plans and leave it to Vin Crosbie, new media professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, New York, who commented my piece in the Guardian.

Here’s the crux: Even if Federic’s model could work for a national daily, will it scale to work for the average newspaper? Maybe NYT, WSJ, or USAToday could eek out 2% profit margin using it, but what of the other 1,412 daily newspapers in the U.S., the average-sized of which is 18,000 daily circulation? Do the math. [...] Look at the paltry signup rate NYT has achieved. Scaled to a 18,000 circulation daily, NYT’s results would mean less than 180 paying online subscribers.

Vin is basically right. One of the tragedies of the digital media model is this: unlike the newspaper model, it doesn’t scale down well. There are plenty of local web sites faring well, but none comes close to supporting a 200 staff newsroom costing $25 or $27 million to operate.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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As if you haven’t heard, Apple posted its Q4 earnings last week. I’ll spare you my own encomium and refer you to these links:

• Despite its title, Business Insider’s list of Facts About Apple’s Business That Will Blow Your Mind contains little or no hype.
• TechCrunch provides context for Apple’s “massive numbers”.
• Brian Hall offers his trademark combination of eloquent and factual commentary while arguing that We’re Not Talking Enough About Apple or About iPhone.
• And this list wouldn’t be complete without Horace Dediu’s keen insight: Apple’s Fourth quarter 2011 Growth Scorecard.

For complete numbers, you can go to SEC filings 8-K and 10-Q. If you have the time and inclination, I recommend a walk through the MD&A (Management Discussion & Analysis) in the 10-Q. Never boring, it’s filled with meaningful details and decently written — I couldn’t find a single instance of whereas, forthwith, or insofar.
With this out of the way, a few thoughts and questions are prompted by the earnings release fever:

What happened to the “Android Is Winning” meme?

No question, Google’s Trojan Horse has made tremendous headway, powering more than 50% of all smartphones worldwide. It’s a technically robust product (comrades of mine from a previous OS war work on Android, so I could be biased) and the “free and open” pitch works wonders with handset manufacturers.

Rev 1.0 of the meme held no hope for Apple: Android will kill iOS just like Windows crushed the Mac. (We’ll deal with the Windows vs. Mac part in a moment.) But where’s the evidence Android is in any way ‘‘killing’’ the iPhone? It’s certainly not happening in the US: The iPhone Accounted for 80 Percent of AT&T Smartphone Sales Last Quarter; for Verizon the portion was closer to 70%. Apple sold 62 million iOS devices last quarter; reports of Apple’s imminent demise are greatly exaggerated. (The actual numbers might include some statistical double dipping due to activations, but that applies equally to all brands so the picture remains the same.)

In the meantime, an ABI Research study shows that Android is losing market share. As with all such research, we’ll keep the usual caveats in mind…and wait for the next study.

Let’s not forget the usual litany: Ah, yes, this is great, but Apple’s success can’t last. Some day, they’ll ship a dud; their arrogance will blind them; the toxic waste of success will kill them.

Sure, we all die. But when?

And aren’t those supposed to defeat Apple exposed to the same hubris, creeping mediocrity and belief in their own BS?

Another question: Where are Nokia, Motorola, RIM? The short answer: They’re all hurting:

• Nokia just posted a steep loss for the quarter, its smartphone revenue declined by 38%.
• Motorola (in the Android camp and soon part of Google) posted an $80M quarterly loss, selling only 200,000 tablets and 5.3M smartphones.
• As for RIM, we know they’re in a tailspin. RIM just kicked Messrs. Lazaridis and Balsillie upstairs and got itself a new CEO (actually, a recycled co-COO). Last year, RIM’s share of the US smartphone market fell from 19.7% to 16.6%. (I don’t know how market research firms justify the digit after the decimal point…)

And there’s more: It now looks like Nokia has taken the lead in a race to the bottom. According to Forbes, Nokia’s “feature phones” (aka “dumbphones”), make more money than mid-market Androids.

Nokia‘s $40 feature phones are vastly more profitable than Sony Ericsson‘s $200 Android models. This is not how the smartphone revolution was supposed to turn out.

This would explain why Nokia acquired Smarterphone AS, a Swedish company specializing in “highly advanced functionality on very moderate hardware.” Goodbye Symbian and Meego, hello Windows Phone and Smarterphone. This is going to be interesting.

Speaking of Microsoft, the Redmond company stubbornly refuses to recognize that it’s a Post-PC world. Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s articulate chief propagandist, contends that we’ve entered the “PC-Plus” era: The PC still holds center stage, and is enhanced by these new “companion devices’”.

With 15 million iPads and large numbers of Kindle Fires and other tablets, Microsoft’s PC For Ever cant is wearing thin. In 2012, Apple will sell between 50M and 60M tablets; we can assume that total industry sales will be in the neighborhood of 100M units. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, openly admits that the iPad cannibalizes Mac sales – and quickly points out that there’s much more to cannibalize on the Windows side.

Last quarter, the Windows business declined by some 6%. Worldwide PC sales were, at best, stagnant; if we remove the nicely growing Mac business from global numbers, Windows PC units actually declined by 8.5%. One you’re over the hill, you pick up speed…

But this shouldn’t be news. Read Paul Robinson’s comment on a Fraser Speirs’ blog post:

There will still be computers and laptops but we will return to a time when they are bought by programmers, hobbyists and tinkerers. Everyone else will buy a ‘computing device’ of some sort and be all the happier for it.

This was written exactly two years ago, on January 29th, 2010. The iPad had just been announced — and criticized for [insert your favorite faults here]. Fraser’s own post, aptly titled Future Shock, deserves to be read in its entirety. I’ll quote two choice morsels:

For years we’ve all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the ‘average person’. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.

Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism. Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing choices.

…and…

If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people’s perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn’t a price worth paying to have a computer that isn’t frightening anymore.

In the meantime, Adobe and Microsoft will continue to stamp their feet and whine.

(See also Fraser’s concise explanation of iOS multitasking here and here.)

Microsoft isn’t stupid. They’re just saying what they have to say for today’s business. We’ll see how their PC-Plus story evolves when their ARM-based Windows 8 tablets ship later this year.

Third and last for today: Macintosh.

Although it now plays third fiddle to its iPhone and iPad siblings, the “historic” Macintosh looks hale: +26% in units, +22% in revenue. That’s $6.6B with an operating margin in the 25% range. Compare this to HP, the world’s largest PC maker. In its last reported quarter, HP booked about $10B of PC revenue, with a 6% margin.

The Mac has lost the pole position before: In 2006, Apple saw $7.4B in Macintosh revenue versus $7.7B for the iPod. Right before the iPhone introduction, Apple’s halo product was its music player.

Now, Apple is the iOS company. While the Mac first donated its software DNA to iOS, in the latest OS X Lion we witness the iPadification of the elder.

So far, my experience of OS X Lion is mixed. Is it because the gene splicing is still in transition? Or maybe simply Apple committed its elite troops to the iOS front, leaving things half-done on the Mac…

I’ll leave that discussion for another Monday Note.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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In the summer of 2009, I found myself invited to a small party in an old bourgeois apartment with breathtaking views of the Champ-de-Mars and Eiffel Tower. The gathering was meant to be an informal discussion among media people about Nicolas Sarkozy’s push for the HADOPI anti-piracy bill. The risk of a heated debate was very limited: everyone in this little crowd of artists, TV and movie producers, and journalists, was on the same side, that is against the proposed law. HADOPI was the same breed as the now comatose American PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). The French law was based on a three-strikes-and-you-are-disconnected system, aimed at the most compulsive downloaders.

The discussion started with a little tour de table, in which everyone had to explain his/her view of the law. I used the standard Alcoholic Anonymous introduction: “I’m Frederic, and I’ve been downloading for several years. I started with the seven seasons of The West Wing, and I keep downloading at a sustained rate. Worse, my kids inherited my reprehensible habit and I failed to curb their bad behavior. Even worse, I harbor no intent to give up since I refuse to wait until next year to see a dubbed version of Damages on a French TV network… In can’t stand Glenn Close speaking French, you see…” It turned out that everybody admitted to copious downloading, making this little sample of the anti-Sarkozy media elite a potential target for HADOPI enforcers. (Since then, parliamentary filibuster managed to emasculate the bill.)

When it come to digital piracy, there is a great deal of hypocrisy. One way another, everyone is involved.

For some large players — allegedly on the plaintiff side — the sinning even takes industrial proportions. Take the music industry.

In October 2003, Wired ran this interesting piece about a company specialized in tracking entertainment contents over the internet. BigChampagne, located in Beverly Hills, is for the digital era what Billboard magazine was in the analog world. Except that BigChampagne is essentially tracking illegal contents that circulates on the web. It does so with incredible precision by matching IP numbers and zip code, finding out what’s hot on peer-to-peer networks. In his Wired piece, Jeff Howe explains:

BigChampagne’s clients can pull up information about popularity and market share (what percentage of file-sharers have a given song). They can also drill down into specific markets – to see, for example, that 38.35 percent of file-sharers in Omaha, Nebraska, have a song from the new 50 Cent album.

No wonder some clients pay BigChampagne up to 40,000$ a month for such data. They  use BigChampagne’s valuable intelligence to apply gentle pressure on local radio station to air the very tunes favored by downloaders. For a long time, illegal file-sharing has been a powerful market and promotional tool for the music industry.

For the software industry, tolerance of pirated contents has been part of the ecosystem for quite a while as well. Many of us recall relying on pirated versions of Photoshop, Illustrator or Quark Xpress to learn how to use those products. It is widely assumed that Adobe and Quark have floated new releases of their products to spread the word-of-mouth among creative users. And it worked fine. (Now, everyone relies on a much more efficient and controlled mechanism of test versions, free trials, video tutorials, etc.)

There is no doubt, though, that piracy is inflicting a great deal of harm on the software industry. Take Microsoft and the Chinese market. For the Seattle firm, the US and the Chinese markets are roughly of the same size: 75 million PC shipments in the US for 2010, 68 million in China. There, 78% of PC software is pirated, vs. 20% in the US; as a result, Microsoft makes the same revenue from the Chinese than from… the Netherlands.

More broadly, how large is piracy today? At the last Consumer Electronic Show, the British market intelligence firm Envisional Ltd. presented its remarkable State of Digital Piracy Study (PDF here). Here are some highlights:
- Pirated contents accounts for 24% of the worldwide internet bandwidth consumption.
- The biggest chunk is carried by BitTorrent (the protocol used for file sharing); it weighs about 40% of the illegitimate content in Europe and 20% in the US (including downstream and upstream). Worldwide, BitTorrent gets 250 million UVs per month.
- The second tier is made by the so-called cyberlockers (5% of the global bandwidth), among them the infamous MegaUpload, raided a few days ago by the FBI and the New Zealand police. On the 500 million uniques visitors per month to cyberlockers, MegaUpload drained 93 million UVs. (To put things in perspective, the entire US newspaper industry gets about 110 million UVs per month). The Cyberlockers segment has twice the users but consumes eight times less bandwidth than BitTorrent simply because files are much bigger on the peer-to-peer system.
- The third significant segment in piracy is illegal video streaming (1.4% of the global bandwidth.)

There are three ways to fight piracy: endless legal actions, legally blocking access, or creating alternative legit offers.

The sue-them-untill-they-die approach is mostly a US-centric one. It will never yield great results (aside from huge legal fees) due to the decentralized nature of the internet (there is no central servers for BitTorrent) and to the tolerance in countries in harboring cyberlockers.

As for law-based enforcement systems such has the French HADOPI or American SOPA/PIPA, they don’t work either. HADOPI proved to be porous as chalk, and the US lawmakers had to yield to the public outcry. Both bills were poorly designed and inefficient.

The figures compiled by Envisional Ltd. are indeed a plea for the third approach, that is the  creation of legitimate offers.

Take a look at the figures below, which shows the peak bandwidth distribution between the US and Europe. You will notice that the paid-for Netflix service takes exactly the same amount of traffic as BitTorrent does in Europe!

US Bandwidth Consumption:

Europe Bandwidth Consumption:

Source : Envisional Ltd

These stats offer a compelling proof that creating legitimate commercial alternatives is a good way to contain piracy. The conclusion is hardly news. The choice between pirated and legit content is a combination of ease-of-use, pricing and availability on a given market. For contents such as music, TV series or movies, services like Netflix, iTunes or even BBC iPlayer go in the right direction. But one key obstacle remains: the balkanized internet (see a previous Monday Note Balkanizing the Web), i.e. the country zoning system. By slicing the global audience in regional markets, both the industry (Apple for instance) and the local governments neglect a key fact: today’s digital audience is getting increasingly multilingual or at least more eager to consume contents in English as they are released. Today we have entertainment products, carefully designed to fit a global audience, waiting months before becoming available on the global market. As long as this absurdity remains, piracy will flourish. As for the price, it has to match the ARPU generated by an advertising-supported broadcast. For that matter, I doubt a TV viewer of the Breaking Bad series comes close to yield an advertising revenue that matches the $34.99 Apple is asking for the purchase of the entire season IV. Maintaining such gap also fuels piracy.

I want Netflix, BBC iPlayer and an unlocked and cheaper iTunes everywhere, now. Please. In the meantime, I keep my Vuze BitTorrent downloader on my computer. Just in case.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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What’s the use of offering more than 500,000 wares if customers can’t find their way through the gigantic bazaar? I know, I already harped on about the lack of curation in Apple’s App Store, but that was 16 months ago…when the Store contained a “mere” 250,000 apps.

Since then, the iPhone has sold in ever larger numbers (we’ll soon see if the December quarter number crossed the 30 million units line, and by how much) and with more than 18 billion downloads, the App Store is an unmitigated success. If this is what “broken” looks like, why fix it? And how?

To answer the question, let’s take a trip back a hundred years to Clermont-Ferrand, home of Michelin. Known for its tires and tourists guides, Michelin is a very old company (incorporated in 1888), but they’ve always been at the forefront of their technology. Tires are complex products whose role in the safety, comfort, and economy of our driving experience lead Michelin engineers to joke that cars are peripheral to their lovingly engineered creations. (If you find yourself traveling through the center of France, treat yourself to a visit to L’Aventure Michelin, a really interesting museum that recounts the company’s many adventures, most of which are unknown, surprising, or forgotten.)

Edouard and André Michelin weren’t just good techies, they were astute businessmen and marketing geniuses. They seized on an obvious idea: If people take more road trips, we’ll sell more tires. And they shone in the execution that followed this intuition, they went far and well in their efforts to encourage and guide automobile travel. Michelin became famous for its world class roadmaps, for the Red Guides that grade hotels and restaurants, and Green Guides for regions, historic sites, and countries. The company also published literary Guides Bleus, forgoing culinary delights for a more cultural angle in their interpretation of locales. (I’ll skip their other marketing inventions, such as the Bibendum character and the iconic Michelin kilometer stones and road signs.)

Michelin had a staff of agents at the ready to devise an itinerary for your trip, all you had to do was write or call.

Did this “content”, as we would now call it, make money for Michelin? Possibly, but the revenue was negligible compared to the amount their tires generated. Michelin’s maps, guides, and services were created with one goal in mind, one mission: sell hardware. That’s where the real margins were, and still are.

Is Apple’s situation, it’s mission, all that different? Hardware revenue and margins are the sacred business model. Everything else, including the App Store, must support the ultimate goal. (For reference, the App Store generates less than 2% of Apple’s revenue, and much less than 2% of its profits.)

The scale of the App Store’s success, probably unforeseen by its creators, could lead management into complacency: Look at these numbers, ain’t they great? This is an incumbent’s attitude. And we know what happens to those.

But ask developers and, most important, users. For all its demonstrable success, the App Store feels broken. It’s too big and confusing, the app reviews are dry and the ratings are unreliable, search is primitive…

Label me naif, but I think Apple could do well by following the century-old Michelin model. It won’t take billions to implement, nor will it require the administration of the Apple Genii, just competent people and hard work. Here’s what a possible solution looks like:

Apple sets up a team in charge of publishing an App Store Guide. The editorial team writes opinionated (and presented as such) reviews of apps by category: Productivity, Games, Utilities, and the like. Published daily on a blog and accumulated in an on-line Guide, these reviews, one to two pages long, present the writer’s experience and opinion, culminating in a ranking in stars or numbers. It sounds simple, often the sign of a twisty road ahead…

Trouble starts quickly.

First obstacle: It’s already being done. True. How many iOS App Review Sites there are? According to this blog, the answer is…116! This is good news: Apple’s customers have an appetite for reviews, but which sites and reviewers can they trust? How do these reviewers make money? There’s no dispassionate, incorruptible Consumer Reports for apps.

Second, there’s Apple’s penchant for control. True, again — but irrelevant. Going back to Michelin, their opinion of a restaurant might be controversial, but the company has no financial gain in the number of stars they assign. They sell tires, not meals. Similarly, Apple wants to move hardware, not generate App Store revenue by favoring one app over another.

Third, attempting to sift through 500,000 apps amounts to boiling the ocean. How can one even hope to ‘‘make a dent” in that universe? But that’s no reason to sit on one’s hands. Let’s say that after a year the Apple App Guide has featured “only” 2,500 reviews, an average of 50 reviews a week, ten a day. Is that bad compared to today’s mess?

Fourth, the expense. Let’s do a gross, back-of-the-envelope overestimation: 20 reviewers at $250K/year “fully loaded” with management overhead and office expenses included. This gets us to $5M/year. Apple is notoriously cautious, if not downright stingy with (most) expenses, but $5M would be lost in the income statement noise. And this miniscule investment would exert a healthy influence on the rest of the app review ecosystem, just as the Apple Store raised the game for its independent retailers.

