Screenshot of VG+, the iPad app from Norwegian news company VG

Apple’s ‘Jesus tablet’ seemed to be the news industry’s best hope of salvation but few publishers are finding apps to be the moneyspinners they so desperately want.

• Join BetaTales on Facebook
• Join BetaTales on LinkedIn
• Subscribe by RsS

This article titled “iPad apps – still more dash than cash” was written by Jemima Kiss, for The Guardian on Monday 10th January 2011 06.59 UTC

The news industry embraced the launch of Apple’s iPad in April 2010 with something that felt like true love: feverish anticipation at that first meeting, lengthy sentimental eulogies and whispers of hope that this must finally be The One.

In an industry largely uninterested in gadgets, the iPad offered optimised reading and viewing, portability – and a built-in payment system wired to the credit cards of 280 million iTunes customers. Editorials began asking if the iPad might be the saviour of an industry in a seemingly terminal decline.

But less than a year on there are already signs that the romance is fading, along with those first flushes of novelty. The latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations in the US show average monthly downloads slumping by the end of 2010. Only two publishers were brave enough to share their figures.

In for a long wait

Condé Nast’s Wired US iPad magazine sold 73,000 copies through the app in its first nine days in May 2010 but that fell to 23,000 in November – a bad month all round. Vanity Fair sold 10,500 in October but 8,700 in November, and GQ’s average fell from 13,000 in October to 11,000 in November. And Men’s Health, published by Rodale in the US, fell from 2,800 monthly shortly after the iPad launch to 2,000 by November.

These baby steps need to grow up fast if they are to compare to the sales and profits enjoyed by print. Last year’s census by the Association of Online Publishers showed nearly two-thirds of publishers pinning their hopes on in-app content as the best chance of making money through mobile – but they might be in for a long wait. The tablet userbase is small and the potential app userbase outside the US smaller still – and Apple takes 30% on every app sold.

Analysts Research2Guidance estimate that 100,000 app sales at 79p would make the publishers £40,000 – not exactly a moneyspinner, when they will have to wait three years to see a return. By then, Apple’s domination of the tablet market could be at an end, bringing a new problem of developing for multiple devices – though Screen Digest senior analyst Dan Cryan expects 6.5 million people will use an iPad by 2014.

If there is any business model to be found for innovative publishing on the iPad, Condé Nast is determined to find it. Albert Read, general manager of Condé Nast UK, acknowledged it is an “undoubtedly expensive” commitment. “It’s a punt,” he said. “A long-term hope is that we create something exciting for readers and advertisers – and that brings its own returns over time. In five years we will have reaped those benefits.”

Read would not comment on how much Condé Nast has invested or when it expects to see a return. But he described the projects as “resource intensive”, with Wired’s app needing up to five dedicated staff. Print pages have to be redesigned and copy resubbed, and advertisers – who are keen to experiment, Read said – have to submit horizontal and vertical formats.

“Though we are ambitious, we are also relatively cautious. We haven’t launched apps for every magazine and have only done one experimental edition for Vogue.

“Rather like the dotcom era, there was a period of hype and excitement over the iPad and then things calmed down. In two, three, perhaps five years, that excitement will be justified.”

Rupert Murdoch seized on “the Jesus tablet” as part of his crusade to elevate his news business from free web content. With a reported investment of m (£19m), he has a team of 100 in New York furiously putting the finishing touches to The Daily, News Corp’s dedicated iPad newspaper, which is due to roll out next Monday. The Daily is expected to include a new push subscription feature that automatically delivers and charges for weekly or monthly editions.

Murdoch will be hoping to outshine Virgin boss Richard Branson, whose own New York-based iPad magazine, Project, launched in November, charging .99 per month. But whether Murdoch can turn around his dubious track record in digital projects, from Iguide to MySpace, remains to be seen.

The Daily could become a mass-market phenomenon – a next-generation Sun – but at 99c (62p) a day, it will be some time before the experiment sees a return.

The Financial Times took advantage of the traditionally lucrative financial news sector to launch an extensive app in May. Download numbers have reached 487,000 in total, the FT said, with iPad generating more than 10% of new digital subscribers. Deputy chief executive Ben Hughes has said that iPad ad revenues reached £1m in the first six months, and ad inventory has been sold out since launch. The app is free and users are encouraged to register to read 10 free stories per month. Subscription models

Common complaints among readers include huge file sizes, and, with more than 300,000 apps in the app store, visibility is also a problem. But by far the biggest issue is that of offering a subscription model within an app. Apple does not share names and addresses of iTunes App Store customers, meaning publishers cannot build that valuable subscriber database. Reports have persisted since September that Apple is working on a subscription service for news and magazine apps; that could launch alongside the second version of the iPad rumoured for April – if it doesn’t debut in Murdoch’s Daily first.

