Silicon Valleywood

Some Time Sites Go Behind AOL Wall March 28, 2003

Finally, Time Warner is making some Time Inc. magazine sites available only to AOL subscribers. According to reports, People and Entertainment Weekly go AOL-only on March 31. 12 others will follow by mid-May

Real Simple
In Style
Self
Teen People
SI for Kids
Time for Kids
Parenting
Cooking Light
Southern Living
Sunset
Coastal Living
Southern Accents

The sites of other high-circ pubs, including Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Money, Field & Stream, Golf Magazine, and Poplular Science, will remain open, at least for now.

This move is necessary, if not sufficient, to add value to AOL’s BYOA strategy. It’s a tough tradeoff for the individual magazine brands, although much of People’s and Entertainment Weekly’s online traffic is already driven by AOL promotions. Notably, no magazines with serious at-work audiences are affected. Time Warner is taking a somewhat less-risky mom and kids/teens approach.

AP story here.

A Sign of H’wood Discipline? March 28, 2003

This story in the Journal sketches out how Paramount makes less risky, but profitable movies.

Paramount executives say the studio has been profitable every year since 1994 — a claim few, if any, other studios can make. Part of the reason is that Paramount has resisted films with super-high price tags. The studio has never invested more than $100 million of its own money to make a movie and caps at 25% the amount of a movie’s revenue that it shares with filmmakers or actors. By bringing in partners and selling certain international rights to apply against a movie’s cost, Paramount will spend the same on movie production this year as it did in 1994, even though the average total cost of making movies has doubled.

It also points out that budget scraps are coming close to alienating one of Paramount’s star producers.

Real Journalism March 27, 2003

Real journalism, as opposed to “embedded” reporters who call US Marines “we”, scores big: Richard N. Perle resigned today as chairman of an influential Pentagon advisory board in the wake of disclosures that his business dealings included a recent meeting with a Saudi arms dealer and a contract to advise a communications company that is seeking permission from the Defense Department to be sold to Chinese investors.

Of course, the Times doesn’t acknowledge the role of The New Yorker , who broke the story, until the 12th graf. Bravo, Sy Hersh. Bravo, New Yorker.

Wait! Tivo Doesn’t Affect Advertising! March 27, 2003

I’m a little slow. I just saw this . Recent internal research by Procter & Gamble Co. indicates that consumers who fast-forward through ads with digital personal video recorders such as TiVo still recall those ads at roughly the same rates as people who see them at normal speed in real time.

Bwhahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

At least AdAge has the good sense to quote a former P&G market researcher: “People hardly recall anything. So you’re dealing with low numbers anyway, and differences with low numbers take a lot to be significant. So I could see how statistically you could make that case.”

Oh my. I can’t wait till the Internet’s measurability standards are applied to TV advertising on a regular basis. Ad spending could go down by 50%!

Nah, it’ll never happen. There’s too much at stake.

Google Envy March 25, 2003

My key takeaway from Jupiter’s Online Media Conference & Expo : everyone is terrified of Google.

Honestly, I’m not sure why. Google is a great company for a number of reasons, but they’re not a real threat to mainstream media companies. They are anti-programming (in the editorial sense), single-media, and their vision of advertising, while expanding, is extremely narrow. I’m eager to see whether they can pull off being an ad network; I kind of doubt it, but I’ll be paying close attention.

I need to do some more homework on this, but I can report they are inspiring much fear and envy.

War News vs. Sports Really is Brand vs. Brand March 21, 2003

Interesting NYTimes piece on CBS’ decision to push basketball to ESPN in favor of war coverage. Leslie Moonves, the president of CBS, said during an interview at the CBS Broadcast Center: “As soon as the war began, we felt it was our obligation to go with wall-to-wall news coverage. Anyone who wanted to get the basketball games could get the basketball games.”

I disagree with this, but freely admit that my reasoning is extremist. CBS essentially made a brand decision: it deemed it was more important to support the CBS News brand (and Dan Rather, et al) than the CBS Sports brand. This might be legit – given that ESPN’s sports brand is pretty untouchable, and it’s conceivable that CBS News could regain some luster that would halo the whole network.

My extremism is that I think network news is a relic of the 1960’s, and has limited value in branding a general-purpose network anymore. In my admittedly cynical view, CBS should have been more concerned with raw ratings (and the accompanying revenue and promotional opportunites), than illusory halo effects and “good citizenship.”

On top of that, news is over-supplied and too expensive. Finally, CBS News connotes old-school CBS, ie, as my former colleague Pat Keane used to say, “the network of the nearly dead.”

It’s a fragmented world; audiences go to specialist programmers. The mission of a general-purpose network is to gather audiences under an umbrella visible network , cross-promote, and offer exclusive event programming.

New Jupiter Weblog March 20, 2003

We’re aggregating our postings on the war’s impact on online businesses here .

Media Industry, Eat Your Own Dogfood March 14, 2003

When I logged on to MyYahoo tonight, these two articles were numbers 2 & 3 on my personalized entertainment headlines:

Dixie Chicks Pulled from Air After Bashing Bush

Country stations across the United States have pulled the Chicks from playlists following reports that lead singer Natalie Maines said in a concert in London earlier this week that she was “ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.”

Station managers said their decisions were prompted by calls from irate listeners who thought criticism of the president was unpatriotic.

Miramax’s Oscar Campaign for Scorsese Causes Stir

Critics of Wise’s column, published initially as an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Daily News, said the director breached an unwritten but apparently sacred prohibition against academy members revealing how they were casting their Oscar ballots.

And they say Miramax, the film’s distributor, violated the spirit of Oscar-campaigning guidelines designed to maintain the “fairness and dignity” of the voting process.

Kinda tough to defend freedom of expression when you pull this kind of nonsense, eh, media industry? Guys, guys, stuff like this is like begging to be regulated.