Fifth, the people. Will readers trust the opinions of enlisted Apple employees, or will they insist on “independent” voices? An employee’s loyalty is to the company, and there could be grumblings that a staff of corporate reviewers would choose apps that, above all else, show off the platform and the Apple brand. On the other hand, independent contractors are just that: independent. As such, they’re much more susceptible to “external influences.” There are any number of gadget blogs that smell of greasy palms and astroturfing.

Apple possesses [five s’s in a nine-letter word!] a treasure of closely-guarded user data — off-limits to a contractor — that could prove very helpful in rating apps. It’s “simply” a matter of finding, hiring, training, and managing competent and honest curators.

Today, Apple already demonstrates a type of curation when it decides which apps get featured as New and Noteworthy, or Staff Favorites. They might as well go all the way and please their users with subjective, personal reviews. Encourage the kommentariat to cluck its disapproval, allow dinged developers to rage online. If presented as an honest, competent effort — occasionally wrong but always with the Apple imprimatur — the review process will be as respected as any other high-quality editorial effort.

I hope Apple’s success won’t blind it to the need to give app seekers more than today’s skimpy categories and unreliable user reviews. Who knows, if Amazon or Google were to wake to the opportunity, their moves could spur Apple into action.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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Advertising still dominates the newspaper revenue model. Depending upon the particular country, it is not uncommon to see print dailies getting 70% to 80% of their revenue from advertising. In the early days of the digital era, when business plans were driven by “eyeballs”, everybody hoped to replicate the tried and true print advertising revenue model. Now, the collective hallucination has dissipated; a more down-to-earth vision prevails: publishers willing to preserve high quality (read: costly) journalism recognize they have no choice but getting their users to pay for it, one way another. The pendulum has swung back.

It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. You’ll be able to charge readers if you put yourself in a position to propose exclusive, unique contents. To do so, you’ll have to put together an strong line-up of professionals, as opposed to a blogger army whose output no one will ever pay a dime for.Next questions include: how much to charge ? Is it 10 (dollars euros, pounds), 20 or more?  What free-to-pay conversion rate to aim at? Can we shoot for 5%, 10% or more of the overall audience? How does a full digital operation look like?

Let’s dive into numbers for a back-of-the-envelope exercise.

First, assumptions: The following is based on my observations of markets in Europe (France, UK, Scandinavia) and the United states; numbers may vary but I trust none are widely off the mark.

In the print world, costs break down as follows:

Newsroom........................25%
Production, printing............25%
Distribution....................20%
Marketing promotion.............20%
Administration..................10%
...............................100%

Now let’s move to a fully digital operation derived from a traditional one in terms of journalistic firepower and standards.

To produce it, we’ll settle for a 200 staff newsroom, with writers, editors, data journalists, information-graphic designers, videographers, etc. We removed the staff working on the dead-tree model. With 200 dedicated people working for an online operation, you can really shoot the for stars. Such a setup costs between $25 and $30 million a year, all expenses included. Let’s settle for a middle $27 million.

Production costs fall sharply as the carbon-based version is gone. The old 45% production and printing line morphs into a conservative 15% for serving web pages and applications. We’ll assume all other costs (marketing, promotion, administrative) remain at the same level.

The cost table now looks like this:

Newsroom...............27M$......40% of the total
Production, technical..10M$......15%
Marketing promotion....20M$......30%
Administration.........10M$......15%
Total Costs............67M$ 

Now, let’s turn to the revenue side.

First: advertising revenue. We assume a real audience of 5 million Unique Visitors per month. By real audience, I mean no cheating, no bogus viewers, reasonable SEM and excellent SEO. People come to the site, stick to it and come back. Each user sees at least 20 pages a month. That’s on the high side. By comparison, Google Ad Planner gives the following page views per UVs:

NYT.........15 pageviews per user and per month (distant paywall)
WSJ.........14 (some paid-for section)
FT.com......11 (strict paywall)
Guardian....14 (free)

20 pages is therefore an ambitious goal. I’m convinced it can be achieved through high-performance recommendation engines (look at what Amazon does in terms of its ability to get people to click on related items).

5 million UVs multiplied by 20 pages views gives (thank you) 100 million PV. Now, let’s assume each page generate a CPM (for several modules) of $20. That’s an average as not all pages yield the same amount: parts of the inventory will go unsold, but pages served to high value, paid-for subscribers will generate twice that amount. This translates into a yearly revenue of $24 million, that is around 5 advertising dollars per visitor per year.

Again: it will vary, but it is consistent with what we see on the market for high quality, branded, publications. (By contrast, even the greatest blogs only yield one or two dollars per user).

Two, subscription revenue. Since our audience is solid and loyal to the brand, we will assume 10% of all readers will be willing to pay. Make no mistake: that is the transformation rate a newspapers such as the New York Times is aiming at (it is currently at 1%, still a long way to go). My take is a general news operation will be price-sensitive, meaning the transformation rate with a $9.99 a month price will be significantly higher than with $15 or $20 per month; by contrast, a specialized publication is less rate-sensitive and can be pricier.

In my model of a general news product, I set the price to $10 a month, which makes the one-tenth conversion rate more realistic. Then, I factor in two items:
- 15% taxes (it ranges from 8% in the US to 20% in France)
- a 13% cost of platform including transaction, database, etc (that’s should be a goal as Google OnePass charges 10%); this line is distinct from the technical costs applied to the entire digital operation.

All of the above taken into account, a digital subscriber paying $10 month will generate a net ARPU of $89 a year for the company. Multiplied by 0.5 million paid-for users (i.e.10% of the global audience), this translates into a revenue of $44 million for digital subscribers.

The revenue table now looks like this:

Advertising......24M$...35% of the total
Subscription.....44M$...65%
Total............68M$...100%

$68 million in revenue for a cost of $67 million (all numbers rounded), leaves a mere 2% operating margin. Nothing to brag about. It could easily translate into an accounting loss, especially since it will take a while to reach several of these goals: a 10% free-to-paid transformation rate, a high number of pages per viewers, both are several years (of losses) away for many publications.
But these are the only dials I set on the ambitious side; the rest (subscription price, audience), is rather conservative; for instance if you simply set the subscription rate at $12 a month instead of $10 — that is fifty cents per weekday — the operating margin jumps to 13%.
And I also set aside many things I firmly believe in, like keeping some print operation in the form of a compact, high-end weekly for instance (with a staff of 200, it sounds feasible), developing ancillary products such as digital book publishing, etc.

Once again, while I feel my numbers are well-grounded, others will find this little model simplistic and questionable. The simulation is aimed at showing there is a life after the death of the daily print edition. Success is a “mere matter” of persistence.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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We continue along the lines of last week’s Monday Note kriegsspiel with the latest speculation Will Microsoft, at long last, buy RIM? The idea has been kicked around for at least five years: Days after the iPhone’s introduction in January 2007, Seeking Alpha suggested that the Xbox maker ought to buy RIM in order to build an XPhone. In retrospect, this would have saved both companies a lot of grief.

It’s early 2007 and the BlackBerry maker is riding high. With its Microsoft Exchange integration; a solid PIM (Personal Information Manager) that neatly combines mail, calendar, and contacts; and the secure BlackBerry Messenger network, the “CrackBerry” is rightly perceived as the best smartphone on the market. I love my Blackberry and once I manage to get a hosted Exchange account for the family, I show my un-geeky spouse the ease of over-the-air (OTA) synching between a PC and the BlackBerry. ‘No cable?’ No cable. She promptly ditches her Palm device. One by one, our adult children follow suit. For a brief time, we are a BlackBerry family.

But the Blackberry’s success blinds RIM executives. They don’t see – or refuse to believe – that the iPhone poses a threat to their dominance. A little later, Android comes on the scene. Apple and Google deploy technically superior software platforms that, by comparison, expose the Blackberry’s weaker underpinnings. In 2010, RIM acquires the QNX operating system in an effort to rebuild its software foundations, but it’s too late. The company has lost market share and shareholders see RIM squander 75% of its market cap.

Now, imagine: On the heels of the iPhone introduction in 2007, Microsoft acquires RIM and quickly proceeds to do what they’ve only now accomplished with Windows Phone 7: They ditch the past and build a modern system. This would have saved Microsoft a lot of time and RIM shareholders lots of money. Instead, Microsoft mocks the iPhone and brags that the venerable (to be polite) Windows Mobile will own 40% of the market by 2012.

Things don’t quite work as planned. Early 2010, Microsoft wisely abandons Windows Mobile for the more modern Windows Phone 7 (a moniker that combines the Windows Everywhere obsession with a shameless attempt to make us believe the new smartphone OS is a “version” of the desktop Windows 7).

And things still keep not working as planned. WP 7 doesn’t get traction because handset makers are much more interested in Android’s flexibility and, particularly, their price. Android’s Free and Open pitch works wonders; the technology is sound and improves rapidly; OEMs see Microsoft as the old guard, stagnant, while Google is on the rise, a winner.

All the while, Nokia experiences their own kind of “domination blindness”. In 2007 Nokia is the world’s largest mobile phone maker, but they can’t see the technical shortcomings of their aging Symbian platform, or the futility of their attempts to “mobilize” Linux. iOS and Android devices quickly eat into Nokia’s market share and market cap (down 80% from its 2007 high).

In 2010, Stephen Elop, formerly a Microsoft exec, takes the helm and promptly states two brutal truths: This isn’t about platforms, we are in an ecosystem war; technically, we’ve been kidding ourselves. Nokia’s new CEO sees that the company’s system software efforts – new and improved versions of Symbian or Maemo/Moblin/Meego – won’t save the company.

Having removed the blinders, Elop looks for a competitive mobile OS. Android is quickly discarded with the usual explanations: We’d lose control of our destiny… Not enough opportunities for differentiation… The threat of a race to the bottom might have entered the picture as well.

This leads Elop back into his former boss’ arms. Microsoft and Nokia embark on a “special relationship” that involves technical collaboration and lots of money. It’ll be needed: By the end of 2011, WP 7 has less than 2% market share. Nokia’s just-announced Lumia smartphone is well received by critics but will it demonstrate enough superior points to gain significant share against the Android-iOS duopoly? I’ll buy one as soon as possible in order to form an opinion.

The “MicroNokia” relationship isn’t without problems. Many Nokia fans are outraged: Elop sold out, Nokia’s MeeGo was unfairly maligned, the company has lost its independence… See Tomi Ahonen’s blog for more. (And “more” is the right word. Ahonen’s learned, analytical, and often rabid posts range between 4,000 and 10,000 words.)

The Nokia faithful have a point. In my venture investing profession, we call an arrangement such as the MicroNokia partnership “buying the company without paying the price.” Right now, Microsoft appears to control Nokia’s future since, at this stage, Nokia is as good as dead without WP 7.

But doesn’t that mean that Nokia also controls Microsoft’s smartphone future? “Statements of direction” aside, there are no notable WP 7 OEMs. (Samsung and HTC ship a few WP 7 phones, but their share is infinitesimal compared to their Android handsets.) With Android growing so fast, why would a smartphone maker commit to WP 7 while Nokia holds a privileged status on the platform?

Microsoft is making smart moves against Android by using their patent portfolio to force Android handset makers to pay (undisclosed) royalties. With LG as the latest licensee, Microsoft appears to have snared 70% of Android OEMs. The (serious) joke in the industry is that Microsoft makes more money from Android than from WP 7.

But success with patents doesn’t translate into more WP 7 OEMs, which leaves us to wonder: Will Microsoft consummate the relationship and acquire Nokia, whether the entire corpus or, at least, the fecund (smartphone) bits? For years, Microsoft has claimed they’re all about choice, and when it comes to the PC, that’s true: Businesses and consumers have a wide choice of PCs running Windows. But their customers have no real choice when it comes to WP 7: It’s Nokia or…Nokia. They might as well tie the knot and call it what it is: Microsoft or Microsoft. It works wonders for Xbox and Kinect.

Going back to RIM, we hear it’s ‘’in play’’, that they’ve hired investment bankers to “look at their strategic alternatives”. In English: They’re looking for a buyer.

But who? Microsoft is otherwise engaged. So is Motorola. And forget Samsung.

With RIM’s market share dropping precipitously, and no sign of a rebound with spanking new models until the second half of 2012, who would want to risk billions in a market that’s controlled by competitors who manage to be both huge and fast-growing? Sure, RIM is still in the black, but its cash reserves are dwindling: the Cash and cash equivalents line went from $2.7B last February to $1.1B in November 2011. What’s left will evaporate quickly if revenue and profits keep dropping, as they’re likely to do for the foreseeable future.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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(This version corrects an error in the percentage for the price increase of the FT)

Every newspaper, magazine or website is working on a paywall of sorts and closely monitoring what everyone else is doing. In almost every news company, execs are morosely watching advertising projections and finding numbers that are not exactly encouraging. For digital media, there is no way around this year’s weak outlook: the bad economic climate only adds to the downward price pressure exerted by the ever growing inventory of web and mobile pages. In a best-case scenario, volumes and prices will remain flat. On the print circulation side, Western newspapers are likely to witness a continuing readership erosion at a rate of several percentage points.

But here is the interesting point: The strongest players don’t just bow to the inevitable, they accelerate their transition to digital. This week, I was struck by the fact two such leaders made the same move: The New York Times and the Financial Times both announced serious price hike for their newsstand price (respectively 25% and 13.6%) :
- The NYT moves from $2.00 (€1.57) to $2.50 (€1.96) from Monday to Saturday, with no change for the Sunday edition still priced at $5 (€3.92) in New York, and $6 (€4.72) elsewhere.
- The FT goes from £2.20 ($3.39 or €2.66) to £2.50 ($3.85 or €3.03) on weekdays, as the weekend edition moves from £2.80 ($4.32 or €3.39 ) to £3 ($4.62 or €3.63).

Those numbers are really meaningful: a 10% increase every two years or so can be seen as an inflation adjustment — a generous one considering the inflation rate in those countries to be about 2.5%-3.5%. At 25% increase is a strategic decision aimed at accelerating the switch to digital. (The paper version of the FT now costs 25% more than it did last October).

Interestingly enough, for a New York Times addict, reading the paper online with the cheapest package ($15 a month), is now 40% to 50% cheaper that the home-delivered version and 70% cheaper than buying the paper each day at a newsstand. As for the FT, the standard digital version is now 21% cheaper than the print subscription and 68% less than the newsstand price.

Both are working hard at converting readers to the digital paid-for model. The FT is heading full steam into digital, furiously data-mining its 4 million subscribers base to convert them into paid-for subscribers (250,000 according to the most recent count). The FT’s tactics is simple: readers are relentlessly pushed toward the paywall thanks to a diminishing number of stories available for free: from 30 free articles per month in 2007 it is now down to 8 articles; the other bold move is making registration mandatory in order to access even a single story.

Last year, the New York Times came up with a less readable strategy: the adjustable paywall. And it seems to work. The NYT has been able to collect 324,000 paid-for digital subscribers in nine months. Considering the NYT has about four times less non-paying digital registered users than the FT (therefore a lesser conversion potential), this is not bad.

The Times builds its paid-for strategy on three key factors:

1 / The uniqueness of its content. Let’s put it this way: The New York Times has no equivalent in the world when it comes to great journalism, period. This valued content helped collect 34 million uniques visitors a month in its domestic market, and 47 million worldwide. More than any other newspapers in the world, the NYT has a huge base of loyal users. If it manages to convert only 5% of its global audience, say 2.4 million people, and extracts an ARPU (combined subscription and advertising) of $150 per year, it will gross €360 million, which largely covers the cost of its newsroom ($200 million a year, by far the largest in the world).

2 / The managed porosity of its paywall. One key requirement in building the digital subscription system for the Times was keeping as many of its readers as possible. There are two main reasons for this: high audience numbers are critical for advertising revenue; and the visibility factor is crucial for a news brand. This led to a system that targets the heaviest users. But even those can easily game the system (by using several browsers on several devices, I never bump into the paywall, with no particular desire to avoid it). Similarly, prices vary from $15 to $35… for exactly the same content — this is typical of a price structure aimed at audiences with flexible purchasing powers (it is widely established that richer people tend to opt for the most expensive package, regardless of its true value).

3 / Getting in bed with Apple. Since the early iPad days, The New York Times has been working closely with Apple for applications, subscriptions, and the nascent Newsstand. Again: thanks to its unique brand and the trust it carries, the NYT experiences no trouble collecting the precious customer data the app’s default settings fail to provide. In doing so, the Times benefited from Apple’s huge promotional vortex. The Apple system is highly beneficial when it comes to building an audience. But it does so at the expense of the essential customer relationship, and at a huge cost of 30% when the goal should rather be in the 10% range.
That was the Financial Times’ rationale for breaking the Apple leash. Last week, the FT went even further: it acquired the software firm Assanka, well-known for the development of the FT.com’s remarkable web-app that insured its crucial independence from Apple (story in PaidContent). In itself, the move demonstrates the FT’s commitment to mobile products: HTML5 development remain difficult and the FT decided it was critical to integrate Assanka’s development tools.

Of these three factors, the uniqueness of content remains the most potent one. With the inflation of aggregators and of social reading habits, the natural replication of information has turned into an overwhelming flood. Then, the production of specific content — and its protection — becomes a key element in building value. As for price structures, there is no magic formula. Usually, the simpler the better (as Apple demonstrated) — especially for businesses that start from scratch. But, with pre-existing and different audience segments such as an individual and corporate users, pricing decisions become more complicated and a diversified price list can prevent cannibalization. As for the Apple vs. independent app issue, my personal take is that sleeping with Apple is a quick short-term win, an easier strategy. But, in the long run, the independent way (which, after all, is an article of faith for Apple itself) will yield better results.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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Android is a huge success. Google bought Andy Rubin’s company in 2005 and turned it into a smartphone operating system giant, with more than 50% of the global market and 700,000 activations a day this past December.