“Apple needs a better balance between its own desire to have visibility of all the data, and the needs of publishers to get data about their readers that is crucial to their businesses,” said Edward Roussel, Telegraph Media Group’s digital editor.

Both the Telegraph and Guardian used big-name advertisers to launch free iPad apps. The Guardian’s Canon-sponsored photography app, Eyewitness, had had 404,559 downloads at last count, with a separate news iPad app under development. Audi has extended its initial 12-week sponsorship of the Telegraph’s iPad app, of which about 100,000 have been downloaded since launch, and version 2 is due out by the end of March.

Roussel said the Telegraph’s in-app registration system shows the iPad is attracting new readers, with most aged between 30 and 50. “We’re making reasonable sponsorship but at this stage apps are more a beta product than a substantial revenue earner.”

Those in the industry express optimism but a lack of confidence in how best to exploit the tablet explosion. Roussel says apps offer the best of the old world and the new. “There’s no question, , it’s a highly significant development of the media industry and the potential is massive. But it will take years, not months, to work out how to make apps better than both the web and newspapers, which they have the potential to be.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

Gartner and IDC data shows slower growth in sales of PCs than expected – with Apple tablet reckoned to account for shortfall.

This article titled “iPad chokes netbook sales” was written by Charles Arthur, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 14th October 2010 07.31 UTC

Netbook sales are slowing as people consider buying tablet computers – particularly Apple’s iPad – instead, according to data released separately by research companies Gartner and IDC with their analysis of third-quarter computer sales worldwide.

Overall, sales of PCs grew slower than had been expected. Gartner said 88.3m were sold in the third quarter, up 7.6% compared with the same period a year ago when 82m were sold, but below its earlier forecast of 12.7% growth (which would have meant 92.5m sold).

IDC, which uses a different method to measure sales, said there were 89.7m sold, up 11% (80.8m) but nearly 3% below its expectations (which would have seen 92m sold).

The data exclude the millions of sales of Apple’s iPad, which Gartner and IDC do not classify as a “PC” for the purposes of their data.

Horace Dedlu, who runs the Asymco consultancy, estimates that if the iPad were included in the figures, it would add 4m to the PC sales figures – neatly closing the gap between Gartner’s sales forecasts and the observed outcome.

Excluding the iPad, PC sales growth in the US was just 3.8% year on year, much slower than second-quarter growth, which was 11.7% – and a long way short of IDC’s expectations of 11% growth.

IDC said that the slower sales were due to the influence of Apple’s iPad on consumers’ intentions on buying PCs, and that it had had a notable negative effect in the US on the netbook market.

Gartner said that sales of “consumer mobile” PCs – netbooks and laptops – were the weakest in years in the US. “The third quarter historically is a strong consumer quarter, led by back-to-school sales,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. “Consumer mobile PC demand, driven by low-priced notebooks, including mini-notebooks, slowed after very strong growth the past two years.”

She added: “Media tablet hype around devices such as the iPad has also affected consumer notebook growth by delaying some PC purchases, especially in the US consumer market. Media tablets don’t replace primary PCs, but they affect PC purchases in many ways. At this stage, hype around media tablets has led consumers and the channels to take a ‘wait and see’ approach to buying a new device.”

Gartner said HP remained in the top slot for worldwide sales, with 15.4m, followed by Acer (11.5m), Dell (10.8m) and Lenovo (9.1m).

In Europe, Gartner said there were 27.3m PC sales, up 7.3% from the same period in 2009 (25.4m). “The western Europe PC market slowed as professional buyers and consumers held back on PC purchases,” the company noted.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

————————————————
[iframe: src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?id=126256000717991&width=560&connections=18&stream=false&header=false&height=255" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:560px; height:255px;" allowTransparency="true"]

Google’s Eric Schmidt suggests we may need to invent new identities to escape embarrassing online pasts – while Facebook has launched a tool to share users’ locations. So does technology pose a threat to private life?

• Join BetaTales on Facebook
• Subscribe by RSS

This article titled “Does technology pose a threat to our private life?” was written by Jemima Kiss, for The Guardian on Friday 20th August 2010 23.06 UTC

Are you in a relationship? What are your political views? And where did you go for breakfast this morning? What would once have been details of our lives known only by those we know and trust, many of us now willingly display online.

