Topic: Business models
Disney, Warner, Sony, 21st CF, Universal Join Movies Anywhere Digital Locker Service (Oct 12, 2017)
Five major movie studios have banded together to join a successor to Disney’s Movies Anywhere service, which serves as a digital locker consolidating digital movie purchases across major retailers like iTunes, Google Play, Amazon Video, and Vudu. This is a pretty big deal, because the service was Disney only in the past and competed with UltraViolet, a competing platform. This partnership now brings together five of the biggest names in movies, and it’s fairly compelling – I just signed up and was able to consolidate my past purchases from iTunes, Google Play, and Amazon Video into one big collection, which I can now view on various devices and even download for offline viewing on a phone. That’s important to me because even though I’ve tended to favor one particular storefront over the last few years, I have at various times acquired movies on other platforms for pricing, availability, or testing purposes, and they’ve been kind of lost on there. This therefore feels like the first time something like this might actually take off in a meaningful way.
via Variety
★ Snapchat Adds Context Cards for Ride Sharing, Restaurant Booking, Other Services (Oct 10, 2017)
Snapchat has added one of its biggest new features in recent memory with the addition of Context Cards, which will be reached through a swipe up on a Snap tied to a specific location. The Context Cards will offer various additional details about the place, and also provide links to ride sharing and restaurant booking services as well as information like address, reviews, and so on. This is yet another move by Snapchat beyond its original limitations, along with the addition a while back of outbound linking from Snaps. What both of those features offer is a way to add additional detail and context to a Snap beyond the limited photo/video formats Snapchat has supported natively. It’s also an interesting alternative to voice assistants, bots, and other ways to add context to what’s currently happening on screen without the user having to type text into a search box. The feature certainly lends itself well to monetization opportunities in future too, whether advertising or revenue sharing with the initial or additional partners. However, as with other Snapchat features, it doesn’t feel particularly tough for others to emulate if successful.
Also worth noting, briefly, is the fact that Evan Spiegel, who has rarely done press interviews, did not one but two as part of the launch of this feature, as a sort of follow-on to his recent comments that he realizes he needs to do more public communication now that Snap is a public company.
via Snap
Google Makes End of First Click Free Official, Plans Subscription Partnerships (Oct 2, 2017)
The two halves of this story have been bouncing around for a while now, but it seems they’re finally official. We’ve been hearing for some time about plans to end Google’s “First Click Free” policy, which gave newspapers the option of making their paywalls porous to search users or forgoing traffic from search, and its replacement is now being announced. It stops punishing publishers for not offering free access to articles, while giving publishers more granular control over how many free news items users of Google search get before they hit the paywall. At the same time, Google is talking (again) about plans to help news organizations drive subscriptions. As I’ve said repeatedly, both Facebook and Google are viewed with distrust by the news industry, but the former has at least been visibly acknowledging the tension and seeking to do something about it, while Google has been slower to act. It’s good to see it finally making changes now, although the subscription tools won’t debut until next year are are still not being spelled out in detail.
via New York Times
Uber Officially Announces Shutdown of US Car Leasing Business (Sep 27, 2017)
This is a second piece today which serves as official confirmation of something previously reported, this time the news that Uber is shutting down its US car leasing business, which the Wall Street Journal was also the first to report early last month. Many of the details were in the Journal’s original report, but there are some new ones, including the fact that Uber will lay off 500 employees, or around 3% of its workforce, as a result. Uber also confirmed that the motivation is primarily financial, though it didn’t confirm the massive losses the Journal had originally reported and refers to again in today’s article. These changes pre-dated the arrival of new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi at Uber and are part of a broader pattern of re-evaluating loss-making enterprises at the company, something he is likely to embrace as he moves towards an accelerated IPO schedule.
via WSJ
Pandora Users Can Now Watch Video Ads In Exchange for Skips and Playbacks (Sep 19, 2017)
Pandora has been testing a new ad model for some time and is now launching it broadly. The model offers users an opportunity to trade watching a video ad for extra skips and playbacks, both of which are normally limited under its ad-based option. That’s a familiar model from the mobile gaming market, where games often offer users additional lives or other in-game features in return for watching video ads, although anecdotal evidence from my own family suggests that those ads aren’t really being “watched” in any meaningful way – they basically insert a 30-second delay in game play during which the player does something else. Pandora says a high percentage – 42% – of its active user base has signed up for this program, which is called Video Plus, so that’s a good start, but the key metrics here aren’t the number of signups or even the number of times people agree to trade an ad view for in-app functionality, but brand recall and other more traditional ad metrics which would demonstrate that users are actually watching and taking in the content of video ads. There’s no mention of any of that in the Adweek article linked below, and whether this new model ultimately succeeds or fails will depend entirely on whether brands actually see a decent return on the investment.