Perhaps, as Steve Jobs seemed to think, it was Eric Schmidt’s position on Apple’s Board of Directors that infected Google with an itch to enter the smartphone OS market. Or maybe Larry Page and Sergey Brin simply recognized the Next Big Thing when they saw it. (As Page points out, the company had begun Android development a year before Schmidt joined the Apple Board.)

Regardless of the “authenticity” of Google’s smartphone impulse, it’s the execution of the idea, the integration of Android into Google’s top-level strategy where the product really shines. Android improves quickly; the “free and open” platform is popular with developers and, perhaps even more so, with handset makers who no longer have to create their own software, a task they’re culturally ill-suited to perform. And everyone loves being associated with a technically competent winner. (I might be a little biased in my regard for the Android engineering team: Comrades from a previous OS war work there.)

For the past three years, Android has experienced a kind of free space expansion: The platform has grown without hitting obstacles. I’m not ignoring the IP wars, they’re real and the outcome(s) are still unclear, but these fights haven’t slowed Android’s triumphant march.

As we enter 2012, however, it seems the game may be changing. Looking at last week’s numbers for Motorola, HTC, and Samsung, we see a different picture. Instead of the old “there’s more than enough room for every Android handset maker to be a winner”, we have a three-horse’s-length leader, Samsung, while Motorola and HTC lag behind.

From October to December of last year, a.k.a. Q4CY11, Samsung is said to have shipped 35 million smartphones, taking it to the number one spot worldwide. Citing “competitive reasons”, Samsung no longer makes its sales/shipment numbers public, so we have to rely on ‘‘independent” observers to tally up the score. Having worked in the high-tech industry for decades, I’ve seen how this information game is played: firm XYZ sells its “research” to manufacturer W…and ends up as its mouthpiece. I’d love to follow the money, but these private firms don’t have to reveal who their clients are and how much they pay for their services. (For a more detailed discussion of these shenanigans, read an excellent piece by The Guardian’s Charles Arthur: Dear Samsung: could we have some clarity on your phone sales figures now? Another possible bias: The Guardian re-publishes the Monday Note on its site.)

But even if we “de-propagandize” the numbers, Samsung is clearly the number one Android handset maker, and, just as clearly, it’s taking large chunks of market share from the other two leading players: Motorola and HTC both announced lower than expected Q4CY11 numbers. HTC’s unit volume was 10 million units, down from 13.2 million in Q3; Motorola got 10.5 million units in Q4, down from 11.6 million in Q3.

This leaves us with the potential for an interesting face-off. Not Samsung vs Motorola/HTC, but…Samsung vs. Google. As Erik Sherman observes in his CBS MoneyWatch post, since Samsung ships close to 55% of all Android phones, the company could be in a position to twist Google’s arm. If last quarter’s trend continues — if Motorola and HTC lose even more ground — Samsung’s bargaining position will become even stronger.

But what is Samsung’s ‘‘bargaining position’’? What could they want? Perhaps more search referral money (the $$ flowing when Google’s search engine is used on a smartphone), earlier access to Android releases, a share of advertising revenue…

Will Google let Samsung gain the upper hand? Not likely, or at least not for long. There’s Motorola, about to become a fully-owned but “independent” Google subsidiary. A Googorola vertically-integrated smartphone line could counterbalance Samsung’s influence.

And so it would be Samsung’s move…and they wouldn’t be defenseless. Consider the Kindle Fire example: Just like Amazon picked the Android lock, Samsung could grab the Android Open Source code and create its own unlicensed but fully legal smartphone OS and still benefit from a portion of Android apps, or it could build its own app store the way Amazon did. Samsung is already showing related inclinations with its Music Hub and its iMessage competitor.

Samsung is a tough, determined fighter and won’t let Google dictate its future. The same can be said of Google.

This is going to be interesting.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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When it comes to cracking the digital media code, 2011 involved more testing than learning. Media companies seem to be locked in a feverish search mode. Their sense of urgency is reinforced by the continuous depletion of worldwide fundamentals: digital advertising’s encephalogram remains flat (at best); and when audiences grow, revenues do not necessarily correlate. As for legacy media such as large quality newspapers which still draw 70-80% of their revenue from print, they are still caught in a double jeopardy: losing circulation plus looming downward price pressure on ads. We see an unforgiving mechanism at work: on mature markets such as Europe or North America, print media currently absorbs about 25% of ad spending while time spent on newspapers falls well below 10%. On digital media the balance is just the opposite: the web takes roughly 20% of ad investments for 25% of time spent; as for mobile devices, there is almost no ad money spent (<1%), but people spend about 10% of their time on their smartphones — and the growth is exponential.

Last year, we saw many efforts in the “right” direction—”right” being a rapidly redefined. Below is a subjective list of moves, trends, innovations, attempts that burgeoned in 2011 and are likely to become more sharply defined with this coming year.

#1 Paid-for news. Many are trying, but no one has cracked the code—yet. Part of the problem is we are in a model that’s just the opposite of one-size-fits-all. We are likely to witness the emergence of many different ways of charging readers for quality content. Variables in the equation are many and sometimes hard to quantify:

- National vs. local
- General news vs. specialized
- Typologies of contents
- Most Likely Prime time reading
- Most Likely Prime device use
- Target group structure.

Go figure a reliable business model with a so many factors in the formula…

Paywalls come in different flavors. The prize for complexity goes for the New York Times’ Digital Subscription Plan launched March 17. According to the Times, its crystal-clear equation can be summed-up as follow:

Once readers click on their 21st [in a 4 weeks period], they will have the option of buying one of three digital news packages — $15 every four weeks for access to the Web site and a mobile phone app (or $195 for a full year), $20 for Web access and an iPad app ($260 a year) or $35 for an all-access plan ($455 a year). All subscribers who take home delivery of the paper will have free and unlimited access across all Times digital platforms except, for now, e-readers like the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook.

Weirdly enough, this overly complex and pricey scheme seems to work: by the end of Q3, the Times had harvested 324,000 paid digital subscribers. This has to be viewed in the context of a site getting 47 million Unique Visitors per month on average, and 33 million in the US alone. As for mobile access, 11 million iPhones apps and 3 million iPads have been downloaded.

To watch in 2012: how fast the NYT will recruit new paid digital subscribers. To get a good view of the key elements in NYT’s digital revenues, see Ken Doctor’s analysis in Newsonomics. Plus, after the sudden resignation of its CEO (Janet Robinson), the NYT might be entering a new era; she could be replaced by a predominantly digital person.

#2 The Web App Movement. The boldest move of the year was made by The Financial Times: in June, it unveiled a web app for iPad and iPhone, independent of Apple’s closed ecosystem. Among its many advantages, the web app allows the FT.com to foster a close relationship with all its customers. In five months, the FT.com has collected over 250,000 paying digital subscribers. Its entire digital operations now accounts for 30% of its revenue. (More on the FT.com’s economics in this PaidContent story.)

To watch in 2012: The outlook seems quite good for the FT.com. Its marketing division is working hard to tap into a huge database of 4 million registered users, including 1 million for the independent web app, half of them putting it on the home screen of their device.

#3 The Apple’s Newsstand is another item of the 2012 watch list. The project responded to publishers’ wish to see their prestigious titles rise over the crowd of garage apps, and to be able to propose long term subscription plans. In October, Apple came up with its digital kiosk, which is essentially a shortcut for publishers apps displayed in a wooden shelf. For good measure, Apple added an exclusive feature: automated downloading. In short, it is a success for magazines who register massive hikes in their digital sales, but much less so for dailies which remain a bit shy. (We been through this in a previous Monday Note)

==> To watch in 2012: the key issue for a massive move to Apple’s Newsstand remains customer data. Either Apple and the publishers will be able to work out a scheme in which about 70% of the customers will agree to provide their coordinates (see Apple’s Newsstand: Wait for 2.0), or the independent web app movement (FT.com-like) is likely to gain traction.

#4 The switch to Digital Editions, as opposed to dumb PDF, might play a critical role in the development of tangible revenue for the industry. Here, I spoke highly of great examples of tablet-specific applications such as BloombergBusinessWeek+ or the Guardian’s iPad version.

To watch in 2012: the adoption of Digital Editions will depend on three factors: 1) The publisher’s willingness to invest significantly on projects not profitable in the short-term, 2) The advertising community’s ability to understand that digital editions will bring their clients much higher benefits than PDF versions or even web sites will do, 3) The acceptance by various Audit Bureaus of Circulation that reader engagement is incomparably higher for designed-for-tablets editions (for more on the subject, read our recent column Unaccounted For Readers.) If these three items are checked, 2012 is likely to be The Year of Digital Editions.

#5 The Huffington Post contagion. Its acquisition by AOL for $315m has propelled the HuffPo to new highs. The content—largely based on unabashed aggregation and legions of unpaid bloggers—remains mediocre, but no ones really seems to care. As in the pre-bubble era, only eyeballs and hype count. The HuffPo has plenty of both. (OK, when you look at the numbers, as Ken Doctor did in this piece, you’ll see a HuffPo visitor brings 3.5 times less money than the NYT does…).

To watch in 2012: This is the year where the Huffington Post will go legit. Everyone is now kissing Arianna’s ring. Including large media company, such as Le Monde, ElPais, DieZeit and a couple of others in Europe that will help Arianna to go global. As appetizing as an alliance between Alain Ducasse and McDonald’s. Sometimes the search for strategy goes haywire…

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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Whatever 2011 was, it wasn’t The Year Of The Incumbent. The high-tech world has never seen the ground shift under so many established companies. This causes afflicted CEOs to exhibit the usual symptoms of disorientation: reorg spams, mindless muttering of old mantras and, in more severe cases, speaking in tongues, using secret language known only to their co-CEO.

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I love talking about the things I enjoy using. The emerging ecosystem in which a bunch of smart people curate long form journalism is definitely one of those things. The companies are called Instapaper, Longreads, Longform. I love the material they find for me and I’m in the debt of developers who wrote neat applications that help me manage my very own library of great stories.

My reading selection process for long articles (say above 2500 words) goes like this. It starts with installing the Read Later bookmarklet, developed by Instapaper, on all my internet browsers. When I stumble on something I have no time to dive into, I hit the ReadLater tab in the by browser’s bookmarks bar (below):

This causes the piece to be stored in the cloud. (There is another service/app of the same kind called Read it Later. I just got it this weekend and haven’t had much time to use it yet.)

Then, I loaded the Instapaper app on my iPhone and my iPad, it works just fine. The stories I don’t have time to read at work are now available on my two nomad devices for my daily commute, my chronic insomnia, after-dinner relaxation or long flights. Unsurprisingly, topics center around business stories, medias, tech; but they also extend to neurosciences, and in-depth profiles of creative people in a wide range of fields. In doing so, I have re-created my own serendipitous environment; as I open the app, I always find something interesting I put aside a couple of weeks earlier.

My second source of good stories is the Editor’s Pick on three long forms curation sites. Instapaper has it own Browse section and my two favorites are Longreads and Longform. There are two other such sites I use less often: The Browser and Give Me Something to Read. They’re all built on the same idea: a self-organized community of thousands people (see graph below) who pick up articles they like and put them on Twitter (and also on Facebook and Tumblr); the feeds are then re-aggregated and curated by the sites’ editors. The process looks like this :

This system combines the best of Twitter (gathering a community that selects relevant contents) with the final responsibility of human editors. Just as important, Read Later and Read It Later rely on hundreds of third party applications that use their APIs (a piece of code that allows apps to talk to each other).

Then two questions arise :
– Does this model benefit publishers ?
– What kind of business models can the aggregators hope for ?

To the first question, the answer is yes and no. From their respective sites, these companies play a referrer role as they send traffic back to the original publishers. But when it comes to apps for smartphones or mobiles, these services become value killers: their content is displayed in the apps without advertising. See screenshots from the iPhone Instapaper app below:

As for Read it Later application, it proposes (below) a web view and a reformatted text-view. No need to be a certified ergonomist to guess which one will be used the most:

For good measure, let’s say Apple is not the last entity to add features that kill value by removing ads; below the same NYT web page in normal and “Reader” mode:

For now, publishers don’t seem to care much about this type of value hijacking. The rationale is such apps are still limited to early adopters. In a study released last week, Read it Later said it recorded a total of 47 million “saves” between May and October 2011 (and 36% growth between the first and the last month.) Weirdly enough, most of the “saves” recorded involve tech-related stories from blogs such as LifeHacker, Gizmodo (both are part of Gawker Media) or TechCrunch. Long form journalism appears too small to be accounted for. Equally weird, when Read it Later gives a closer look at data coming from the New York Times, we see this:

Great writers indeed, but hardly long form journalism. We would have expected a predominance of long feature stories, we get columnists and tech writers instead.

Similarly, Longreads.com gets about 100,000 unique visitors a month, founder Mark Armstrong told me. For this last week, publishers altogether got 21,230 referrals form Longreads’ curated picks. Despite this modest volume, Longreads’ 40,000+ community of referrers is growing rapidly at the rate of a thousand every two weeks or so.

Let’s talk business model. The Longreads team includes former McCann Erickson creative director Joyce King Thomas (story in AdAge here). She seems more interested in good journalism rather than in loading the elegant Longreads with a Christmas tree of ads. In short, Longreads’ business future lies more in a membership system than in anything else — maybe some sponsorship, Armstrong acknowledges. The contents Longreads promotes through its links addresses a solvent audience, one that knows great journalism comes with a price and so do good tools to mine it. It shouldn’t be a problem to extract €10 or $20 a year, directly or via an app.

Having said that, I remain a bit skeptical of Longreads’ avoidance (for now) of the classic startup venture capital mechanism. Because barriers to entry into its type of business are low, Longreads ought to quickly build on its momentum and on the undisputed quality of its product. This means promotion and also technology to extend the reach of the service and to secure control of the distribution channel–and to make it more mainstream.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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We strongly believe that the best days for webOS are still ahead.

Thus spake Meg Whitman in her memo to the troops, an intramural rendition of HP’s official announcement that webOS will be “contributed” to the Open Source community.

…the executive team has been working to determine the best path forward for this highly respected software. We looked at all the options in the market today…By providing webOS to the open source community…we have the potential to fundamentally change the landscape.

Either she thinks we’re dimwits, or she’s being cleverly cheeky. Does she think we’ll fall for the tired corpospeak? “Victory! WhatWereWeThinking v3.0 has been released to the Open Source community”. Or is she slyly fessing up? “After much abuse inside the HP cage, it’s clear that webOS can only be restored to health if released into the wild.”

Releasing a product as Open Source isn’t always an admission of failure; see exhibits Linux or, more recently, WebKit. But the successful Open Source offerings were created in Open Source form. They weren’t “contributed” in a last-ditch effort to save face after unsuccessful attempts to monetize a proprietary version.

Furthermore, there’s real money to be made with an Open Source product…if you know what you’re doing. Look at Red Hat: nicely profitable, with nearly a $10B market cap. They make a lot of money selling Linux…or, more accurately, by selling a Linux “distro”, a suite of products and services that surround the free Linux kernel. They make money the iTunes way: Customers won’t pay for tunes that are otherwise (more or less legally) freely available, but they will pay for services around the music.

So is Open Source the way to go for webOS? I don’t think so.

Let’s look at Symbian, a product that’s similar to webOS in its complicated history: Born at Psion; moved to a Nokia-Motorola-Ericsson-Matsushita-Psion joint venture; thrown into Open Source by the Symbian Foundation, an even more complicated JV. Lately, things have become even murkier as Symbian appears to have been “outsourced to Accenture”.

Adobe’s Flex is another kicked-to-the-kerb example. When HTML5 appeared to displace Flash, Adobe officially open-sourced Flex to the non-profit Apache Software Foundation.

Even the success of Firefox, certainly the most visible Open Source application, might not be as indisputable as we first thought.  With net assets of $120M at the end of 2009, the “non-profit” Mozilla Foundation, Firefox’s progenitor, has been the great Open Source success story. 2009 revenues were $104 million, most of which was generated by sending searches to Google from the Firefox browser. In other words, Google has been Firefox’ sugar daddy as the Mountain View company battles Microsoft’s Internet Explorer quasi-monopoly.

But things have changed. Google Chrome is in its ascendancy; Google points to security holes in Firefox. Firefox served at Google’s pleasure, but is no longer needed.

Not exactly a bona fides Open Source success.

(Ironically — or at least amusingly — Meg Whitman singled out Firefox as an example of Open Source success in a post-announcement interview. To add tech credentials to appearance, she had HP director, venture investor, and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen sitting by her side. We won’t dwell on the admission that trotting out Andreessen represents.)

A closer look at HP’s official statements makes things even less clear:

HP will engage the open source community to help define the charter of the open source project under a set of operating principles:
. The goal of the project is to accelerate the open development of the webOS platform
. HP will be an active participant and investor in the project
. Good, transparent and inclusive governance to avoid fragmentation
. Software will be provided as a pure open source project
HP also will contribute ENYO, the application framework for webOS, to the community in the near future along with a plan for the remaining components of the user space.
Beginning today, developers and customers are invited to provide input and suggestions at http://developer.palm.com/blog/.

This is language designed to obfuscate rather than clarify, filled with qualifiers and weasel words. Read it again and ask yourself: Is there even one actionable sentence? are we given numbers, dates, some measurable commitment?

No. Instead, we get lame HR-like phrases:

. HP will engage the open source community — in what kind of embrace?
. active participant and investor — by how much and when?
. transparent and inclusive governance — why not opaque and exclusionary?
. a pure open source project — as opposed to yesterday’s impure and proprietary?
. near future… along with a plan — we don’t know, we’re just saying

Nowhere does Whitman state how much money, how many people, or when things might coalesce.