From the surveillance entertainment of Big Brother to CCTV and celebrity magazines, the boundaries of what is regarded as appropriate to put in the public domain are shifting dramatically. But nothing is challenging our notion of privacy more than social networking, with 26 million of us using Facebook to share the minutiae of our lives every month in the UK alone.

Facebook has proved irresistible to many because we are lured into joining by friends and family. Browsing, reading, comparing and nosing is instinctive, impulsive and reflects our tendencies offline, our “social graph”, as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg likes to call it. Having executed the social networking business idea better than its rivals – MySpace, Bebo, Friendster and Hi5 have been left for dust – Facebook has seen astonishing growth, from a Harvard dorm project in 2003 to a global phenomenon that had 500 million monthly users by July this year. That’s already one in 13 people on Earth, and Zuckerberg recently predicted it was “almost a guarantee” that his site would reach 1 billion users, with growth in relatively untapped markets such as Russia, Japan and Korea “doubling every six months”.

On Thursday, Facebook unveiled its latest gambit in the battle to remain top of the social networking heap with a move into geolocation services, which harness the GPS functionality of increasingly powerful mobile smartphones. Facebook Places will launch first in the US and later in the UK, allowing users, if they choose, to share their location with friends on the site by checking into public venues. Sensitive to intense public scrutiny of its privacy controls, Facebook was careful to make the service opt-in but every geolocation service – including Google’s Latitude, Gowalla and Foursquare – has prompted renewed debate about the protection of personal details online.

“This is a seminal moment where we’re seeing new thinking and new practice starting to emerge around the issue of privacy,” says Stephen Balkam, chief executive of the Family Online Safety Institute and member of Facebook’s safety advisory board. “The battle lines are being drawn between generations. Facebook is headed by someone who hasn’t hit 30 yet, but has very different perceptions and assumptions about what is private and what is not. We need to recognise that with social networking, geolocation and digital technology, the privacy bar is being reset.”

Facebook has come under significant pressure to make its site safer for users. Incidents of serious crimes facilitated by the internet such as the murder of British teenager Ashleigh Hall by Peter Chapman earlier this year, are tragic but rare. More common is the embarrassment from a compromising tagged photo of a drunken night out.

The rapid pace of development by technology companies often throws up new cultural and ethical challenges. Google’s Street View has frequently been challenged by privacy campaigners who question whether the logistical and commercial benefits of making every property in every street visible on the web are worth the sacrifice of the individual’s right to privacy. Facebook users first raised their pitchforks in 2006 when the site introduced a news feed for each user, summarising their friends’ activity. More recently it came under pressure to simplify its privacy controls with some high-profile commentators and groups – organised on Facebook pages, naturally – encouraging others to remove their profiles. It responded in May with simplified privacy settings.

Richard, now Lord, Allan is a former Liberal Democrat MP and Facebook’s European policy director. “The internet is here to stay as a ubiquitous way for every individual citizen to capture and share information. The challenge is how you manage that increasing flow of information and that’s where Facebook is at the bleeding edge, allowing people to navigate that world. Expressions of concern and criticisms are really of that direction of travel, rather than any particular product, like Facebook.”

Allan thinks it is an exaggeration to characterise privacy as a natural state of man, citing societies before mass transport where a large community would know every intimate detail of each other’s lives. The modern sense of privacy came much later, with modern transport and cities. “Notably with new technology, you end up with a utopian viewpoint and a dystopian viewpoint, but a lot of things those dystopians feared did not come true. To say you’re ‘living in Facebook rather than the real world’ is a complete misreading of what’s happening. The reason it is so compelling is because it is so connected to the real world. With every wave of technology we need to get used to it.”

Our personal information can broadly be categorised as trivial data such as music preferences, behavioural information about our activity and connections, and confidential information including credit card numbers. But even seemingly innocuous information can be used against us, says security expert Rik Ferguson of Trend Micro. “In isolation, much of this data may be trivial but from a hacker’s perspective, any information is good information,” he says. “Use search engines to discover the extent of your online footprint and tailor it. Keep tabs on yourself before anyone else does.”

Balkam describes the internet’s two biggest privacy problems as reputational damage – inadvertently posting drunken photos that your boss might see, for example – and physical safety, the latter being the issue for women particularly wary of location tools. Burglary is another concern, when users of location services announce they are out of the house; in February three developers built PleaseRobMe.com to raise awareness about the implications of broadcasting location to a public audience.

