Dec
19
News Not Fit to Print
Filed Under Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized | 4 Comments
One of the themes of this year has been the wearisome regularity with which the “news” comes up as a topic of conversation at conferences and fora. It seems that every audience contains a voice, half-defensive, half angry, asking why people have a down on newspapers, claiming that they will always be needed, and indicating that they have changed and are adapting wonderfully to the networked world. I am not the only one with a wonky view of reality. So I am writing today to those who still appear to think, as one UK national newspaper proprietor once said to me, “that we must expect a time when everyone gets over this digital fascination”. And my message is simple: all print and broadcast news media will survive for as long as their idea of periodicity equates with the demands of their users. When they get out of step in terms of time, the end is nigh.
One of the greatest drivers of news used to be what was happening in the financial markets. The day has long passed when you could read that over your breakfast and then react, but lets go over and see what is happening in the fast lane. Selerity (www.seleritycorp.com) is a wonderful case study. Here ex Thomson Reuters people are building an actionable news service using what they undramatically call “low latency event data”. In other words they take Quantitative News from corporate announcements, retailers’ sales performance statements, or car sales releases and they squeeze it down the network in micro seconds so that when it hits pre-progammed, rule-based automated equity trading systems instant decisions can be made and actioned. My guess is that machine readable news will soon dominate the financial markets where that news can be reduced to market data, and that over time it will be possible to add more and more “sentiment ” into this news-stream, and react to that within the algorithmic trading approach.
Over at Alacra they are well down this track in one sense, since their PulsePro technology (http://pulse.alacra.com/pulse-solutions), with some 3000 sources, reads and scores the blogs and commentaries of pundits, traders, journalists (but hopefully not me) in order to create programmatic trading based on a sentiment score. Slower of course, but still a way of generating news and applying it to decisions before any of the existing players are awake. And this type of feed will have its echo in other walks of life. Monitoring blogs, where Factiva was a pioneer in its headier days, has morphed into Corporate Reputation Management. The argument is that by the time the bloggers have finished with a topic and it reaches the media, it is too late to put things right, so the successors of the PR agencies are into pre-emptive monitoring ( do they even read those carefully automated news clipping files – except to put them into the client report!). In truth, news has moved upstream, and companies like www.infegy.com are beginning to build news businesses there.
And when we get really clever we will use the technology to write the news as well as reading and reacting to them. Over, then, to StatSheet, a start-up player in the fielsd of sports reporting. In the statistics fest which is US college football and basketball, this company has built a niche called StatSheet Network which in turn creates a newsite for each team (currently 345 NCAA Division 1 men’s basketball teams). This adds in all the latest game statistics from each team, and then provides narratives and analysis as a form of robotic news development. For smaller teams with little infrastructure, this is clearly a godsend (http://statsheet.com/#websites).
Some newspapers may re-invent themselves online, and sometimes (as with the UK’s MailOnline, its online presence will take on a life of its own and become very distinct from its real world form and meaning. A few years back I was more confident of this. Now I wonder. It seemed to me then that it would be non-trivial but possible to create micro-news publishing and re-invent the local press. Now I feel that the format and business model of the newspaper world make it impossible for those immersed in that world to see enough of what is going on around them to start again in a new place. Only new players with unclouded minds can do that. If you can analyse need and come up with solutions that do not necessarily need journalists, or sub-editors, or even feature writers then you are beginning to think again. I see little evidence that our press are doing that.
Dec
16
Noah: the Rainbow Sign?
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, Publishing, Search, social media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
“God gave Noah the rainbow sign – he said, there’s no more water, its the Fire next time”
Marco Rodzynek and his colleagues at Noah Advisors are to be congratulated. The 650 attendees at the Park Lane Hilton in London yesterday had a treat: an event just as good as last years’ inaugural, genuinely Pan-European, full of investment opportunities at a wide variety of levels and concentrated around the winning world of internet services, where at last Europeans are beginning to work at scale, and respond to the needs of some very specific European cultures. I cannot attempt to sum up 35 presentations, and a panel of 6 fascinating angel investors, but here are a few lines and figures that hit me hard:
- “global roaming is about to be a reality – this is the end of the Roaming Empires”
- “the future of broadcasting is event – driven – everything else goes downloadable or otherwise playable on demand”
- “local advertising will become almost wholly transactional”
- “online advertising cpm in Asia is now under £1.00 – here is a market that collapsed before it started”
- “WPP is not an advertising agency – we see ourselves as a data, analytics and marketing company” Mark Read
- “the entire music industry in all formats and delivery modes is now smaller than the Apps business”
- Apps will grow from $4.6 billion in 2009 to $20billion in 2015 (GetJar)
- The secret of ticketing is to get people to optimize opportunity – if they book and then decide not to go then they can sell back through us – SeatWave
- Conduit is the largest B2B Apps player – it creates and manages Apps for “publishers” of all types. Its a SaaS service with 200 million users, 260,000 client publishers and in 2009 was acquiring 1 million new users a day. Recently moved distribution from Google to Microsoft.