Allow me to translate:

We tried and tried and found no takers for webOS. Android is too strong, our old partner Microsoft leaned on us, and webOS is seen as damaged goods. We used the Open Source exit to get kudos from vocal enthusiasts. We know it’s cynical, but what do you want us to say? Good bye and good luck?

The charade (and cynicism) doesn’t stop there. Now we’re told HP might make webOS-powered tablets. Not in 2012, that year’s roadmap has been inked, HP is committed to Windows 8 tablets. Maybe in 2013. That, ladies and gentlemen, attests to HP’s unwavering commitment to webOS.

By 2013 there will be tablets coming from all the usual suspects (except RIM): Samsung, Googorola and other Android players, Amazon, Microsoft’s OEMs and newly acquired subsidiary Nokia…and, of course, Apple’s iPad HD2.

When I hear Whitman make such statements, I’m reminded of the old joke about the difference between a computer salesperson and a used-car salesman: The used-car gent knows he’s lying. For my alma mater’s sake, for HP’s good, let’s hope Meg Whitman knows she’s putting us on.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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On its own, Twitter builds an image for companies; very few are aware of this fact. When a big surprise happens, it is too late: a corporation suddenly sees a facet of its business — most often a looming or developing crisis — flare up on Twitter. As always when a corporation is involved, there is money to be made by converting the problem into an opportunity: Social network intelligence is poised to become a big business.

In theory, when it comes to assessing the social media presence of a brand, Facebook is the place to go. But as brands flock to the dominant social network, the noise becomes overwhelming and the signal — what people really say about the brand — becomes hard to extract.

By comparison, Twitter more swiftly reflects the mood of users of a product or service. Everyone in the marketing/communication field becomes increasingly eager to know what Twitter is saying about a product defect, the perception of a strike or an environmental crisis. Twitter is the echo chamber, the pulse of public feelings. It therefore carries tremendous value.

Datamining Twitter is not trivial. By comparison, diving into newspaper or blog archives is easy; phrases are (usually) well-constructed, names are spelled in full, slang words and just-invented jargon are relatively rare. By contrast, on Twitter, the 140 characters limit forces a great deal of creativity. The Twitter lingo constantly evolves, new names and characterizations flare up all the time, which excludes straightforward full-text analysis. The 250 million tweets per day are a moving target. A reliable quantitative analysis of the current mood is a big challenge.

Companies such as DataSift (launched last month) exploit the Twitter fire hose by relying on the 40-plus metadata included in a post. Because, in case you didn’t know it, an innocent looking tweet like this one…

…is a rich trove of data. A year ago, Raffi Krikorian, a developer on Twitter’s API Platform team (spotted thanks to this story in ReadWriteWeb) revealed what lies behind the 140 characters. The image below…

…is a tear-down of a much larger one (here, on Krikorian’s blog) showing the depth of metadata associated to a tweet. Each comes with information such as the author’s biography, level of engagement, popularity, assiduity, location (which can be quite precise in the case of a geotagged hotspot), etc. In this WiredUK interview, DataSift’s founder Nick Halstead mentions the example of people tweeting from Starbucks cafés:

I have recorded literally everything over the last few months about people checking in to Starbucks. They don’t need to say they’re in Starbucks, they can just be inside a location that is Starbucks, it may be people allowing Twitter to record where their geolocation is. So, I can tell you the average age of people who check into Starbucks in the UK.
Companies can come along and say: “I am a retail chain, if I supply you with the geodata of where all my stores are, tell me what people are saying when they’re near it, or in it”. Some stores don’t get a huge number of check-ins, but on aggregate over a month it’s very rare you can’t get a good sampling.

Well, think about it next time you tweet from a Starbucks.

DataSift further refined its service by teaming up with Lexalytics, a firm specialized in the new field of “sentiment analysis“, which measures the emotional tone of a text — very useful to assess the perception of a brand or a product.

Mesagragh, a Paris-based startup with a beachhead in California plans a different approach. Instead of trying to guess the feeling of a Twitter crowd, it will create a web of connections between people, terms and concepts. Put another way, it creates a “structured serendipity” in which the user will naturally expand the scope of a search way beyond the original query. Through its web-based application called Meaningly, Mesagraph is set to start a private beta this week, and a public one next January.

Here is how Meaningly works: It starts with the timeline of tens of thousands Twitter feeds. When someone registers, Meaningly will crawl his Twitter timeline and add a second layer composed by the people the new user follows. It can grow very quickly. In this ever expanding corpus of twitterers, Meaningly detects the influencers, i.e. the people more likely to be mentioned, retweeted, and who have the largest number of qualified followers. To do so, the algorithm applies an “influence index” based on specialized outlets such as Klout or Peer Index that measure someone’s influence on social medias. (I have reservations regarding the actual value of such secret sauces: I see insightful people I follow lag well behind compulsive self-promoters.) Still, such metrics are used by Meaningly to reinforce a recommendation.

Then, there is the search process. To solve the problem of the ever morphing vernacular used on Twitter, Mesagraph opted to rely on Wikipedia (in English) to analyze the data it targets. Why Wikipedia? Because it’s vast (736,000 subjects), it’s constantly updated (including with the trendiest parlance), it’s linked, it’s copyright-free. From it, Mesagraph’s crew extracted a first batch of 200,000 topics.

To find tweets on a particular subject, you first fill the usual search box; Meaningly will propose a list of predefined topics, some expressed with its own terminology; then it will show a list of tweets based on the people you’re following, the people they follow, and “influencers” detected by Meaningly’s recommendation engine. Each Tweet comes with a set of tags derived from the algorithm mapping table. These tags will help to further refine the search with terms users would have not thought of. Naturally, it is possible to create all sorts of custom queries that will capture relevant tweets as they show up; it will then create a specific timeline of tweets pertaining to the subject. At least that’s the idea; the pre-beta version I had access to last week only gave me a sketchy view of the service’s performances. I will do a full test-drive in due course.

Datamining Tweeter has great potential for the news business. Think of it: instead of painstakingly building a list of relevant people who sometimes prattle endlessly, you’ll capture in your web of interests only the relevant tweets produced by your group and the group it follows, all adding-up in real-time. This could be a great tool to follow developing stories and enhance live coverage. A permanent, precise and noise-free view of what’s hot on Twitter is a key component of the 360° view of the web every media should now offer.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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On December 5th, three days ago, RIM announced a $485M write-off “related to its inventory valuation of BlackBerry PlayBook tablets”. Wall Street didn’t like the news and dumped the stock, it went down 9.7% in one session. One of the last analysts supporting RIM, Scotia Capital’s Gus Papageorgiou, finally gave up and turned vocally bearish. Others, as in this Reuters summary, grumble and suggest “necessary changes at the top of the company.”
Those are rote comments over an half-expected development: everybody knew PlayBook tablets weren’t selling well and the latest stock movement was but another step in a year-long descent:

But a second look at the numbers and at RIM’s communiqué itself raises more questions, ones I’m surprised analysts didn’t ask. Was it because RIM’s disclosure took place on a Friday, an oft-used maneuver to limit the spread of bad news?
We’ll focus on the $485M number and a look at RIM’s two previous quarters. As the company’s fiscal year starts March 1st, we have Q1 (ending in May 2011) numbers here and Q2 (ending in August 2011) results here.
For Q1 the company claims it sold 500,000 PlayBooks; for Q2, RIM says it sold 200,000 of the same tablets. Sold, in accounting parlance, is a precise term: this isn’t just a shipment, it’s a financial transaction whereby the buyer now owes RIM money, and RIM counts this as revenue and, after costs, profit.

We now turn to the cost of the PlayBook tablet. We know it’s made by Quanta, a reputable Taiwanese ODM, with approximately the same contents as Amazon’s Kindle Fire, also made by Quanta and, reportedly costing around $200 to make. Other reports peg the Playbook’s manufacturing cost around that same $200 number
Accounting rules say inventories are to be valued at the “lowest of cost or market”. If my widget costs $100 to make and sells for more, the accountants will value the inventory at $100 per unit. If, sadly, I can only sell it for $50, the inventory valuation must be $50. And, if an optimistic valuation of $100 was once used, it must now be “written down” to $50, causing a loss, even in the absence of commercial transaction. This is an inventory write-off or write-down. (This type of cashless loss mystifies normal humans who have trouble with the notion you can be profitable and go bankrupt. It’s ‘‘easy”: You make a profit the moment you sell a product for more than it costs. And you go bankrupt if your customers don’t pay but your suppliers insist on being paid. And there’s Uncle Sam to whom you owe tax on your “profit’’.)

Turning back to RIM’s $485M write-off, how many PlayBook tablets does it represent? Using the $200 cost figure as an assumption, we get 2.4 million tablets all written down to zero! This doesn’t quite make sense.
First, why write the inventory down to zero? HP’s TouchPad fire sale demonstrated the existence of demand at the $99 price level. Admittedly, Amazon’s $199 price for its Kindle Fire makes it difficult for RIM to get to that price at this stage of the PlayBook life and tattered reputation.
Second, even if we accept a write-down to zero, 2.4 million tablets is a strange number. How could RIM have accumulated such large inventory? And if the inventory hit is less than $200 per device, this increases the number of tablets in RIM’s cellar: $100 write-off per tablet yields 4.8 million devices. Impossible.

A possible explanation lies in the way ‘‘sales’’ were reported in previous quarters. Perhaps these transactions weren’t totally final, meaning they shouldn’t have been recorded as revenue because the buyer had the right to return Playbooks to RIM. Faulty reporting of revenue could spell trouble with shareholders, the SEC and hungry attorneys.
Still, RIM only reported a total of 700,000 tablets “sold” for the Q1 and Q2, they can’t have all been returned and massive returns would have been disclosed previously, one hopes.
RIM’s Q3 numbers will be released in a week, on December 12th, giving the company an opportunity to explain this strange $485M number. This should be interesting.
There’ll be more to watch, such as the year-to-year change in smartphone sales, the state of relations with applications developers and, crucially, how much cash is left in RIM’s coffers. For the last reported quarter, it was $1.15B, down from $2.1B the previous period. This isn’t much to wage today’s smartphone wars.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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Newspaper publishers need to quickly solve a troublesome equation. As carbon-based readership keeps dwindling, the growing legion of digital readers is poorly accounted for. This benefits advertisers who pay less for their presence.

Putting aside web sites audience measurement, we’ll focus instead on the currently ill-defined notion of digital editions. A subject of importance since digital editions are poised to play a key role in the future of online information.

First, definitions. The International Federation of Audit Bureaus of Circulation (IFABC) makes several distinctions that are adopted by most certification agencies around the world. The most straightforward is the “Digital Version” of a publication based on PDF. To be counted in the paid circulation of a newspaper or a magazine, a Digital Version must carry the same editorial content as well as the same advertising (volume and placement) as the paper version.

The second category, “Digital Edition”, is much fuzzier. Digital Editions come in different sizes and shapes, tailored for tablets or smartphones. Examples include The Guardian for iPad, Bloomberg Business Week+ and The Economist versions for iPad or iPhone (see previous Monday Note The Capsule’s Price). These editions have little to do with the print version. They are usually loaded with the same set of stories as their paper sibling, but add more pictures and, sometimes, animated infographics and video. The layout is designed to fit gesture-based navigation. Ads are different, too: far fewer modules, but with multiple screens and multimedia packages. The idea is less ads carrying more value per unit.

Here comes the absurdity.

Digital Versions (in PDF) are often hosted by digital kiosks carrying hundreds of publications, most often magazines in PDF facsimile. On many such kiosks, the best-selling product is the all-you-can-eat flat plan; for users, the 20 dollars or euros per month plan encourages indiscriminate downloading. I chose the word users on purpose. Readers would be presumptuous. On their first month, users will download about 60 to 80 publications. After a quarter or so, downloads stabilize to about 30 publications a month. Are those actually read? Maybe some, but the rest of the bulk is barely leafed through. As a result, the value of the advertising carried by these glanced-at publications trends to zero (the value of an ad being — at least in theory — a function of the eyeballs it will capture). It’s ridiculous to expect a “reader” who gulps down 30 publications to memorize a stack of 40 ad pages.

Nevertheless, such Digital Versions fall into the crucial “paid circulation” category which is still, unfortunately, the main gauge of market performance.

Noticing the absurdity of the open-bar kiosks, various circulations bureaus across the world have worked on ways to account for the behavior of this super-fly-by readership. In France, the OJD says that, in order to be counted as sold, the revenue derived from a digital publication must be higher than 25% of the single copy price, all taxes included. As an example, let’s take a user who opted for a €20 monthly unlimited plan, downloading 40 magazines in one month, each priced at €4.00 in a physical newsstand. To be counted as a valid sale, each magazine should bring at least €1.00. But a consumption of 40 magazines for €20 will only yield €0.5, half of the required minimum. Therefore, the OJD will only count half of the volume sold.

These audit agencies efforts are fine but, regardless of all the tweaks in the way copies are counted, they don’t solve the problem of ads that remains vastly inefficient.

Turning now to Digital Editions, their adaptation to the needs of tablets and smartphones much improves advertising performance. Modules will be fewer, but far more engaging. Interactive ads will lead to what marketers call transformation, which is when someone actually orders an item or interacts with a seller (by requesting a test-drive of a car, for instance). All such things are impossible with a static ad embedded in a PDF.

In addition, Digital Editions can point to an individual reader. When I subscribed to the iPad version of the Guardian, or of BusinessWeek, I actually gave permission to what I consider trusted editorial brands to get my coordinates from Apple. (For high quality publications, the rate of opt-in is said to be above 50%. Not bad.) Practically speaking, it means the publisher will be able to directly interact with me. And, in the near future, for my very own digital edition, that same publisher will inject ads tailored to my socio-demographic profile, my location, etc. (don’t rush folks, I can wait for this type of targeting).

Summing-up: We have Digital Versions that are basically PDF images of the original print publications and Digital Editions that are more sophisticated and built — for obvious reasons — on different structure.

And guess what? Most circulation bureaus segregate the two products; static ones are counted in the paid-circulation line — and consolidated with the paper’s global  circulation — but the tablet or smartphone-designed versions appear in a separate line.

No big deal, you might say. But it actually is.

Problem is, media buyers almost exclusively consider the aggregated figure. They tend to overlook the value of itemized lines. As a consequence, the most sophisticated products, the ones able to deliver engagement and value to advertisers are simply ignored.

Hence the publishers’ furious lobby to convince circulation bureaus to include Digital Editions in their global circulation numbers.

The British Audit Bureau of Circulation was quick to understand the importance of aggregating all forms of circulations on the sole basis of the editorial content. Probably because many UK publishers developed good tablet and smartphone editions. Just a year ago, they issued this unambiguous communiqué:

ABC announced today that it has agreed new Reporting Standards that will allow publishers to present both print and digital editions on one certificate. This offers more flexibility to publishers in how they can claim digital editions.

The new Cross Platform Certificate of Circulation enables publishers to provide a single view of their circulation figures. This includes the circulation of digital editions of magazines designed especially for mobile devices such as Apple’s iPad.

In many countries the issue is still on the table. To their consternation, newspapers and magazines publishers see the constant erosion of their paper versions; at the same time, they are required to serve the booming tablet and smartphone markets with dedicated digital editions that remain undervalued by the advertising community. Frustrating.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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At the end of last week’s Monday Note, I briefly wondered about the rumored Amazon smartphone. Would it follow the Kindle Fire strategy: Pick Android’s lock and sell the device at or below cost in order to lubricate the wheels of Amazon’s e-commerce of tangible and intangible things?

This week, we have the rebirth of another story: the Facebook phone. All Things D, the Wall Street Journal’s site dedicated to… All Things Digital, aired a series of posts focused on Facebook’s hypothetical jump into the smartphone fray. Given the site’s reputation for reliable sources and real writing, this must be more than idle speculation floated for pageviews.

But what’s going on? Why would Facebook — or Amazon — create its own smartphone?

(For the time being, I’ll set aside the 4-year parade of “Google phones”: T-Mobile’s G1 and G2; the ill-fated Nexus One built by HTC and sold by Google; Samsung’s Nexus S and now the Galaxy Nexus. Sign up here; Steve Wozniak got his a few days ago, my turn will surely come soon.

What HTC thinks of its erstwhile beautiful friendship with Google isn’t known, neither is Samsung’s view of being last year’s model now that Google owns Motorola. Nor is Moto’s serenity, or lack of it, when competing with the muscular Korean for the sultan’s favors. This brings back memories of the sorry parade of companies touting their shiny new partnerships with Microsoft, only to be discarded for the next pony in the carousel. We need a little time to figure out who’s playing whom.)

Looking at the PC market, we wonder: There’s no Amazon PC, or Facebook notebook, so why would these companies launch their own Really Personal Computer? What changed?

Google.

When Microsoft unified the PC industry under its tender care, the Web — and thus Web advertising — didn’t exist. For Microsoft, the game was the two-way Windows/Office leverage; the rest of the industry picked up the crumbs that fell from the Wintel table.

When the Web changed the game in the mid-90s, Netscape emerged as the dominant player, at least until Microsoft added Internet Explorer to the Windows/Office engine. Then Google entered the market with what initially looked like a search engine but turned out to be a huge, highly efficient advertising money pump. This left Microsoft (and others) reeling. The Redmond company’s online business keeps losing large amounts of money: $8.5B in the last 9 years!

Although Google confused things by attacking the Office franchise with its Google Docs service, the company’s true M.O. is nonetheless very clear. Advertising generates 95% of Google’s revenue and, probably, 105% of its profits. Google will say and do everything needed to ensure we’re exposed to its advertising radiation pressure at all times, in all venues, and on all devices. Everything is either a means to that end, or an obstacle that must be leveled, disintermediated.

