Data is Free

According to Attributor my old colleagues at Revenue Science are to be congratulated for breaking into the top 4 of Ad Server Market Share.

They've opened up a substantial lead on Microsoft, which is impressive. What's even more interesting is that their market share of large sites is bigger than Microsoft's Atlas.

Jack Shafer at Slate argues that the newspaper industry has long been attuned to new technology, that they were on the forefront of the Web, and therefore the industry deserves a break.

He's right. Anyone who calls newspaper industry execs dumb for "missing" the Web is a fool. The people I know in the paper biz are some of the smartest people I've ever met. The papers didn't miss the web, they just have the wrong model.

But buried in Shafer's article is a terrific description of the difference between generative and non-generative technology.

• Nongenerative technologies can't be tinkered with or otherwise improved by outsiders.
• Generative technologies such as the PC, on the other hand, invite improvement by outsiders, making them more and more useful to users as time passes—and often more useful in ways that the original designers never would have imagined.

Traditional businesses are 100% nongenerative. Nothing more nongenerative than your morning paper, for example. The challenge for all businesses going forward will be to strike a balance between the nongenerative and generative. Just enough IP to sell and to protect, but otherwise open and encouraging for others to add value.

I have a feeling that this is going to become a theme of mine: the upside down pricing model for online advertising on premium branded sites.

JP Morgan's Imran Khan makes the point that pricing for online ads will fall or remain flat through Q1 '09 and probably through all of '09. We are an a recession, prices fall during a recession. At least that is the conventional wisdom.

I realize how contradictory (and illegal) the following suggestion is, but let's make it anyway. The CEOs of the biggest media companies in the US should meet on, say, the 5th floor of an underground parking garage and agree on an across the board price increase for their online ads.

Given the extreme dangers of deflation to our economy in general, having an area of the economy where prices are going up wouldn't be a terrible idea.

Great article at The New York Times on R, the software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The article does a great job of capturing the history of R, and hints at what lies ahead.

The money quote is:

But while SAS plays down R’s corporate appeal, companies like Google and Pfizer say they use the software for just about anything they can. Google, for example, taps R for help understanding trends in ad pricing and for illuminating patterns in the search data it collects. Pfizer has created customized packages for R to let its scientists manipulate their own data during nonclinical drug studies rather than send the information off to a statistician.

With cloud computing, virtualization, and open source software like R the costs of serving content and analyzing data for media companies is rapidly approaching zero. That's good news since it frees up the media companies to do what they should be good at: producing content to attract eyeballs.

For my money one of the best apps on the market is Nike+. It simply has it all:

1. It does something useful - it tracks how far you ran and how fast you ran it.
2. It launched with a built in user base of millions of iPod users.
3. It drives sales - when you finish your run and plug it into your computer it takes you to Nike.com where you can buy more shoes.
4. It is fun to use, and aesthetically beautiful.
5. Because it is fun to use, and because it sets goals, it encourages you to run more. And if you keep running it probably means you are going to need a new pair of shoes.
   
6. It is generative: users can set their own goals and blog on the site.
7. Finally, Nike must be getting crazy amounts of data from the app. Given the data Nike is gathering, the valuation of the app has to be the value of the sales generated by the service plus the value of the data on the users. Though Nike is limited in how they can monetize that data beyond the site, I'd still ballpark that value in the neighborhood of $5 to $10 per user.

According to ContentNext the NY Times Online needs 1.2 billion page views a month for the company to survive (on the strength of an estimated $300 million per quarter.)

The problem is that the Times only gets about 173 million page views per month while sites like Yahoo News and AOL News get nearly 1 billion page views per month.

The question then is, how can the Times get an extra 800 million page views per month. Isn't the answer to open up to the Times and get bloggers and citizen journalists writing under the banner of the Times.

The more people they can get reporting and telling their stores, the most page views that Times will attract.

There has been a ton written about what I'll call "Generative Marketing." What is it?

Generative marketing is when a brand opens itself up to feedback, interaction, and cultivation of its "tribe." What is a tribe? For a company a tribe is a group of customers who so identify with a product or service that their loyalty and enthusiasm can propel the company to new heights or new depths.

Paul Dunay makes a good point that traditional media is completely broken as a means of building a brand:

There is just too much noise out there to shout at people. No consumer brand has been built on the back of traditional media for a while now. TV certainly isn’t working for the creation of new consumer or B2B brands.

Which means your only option is to define your brand in a way that is open to a dialog and in a way that is narrow enough to start or tap into a “movement”.

The goal for marketers is to harness the power of social marketing to reach its tribe directly. Twitter, Facebook, and other social marketing tools permit brands (and even small companies) to reach their customers directly.

Seth Godwin's new book, Tribes, address this issue directly. Here a presentation he gave last October. I particularly like the message on one slide: Connect, Create Meaning, Make a Difference, Be Noticed, Matter, Be Missed