Currently location games such as Foursquare, where users check in at public venues to earn points and prizes, tend to have a small, enthusiastic and largely trustworthy group of dedicated users comprised of so-called “early adopters”. For them, this period of intensive invention and opportunity is a golden age. Christian Payne – who describes himself as a “social technologist” – abandoned a career as a photographer in early 2008 when he had a “car crash epiphany”. Within minutes of tweeting a video of his crashed Land Rover, he had an offer of help from a local crane operator, his AA membership number sent to him and a call from BT asking for the serial number of the telegraph pole he’d crashed into. He worries that spirit of helpfulness will dilute as social media becomes more commercialised, and its users more sceptical.

“We’ll never see it like we do now – more nefarious people will come later,” he says. “But it would be more risky for me not to take the chance of building meaningful connections with acquaintances who then become friends when one of you needs some help.”

Payne seems to put a lot of intimate information into the world, but still skillfully manages to keep his personal life, and that of his partner and son, almost completely private. It’s up to the user to decide what they want to keep private, he says, though he’s uncomfortable with the idea that he is unknowingly creating a public persona for himself. “I’d hope I’m doing this naturally and not thinking about it. But then asking me that is like taking me out of the play I’m acting in as myself – and asking me to direct it.”

Online privacy is intrinsically linked to identity. Author Peggy Orenstein wrote in the New York Times recently that her reflexive compulsion to tweet a pleasant moment with her daughter had also spoilt the moment, and mused that our online personas are elaborate constructs that we, knowingly or unknowingly, craft into an identity we want the world to see. The internet has provided a platform that seems to challenge us to present a single identity to the world, yet we struggle to balance the profiles we share with family, friends and work colleagues.

Stories of employers sacking staff for drunken Facebook photos will be replaced by an acceptance that drunken university pictures are the norm, says Dr Joss Wright, Fresnel research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. He hopes sites will develop more intuitive ways to share information with the appropriate people; when his grandmother joined Facebook it “severely curtailed” what he could share with his friends.

“I’d like to believe people will learn how to guard their privacy, but we’re more likely to see societal shifts in what is seen as acceptable for privacy,” Wright adds. “Privacy has tended to be something quite intrinsic, and there hasn’t been a mechanism for privacy violation in general society until the arrival of the internet. The rise of Facebook and Foursquare show we don’t really understand privacy or what it means to preserve it, and don’t have an ability to understand the consequences of violating it either.”

Regulators struggle to keep up with the pace of technology and enforcement of what rules there are is weak, meaning the onus for education should be on the services themselves, says Wright, who doesn’t think they are closely scrutinised enough. Though sites like Facebook have a duty of care, “the economics are against that, because their entire business model is built around getting us to share as much information as possible”.

But there are upsides, too. Sharing personal information is beneficial in giving insights into different aspects of society. “If you can see the details of people’s lives, when you can see someone’s actual persona, it’s harder to be biased and bigoted,” said Wright. “But a balance has to be struck between the amount we share for the positive and negative.”

Eric Schmidt, Google chief executive, recently reiterated his suggestion that internet users may one day be able to change their identities in order to distance themselves from personal information shared so freely in their formative years. “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

Zuckerberg takes a different tack. “You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity,” he was quoted as saying in David Kirkpatrick’s book, The Facebook Effect.

Part of Facebook’s success has been to demand people’s real identities. In that way, it represents the maturation of the internet where the previous norm had been a wisecrack pseudonym and a world of “trolling”, where faceless, nameless commenters could easily post abusive messages and attack each other. The improvement in the quality of communication and debate online is in no small part down to the trend towards using real identities. However, anonymity still has its role in whistleblowing sites such as Wikileaks, or in debates where a contributor to a discussion on rape, for example, deserves protection.

If you think the current internet landscape is frightening, don’t think too much about what’s coming next. Already served with targeted ads based on keywords in our Google email, or picked out by our age and interests on Facebook, the future is more personalised still. “Sites will get much better at filtering information and predicting our behaviour, serving us what we want to buy and finding new ways to share information, like location. Three years ago, people wouldn’t even have dreamed of sharing their location,” says Wright. While the sensitivities and sensibilities of managing our online data still need to be clarified, there will be benefits in personalisation, which promises more meaningful, relevant advertising for consumers and consequently, for advertisers, far more effective bang for their buck.

So what next? Three years ago, rival social networking site MySpace seemed invincible. Could Facebook still lose its edge? Anything is possible.