Enter the smartphone.

Google saw it coming. Whether it did or didn’t get the idea because Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO at the time, sat on Apple’s Board of Directors doesn’t matter for today’s purpose. In August 2005, Google bought Android, a company started by Andy Rubin and others after they sold Danger (no pun) to Microsoft. Google’s first smartphone, the aforementioned G1, looked a lot like Danger’s Sidekick device. After the iPhone came out in 2007, Google’s products took a distinctly Apple bent. Unsurprisingly, Google disagrees with Steve Jobs’ strongly expressed opinion of their “sincere flattery.”

Regardless, Google was right, the smartphone wars are on: This is the new PC, only bigger because it’s smaller, more ubiquitous, more connected, more personal.  Google doesn’t want anyone (but themselves) to control the smartphone market the way Microsoft dominated the PC; they don’t want anyone to stand between the viewer and the ads they serve up. With Android, they engineered a Trojan Horse: The ‘‘free and open” smartphone OS came with mandatory Google applications that guarantee the vital revenue-generating exposure to advertising. As Bill Gurley explains in his memorable “The Freight Train That Is Android” post, Google wants its smartphone OS to flatten everything in its path — and they’re succeeding: Android now has more 50% of the smartphone market. That dominant position was taken from Nokia, the former king; from Palm, now deceased; from RIM, sinking fast; and from Microsoft, struggling to get in third place with its truly modern but late to the game Windows Phone 7, this after losing the market because of its creaky Windows Mobile.

(Apple plays a different game. In the quarter ending in September 2011, they had a mere 14% smartphone share, but managed to get more than 52% of smartphone profits.)

Back to Facebook. Both Google and Zuckerberg’s company vie for the same advertising dollars. This makes Google Facebook’s biggest, most direct competitor. The Trojan Horse applications on Android-powered smartphones are a direct threat to Facebook’s advertising business. Just like Google, Facebook wants to maximize our exposure to ads that are finely-tuned using the personal data we provide as a payment for the service. For this, the company needs a well-controlled smartphone.

Apparently, Facebook’s first home grown project was ditched and a manufacturing partner such as HTC is now being considered. For the software, let’s assume that Facebook will following Amazon’s lead and develop an Android “fork”: Open Source code without the Android license and obligations.

The Amazon parallel is useful when considering the technical solution, but it breaks down when we think about revenue generation. Amazon’s forked-Android device, the Kindle Fire, is a way to sell more content by lubricating the purchase and consumption processes. They sell more physical goods as well, all integrated into their very successful Prime deal. We see no such processes and revenues for Facebook. The only justification for a Facebook smartphone would be a better user experience and a more effective vehicle for its advertising business.

It boils down to a comparison. On the one hand, an Android-powered smartphone — a Samsung Galaxy device, perhaps — with one good Facebook application and all the Google applications, the “evil” Google+ insinuating itself everywhere. On the other, a Facebook smartphone, with the Facebook experience on top of everything, its own app store, a Facebook browser, and Facebook Cloud Services.

I can’t help but think that there’s more to this hypothetical Facebook phone than a play against today’s Google+ in defense of today’s Facebook money pump. There must be something else in Facebook’s future, a new revenue stream that it will eventually need to promote/protect. But what?

— JLG@mondaynote.com

PS: If we needed confirmation of the impact of smartphones on e-commerce, we just got early reports on Thanksgiving shopping behavior. According to Forbes and IBM Mobile Sales Hit It Out of the Park on Black Friday.

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Last’week’s Part 1 column about Apple’s dominant’s position in the tablet market triggered an abundance of comments and emails, both on the Note’s blog and on the Guardian. All interesting, most well reasoned. But, for some people, it’s always funny to see how an Apple topic can turn religious. Question a few basic facts and you’re automatically labeled as a foe, as a member of the anti-innovation camp.

At the risk of repeating myself, here’s my perspective: my day job is to try and find sustainable news media business models in the digital world. No more no less. I set aside the fact that I’ve been a big fan of Apple products since 1986 and that I’ve always admired Steve Jobs. I don’t let such feelings impair my judgement or my ability to question Apple’s ways in the digital world…
And I’ll begin by reviewing the latest statistics documenting Apple’s dominance over the tablet market. The numbers are compelling: according to hosting provider Pingdom, which monitors global traffic, the iPad controls 88% of the tablet-based internet traffic worldwide; in the US, it’s 95.5%. For a device that represent only 1.2% of the worldwide web usage (desktop + tablets), that’s not bad. Then, setting aside the hectoring of zealots, we’ll examine what this position means for content providers and end-users.

Today, we’ll take a closer look at  two issues:
#1 Apple’s publishing business models
#2 Customer data

The 30% Fee

Let’s settle this one quickly: according to a lawyer I spoke with, regulatory bodies have nothing to say about how much a company charges its partners. Apple can charge whatever it wants to media providers willing to be on its platform, the market is supposed to regulate this, and judging by the number of apps and books in the iTunes Store, it has voted.

Ok, then, it’s legal. But is it fair and, more importantly, sustainable for Apple?

The 30% fee is part of Apple’s simplicity obsession. It undoubtedly played a key role in  the iTunes Store’s success. But this system essentially favors the vast market of small to medium-size companies unencumbered by legacy products and unwilling to bother with the tasks of distributing, marketing, and invoicing their customers. As for the news business, I keep telling my journalism school students who consider an e-publication based pay-for model: ‘Go for it! In your case, 30% is fair and convenient’.

It’s a very different story for large established companies. When probed about the 30% for online media, Apple cinder-block answer is: don’t complain fellows, we charge much less than you’re used to spend in the physical world.

Wrong answer, for three reasons: ad-related ARPU, retail price and distribution costs. On the Average Revenue per User side, we know that advertising revenue, as calculated per digital user, fall to a fifth or a tenth from what it is (soon: was) for print. Two, ask a twenty-something how much s/he’ll be ready to pay for the convenience of a digital edition landing on her iPad. I did it with my Sciences-Po students as I was showing a variety of digital products ranging from the precambrian PDF to brand new iPad design-for publications. They’d accept to pay no more 30-50 Euro cents per copy. Take 30% of this — actually, 39% with taxes — and you end up with 18 or 30 cents — again with a largely depleted advertising revenue. Plus, still worth mentioning, the cost of distributing a file is negligible compared to printing and shipping physical product to users’ doorsteps.

What about market trends? A good agency-model deal (in which the publisher sets the price) can land around a 20% commission fee and Google will be more like 10%.At some point, my take is Apple will have to adjust its fees to market conditions. Again, while 30% is fair for a startup with no marketing and distribution system whatsoever, it remains quite high for big companies who already have large infrastructures.

The same goes for its applications review system. $99 for a developer account wether you are the Wall Street Journal or some students e-zine makes little sense. Large companies should be asked to pay way more and to get different services, such as an interoperable transaction system instead of iTunes passage obligé. As long as it pays Apple for its apps-related service, the publisher should have the right to use the transaction system of its own choosing. If Google, PayPal, or some local system is cheaper, the content provider should be entitled to direct its customer to it — at least antitrust lawyers believe so. For Apple, the problem is it won’t collect precious customer data, which brings us to the next point.

Accessing the Customer

The genesis of this hot issue between Apple and the publishers is to be found in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. The author recounts the meeting with Time Warner CEO’s Jeff Bewkes. The discussion focused on publishing Time Inc.’s magazines on the iPad. Bewkes had agreed on the 30% (this was early 2010, Jobs was not ready to yield anyway), then the main subject arose:

“I have only one question,” Bewkes continued. “If you sell a subscription to my magazine, and I give you the 30%, who has the subscription—you or me?”

“I can’t give away all the subscriber info because of Apple’s privacy policy,” Jobs replied.

“Well, then, we have to figure something else out, because I don’t want my whole subscription base to become subscribers of yours, for you to then aggregate at the Apple store,” said Bewkes. “And the next thing you’ll do, once you have a monopoly, is come back and tell me that my magazine shouldn’t be $4 a copy but instead should be $1. If someone subscribes to our magazine, we need to know who it is, we need to be able to create online communities of those people, and we need the right to pitch them directly about renewing.”

In fact, access to the customer could be another antitrust issue. Specialized attorneys I spoke with say Apple has no right to retain customer data the way it does and it should make the transfer customer information much easier. Today, you can’t engage into a direct relationship with a customer via the application. Furthermore, the opt-in system Apple sets up for apps-subscribers yields meager results and, when it comes to use the info, “some restrictions apply”. That’s a double jeopardy.

Some readers of the Monday Note liked to refer to Wal-Mart in defense of Apple’s position. First of all, I don’t see the comparison as particularly flattering. To me, Wal-Mart is one of the worst companies on Earth, built on below-poverty-level wages and third-world enslavement (I encourage the reading of this 2003 Pulitzer Prize winning series in the Los Angeles Times). Compared to Wal-Mart’s founder Sam Walton, Steve Jobs was Mother Teresa.

Except for one thing. Wal-Mart allows a box of corn-flakes sitting in its shelf, to be loaded with everything needed by the brand to engage a relationship directly with its customer: coupons, games, toll-free numbers, emails and web addresses, samples, all sorts of incentives designed to further tie the customer to the products whether or not they are sold in Wal-Mart stores. On the contrary, in the app-world, you can’t even have a link sending the user to a customer-relation pages. On this specific matter, Apple is doing worse than the worst retailer in the physical world.

Elusive Attitude

What’s next for Apple regarding the anti-competitive issue? Not very much. First of all because Apple is cornering only one segment of the digital devices. And, unlike Microsoft in the nineties, Apple is playing a clever chess game. “They have a well-defined elusive strategy”, said a European antitrust lawyer, “their goal is avoid the European Commission opening the case. They are closely monitoring the other players’ moves, and they will budge accordingly, one inch at a time. In doing so, they are buying time. And six months here and there is a big deal in the digital business.” On the publishing side and the customer relationships irritant, I bet the Cupertino guys will calm everyone down with minor adjustments in the coming few months.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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Spurred by years of frustration with AT&T, Verizon, Orange and the like, I wrote a half-serious Monday Note a few months ago (Steve, Please Buy Us A Carrier!) that imagined an Apple wireless universe. Simple pricing, no-surprise phone bills, no-tricks agreements. There would be dancing in the streets…

Unfortunately (I concluded), if Apple were to acquire a carrier — T-Mobile, say, to keep it out of AT&T’s clutches — they’d be saddled with a legacy business, its infrastructure, its people, its culture. That’s not the Apple way. They didn’t get into retail by buying up and remodeling Circuit City stores; the company builds from the ground up.

There are other problems. A single carrier – any carrier — would have limited geographic impact; the potential billions in service revenue is attractive, but it doesn’t serve Apple’s #1 business: selling hardware; wrestling with the FCC over regulatory issues would be intolerable.

Give us a carrier…It’s a nice fantasy but Apple isn’t going to spend tens of billions to buy a headache.

A few weeks later, I was politely but firmly admonished by my daughter’s significant other: Yes, buying a carrier – or a string of carriers – probably isn’t in Apple’s playbook, but let’s not be so quick to kick them out of the game. There is, he said, a better, simpler way for Apple to indulge their iPhone customers.

Today, Apple uses its cash to buy capacity from parts suppliers and manufacturing contractors. Why not do something similar with wireless carriers? The Cupertino company could buy “capacity” (minutes and gigabytes) from Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, or even China Mobile, Vodafone, and the intriguingly-named Tata Teleservices. Apple would become a Mobile Virtual Network Operator, a company that provides cell phone services that ride on someone else’s infrastructure.

There are dozens of MVNOs operating in the US: Virgin Mobile, Firefly, Straight Talk… Even 7-Eleven, the convenience store giant, offers its “own” cellular network: 7-Eleven Speak Out Wireless. I found one MVNO, H2O Wireless, that claims to “work” with iPhones and Android devices, although keep in mind the (in)famous “Some Restrictions Apply”.

This is a much livelier scene than I imagined. In 2006, according to the felicitously named mobileisgood.com, there were only 330 MVNOs. Wiki the term today and you’ll read that “there are 645 active MVNO operations in the world.” (For the modest sum of $1,125, you can buy a PDF copy of the MVNO Directory 2011 which lists all 645 companies. One free detail: 205 new companies in one year!)

Add Apple’s new “worldphone”, the iPhone 4S straddling GSM and CDMA networks, and you have the ingredients for a virtuous virtual Apple carrier

Insiders tell me this is easier said than done. They’re right. Wireless networks are complicated. Picture the attempt to superimpose Apple-style simplicity on top of layers upon layers of old hardware and patchwork software that span several “somewhat compatible” networks. Once again, an idea that sounds good is, in practice, unfeasible. Worse, the beautiful theory might lead to the sorriest kind of mediocrity: The product that’s impossible to fix and can’t be killed.

Still, I’m optimistic. I find the froth, the growth of MNVO companies exciting, encouraging. Whether they admit it or not, the incumbents know their culture isn’t going to foster innovation, only incrementation. For them, MVNOs might be a way to wage a proxy war against the competition by attracting innovators to their side — until the unruly mercenaries kill the overlord that engaged them.

Back to Apple, they could buy, rather cheaply, a number of MVNOs or even build their own. If 7-Eleven can do it…

Now we find out that as far back as 2005, “Jobs initially hoped to create his own network with the unlicensed spectrum that Wi-Fi uses rather than work with the mobile operators…” This came out in a talk given last week by John Stanton, a cellular industry pioneer, at a Law Seminars conference in Seattle. No real surprise: Jobs wasn’t fond of carriers. He considered them to be obstacles rather than instruments of progress and was naturally inclined to look for ways around them. We know what happened. Jobs ended up working with carriers — but only if they accepted Apple’s control over the handset features and iTunes and App Store content sales.

End of story? Not quite.

Take a look at the recently-announced Republic Wireless, a hybrid carrier that rides on a combination of WiFi networks and cellular infrastructure. The phone, a LG Optimus Android device, costs $199 upfront and the service goes for $19/month, with unlimited minutes, data, and text. No hidden fees, just sales tax. Free roaming in the US over Sprint’s network. Free WiFi calls to the US from anywhere in the world. No contract, no termination fee, cancel when you want. This is far from the $100+/month, two-year indentureship that AT&T offers its iPhone users.

Reactions to the new service, one of a broad array offered by Bandwidth.com (a Carolina company that presents itself as a “Complete BUSINESS Communications Provider”) range from guarded to enthusiastic. As Ina Fried of All Things D points out, Some Restrictions (Still) Apply:

“…the company wants to deliver most of its service over Wi-Fi, using cellular more as a backup for when Wi-Fi isn’t available. Customers who…gobble up too much cellular data or wireless minutes will be asked to find another carrier.”

The company buys 3G network capacity from Sprint. Return too often to the “all you can eat” network buffet and management will escort you out.

We’ll have to wait a few months to see what happens next. Will Republic Wireless grow into a viable, disruptive business, proving Jobs was right to look for a way to build a hybrid carrier? Will its business model fail because $19/month won’t be enough to pay the Sprint bill? Or will Republic Wireless end up as a beta for Apple’s own hybrid network?

———–
An afterthought before we close.

Last week, we heard a titillating rumor: an Amazon smartphone would come out late next year. At first, I dismissed it as unrealistic. Then, I looked at my brand new Kindle Fire and marveled again at the way Amazon “picked Android’s lock”. The company took the Android Open Source code, added its own UI, applications, services and app store. The result is an ‘‘unofficial” Android device without any Google control on it, without the Trojan Horse apps. Further, by slotting its own browser between the Amazon customer and the Google search engine, Bezos & Co. keep accumulating user data without sharing any of it with their Mountain View frenemies. Why not apply this newly developed arrangement to an Amazon smartphone?
I also realized that, in order to feed data to its Kindles, Amazon developed Whispernet, a 3G network riding other carriers‘ infrastructure — which sounds like an MVNO of sorts.
We know the Kindle Fire model of being sold at cost or at a small loss because it boosts the company’s real business: selling things and content. The hypothetical Amazon smartphone (hardware + MVNO contract) would be priced in the same spirit.

More disruption on the way?

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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(First in a series)

Will Apple face the type of antitrust issues Microsoft had to contend with in the 90′s? Possibly, but not with the same magnitude. Apple is by no means locking up its market the way Microsoft controlled the personal computer field with Windows. Still, the question arises for the iTunes Store, the App Store and their tightly controlled transaction and subscription systems.

Today, we’ll take a look at the issue from a news business perspective.

The fact that scores of publishers are flocking to the iTunes system doesn’t mean they are happy with it. For any publisher willing to access the burgeoning tablet market currently dominated by the iPad, a presence in the AppStore is mandatory. But I never met a publisher happy with his relationship with Apple. For most, what started as an enthralling partnership is slowly morphing into a feeling of servitude.

That perception is tinged with schizophrenia. Media people are usually fond of Apple products. From top bosses to tech reporters, they cherish their iPads and their iPhones. Then, each time Apple introduces a well-polished new device, it gets glowing coverage worth hundreds of million dollars if converted in media space.
Enjoying great products and admiring Apple for its many achievements does not prevent anyone from taking a stern look at the way the Cupertino folks do business. In a nutshell, publishers feel increasingly locked-in, and sometimes abused by Apple’s tight ecosystem.

As always, there are excesses on both sides. Difficult as it might be, let’s try and take a balanced view of three majors issues:
#1 the Application ecosystem
#2 the validity of a business model build on a 30% commission
#3 the issue of the customer data.
(We’ll start with #1 today, and address #2 and 3 next week)

The following is based on my ongoing contacts with publishers and conversations I had with lawyers specialized in antitrust and intellectual property. They spoke anonymously as they are quietly loading their guns for a possible legal action before the European Commission.