via Adweek
Google Moving Away From Penalizing News Sites Who Don’t Do Free Articles (Sep 13, 2017)
This article is a bit of an oddity – the Wall Street Journal reporting on the Wall Street Journal – but the news itself is important: Google is relaxing the policy that currently penalizes sites like the Journal which no longer allow Google searchers to view an article linked from search results for free. Since the Journal instituted that change, it’s seen traffic from Google (which in turn is likely a big chunk of total traffic) drop enormously, because sites that don’t participate in Google’s “first click free” program are penalized in search results. This is yet another sign of a softening at Google towards news organizations, which have been increasingly critical of its (and Facebook’s) power over them, though Google still seems to be months if not a year behind Facebook in coming around and making serious concessions.
via WSJ
Roku Launches its Own Channel Showing Ad-Supported Movies (Sep 6, 2017)
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WhatsApp Tests App For Businesses, Says Will Begin Charging Them Soon (Sep 5, 2017)
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Uber Reports $50m in Tips Paid, More Controls and Flexibility for Drivers (Aug 22, 2017)
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Spotify Wants to Rival Facebook and Google in Advertising (Aug 17, 2017)
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Google Might Pay $3.5 Billion to Samsung and $3 Billion to Apple in 2017 (Aug 16, 2017)
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Amazon Expands Program Paying Popular Alexa Developers (Aug 16, 2017)
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Uber to Close Massively Loss-Making US Car Leasing Business (Aug 8, 2017)
The Wall Street Journal reports that Uber is planning to shut down its US car leasing business, which was apparently losing $9,000 per car instead of the $500 Uber projected it would lose when creating the program. It sounds like Uber might have around $800 million in cars leased through the program, which Uber apparently holds titles to in trust rather than on its books, and it may have to sell many of them and the associated leases to get out of the business. The program and this outcome are indicative of Uber’s enormously aggressive expansion strategy and the huge sums it’s sometimes incurred in poorly thought out initiatives which have ended up significantly worsening its losses. Though it’s most common to see Uber’s losses attributed to its subsidies in ride sharing itself, a good chunk of its losses are made in these other aspects of its business and could be cut back significantly as it focuses on more rapid progress towards profitability. I suspect cutting the leasing program in particular wouldn’t dent growth much but would certainly go a long way towards improving margins. It’s also likely another example of an area where Uber might well do better to partner with a small number of large, reputable firms rather than taking such a direct role in the operation – in general, Uber seems far less willing to partner than Lyft, which is arguably holding it back in some areas.
via WSJ
Lyft is Partnering with Healthcare Providers to Give Patients Rides (Aug 4, 2017)
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Microsoft Introduces Leasing and Upgrade Program for Surface Line (Aug 1, 2017)
Microsoft has today announced a leasing and upgrade program for its Surface line, offering a 24-month payment plan for the devices, and an option to trade in for a new device after 18 months rather than paying it off over the full 24 months. The program is called Surface Plus and there’s also a version for business customers, though it seems like a missed opportunity not to call it Surface as a Service… We’ve obviously seen the installment and leasing models become the default for smartphones on US carriers over the past few years, and there are already examples of hardware vendors getting into the game directly, notably Apple’s iPhone Upgrade Program. So this is both a familiar model and a smart move for Microsoft, which recently began to offer bundled Windows and Office subscriptions to business customers and can now offer a single bundle of Surface hardware and those two software packages for businesses. But it’s also a great way to lower the barriers to entry for what are fairly pricey machines for the most part, as Microsoft has stayed firmly above the fray with its Surface line, in contrast to the much lower overall average selling prices of Windows PCs. The Surface Pro starts at $799 (or $33.29 per month over 24 months), while most of the models are over $1000. Reducing that to $40-60 per month for many models should make it much more affordable and predictable as a cost for both individuals and businesses. We’re going to see lots more of this, with hardware vendors packaging up access to one or more devices on a subscription basis with additional subscriptions to software, content, or other services layered on top.