Balkam recently suggested Facebook recruit a philosopher to help interpret some of the demanding and unprecedented ethical and sociological challenges it faces.

“No company in the world has ever attracted 500 million users, and they are having to come to terms, at lightning speed, with what is good and what is abhorrent behaviour. Aristotle and Plato struggled with that – and the average age at Facebook is 28.”

Where the Twitterati draw the line

Zoe Margolis, blogger

While I’m very active on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, I have so far avoided all the location-based tools on my phone. Primarily, this is because I do not want to publicly announce where I am – I wish to protect my privacy and safety – but also because I don’t want to bombard people with incessant, dull, information; I’ve unfollowed people on Twitter and Facebook due to their too-frequent (and, might I say, very annoying) Foursquare updates being fed through to their timelines.I can see the point of location tools – they’re an easy way to connect people who might otherwise be unaware of their proximity to their friends – but given the amount of information we already share using social networking sites, it almost seems like overload to add yet another method of input, and it’s pretty much redundant if not all of your friends/social circle are using the same tool.

I have some major concerns with Facebook Places though and believe it is a huge threat to people’s privacy. It is already live in users’ settings(though the feature has not yet been rolled out in the UK) and while there is the option of limiting the location info to friends only, they have to de-select the automatically enabled “Include me in ‘People Here Now’ after I check in” box in order to opt out of their location being included on a public list for all to see.

In addition to this, people’s friends can “check’ ” them into locations, so even if someone has limited the information about themselves that they are sharing, there might still be a breach of their privacy from others.

Most of my friends on Facebook have never heard of Foursquare or Gowalla, let alone used a location-based tool on their mobile phones; I assume the majority of people who use Facebook are similar. Given this, it concerns me that Facebook Places appears to be lacking transparency about privacy. The ability to change the settings to ensure personal information is protected seems more geared to the tech-savvy, than the lay-person; I fear many people will discover their privacy has been breached only after the event.

Privacy on any social networking site or location-sharing tool should start off being intact: 100% protection, with the chance to opt-in to less privacy, should you wish to share information with others. Facebook seems to take the opposite view, making the default position little/no privacy with the need to opt-out; I won’t be using Facebook Places any time soon.

David Nobbs

I don’t believe total privacy is possible so I never telling anybody anything on line that I wouldn’t be happy for the nation to know (if it was interested!).

I think some people are so hungry for celebrity they’re happy not to have a private life at all. I’m very careful with my tweets. People can never be quite sure whether they’re true or false, and I never reveal when I’m going to be away.

Sorry this is so short but I’m off to Portugal now for five months. Only joking.

Max Tundra, musician

I probably spend too much time online, sharing details about my life with anyone who has the remotest interest in my music. I don’t like the idea of letting people know exactly where I am right this second, but as my fans tend to be fairly sane and unstalkerish, I feel comfortable letting them know what I’m up to in a general sense.

I don’t use Foursquare or any applications which might reveal my geographical co-ordinates, although I am often easily locatable, as I play advertised concerts. I did, however, recently delete my personal Facebook profile, as that seemed to be a cluster of unnecessarily pertinent information about my life and the people I share it with, as well as being a colossal waste of time which could be better spent telling people on Twitter that I prefer the Henry vacuum cleaner to the Dyson.

Graham Linehan, comedy writer:

I always hated Facebook because it made me very uncertain about what I was and wasn’t sharing with the world. The privacy settings were, famously, a bit of a maze, and seemed subject to sudden changes that you hadn’t agreed to. I felt like one day I might open up the site to see a picture of myself in bed asleep with my wife, like in Hidden’.

Twitter is different because it forces you to be very selective with what you choose to share, and so forces social media back to a more private place. I personally don’t tweet much stuff about my home life, because I don’t want to accidentally tweet something stupid like “Holiday starts tomorrow!” along with a geotag to my home address. So my tweets are generally links to things I find funny or interesting, and my home life only gets a look-in when something truly interesting or funny happens.

Once I made a mistake and posted my home number while trying to send a direct (private) message to someone and we had to change it, but that was a valuable lesson to learn early on, because now I’m a lot more careful with what I put out there. It wasn’t too much of a problem, though. We only got two or three callers who hung up as soon as my wife said “Hello, Dreambeds”. I asked her who Dreambeds were and she said “Dunno. I suppose they sell beds.”