#1 The App Ecosystem

The context. Apple set up a huge technical and human infrastructure in order to provide tools to anyone, large of small, willing to build an application and yearning to make it available to any market. Amazingly, from the outset, Apple decided to provide all this machinery (software development kit, tracking system, testing) for free (let alone the symbolic cost of a $99 developer account).
Entrepreneurs voted with their keyboards and mice: there are 500,000 applications in the AppStore today, and counting. It created a huge new business. As Apple gives back 70% of the revenue for paid-for applications, by June 2011, the company had paid over $2.5B to developers, many of them individuals or very small companies.
Well, is there really a matter to complain about here?
Surely not for the developer working from a high rise in Seoul or a barge in Amsterdam. But for the large publishing company, it’s another story. Once it enters the system, two keywords begin flashing : “discretionary power” and “locked-in”.

Let’s face it, Apple has life and death power over the apps it harbors in its store. Its approval system it completely opaque, left at the discretion of an elusive army of people working at “undisclosed locations”. Welcome to the kingdom of the arbitrary. The same set of features that once raised a red flag triggering a rejection will be accepted the next time around — without explanation. Approval delays vary widely, making it difficult to plan the roll-out of a critical product. What is acceptable for a mom and pop operation becomes anxiogenic for large organizations.

The question of “choice”. To those who criticized its “black box” system, Apple’s retorts we evolve in a free market: if a publisher is not happy with its App Store it can: (a) go to the Android market, or (b) build its own web-app, i.e. an app that will live and function independently of the iTunes Store.

Antitrust lawyers don’t see things that way. Their argument: for someone controlling 75 % of the tablet market, invoking such a marginal alternative isn’t relevant. A publisher willing to join the tablet business has no choice but being available on the iPad. In practical terms, this means investing serious money to join a platform operated in a discretionary and opaque way, with unclear and changing rules.

As for the web app, antitrust attorneys suggest they represent a degraded and dangerously uncertain alternative to the iTunes Store. Degraded because a web app such as the Financial Times’ — the poster child of the “resistance” to Apple — doesn’t work as well as a native app. And this notion of “slightly less good” is absolutely critical. Given the sate of HTML5 (the programming language used for independent apps) and whatever the skills of its developers, a web-app will never be as fast, as fluid, as features-rich as a native application. As for the uncertainty, it lies in the fact that a web-app depends on features Apple can change without warning, such as the ability to use its browser (no choice here, it’s Safari) to store content. Put another way, web-apps are likely to work — no more than OK — until Apple decides otherwise. Again, it’s difficult to build a sound business upon such quick sand.

Evidently,  Apple is entitled to defend the integrity of its operating system by not giving independent applications access to critical layers of its iOS. This precaution provides better security against rogue code such as viruses and other malware; it is an indisputable justification for tight control. Agreed, said the antitrust lawyers, but: (a) for the native apps, rules could be more transparent and stable, (b) as for web apps, such rules should evolve within a framework of well-documented Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), a set of coding conventions used by programs to communicate with each other and with the underlying operating system. These APIs would be controlled by Apple on the sole basis of technical concern in order to protect the integrity its OS while creating a clear and well-defined framework for publishers.

Evidently, these suggestions sound a bit naïve. Apple has no business interest whatsoever in easing its allowance for independent web-apps. Most likely, it will carefully adjust the cursor to appear reasonably open while, at the same time, protecting its own ecosystem.

Things are likely to get worse before they get better: Apple is likely to unleash features that will benefit only applications and services of its choice in order to preserve its position. The best example is its Newsstand’s background downloading for publications (your iPad automatically wakes up to download the publications you subscribed to in the Newsstand, see a previous Monday Note on the matter). Lawyers says this is the perfect example of a feature that creates an unfair advantage favoring Apple’s own distribution channel.

Apple’s attitude towards competition epitomizes a often-seen scenario of the technological evolution: a company acquires a dominant position in a given market (in today’s case, several ones) thanks to superior products and services. As the company further gains ground over its competitors, the admiration for its quick success morphs into growing suspicion. Features that once were lauded as innovative market boosters begin to be seen as instruments of a market lock-down. At the same time, competition tries to imitate the leader as fast as it can. As it feels both unfairly copied and threatened, the market leader reacts by further tightening its grip on its business, using whatever it takes to buy time. In doing so, it triggers more hostility, etc. A vicious spiral begins.

Next week, considering market domination, we’ll see why Apple takes a different approach from the one Microsoft once used. Unless it becomes completely intoxicated by its own success, a clever “cursor adjustment” could preserve Apple’s lead and, at the same time, favor healthy competition.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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In reaction to last week’s technical speculation on the putative iTV, several commenters raised questions about content providers, distributors, and “pipes”. Does iTV help or harm NBC, Netflix, and Comcast? How does the [one last time: “putative”] iTV make money, and for whom?

Indeed, the column ignored an important – perhaps the most important — part of the product: the Money Pump, a.k.a. the Business Model. While Apple displays a sharp, fulfilling sense of aesthetics and simplicity in the design and implementation of new products, the company didn’t reach the pinnacle of high-tech profitability by merely practicing l’art pour l’art. Apple isn’t deaf to a more practical art form: cash register music.

Starting with pipes, let’s look at smartphone carriers as an analogy. When AT&T “won” exclusive iPhone distribution rights in the US, it appeared that they had traded their birthright. The iPhone bore no AT&T customizations, no stickers, no craplets. Worse, the carrier had to let Apple run the content distribution table with iTunes.

As we’ve since seen, the trade turned out well for AT&T. With more subscribers because it’s an iPhone!, and with more revenue per customer, the device yields AT&T a $100 monthly ARPU, much higher than the $50+ industry average.

With this in mind, should we think of an exclusivity deal between Apple and a “TV carrier”? Perhaps another AT&T deal, this time for their TV + Internet U-Verse line.

AT&T’s network topology — a dedicated set of wires running into each subscriber’s home — is ideal for voice and Internet traffic. But the company is at a disadvantage when it comes to distributing several hundred TV channels, something a cable provider has no problem with. Comcast simply taps into the coax cable that passes by each house and feeds the same anonymous, multiplexed signal into the set-top box for authorization and decoding. (This is an oversimplification and ignores the evolving topologies made possible by optical fiber…but we’re still far from the dream of Fiber To The Home)
iTV could give AT&T an opportunity to take the lead in 21st Century TV, to stop fighting Comcast on its own ground. The resources AT&T deploys today to bring old-style TV channels into markets dominated by cable carriers could be re-allocated to the fast Internet access that lets several iTV devices run in the same home. (Try asking today’s friendly AT&T U-Verse salesperson how many DVRs you can have. “One” is the general answer, as this U-Verse user document cautiously explains. Comcast will let you have — and pay for — as many as you like.) A simpler, more focused life, stealing subscribers from the incumbent, a higher Phone + Internet Access ARPU… For AT&T, this could be a repeat of the original iPhone deal.Realistic? I don’t know if AT&T is bold enough to make such a move.

For cable TV incumbents, the money pump equation is different. By “virtue” of their dominant position, they have more to lose, they have these expensive, inflexible, and tricky channel bundles to protect. What looks like a potential ARPU uptick for AT&T could turn into a subscriber revenue decrease for a cable operator supplying Internet access to iTV viewers using apps instead of channels.

This gets us to iTV content. It will either be “free”, meaning subsidized by advertising; by subscription, like Bloomberg BusinessWeek on a tablet; or pay-as-you-go, one show or game at a time. One reader suggested we’d end up paying more than we do with today’s bundles. It’s a possibility, but we might be happy to pay more in exchange for the freedom to pick and choose, as opposed to today’s situation where adding an “extraneous” channel to an existing bundle is a chore that makes you feel like you work for the cable company and not the other way around. Who knows, we might even spend less overall — while giving more money to the better creators.

We now move to content providers. As they ‘‘appify’‘ their channels, will they be willing to give Apple 30% of the app revenue? If the app is “free”, no problem: 30% of zero isn’t terribly onerous. But even for a free channel, there’s the question of sharing ad revenue: How much for CBS, how much for Apple? This isn’t a random example, we just heard Lee Moonves, the CEO of CBS, say that his company turned down a streaming TV deal with Apple because of a disagreement over ad revenue. CBS and others have to see how iTV will make them more money. (The same is true for game developers who could use iTV as a vehicle for living room or networked games.)

Finally, Apple itself. Their emotive talk about the purity of the software architecture, the praise for the elegant kerning of the Garamond Light Condensed ITC font on Keynote slides…such talk is important and relevant, it addresses the very reasons for Apple’s success, but we shouldn’t forget what rings the Big Cash Register: hardware. The iTV product itself has to generate billions in hardware revenue or stay what it is today, what Jobs felicitously called a hobby, a mere hundreds of millions of dollars of hardware revenue. That’s nothing when compared to the tens of billions — soon $100B — in iOS mobile devices revenue.

How to get there? Recall last week’s No Set-Top Box configuration:

I’ve added a twist, one simplification. Why have two devices, one iTV and one Wifi Base Station or Time Capsule? A unified device saves room, power, the need to have disk storage in two places – and it will help justify a unit price that’s greater than the current $99 for Apple TV.

Let’s put the price tag of this unified device at $299, the price of today’s 2TB Time Capsule. If Apple can sell 10 million units, that’s $2.9B in revenue… Not bad, but put that number into the context of Apple’s overall revenue estimates: $120B in 2011 (calendar year, not fiscal), $160B in 2012, and $200B in 2013. $2.9B in iTV revenue doesn’t get it out of the hobby category. Apple would need to sell 100 million units, $29B in revenue, to really “make a dent in the universe”.

What about the revenue iTV will generate through the App Store as users buy apps-as channels? Consider iTunes: It made about $2B in revenue in the 2011 Fiscal Year ended last September (probably much less in profits as this is a complicated organization with many revenue streams and an expensive infrastructure). iTunes is hardly a loss leader, but its purpose is to fuel iOS device sales, not the other way around. By analogy, the App Store and advertising revenue share isn’t going to make or break iTV.

In last week’s Monday Note, I argued against an Apple-made big-screen TV: Too big, can’t be brought back to the store for repair, the computer inside would become obsolete much more quickly than the screen itself.

Friends tell me I’m wrong. A Big Screen might be the answer to the revenue question. At $1,500 or more, an Apple HDTV set might achieve revenue levels in the tens of billions, and, unlike today’s TV set industry, it might even be profitable.

(As an aside: Last week, Sir Howard Springer, the courageous Welshman running Sony, let it be known that while his company is — “like Apple” — in the process of re-inventing the TV, “Every TV set we make loses money”. We also heard about Logitech giving up on Google TV after losing tens of millions in the misadventure. And Adobe decided to stop Flash development for TV. The news from the TV front could be better.)

As a big beautiful flat-screen set, or even as a separate module, an iTV sounds like a great idea. But translating the dream into a viable 21st Century TV product looks considerably more difficult. To be successful, the iTV needs to make money for carriers, for content developers, for distributors, and for Apple itself. None of which is self-evident.

Still, the ossified TV ecosystem is ripe for disruption, ready for an annoying innovator.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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You hear things about Facebook. You see things. As its audience matures, a subtle shift might be underway. Of course, numbers remains staggering. Facebook is heading toward the 800 million users mark, mostly by conquering new markets. The growth is distributed as follows : Middle-East Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America grow by around 60% per year; Europe by 35-40%; and North America by 25%. And demographics are shifting: older people are joining in Western markets while a younger audience grows in emerging ones. More changes are underway as the internet spreads on both landlines and mobile devices: over the last 3 years, China added more internet users than exist in the United States today. Furthermore, in the fastest growing markets, Facebook captures over 90% of all social network traffic. So, for the near future, Facebook doesn’t have a growth problem.

On mature markets, the future looks bright as well. In the United States, unique users grew by 22% between June 2010 and September 2011, reaching a total of155 million. Notably, the average time spent per person grew from 6:02hrs to 7:42hrs.

And…

When you speak with grownups and young adults who used to be Facebook enthusiasts, you hear the following :
– Facebook’s interface, its features have become overly complicated. The result is it takes more time to do the same old things.
– Managing friends leaves you with two choices: spending a lot of time delicately pruning lists, circles and groups, or being swamped.
– Constant and insidious changes in Facebook’s privacy features keep taking people off-guard: all of a sudden, you find many things about your digital life, mostly mundane stuff such as what you read and listen, being broadly available outside your initial circle. Quasi-paranoid caution has become a must. And again, since “opening” is the default setting on Facebook, recovering your own privacy gets increasingly complicated.
– A rise in the advertising presence, which reinforces the impression of being tracked down: users don’t have the slightest idea of the breadth and depth of Facebook’s mining of their personal activities.

It now seems Facebook’s usage is undergoing a split. Active Facebookers become increasingly engaged, spend more time doing more stuff, while “reasonable” users (above 25) become more reluctant and careful.

Who benefits from such shift? Twitter, primarily. Globally, Twitter’s microblogging/social network is much smaller than Facebook, with a reported 200 million users, only a fraction of which are really active. Business-wise, Facebook is 30 times larger than Twitter and is expected to gross $4.27bn this year, according to eMarketer ultra-precise estimates; that’s more than twice last year’s revenue. As for Twitter, its advertising strategy is gaining traction: again, eMarketer expects Twitter to make $139.5 million, up 210% from the previous year.

Given the differences in size and reach, does it make sense to compare the two?

Let’s consider the news media sector. From a pure quantitative standpoint, Facebook remains a solid referral for news sites as people “Like” and link to stories. But Facebook encourages fly-bys, i.e. viewers that  won’t stay on the site. Twitter’s referrals to a news content is of a different nature. Tweets and retweeets usually come from people who have chosen to follow a given individual, a news organization or a specific subject. The referral is therefore much sharper, more targeted than the impulsive “throw-on-my-Facebook-wall” type.

For what it worth, let’s look at an essay published last Saturday in the Wall Street Journal. Titled Why Can’t Wall Street Handle the Truth, it is written by Mike Mayo, a long time banking analyst who made repeated calls to dump banks stocks.

The essay generated 795 Facebook “Likes” — which is small for a story that is freely available in the WSJ Social Facebook application:

In the meantime, the same piece (and the mention of Mayo’s book) has been indexed 140,000 times in Google, thanks to only 392 tweets.

Still using the Wall Street Journal as an example, let’s have look at Walt Mossberg’s presence. (He is the Journal’s world-famous tech writer.) On Facebook, his page got 874 “Likes”. On the WSJ Social application, where Mossberg appears as an editor, he got 252 readers as the app has been able to collect a total “23K Readers”

Not very compelling.

But, on Twitter, Walt has 264,000 followers.

Another key element in Twitter’s favor: the mobile factor. Twitter’s 140 characters format turned out to be a killer on smartphones: it is growing faster on mobile (+75% Year-to-Year) than LinkedIn (+69%) and Facebook  (+50%). That’s the privilege of simplicity and straightforwardness over feature-itis.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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Search for the word ‘‘cracked’’ in Walt Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs (or flip to page 555 if you have the bricks-and-mortar version). The second hit yields the following:

It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.

“It” is the mythical Apple iTV. Even though Walt’s report of the July 2011 conversation didn’t hint at Steve’s solution, the eleventh hour revelation has rekindled old rumors and set the blogosphere on fire. “If Steve said he ‘cracked’ the problem, it must be true!”

At first, I had impure thoughts: I imagined Dear Leader, taking a moment away from redesigning Saint Peter’s abode, had foisted a prank upon us abandoned mortals: “That’ll keep ‘em busy…and will take their attention away from embarrassing topics such as the incompatibility between iOS and Mac file formats.”

A few days later, however, I read two posts that made me rethink my dismissive views.

First, in “Apps Are the New Channels”, John Gruber floats the idea of channels-as-apps (powered by iOS, of course):

Imagine watching a baseball game on a TV where ESPN is a smart app, not a dumb channel. When you’re watching a game, you could tell the TV to show you the career statistics for the current batter. You could ask the HBO app which other movies this actress has been in.

Second, in his good-natured pout post “Fine. I will talk about Apple Television or iTV or whatever it will be or will not be called.”, Brian Hall led me to a Nielsen Wire article that contains this graph:

40% and 42% of smartphone and tablet users, respectively, use their devices while watching TV — on a daily basis. The statistics themselves are hardly surprising, particularly to parents who have watched their multimedia-tasking children grow into young adults. But as I looked at the charts, a retroactively-obvious connection, a compatibility, struck me: Smartphones, tablets, and the iTV all use apps. [I’ve given up using the precautionary “putative” when speaking of iTV, and I use the present tense with license.]

With this in mind, what will the iTV look like?

As discussed in a previous Monday Note, if the iTV is an integrated device, the computer inside will become outdated long before the monitor does. Once you’ve graduated to Full HD (1920 by 1080 pixels) any other “improvements” –“240 Hz” display frequency and the like — are markitecture gimmicks that are invisible to most users. In other words, you won’t want to upgrade your TV after 18 months the way many of us do with laptops, tablets, and smartphones. (One could imagine a replaceable iOS computer module inside the iTV, but it sounds clunky, a source of problems.) Even more important, an integrated iTV would orphan the millions of HDTV sets already in place.

Furthermore, I still don’t see a 50” TV set walking out of an Apple Store. It’s hard enough to carry a 27” iMac out — or back in when trouble strikes. And I don’t see battalions of Apple field service people coming to our homes to fix these things.

If there’s no integrated iTV, let’s consider the iTV as a separate module, the next-generation Apple TV. In order to really work in the marketplace and achieve an iPod-like status, the module would have to “swallow” the set-top box, DVR included. If it didn’t, we’d still have to fight the multiple device/multiple remote battle: The set-top box, the primary source of TV fodder, has to be connected to the Input 1 HDMI connector, relegating iTV to Input 2. Certainly not the elegant solution Steve had in mind.

