June 23, 2009
...Fly Clear is gone. Just as I was packing to fly off again tomorrow, Clear has ceased operations with no notice whatsoever. The troubling thing about this economy is not so much that business are in trouble, it's the alarming speed of their decline. There is so much leverage behind some of these ventures that if credit is cut off, they literally can't function overnight (the same thing happened to Bear Stearns on a much larger scale.) I have to believe that Clear was succeeding, so I wonder why their creditors pulled the rug out from under them?
June 18, 2009
Surely Sirius XM didn't just release a paid subscription model iPhone app that doesn't include Howard Stern, MLB NFL or other premium content? I realize that the rights to MLB and NFL on the iPhone are not theirs to sell, but they also didn't have to charge subscription fees, either. What Sirius XM has done here is far more sinister than this strategic error might initially suggest. What they have really done, by putting their service on the iPhone, amidst myriad other (free) apps like Pandora and Slacker, is to invite listeners to make the kind of apples-to-apples direct comparison to other services that was heretofore impossible with the satellite-only, dashboard-full-of-wires iteration of their previous offering.
May 29, 2009
You'd think I would be a sucker for web metrics, being in the market research business, but I find a lot of metrics to be ultimately not as useful in practice as they are 'interesting.' By useful here, I mean "have a direct correlation to driving sales." One that I love to track, however, is the percentage of site visits (landings/entry pages) that initially land on our home page. Much to my delight, this number continues to decline. Today, less than 15% of our site visits enter initially through our home/index page, and this continues to drop from month to month. The lower this number goes, the better we are doing with creating content, articles, studies and other search-sticky content: i.e., the other stuff people land on when they visit the site. When someone visits our home page, we really don't know much about them, and they probably won't be back--that's the hard truth. When someone visits a page that is about something, however, we know a lot about them--that they are interested in that thing, at least--and when people find something of value on a topic they are interested in, they generally come back. When they keep coming back, they are more likely to regard us as subject matter experts, and that puts us one step closer to having a client relationship than we would have been had they simply stumbled across our home page at random.
May 26, 2009
I recently gave a webinar presenting the 2009 iteration of The Podcast Consumer Revealed. You can watch it in its entirety below:
May 4, 2009
These data points were taken at the very end of January 2008 and 2009, so this most recent stat is "B.O." (Before Oprah, though it remains to be seen if Oprah's recent Twitter adoption actually drove new users or just increased traffic). Now, estimating Twitter usage right now is about like throwing a dart at Dale Earnhardt...in the dark. Twitter is an upward speeding curve at the moment; still, we feel pretty secure about planting a flag here in showing January to January growth and estimating monthly users at around 5 million. This of course excludes users who are more 'casual' in their usage (though we argue that if you haven't used it in a month, you don't use it.) In 2008, by the way, we recorded '1' monthly user out of a methodologically sound, nationally representative survey of about 2000 Americans 12+.
April 24, 2009
While I am thrilled to have made the daily Center for Media Research brief, check out my quote at the bottom of the article. Do I...talk...like that? SPOCK! KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNN!!!!!
April 17, 2009
Yesterday I was privileged to co-present Edison's annual study with Arbitron of radio's digital future, The Infinite Dial. I'll be posting the full webcast in this space soon, but earlier today on our company's blog I wrote a brief piece on making content that matters called "One Great Song After Another." A brief note on one slide, but an important one. I know a lot of webcasters--hell, I used to be a webcaster--and one of the things that concerns me is the current fixation on the copyright royalty negotiations and how onerous those rights fees may be for webcasters. This is a serious problem, and one that threatens to put a lot of pure-play webcasters right out of business. I don't want to minimize that.