I think people should start to claw back as much privacy as they can. Services such as Twitter show that it’s possible to share selectively. Sharing selectively should be the default setting on every social network service. Which, again, is why you won’t see me on Facebook any time soon.

John Prescott, politician

Twitter has been a revelation. In the past if I needed to get message out I’d have to convince a paper to publish it. Now I can tweet my thoughts and, if interesting, it’ll get pick up. My Milburn tweet was running on rolling news within 10 minutes.

I share a lot of content like my blogs and vlogs along with links to stories and virals from others I like. Twitter is also great to run campaigns and organise tweetups.

We did the first pastiche of the Cameron airbrushed posters, which then inspired mMyDavidCameron.com. Suddenly hundreds of thousands of people were doing their own versions. It destroyed Ashcroft’s poster campaign and cost nothing.

And when the founder of the National Bullying Helpline said people were bullied in No10, someone tweeted me a link to the industrial tribunal which proved she was accused of bullying herself! It killed the story within 24 hours.

I’ve found Twitter to be a fantastic way to communicate, learn from others and show the real me, not the distorted view peddled by the media.

But I’m not convinced about geolocation applications. You have to have some privacy.

Suzanne Moore, journalist

Don’t mistake personal information for honesty. Personas are created and people play as well as tweet their hearts out. If you don’t want to bare your soul you don’t have to, but the dividing line between public and private is now generational, one that neither mainstream culture nor government appears to understand.

I don’t much care what people think of me and was wondering who some guy on MasterChef was the other day on Twitter and wondering if I had slept with him. Turns out I hadn’t which was a relief. And a joke!

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

The debate is always black and white: put up a paywall or lose money. But the UK Daily Mail’s website is getting so big it needn’t do either.

The Mail has chosen a different road than many media companies: It doesn’t want a paywall and it shuns newsroom integration.

• Join BetaTales on Facebook
• Subscribe by RSS

This article titled “The Mail’s online miracle: or how to get paid without a paywall” was written by Peter Preston, for The Observer on Saturday 17th July 2010 23.05 UTC

David Mitchell had some brutal alternatives on offer last week. You either build a paywall around your newspaper net site – or you don’t, he told Observer readers. You either make money online – or you lose it. You either think Mr Rupert Murdoch may have had a useful idea for his Times – or you excoriate him as per usual. But hang on a moment, because all this black and white stuff leaves out one discommoding part of the argument. Yes, it’s the Daily Mail.

Take the Mail in print. Around 1.9 million punters buying a copy every day, which means 4,881,000 readers scanning their favourite sheet each morning. And online, the growth from nothing much four years ago to 40,500,000 unique browsers a month is verging on the phenomenal: up 72% year on year. Through 2009, the Telegraph and the Guardian were two close competitors – sometimes ahead, often very near to, the Mail. Not now. Both still have good growth of their own, but Associated’s electronic baby – 16 million unique browsers in the UK, 26.3 million in the rest of the world – begins to hint at a different league.

Ah! Perhaps that’s because it is in a different league, say the snipers. Look at those yards of celebrity gossip and pictures on the site; this isn’t the Mail we know (and don’t much love). This is a different beast that somehow doesn’t count because it fights unfair.

Park that charge for a moment, however, and ask why the Mail’s online chief, Martin Clarke, is clearly (though pragmatically) opposed to paywalls. Because he doesn’t need them. Because the surge of traffic is bringing in advertising fast. Because he can see a moment, very soon, when his digital daily will make real profits of its own.

It’s relatively easy to reckon how that could happen since, unlike its rivals, the Mail shuns newsroom integration and runs online operations totally separately, which means that costings and revenue are separate, too. So (purely notionally, on the back of an envelope), the 25 people who sit at Mail online desks each day, boosted to 45 or so for round-the-week working, might cost an average of £100,000 each all in: say £4.5m a year. Add another £1m a month for buying pictures and syndicated tales: £12m. So put down £16.5m for annual costs – with maybe a million or three on top to pay for development and emergencies.

Can internet advertising alone bring in a round £20m to turn Mail red ink into deep black? Clearly it can. However rough and ready my figuring may be, there’s a reality to the audience numbers here, and to the rise within that of engaged readers who visit the online Mail much as they might pick up a print copy. Forty million unique browsers creates a tide of interest in the States as well as in Britain. Of course Clarke doesn’t need and doesn’t want paywalls. He’s building a nice little free earner of his own.

But back to the critics again: to those who don’t think the electronic Mail is a follower of the true faith. Which is where we reach a fork in the road.