However, swallowing the set-top box and its DVR would entail making agreements with cable operators, business that are more numerous, less sophisticated, and more afraid of Apple than are the wireless carriers. While the wireless carriers have seen how smartphones can increase their ARPU, cable operators know only too well what would happen to their barely legal and definitely distasteful program bundling schemes once Apple gets in the game. (Try adding a single channel to your existing Comcast bundle: in Palo Alto, with Comcast, you must fill and email a form. It can’t be done on the phone, even if you manage to get to a human after a 20 minute wait.)

Ah, but maybe there is a way: Connect the set-top box to the HDMI input on the iTV, then connect the iTV to your HDTV’s prized Input 1. That gets us partway there, but it still doesn’t solve the multiple remote problem.

That’s where apps come in for the first but not last time: Download Apple’s iRemote application to your iOS, Android, or Windows Phone smartphone or tablet and you’re done.

Smartdevice-as-remote has been attempted before, of course. One example is the Xfinity iPad/iPhone app. You prep each set-top box in your home, download the program guide to your iDevice, and you’re good to go. When you issue a channel-change command from your smartphone, it’s sent through the Net to the Comcast cloud, and is routed back to your set-top box via Comcast’s cable:

Why the detour through Comcast? Because your smartphone/tablet and your set-top box don’t understand each other. The former speaks WiFi and Bluetooth; the latter only understands infrared.

Unfortunately, in my case, it worked once and never worked again.

Judging from the comments in the App Store, I’m not alone.

Furthermore, counting on the cable operator – and there are more than 25 in the US — to let the smartphone/tablet app control a multitude of set-top box models via the circuitous route described above probably isn’t the type of elegant solution Jobs had in mind.

How about translating between the smartphone/tablet and the set-top box by inserting a mediating device, a WiFi or Bluetooth-to-I/R converter? With the iTV connected to the set-top box and TV via HDMI, you still end up with a complicated arrangement: Your home WiFi base station provides a Net connection to your smartphone and iTV, and the WiFi-to-I/R converter listens to your smartphone and speaks I/R to your TV and set-top box:

This looks ugly, and it gets uglier: Since there’s no two-way connection between the TV/set-top box and the “remote,” the remote has no idea whether the TV is on or off, which input it’s using, which channel it’s tuned to. As a result, it’s easy to have a system in an unknown state, frustrating most mortals and forcing ‘‘harmonizing remote” makers such as Logitech to use complicated workarounds.

For most users, chances are slim that the set-up I just described will work and keep working.

Now let’s consider channels as apps. Why should TV on an iTV be like the TV we get through a set-top box? Newspapers and magazines on tablets (and smartphones for some publications such as the NY Times) aren’t mere replicas of the paper-based product. The adaptation to the new medium isn’t always pretty, but there are some great examples: See Bloomberg Businessweek or The New Yorker Magazine on a tablet.

The same will apply to TV. Not all channels will adapt equally well or equally quickly, but as “channel apps” evolve, we’ll see new ways of using the medium. As Mr. Gruber pointed out, imagine a football game as an app on an HDTV screen with the on-demand stats he mentioned plus the Twitter and Facebook streams we’ve grown to expect. (Personally, I’m not crazy about having too much “other” content on the screen as I watch a game, but I might be in a minority.)

Delivering channels as apps liberates our “viewing experience” in two ways: It breaks today’s narrow channel delivery format and it bypasses the set-top box. Today, I can watch the “straight” version of 60 Minutes on my TV (in real time or from my DVR), or I can go to my computer and watch a recent episode plus the additional “60 Overtime” content…or I can buy the $4.99 iPad app and get all of that through a much better UI that includes great navigation to the vast library of past episodes. Port that iPad app to the iTV device and you’re done. With channels as apps, all you need is a net connection (sometimes provided by the cable operator). You can throw the set-top box away.

Will consumers pay for iTV apps/content as I did for 60 Minutes? Probably, and we won’t have to pay for everything, just as with today’s TV with its combination of free and pay-per-view programs.

Of course, there’s the notorious “simple matter of implementation,” here: Someone has to write the apps that encapsulate the channels. But once the movement gains strength and tools become widespread and understood, it will be easier than you might think. 500,000 iOS apps attest to the availability of institutional knowledge.

In the meantime, if you don’t have an iPad, borrow one, spend $4.99 for the 60 Minutes app, and imagine the experience on an HDTV. Is this the TV future Jobs had in mind?

—JLG@mondaynote.com

[In a future Monday Note and/or in comments on our site, I’ll cover variants to the approach described above, infrastructure issues, and also potential reactions from carriers/operators and competitors.]

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Web design is in bad shape. In the applications boom, news-related web sites end up as collateral damage. For graphic designers, the graphics tools and the computer languages used to design apps for tablets and smartphones have unleashed a great deal of creativity. The transformation took longer than expected, but great designs begin to appear in iPad applications (in previous Monday Notes, we already discussed Business Week+ and the new Guardian app). The best applications get rid of the print layout; they start from a blank slate in which a basic set of rules (typefaces, general structure of a page, color codes) are adapted to the digital format. Happily, we just stand at the very beginning of a major evolution in news-related graphic design for apps. And this new world proves to be a killer for the traditional web which, in turn, seems to age fast.

The graphic evolution of the web must deal with two negative forces: its language framework doesn’t evolve fast enough, and it faces the burden of messy advertising.

Less than a year ago, the potential in the latest iteration of the HyperText Markup Language a.k.a. HTML5 thrilled everyone: it was seen as the decisive, if not definitive, upgrade of the web, both functionally and visually. Fact is, it didn’t take-off — yet. Reasons are many: backward compatibility (not everyone uses the latest web browser), poor documentation making development uncertain, stability and performances issues. There are are interesting initiatives but nothing compelling so far. None of the large digital media have made the jump.

For advertising, the equation is straightforward. The exponential rise of inventories coupled to fragile economic conditions have pushed ad agencies to ask more (space) for less money. And, for the creativity, the encephalogram remains desperately flat.

The result is this:

This is the first screen of the French website 20 minutes’ home page. A good site indeed, doing quite well audience-wise, but which yields too much to advertising. In its case, the page carries an “arch” that frames the content; and, for good measure, a huge banner is inserted below the main header. If you mask the ad, it looks like this:

The weird thing is this: On the one hand, web designers seem to work on increasingly large monitors; on the other, the displays used by readers tend to shrink as more people browse the web on notebooks, tablets or smartphones.

The result is a appalling when you try to isolate content directly related to the news. In the series of screenshots below, I selected the first scrolls of pages as they render on my laptop’s 15” display. Then, I overlaid a red mask on everything but the news contents: ads, all sorts of promotions, large white spaces, headers and sections lists are all hidden away.

Not surprisingly, digital version of organizations who carry strong editorial values are the most parsimonious when it comes to hosting ads.

The New York Times :

The Financial Times:

The BBC:

The Wall Street Journal (subscribers version):

Interestingly enough, the Wall Street Journal, which is mostly subscription-based, doesn’t inflict loads of ads on their occasional readers (the home page stays more or less the same in both cases).

Which is not the case for Le Monde; here is the subscriber version:

… and the non-subscriber one. (Understandably, the occasional reader gets more ads and that the paying subscriber).

But, when ads become the main source of income, excess looms. Remember, the big red blocks mask the ads.

The online version of the Swedish paper Aftonbladet:

The French Figaro, whose layout is more or less standard in the industry:

Again: this doesn’t prejudge the quality of those media. Whatever their level of advertising saturation, these are fine websites that chose to maximize the revenue of their home page. Their rule of thumb makes business sense: For the digital version of a national newspaper, the home page should get as much revenue as a full color printed page.

Things do get worse on article pages. Readers land there from the home page but also from search engines, social networks or third party links. At some point, too many ads, and/or designers’ inability to limit themselves to what is really needed to navigate the site converge in creating a bad reading experience.

Here is a simple graphic showing where a story actually starts on a page (based on its headline), the red rectangle being the browser’s window:

Unsurprisingly, the paid-for digital versions of newspapers tend to display as much as possible; as advertising weighs more in the P&L, so do ad pixels.

The BBC

The Financial Times:

The Wall Street Journal:

Le Monde (subscribers version):

The Guardian

(The French business daily Les Echos, largely paid-for, is a notable exception with plenty of stuff on the top of the stories):

Scandinavian papers surrender a lot to heavy ads: stories in the Swedish Aftonbladet begin below the fold as the pictures come ahead of the text:

… As in its way, the Norwegian VG do the same:

Interestingly enough, the audience-obsessed Huffington Post, is rather careful to load its pages with mostly news-related contents:

More than everything else, layout is a matter of choice. This is especially true for digital media where the same content has to be tailored — sometimes on the fly — to serve different readerships (paid-for subscribers or free-riders, national or international versions, etc.) Having said that, the examples above show publishers went too far in yielding to advertising pressure. Thanks to the rise of mobile internet, the pendulum is likely to swing back: smaller screens will result in fewer ads carrying more value. Today’s ugliness won’t last forever.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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Let me jump to the conclusion: This is an extraordinary book on many levels: informative, entertaining often, insightful, sympathetic but not indulgent; it rises to its unusual subject and manages to render its complexity in a straightforward manner that attests to the biographer’s talent.
Get thee to a physical bookstore, if you can find one, or to Amazon’s or Apple’s online dispensers, you won’t regret it. And if you don’t have the time or patience, start with Chapter Thirty-Six: The iPhone, Revolutionary Products in One (page 465 on paper, easily searched on electrons).

Last year, Walt Isaacson called to talk about the bio Steve had asked him to write. No surprise there, Dear Leader always wanted the best, and Isaacson had written world-class biographies of Ben Franklin, Einstein, and Henry Kissinger.

I told Isaacson how sad this felt, how I perceived Steve’s decision as ‘‘putting his affairs in order’’ before leaving this Earth. Walt didn’t answer directly, but he did say something shocking: Steve had relinquished all control over the book, all decisions were Walt’s. I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t see Steve giving up control on anything. His fanatical attention to detail is, sorry, was a key ingredient of his success. But Steve’s editorial grip on the book went no further than his picture on the cover. In Isaacson’s words:

“He had never, in two years, asked anything about what I was putting in the book or what conclusions I had drawn. But now he looked at me and said, “I know there will be a lot in your book I won’t like.” It was more a question than a statement, and when he stared at me for a response, I nodded, smiled, and said I was sure that would be true. “That’s good,” he said. “Then it won’t seem like an in-house book. I won’t read it for a while, because I don’t want to get mad. Maybe I will read it in a year—if I’m still around.” By then, his eyes were closed and his energy gone, so I quietly took my leave.”

To be sure, this isn’t your typical CEO encomium where the slightest achievements are remembered as world-changing deeds, and unseemly details are airbrushed into endearing idiosyncrasies.

The arc of Steve’s life is the stuff of legends: Abandoned at birth; raised in Silicon Valley; an acid-dropping, ashram-dwelling college drop-out, hacker, and co-founder of the most iconic of personal computer companies; fired at age thirty; re-inventor of animated movies at Pixar; the struggle to create the NeXT big thing; the return to Apple in the most stunning turnaround the industry had ever seen; reshaping the music industry; building a world-class retail network in his own image; re-inventing the smartphone industry and grabbing half of its profits; and, finally, after thirty years of false starts, making tablets a reality and grabbing iPod-like market and profit share as a result. An arc that saw the unmanageable hippie become the head of one of the world’s best-managed companies. And he died just as he reached the pinnacle.

This could tempt both subject and his biographer to produce a statuesque book, a North Korean monument to Dear Leader’s achievements. But instead of The Life and Miracles of Saint Steve, we get the gift of truth. We are forced to stare at the reality, or realities of the actual man. Thinking of his children, for whom Steve said the book was, so they got to better know him, this book is a great present. Judging oneself only by comparison to the better side of a parent is a terrible burden. Walt’s book gives them an independent look into the incredibly luminous Steve as well as into his sometimes repulsive dark side. Steve’s must have hoped to free them from his legend.

On the one hand, Isaacson shows the man who thrilled us with his (almost) unerring taste, with his sense that computers of various sizes and forms were more than merely utilitarian, that they were the objects, the vehicles of an evolving culture. Visionary, artist, leader, innovator… the list of meliorative words goes on, and rightly so: Steve was all these.
On the other hand, Isaacson manages the feat of being, by turns, empathetic, even affectionate and, in the next sentence, unblinkingly factual. The book will confirm everything you’ve heard about Steve’s unpleasant sides, and then some. When learning of his truly pathological eating habits, for example, you’ll wonder about his sanity. I don’t use the word pathological lightly: you’ll see how delusional Steve was when, for eight months, he refused surgery for his diagnosed pancreatic cancer, choosing instead a strict vegan diet, acupuncture and “herbal remedies, and occasionally a few other treatments he found on the Internet or by consulting people around the country, including a psychic”.

In a similar vein, you’ll read what Jony Ive, Apple’s Sr. VP of Design, Steve’s soulmate had to say about his dark side:

“… his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and a license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him. Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone.”

Yes, that’s also the way Steve was. With everyone, family included.

Knowing or having known many of the characters in the book, I can vouch for its accuracy. But, even more important, I can vouch for its voice. Walt Isaacson got Steve right. He didn’t get intimidated, he wasn’t seduced into being a groupie, he didn’t get nauseated or angry. Instead, he delivered the truest rendition I’ve read of one of the most complicated people I’ve known.

His subject’s complexity didn’t rob Isaacson of his dry wit, such as this when observing Jobs after his liver transplant:

“As Jobs got better, much of his feisty personality returned. He still had his bile ducts.”

Or from recording memorable Bill Gates quotes such a this one:

“I’ve been predicting a tablet with a stylus for many years,” he told me. “I will eventually turn out to be right or be dead.”

(Not so fast, Bill, we love to have you and Ballmer around.)

In my view, the only way to keep one’s sanity when dealing with Steve was to stay ambivalent, to force oneself to harbor contradictory feelings about him. Easier said than done. In my case, over time, feelings of admiration and affection have taken over when watching the feats and the struggle. Reading Walt’s book was a helpful and, at times, painful reminder of who Jobs actually was.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

[For a small compendium of Walt’s best-selling Steve Jobs bio reviews, look here.]

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Can Apple crack the digital news market the way it did with music? The comparison might not be relevant. Here is why:
– Today, in the new business, imperfect as it is, the transition from print to digital is much more advanced than the music industry’s similar transformation was when, in 2001, Apple launched the iPod. There are thousands of web sites now. They come in all shapes, from powerful pure players to paid-for legacy media. Many already make serious money, showing evidence of strong strategic thought.
– The two industries are structured in different ways. In the news business, there is plenty of players; the market is more scattered than ever, unlike the music business in which securing one of the few key distributors is the only way to a sizable market share.
– Technically, when compared to the news business, the music market was easy to standardize: very few digital formats as opposed to many and complex web sites and applications.
– The foray in the music business was driven by Steve Jobs himself. From the outset, he was really fond of music. By and large, he was not a news freak (nor did he liked journalists very much). For Apple, digital news was meant to be a second class business.

For all of these reasons, Apple had no hope to succeed organizing the news business the way it did with music. That’s why it came up with an ultra-simplistic approach for its Newsstand: aggregating pre-existing news applications while taking advantage of its control of the server side (iTunes) and on the device side (iOS).

In its first iteration, Apple Newsstand is no more than a super-shortcut for news related applications. Once a publisher offers subscriptions in iTunes and selects to go for the Newsstand, its app automatically migrates to there. First you get a  push message such as this one….

…Then the publication is displayed on the store’s wooden shelf…

… where it shows up with a clever updated icon reproducing the publication’s most recent cover or front page.

But the Newsstand’s real killer feature is background downloading. Once you’re subscribed, your issue is automatically downloaded on your iPhone and iPad. This feature was actually sought for by all developers working on news application: everyone dreamed about the iOS device being able to wake up following a request from the iTunes Store and download the latest issue of a newspaper or magazine. At the time, no one knew Apple intended to keep this functionality for itself. As expected, its works fine and proved to be extremely useful.

How did the service perform since its October 12th launch? Magazines are doing well, but newspapers are still absent from the platform. I was expecting to get all the English-speaking publications I’m subscribing to or reading on a regular basis. But the Newsstand is mostly filled with leisure magazines — for now.
Take UK’s Future Publishing: with no less than 50 titles, it went full steam ahead to the Newsstand. Future said it logged two million downloads in four days — but we don’t know how many actual in-app copies purchases it generates. Still, that’s an impressive result for a company that sells 3.2 million magazines every month.

Again for the magazine industry, other data seem similarly compelling. According to Paid Content:

Exact Editions, [an US aggregator of paid-for PDF versions] which says it made about 10 percent of the Newsstand app titles on iTunes Store, says downloads of freemium sample editions jumped by 14x in just a few days, whilst some titles’ actual sales have more than doubled.

And Poynter.org reports the following (emphasis mine):

The week Newsstand launched, the NYTimes for iPad app saw 189,000 new user downloads, up seven times from only 27,000 the week before.

That’s impressive, but it’s nothing compared to the NYTimes iPhone app, which saw 1.8 million new downloads that week, 85 times more than the 21,000 downloads the week before. Nearly one-fifth of the 9.1 million people who have ever downloaded the NYTimes iPhone app did so last week, with the launch of Newsstand.

The NYT’s performance is truly amazing given its subscription system’s weird price structure. It is also surprising considering its iPad application isn’t the best in its class.