via Microsoft
WhatsApp is Hiring Business Sales and Monetization Product Roles (Jul 21, 2017)
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Facebook Confirms News Subscriptions Coming in October (Jul 19, 2017)
Campbell Brown, the former news anchor Facebook appointed as head of News Partnerships in January, has finally confirmed what’s been rumored for some time now, namely that Facebook is readying a subscription product for newspapers. It sounds like it will adopt the familiar though not universal approach of allowing readers to access ten articles before having to pay for a subscription to a given publication, though it’s not clear that the ten articles will include those readers read separately in their browsers, so that will be a key point for papers to nail down before signing up. Another will be payments and how those will work, since Facebook still doesn’t have credit card details from the vast majority of its users. Since some publications don’t allow any free articles before the paywall kicks in, this won’t be a perfect or universal solution, but on paper should neutralize one of the big criticisms of Facebook’s gobbling up of news consumption. However, given that this has been in the works for some time, and the largest publications will be aware of that, the recent PR push by the News Media Alliance against both Facebook and Google suggests that it certainly won’t assuage all their concerns. Update: also today, Facebook announced analytics for Instant Articles with support from Nielsen, to allow publishers to compare results from their IA and web-based versions. The lack of comparable analytics has been another bugbear for the news organizations using IA, so this should check another box in resolving those concerns, at least on paper.
via TheStreet
Amazon’s Video Direct Program Starting to Generate Meaningful Revenue for Creators (Jul 17, 2017)
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Some Online Publishers Increase Revenue by Reducing Ads (Jul 13, 2017)
The Wall Street Journal has a nice bit of reporting here on several websites which are reducing the number and toning down the nature of ads, and seeing positive results in terms of ad revenue as a result. Reading the article, it’s hard to avoid asking “You mean you dramatically improved the user experience and more people spent more time on your site?” The changes being described here seem so obvious that it’s easy to forget that the received wisdom in online advertising (as in TV advertising, arguably) has been that the best way to generate more ad revenue is to show more ads and make them harder to ignore, at the expense of the user experience. The backlash against advertising online (manifested in both use of ad blockers and refusing to visit sites with obnoxious ads) and on TV (manifested through ad-skipping DVRs and the rise of ad-free properties like Netflix, Hulu, and HBO) is now finally forcing a reckoning among those that have swallowed that line of thinking. And the results should surprise no-one: prioritizing anything over the user experience is always going to worsen the experience and therefore usage, while prioritizing the user experience will improve it and usage, and in the process may well improve revenues too. This isn’t a panacea for online display ads, many of which will be blocked anyway even if not obnoxious, and whose value compared to native and search ads continues to erode, but it’s better than continuing down the road most online publishers have been on. The solution for TV advertising, on the other hand, isn’t nearly so simple, given the broader declines in viewership.
via WSJ
Major Newspapers Seek Legal Cover for Collective Bargaining with Facebook and Google (Jul 10, 2017)
The News Media Alliance, an industry group representing major newspapers, is beginning a push, launched with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal from its president, to get permission from Congress to act collectively in negotiating with Facebook and Google. I’m linking here to a piece in the New York Times on the topic, but it’s from the media columnist and therefore almost as much opinion as reporting, something I’ve found with most of the stories on this, which feels a little ironic. But the thrust of both the op-ed and the opinion side of the New York Times piece is that the news industry is being lorded over by the digital giants, and that single publications or even media groups are powerless to negotiate better relationships without being able to bargain collectively. That, in turn, would be a violation of antitrust rules unless Congress were to pass legislation providing legal cover, something it seems rather unlikely to do, especially in the current political climate. The op-ed is disingenuous to say the least – this is the money quote, in my opinion: “But the two digital giants don’t employ reporters: They don’t dig through public records to uncover corruption, send correspondents into war zones, or attend last night’s game to get the highlights. They expect an economically squeezed news industry to do that costly work for them.” That feels like a distortion of the true relationship here, which is that Google and Facebook both point people to the content those people find interesting, including content from major newspapers. If those newspapers decide to make that content available for free either on their sites or through Instant Articles or AMP, that’s their decision. But that’s not nearly the same as those companies doing that work “for” Google or Facebook. While the idea that the newspapers face an imbalance of power in negotiating individually with Facebook and Google has more merit, it’s also disingenuous to argue that these two companies are somehow singlehandedly responsible for the inequitable distribution of advertising revenue between them, given their respective audience sizes and all else that ails newspapers and their business models. At the same time, it’s worth noting that Facebook is pushing ahead with its plans for subscriptions and other improvements to how it works with publishers, but publications including the New York Times continue to be skeptical of those changes, which makes one wonder just what these papers would kind of relationship with these companies the papers would find acceptable. All of this merely reinforces my sense that the companies don’t really have any solutions to propose, but in fact are angling for some kind of punitive regulatory action against these companies on the basis of their size and influence.