There is no rule that says online papers must play print’s little brother. On the contrary, the most successful ones are more like inspired riffs on a print theme. Nor is there a rule that says big print sellers carry the same clout when they transfer to screen. The print Sun far outsells everything day by day but, with 20 million or so unique browsers, was trounced and trounced again by the Telegraph, Guardian and Mail before Mr Murdoch announced yet another paywall.

Why assume that the Telegraph – with 1.7 million print readers a day – must go head to head with the Mail and its 4.8 million? Why assume that the two online versions are really in such close competition either? The online market, like the print market, is beginning to set different rules for itself, to insist that quality and redtop and celeb can define different pitches (and appeals to advertisers) just as they do in the land of dead forests.

In short, it doesn’t necessarily matter that the Mail is different. Perhaps its success merely prompts other news sites to be different as well. Not one site covering all, but many sites offering alternative things. Not one site ruling the world, but many sites carving up the globe.

And once we’re dealing in niches and targeting – for readers, for ads – then paywalls become merely part of the debate: not Rupert’s (or David’s) last weapon of every resort.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

[iframe: src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?id=126256000717991&width=560&connections=18&stream=false&header=false&height=255" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:560px; height:255px;" allowTransparency="true"]

One of the world’s most important news sites, BBC News, has been redesigned and claims to be part of a new “global visual language”.

• Join BetaTales on Facebook
• Subscribe by RSS

This article titled “The BBC News redesign: Hot, or not?” was written by Jemima Kiss, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 14th July 2010 09.47 UTC

BBC News has a new look from today, the first major redesign since 2003.

It has everything you might expect from a 2010 redesign: share buttons for Twitter, Facebook, Digg, better links to related stories that provide context and a crisper, less cluttered design with more white space.

There’s also more emphasis on video, with suggested video stories in a high-profile box on the top right of every page and a bigger, better quality video player.

Predictably, there have been more than a few teething problems. The new site doesn’t seem to serve up an iPhone version, which means a “rilly rilly rilly rilly” tiny page that needs a lot of zooming in to read anything. On Blackberry, the old site is still being served up.

Journalist Louise Bolotin pointed out that the fully accessible site isn’t ready yet. “Not good enough,” she tweeted, and pointed to the BBC’s explanation that it has removed the low graphics version of the site as part of the upgrade, but that a “suite of accessibility tools” would be added later this year.

That said, feedback on Twitter has been pretty balanced.

Jordon Dias: “I know: what happened to the internet generation being one of change? If people don’t like it, they go elsewhere.”

J Templar: Where previously there was simplicity, clarity and uniformity there is now a disjointed, & ugly disunity: http://bit.ly/9YuoPe

The BBC design is conventionally safe and easily navigable for its least web-savvy users, but is definitely more attractive, graphically stronger and rightly gives more prominence to video. There’s also more white space on the home page which gives the impression that there’s less on it, and much of the grumbles have been about a white gutter on the page.

As Labour candidate Luke Pollard said in response: “New look BBC website is like new look Facebook – I hate it today but will love it tomorrow.”

That’s normally the way we react to changes on sites we use the whole time, but after a few days we can’t remember what they used to look like.

Ah, it’s all part of a new ‘global visual language’

In an introductory blog post, BBC News website editor Steve Hermann explained some of the research that informed the design:

“We talked to audience groups, held one-to-one user testing sessions, and invited several thousand of you to try out a prototype version of today’s new design. With this feedback, we arrived at the design you see today,” he wrote.

“There’s also been some major behind-the-scenes work on our production system which means we’ll be able to adapt even more quickly in future, whether to the changing expectations of our users or to new technology as it emerges.”

The BBC’s Future Media and Technology director Erik Huggers added that this redesign is the first to implement the BBC’s new ‘global visual language’ that is eventually supposed to make the BBC’s services look and feel more consistent. On the back end, the redesign has improved the content management system for journalists uploading text, images and video.

The BBC couldn’t say exactly how many people worked on the project, but confirmed that the in-design team did consult external design experts.

“At the same time as the in-house team has been working on the News redesign, we have worked with Neville Brody and his team at Research Studios on establishing a new ‘global visual language‘ to establish consistency in design and interaction across all of the BBC websites,” said a spokesperson.

So… what’s your verdict?

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

[iframe: src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?id=126256000717991&width=560&connections=18&stream=false&header=false&height=255" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:560px; height:255px;" allowTransparency="true"]

After all the hype and all the disappointment, a report from Reuters Institute for the study of Journalism digs deeper into the effect of social media on the 2010 campaign.