Why do magazines take the lion’s share of the Newsstand? Two main reasons. First, when it comes to subscriptions, magazines are extremely inexpensive; for a full year subscription, single issue prices can fall to a symbolic level of 50 cents or less. Second, magazines are best suited to the PDF format that still plagues most of the e-publishing industry. Therefore, without redesign expense, publishers can shovel magazines by the bulk into any newsstand. It limits the reader’s engagement, but no one really seems to care yet. Copies are counted as sold.

By contrast, subscriptions to dailies remain quite expensive since they are expected to contribute a great deal to the bottom line. As for the format, most newspapers can’t be reduced to a zoomable PDF to be read on a tablet (let alone a smartphone).

In order to really take off, daily publications’ digital editions will have to morph into dedicated applications designed for tablets (or smartphones). That is exactly what The Guardian did with is brand new iPad, iOS5-only applications that is by far the best on the market.

This app scores well on many items: navigation is reduced to the basic 10 sections of the newspapers; story layout and readability are optimal; photographs are spectacular (although Apple doesn’t allow The Guardian app to be linked to its photojournalism’s Eyewitness app); pricing is right (£9.99 – $13.99), plus there is a huge incentive with 82 free issues (!!); the app is not autistic as it is tied to the brand’s website and to the social media sphere; finally, it downloads fast (which is appreciable but less of an issue now with background downloading).

From a reader’s perspective, the Apple Newsstand is a first step. There is no decisive momentum — yet.  The real transformation will occur when newspapers and magazines will move to applications really designed for tablets as opposed to unimaginative adaptations of their print editions. This means: approaching the market with new interfaces (such as the Guardian’s or Bloomberg BusinessWeek — our story here); moving to ARPU measurement instead of old-fashioned auditing; and setting up new productions schemes. That’ll be version 2.0. not just for Apple, but for the entire industry.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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These are the three interdependent forces that power the biggest wave of growth, change, and destruction I’ve seen since I have been allowed to take part in the high-tech industry.

In the beginning (or mine, anyway), back in 1968 when I was, miraculously, offered a salary to be part of HP France there was the mainframe. IBM – “The Company” — reigned supreme, a dynasty that seemed unassailable. The IBMer wore a suit and tie when approaching the punch card feeder. Big Blue’s competitors, the BUNCH, were also called the Seven Dwarfs because their combined market share couldn’t compare to IBM’s dominance.

A few years later, the dress code relaxed a bit and Digital Equipment Corporation’s minicomputer displaced mainframes. IBM still exists, of course, although under a different guise, but DEC is no more. They were acquired by Compaq in 1998, killed by the Personal Computer.

The PC era lasted longest of all, more than 30 years, partly due to Moore’s Law: “The microprocessor shall double its power every 18 months”, and then repurposed as a transmission medium with the advent of the Internet. Thanks to the standardization enforced by the Wintel duopoly, the industry manufactured hundreds of millions of PCs, giving rise to an inexpensive clone organ bank that largely displaced higher lifeforms such as Sun servers (the company that once claimed to ‘put the dot in dot.com’). As an example, the five million servers deployed by Google use a combination of such parts — and private versions of Linux.

Referring to the PC era in the past tense is contentious. In a now famous post, Frank Shaw, the literate head of Microsoft’s Corporate Communications, contends that  ‘the 30-year-old PC isn’t even middle aged yet, and about to take up snowboarding’. I’m writing this on an Intel-powered personal computer and don’t feel particularly necrophiliac. But the marketplace has spoken: The PC is, at best, stalled. Looking at last quarter’s Microsoft numbers, shipments to business customers are still growing, about 5% year-to-year, while the consumer market is flat. (From Gartner, more details on the PC sales slowdown here.)

Contrast this with the rise of Google’s Android smartphones, Facebook, Twitter, Apple’s iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch), Zynga, LinkedIn… And the fate of the incumbents, Nokia, Palm, RIM, Microsoft… They’ve all been displaced, ‘‘flummoxed” in Steve Jobs’ words.

We just got the latest Mary Meeker presentation, now on the Kleiner Perkins web site as she joined the grand Valley venture capital firm, a great combination of PR and talent acquisition. Mary Meeker’s opus is 66 slides long and covers so much ground it could become overwhelming, but it’s worth your time. The range of topics is impressive: e-commerce, the global race to adopt mobile devices and apps, on-line payments, social networking as a pervasive wave of opportunity spanning the online experience. She ‘posits that the mobile revolution is still in its infancy and poised for tremendous growth’.
Regarding the changing of the guard:

She then points to the new entrants clobbering the smartphone incumbents:

But, there’s more than clobbering, there’s location. When it comes to operating systems, ‘Made in USA’ – and, more specifically, Silicon Valley, the Detroit of computing – still means something:

As much as I like and admire her presentations, I’d take a slightly different angle.

First, as Horace Dediu meticulously points out in his Asymco blog, I’d emphasize the startling creation and destruction of value that has taken place in the past four years, since Apple and Google have entered the field. (For a slightly less analytical and more animated take, there is also Brian Hall’s Smartphone Wars, occasionally NSFW, never dull.)
Calling what’s taking place “the biggest wave of growth, change and destruction” is no hyperbole: One company, Apple, went from zero to $70B in mobile revenue in 4 years; another, Google, propelled its Android platform to the top of the smartphone class; Samsung ships more phones than anyone else; Nokia lost its crown, it sales went down 13% year-to-year last quarter; Palm is no more; and Microsoft Windows Mobile sales are so small the company omits them in its latest quarter release, merely mentioning ‘favorable reviews’, confirming Ballmer’s earlier statement: “In a year, we’ve gone from very small to … very small.” This from the man who once predicted Windows Phone would get a 40% market share in 2012. When Nokia finally starts shipping Windows Phone 7 devices, we’ll see how Microsoft manages in the unusual role of being number three in a race.

Second, the combination. While both mobile revenue displacement and growth are impressive, the real revolution is in the Mobile + Cloud + Social explosion.
Why does Google ‘‘give away’’ Android, both the OS and applications? Android is a Trojan Horse that protects Google’s one and only business model, advertising, on mobile devices: Cloud + Mobile.

Facebook, an interesting challenge to Google, isn’t just a Social company, it could only reach its current 800 million registered users by deploying a scalable Cloud infrastructure.

Apple, rightly described as focused on great devices (read “hardware”), could only succeed with the iPod because of its iTunes service in the Cloud. This is the same iTunes that gave birth to the iPhone App Store, the great game changer, the Cloud service that morphed smartphones into app phones. Apple’s Cloud maneuvers haven’t always been felicitous — the company struggled with MobileMe — but they never gave up. We’ll soon see if the newly available iCloud, with its original approach to local caching and synchronization finally ‘‘Just Works”.

Lastly, emphasizing Meeker’s point about geography, inside a tiny circle, ten miles in diameter, we have three cities: Mountain View, Palo Alto and Cupertino. Google, Facebook, and Apple. Three companies redefining the future of computing, the new Mobile + Cloud + Social wave.
In the history of computing, there’s never been so much power concentrated in such a small area.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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Surprise: To boost its circulation, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal Europe engaged in massive channel stuffing. No kidding. It sounds like everyone discovers, all of a sudden, how medias (old and new) actually work. Granted, when it comes to cheating, News Corp is in a class all by itself. The phone hacking scandal pushed the practice of checkbook journalism to the pinnacle of massive corruption. As for the circulation scheme unveiled last week by the Guardian, WSJ Europe has pushed the envelope of bogus circulation numbers much farther than any other newspaper in the world.

From May 2009 to April 2011, the WSJE had a deal with a Dutch company called Executive Learning Partnership by which ELP purchased thousands of copies of the Journal for a price as low as 0.01€. If such deal is not uncommon, the scale was: 41% of the WSJE’s total audited circulation was inflated via this little scheme. The deal also involved a positive coverage of ELP. On Tuesday October 11th, Andrew Langhoff, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal Europe handed his resignation out.

The next episode is likely to unfold inside the soundproof walls of News Corp’s boardroom. While the phone hacking scandal might still hold more juicy bits in reserve (Guardian’s full coverage here), the circulation scandal involving the Murdoch empire’s most prestigious asset could be the one transgression too far. The board could be tempted to demote the aging boss. The rationale behind their putative decision would point to the rigid, top-down News Corp chain of command. In such an environment, practices such as this amazing circulation scheme must have been directed or, at the very least, tolerated by top management.

More broadly, this scandal raises another question: What is the real value of an audience, print or digital, when it is artificially bought — instead of naturally sold?

In the newspaper business, inflating circulation is hardly new. In fact, it is standard practice. The way copies are counted is a soft encouragement to blur the line between loyal and occasional readers. Officially, audit organizations across the world make subtle distinctions between distribution channels. They break down paid/unpaid circulation, mass subscriptions, types of deliveries, etc. On most Western markets, roughly 20% to 35% of the circulation for supposed paid-for newspaper is actually free.
Beyond that, we have what I’d call “near-free” circulation, i.e, copies that are paid a fraction of the cover price, usually just above the minimum rate imposed by audit organizations to be counted as paid distribution. This includes copies made available in airline lounges and hotels. In the end, this circulation is free. First of all, end users won’t disburse a dime for their newspaper (it is part of the service). Second, the price paid by the corporate distributor will likely be offset by side arrangements such as logistics fees charged by airlines or hotel chains (let alone advertising deals that could also be part of the package). Taking in account such arrangements, the share of free distribution can rise well above 50%.

USA Today had always championed such practices. Poynter.org Rick Edmonds wrote a compelling story on the subject.

[USA Today's] report for the six-month period ending March 2011 shows 973,000 of an average daily circulation of 1,829,000 comes from the hotel programs — about  53 percent.
USA Today has relied on hotel copies since its launch in 1982, but the deals have morphed over time. Slightly fewer than half are still placed outside guests’ room with a charge added to the bill (unless the guest declines).
The rest are simply left out in the lobby, breakfast rooms and hallways for the taking. Under the newest ABC rules, USA Today can charge as little as a penny per paper — so it could offer a hotel stack of 100 copies for a dollar a day.
Also, returns (copies not picked up) are not counted as they are by newsstands, so those remaining untouched at the end of the day in a hotel still count toward the total.

The Wall Street Journal incident and other related practices are likely to induce changes in the way audit organizations certify the distribution of print press, they will have to better reflect the weight of near-free distribution.

This raises two questions: to what extent are digital media and their native analytics really willing and able to solve the issue once and for all? And what is the real value of artificial audiences?

The answer to the first question is no. Unfortunately, despite its native ability to count users on the web, assessing real audiences proves more difficult than expected as people use more than one device and/or dedicated applications to access the same content. In addition, the advertising community invests very little effort in isolating the most valuable audience segments. In most cases, ad purchases are performed with limited analytics and handled to young and poorly trained people who apply the only rule they understand: discounting.

This approach leads to the emergence of a strong ecosystem of cheating. Scores of companies are now in the business of inflating traffic stats. The de rigueur metric is unique visitors? Just buy those. The seller will load your sites with incentives aimed at luring users. Attracted by games or other tricks, people flock to the site, they visit only one page and go away. Do that once a month and you’ll see the actual number of UVs jump at a cost of about 5 cents per user. In other words, if you spend €100,000 a month on such tricks, you’ll get an extra 2 million users on your site. These are super fly-bys not reading a single story on your site? No one really cares. Since ads are purchased on the basis of quantity, over time you are likely to recoup your investment.

There is a side effect: such tricks push prices further down because media buyers increasingly distrust the system. Today, they apply the rule “you cheat, we cut prices”. And the downward spiral continues.
Many in the business hope for a serious cleanup of audience measurement systems for both print and digital. The goal is to assign a higher value to quality audiences, that is paying more for readers of Slate, Politico or the Guardian, as opposed to those of Arianna’s legion of unpaid bloggers, or of content farms’ illiterate digital slaves.

Loyal audiences do carry a much better value than fly-bys. The 20/80 rule also applies to the digital business: the most loyal users make 20% of the audience and account for 80% of the revenue. Matt Shanahan of Scout Analytics has documented this in detail: in a recent piece titled Building a Loyal Audience? That’s a Business Model!, he shows how a fly-by generating three page views in one month is worth $0.09 in revenue; by contrast, a loyal user will generate 100 page views and $3.00 in monthly revenue.

There is no shortage of tools to isolate the most loyal audience. The increasing weight of mobiles devices such as tablets and smartphones might actually help. Those reading devices are indeed very personal. Most can be tracked down to a single individual. Already, large databases aggregate user names and unique device ID numbers. Soon, applications will also carry unique ID numbers, adding further granularity to measurement capabilities.

As for now, the digital advertising business hits a low point “thanks” to the following triplet: bottomless inventories, indiscriminate bulk purchases, and thick slices of bogus audiences. But as users shift to mobile, we can hope for a flight to quality that will breathe a new life into the entire food chain.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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On October 4th, after months of speculation, Apple finally introduces the iPhone 5. The kommentariat are ecstatic and approvingly list the new smartphone’s strongest points: Twice the processor speed; seven times the graphics oomph; a new camera with an Apple-designed lens, 8 megapixels and improved image processing; the power of the new iOS 5; iCloud integration and synchronization with all your iDevices; a new smart antenna; Siri, the innovative intelligent assistant. And, courageously resisting the temptation of capricious cosmetic changes, the iPhone 5 stays with Jony Ive’s elegant, timeless design that was unveiled only last year.

The preternaturally modest Apple execs cringe at the gushing praise, but what can they do? It’s their cross to bear.

That’s what we expected. Now let’s consider the reality: Same phone, same features, same design, but it’s now called 4S instead of 5. This changes everything. The pundits are indignant: The iPhone 4S is a lame, evolutionary product; management’s presentation (video here) is flat, uninspiring. This dog won’t sell. Apple has lost its mojo.
(Regarding the “flat” presentation, Apple execs knew Steve Jobs was just a few breaths away from his last, but they got on stage and delivered anyway. When news of Steve’s demise came out the following day, many critics, such as blogger Robert Scobble, had the good grace to apologize to Cook & Co. for railing about their subdued performance.)

Despite these lamentations, strong pre-order numbers start circulating (more than 1 million on day one), followed by the first batch of reviews. Apple 2.0’s Philip Elmer-DeWitte obligingly provides a neat compendium of these first impressions, which range from “fair and balanced” to unabashedly enthusiastic.
The doubters begin to change their tune. In a Business Insider post on the very day of the announcement, Henry Blodget had dismissively concluded:

“So, bottom line, it seems reasonable to think that announcing the “iPhone 4S” instead of the “iPhone 5″ will hurt Apple’s sales over the next year, especially with Android phones improving all the time.”

And, to buttress his point, he quoted the following “statistic”:

“… in our initial survey, 45% of iPhone 4 owners say they will NOT upgrade.”

Lovely. The militantly anal seekers of meaningful data will inquire about the survey methodology, sample composition, size… And one wonders if the “survey” summary could just as meaningfully be written as:

“… 55% of iPhone 4 owners say they WILL DEFINITELY upgrade.”

Twenty-four hours later, Dear Henry could no longer contain his true feelings:

“After the change in the calendar rollout schedule from June to October and all the iPhone 5 hype, I was expecting the company to announce something bigger. And a phone that looks and feels just the same as the (admittedly awesome) iPhone 4 wasn’t what I was expecting.
But that said…
I cannot WAIT to buy a 4S!”

Some thoughts come to mind.

For the past few months, regions of the blogosphere had become a gigantic echo chamber for iPhone 5 rumors ranging from the bizarre (a new ‘‘teardrop” design) to saner extrapolations such as the use of the iPad’s A5 processor or a better camera. This is how Internet streetwalkers roll. Sites need strong pageview numbers so they can attract advertising revenue. And once this noise starts, the volume increases as the herd competes for traffic.

Should we ask if Apple could have done a better job pre-positioning its product? The vestal Apple jealously guards its product secrets, triggering an escalade of fantasies among inquisitive barbarians — what the French call l’hommage du vice à la vertu, vice paying tribute to virtue: Keeping everything under wraps might protect revenue, preserve flexibility, and increase mystique but the price Apple pays for totally clamming up is that they lose control of the public discourse about unannounced products. Alternating between lauding and trashing fantasy Apple products is fun and sometimes profitable, but it can create unreasonable expectations and, as we just saw, it exposes the company to the perception of a letdown.

It’s tempting to think that the unrealistic expectations could be avoided if Apple would simply tell one or two trusted friends, discreetly, to euthanize the particularly noxious rumors. Some companies buy such friends: a frequently quoted “observer” gets a discreet consulting agreement and dutifully parrots the party line in media interviews. I know: years ago, when I joined the Board of a tech company, I saw one such arrangement at work with a professional ‘‘quote machine”. And I was reminded of the episode when, watching last week’s 4S intro video, I recognized the individual in the audience. He still ‘‘comments’’, but definitely not on Apple’s behalf.
This type of complicity is a slippery slope: You know when you start but you might not be able to stop and it always ends up creating a smell as, over time, the media figure things out. In addition, such practice carries with it serious potential for insider trading.

Paying customers, on the other hand, march to a different drummer. We saw it last year with the Antennagate scandal: Lots of noise and dire predictions, but no visible effect on the product. The iPhone 4 logged record sales quarter after quarter, reaching 20.3 million units for the last reported period. Likewise, the 4S “snafu” isn’t likely to have an effect on Apple’s numbers.

As for the iPhone 5, errr 4S, I don’t have a second impression yet. I’m particularly curious to see how my gut will react to Siri — and how it/she will react to my French accent. I should know in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, Apple 2.0, again. offers a selection of Web sites dedicated to Siri’s humorous utterances. I can’t help but admire how Apple uses clever humor to ‘‘humanize’’ Siri and, in so doing, defuses negative feelings arising from the inevitable imperfections of an ‘‘intelligent’’ computer system.

— JLG@mondaynote.com

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