rss ads

The Business Week article mentioned RSS feeds as a factor which decreases the number of page views on blogs and other sites. This skews visitor stats and thus ad rates and the like.

However, RSS has also had a couple other impacts on the online advertising world.

Many RSS feeds actually include ads at the end of each entry. This seems like an important detail that the Business Week article neglected altogether. Furthermore, experts have also noted some interesting distinctions about RSS users vs normal site visitors.

RSS feeds can either consist of the full content of articles or just teasers for articles. Some groups even just use RSS to list headlines, neglecting any body text at all. (I would argue that these people are using the technology improperly but that's really outside the scope of this discussion.) Anyway, at least one RSS expert declared use of teaser text as a kind of ad. These "ads" serve to drive readers to the site to read the full article.

final stocks

symbol shares price/share total cost
atvi 1160 $15.82 $18,351.20
goog 145 $438.23 $63,543.35
nflx 580 $31.18 $18,084.40

$99,978.95

EDIT: Eeek! I can't do math.
Revised:

symbol shares price/share total cost
atvi 116 $15.82 $1,835.12
goog 14.5 $438.23 $6,354.33 <-- can i have a half share on account of the fact that i can't do math?
nflx 58 $31.18 $1,808.44

$9,997.90

My stocks

I changed my initial stock choices from Time Warner and CBS corporation to two big Korean corporations. So here are my new choices:

1. NHN corporation. (I changed my third choice from CBS Corporation.) NHN corporation is a Korean corporation that owns a biggest search engine in Korea called "naver." This Web site is like a Korean version of google + yahoo.)

2. Daum.net (The second largest search engine, and the biggest e-mail provider in Korea.)

3. Walt Disney Co. (Owner of ABC and ESPN)

This article from New York Times explains a breif history about naver.com and how it operates.

my picks

I'll take the major newspaper companies (can I have more than three?):

NYT (New York Times Co.)
WPO (Washington Post)
GCI (Gannett)
MNI (McClatchy, my former employer!)

and Morris Publishing Group, if they're publicly traded (appears they're not?)

Media companies

My three media companies:

Baidu.com which is the number one search engine in China and more...

Sohu.com is a portal site in China like Yahoo.com.

I also want to talk about News Corporation.

local newspapers

Reading about product competition inspired me to think about newspaper businesses in South Korea. The United States has only few national newspapers while it has numerous local newspapers. It was my impression that Americans liked to get news from local newspapers as much as national newspapers. However, South Korea has completely different issues. It has many national newspapers and these national newspapers are what most people get the news from. On the other hand, people seem to care much less about local newspapers. I know that many local newspapers are dying because they simply could not compete with national newspapers. The amount of content and quality of the local newspapers are almost incomparable to national newspapers unlike the United States.

I wonder, can there be ways for these local papers to become competitive in the local area at least? Focusing on local issues do not seem to have the strongest asset in Korea unlike the local papers in the United States. Since South Korea is such a small country, the national newspapers cover a wide variety of local news in great details.

I guess what I really want to ask here is “how can these local newspapers differentiate their products from national newspapers other than merely focusing on local news? Is there a way to save these local newspapers from disappering?”

Market structure in the era of convergence

By reading the chapters on market structure, I do understand the differences among four types of market, however, I think it will be hard to identify the characteristic of news media market at least not as clear-cut as those are described in the textbook. Especially in the current trend of “multimedia journalism”, which converge text, video and audio together to present news. When the news products are a bundle of services, it is increasingly difficult to argue whether the product differentiation can keep the traditional news outlets separately in the markets of newspapers, network TVs, Cable networks, etc.. Or it may bring all the news media to the same play ground to form a single “news market”. (Isn’t it already happening?)

In this line of thinking, I am wondering the product differentiation, the entry barrier and whether the media firm is sensitive to the price changes of other competitor in the market, all those hard lines can define the market either as Monopolistic competition or Oligopoly or else may become blurred. Just looking at the data in Jacie’s post, would the news on Yahoo or on CNN.com make a difference to online news users? Would Yahoo or MSN be considered as competitors (in terms of online ad revenue) by CNN.com? Also, would CNN.com and Yahoo have the same entry barrier as an online news organization?