This article titled “How the internet really affected the election” was written by Jemima Kiss, for The Guardian on Monday 12th July 2010 06.00 UTC

Among the many promises broken during the course of the 2010 UK general election was the contention that this was to be Britain’s first true internet campaign, won and lost Obama-style due to grassroots funding campaigns, intimate video messages and – anathema to the serious political pundits – soundbites on Twitter.

What we got was a sensational election dominated by some very traditional TV debates, while the promises of the web and social media seemed to provide an entertaining but superficial backchannel. But with two months’ breathing space since 6 May, a refreshingly thorough report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism illustrates just how much impact social media had on the election, and particularly how the engagement of younger voters may have influenced the outcome.

Nic Newman, the BBC’s former future media controller for journalism, spent six weeks reviewing Facebook groups, Twitter coverage and the use of social media by traditional media organisations. “This was never going to be an internet election,” he says. “Social media is just another layer … it has always been there, through discussion and networks in the pub.”

Facebook dominated the media behaviour of the 18-24 age group he surveyed, with an emphatic 97% saying they used the site during the election. The same group used the web more than any other source of news – 89%, compared with 81% for TV and 59% for newspapers.

When asked how they used social media during the election, 64% said discussing events, joining a group or clicking on links from a friend, while 30% said the TV debate was the biggest factor in swaying their vote – more than TV, newspapers or friends and family.

After decades struggling to engage the youth vote, the Electoral Commission had a major success with aboutmyvote.co.uk, which recorded 1.8m visits, 40% of them from 18-24s. But does the trend for paywalls threaten to cut off a supply of authoritative, informative online news for this group? Though few sites charge for access to general news now, an accelerated trend could mean this would be the only election where wide engagement combined with open sharing of information.

“It is clearly an issue, as social recommendation becomes bigger, that some of that content will be behind paywalls, and this is not just about the election,” Newman says. “But it becomes more significant around election time, and an issue about access and the necessity to get free information.”

The challenge is to engage individuals deeply enough that they will escalate from passive viewer to active participant. Aboutmyvote.co.uk certainly succeeded to some extent, but Photoshop also helped, as illustrated by the reworked campaign posters that littered the web. Labelled “the fifth estate” of grassroots commentary and activism by the report, this trend was made even more accessible by Clifford Singer, who launched mydavidcameron.com to invite anyone to customise the latest Conservative billboards. Singer claimed 3,000 posters were made through the site, and that spreading the images through Twitter and Facebook “enabled us to contest a £500,000 Tory advertising campaign at zero cost”.

Was it a problem that so much of the backchannel commentary, particularly during the debates, was humour? Newman says analysing 1,000 tweets sent during the final debate showed 34% were jokes, with 39% definitely serious. But what matters is the quality of the commentary, not the tone.

“A lot of this was absolutely fantastic. It was like watching the debate with some of the best scriptwriters in the business – the gags came thick and fast,” he says. Politicians’ campaign trail anecdotes were so quickly and thoroughly parodied, he notes, that they were abruptly dumped.

He likens the debate to a Roman forum where everyone could have a say – “cynics and humorists heckling from the back, with activists closer to the debate making more serious interventions”.

Those interventions included the Guardian’s Richard Adams, who tweeted a link to figures on Eurozone debt levels in response to one point in the debate, while The King’s Fund posted a link to its election guide to healthcare policies.

Overall, mainstream media has learned, through experimentation during major news events, how to involve readers and use social media tools; but for politicians, this was the first election where Twitter was taken seriously – more than 600 of them were tweeting.

“Mainstream media are largely getting it right, and recognising that this is about conversation and not broadcast,” Newman says. “For politicians, this is the first election where they are really having a go and some, like John Prescott, have been authentic and posted regularly while others have been in broadcast mode, still finding their feet.”

Easy to dismiss, but less easy to master – social media is yet to come of age. But its growing influence and ubiquity, particularly among younger voters, cannot be ignored. Newman cites one of the more modest estimates, by Mori, that the voting turnout of 18- to 24-year-olds increased by 7%, above the national average of 5%.

“The complications of this new reality are that 18- to 24-year-olds do enjoy big events like the TV debates, but they are not prepared to consume political messages passively,” he says. “[Social media] puts more tools in the hands of audiences to make politicians and the media more accountable.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

[iframe: src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?id=126256000717991&width=560&connections=18&stream=false&header=false&height=255" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:560px; height:255px;" allowTransparency="true"]