- Trovit is now a major player in web classified advertising, aggregating 80 million listings in homes, jobs, cars etc (Why did we ever do Fish4?) It has 35 million unique users per month and ebitda is now up to 3 m EUR.
- Ticketing is an area for hugely increased penetration in future. “Over 50% of the market is still conventional in approach – yet this is a simple business where you are just trading a barcode” SeatWave
- Wonga also points to microfinance as a growth industry. Its a £60 billion pa sector dominated by banks. Wonga do loans of £1 to £1000, cash in the borrowers bank account within 15 minutes of approval, repayment in 11 days. They reject 70% of applicants, so risk information systems are vital. They will flourish as long as they are cheaper than late overdraft fees from banks – who charge UK consumers £3.2 billion per year for exceeding overdraft limits!
- German publishers have been better than anyone else in Europe in terms of network migration. Burda was a founder of Tomorrows World Group (dating, holiday booking, car sales etc): von Holtzbrinck is the owner of Parship, the leader in the dating market.
- Dating is great, and very special in Germany (high levels of profiling, security and psychological testing). There are 4000 services in Europe, and they are expected to consolidate by 75 % in the next 5 years.
- Compare Parship and ElitePartner (Tomorrow Focus Group), the German market leaders in dating. Parship has 56 million EUR in revenue, after 10 years and 11 million sophisticated German singles as members. Tomorrow Focus claims that it is close to Parship in size, which means that some 45% of its total revenues are dating. Total revenues for Tomorrow Focus are 120 million EUR, forecast to rise to 250 m in 2015. Ebitda is currently 12million EUR, rising to 30-40 million in 2015. Scout24 Group is smaller than either in these sectors.
- DACH really is now an expression of a marketplace which makes sense to these players.
- Spotify now has 750 000 users. Like LoveFilm, this is an increasingly cloud-based business, delivering services licence to every and all devices that the users want to play them upon. It say that “it does not compete with downloads – it just grows the market”. (But perhaps one day they will be the market!)
- Softonic “claims to be the largest neutral marketplace for apps software”. It has 130 000 reviewed programs and has done 1 billion downloads this year. It has 80 million unique users per month, is growing at 65 % pa and has operating margins of 50%.
- Only 5% of apps are used within 20 days of download.
- There are 1 billion internet users and 4 billion mobile phone users – guess where the information market is going?
- Amiando was bought by Xing: the future of B2B social network players is going to be events management.
- The sort of classified services we expect on our mobile platforms: take a photo of a car registration plate – and see if that car is for sale of if there are some available like it. Same for Homes? (Probably won’t work so well with partners!)
- 3D will be slow – but augmented reality will be everywhere next year.
- Travel sites – European commission on air tickets is 5% average – on accommodation it is 15-20 %: so we have less Expedias and more hotel booking agencies.
- Bigpoint leads the games arena: 160 million registered players, 25 languages, 1 million concurrent active users, 60 games at any one time, 250 000 new registrations per day, 10% of users create 80% of revenues.
- Growth is in non-specialist area – the Zynga/Playfish market where Bigpoint have their Rama series.
- GetJar’s claim to be the world’s largest Open app store (yes, you can use Flash!) backed by $100 million revenues per month. Company and founder moved from Lithuania to Silicon Valley (who says we cannot do “big” in Europe?). App developers pay no fees for being in the store, and users can use any billing systems. Angry Birds was the fastest ever app launch!
Take away a percentage for hyperbole, and a bit more for overselling, and you will still find that Marco is right: these are buoyant markets in Europe, showing aggressive growth and interesting investment possibilities. With some distinguished exceptions, they are not related to European publishing or broadcasting, and their growth cycles are not limited by print or broadcast relationships. Something new happened in the middle of the last decade and now it is happening again. Noah and its conference do us all a service by getting the vital essence of these changes onto a stage.
keep looking »