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Conferences, Presentations & Speaking Engagements

  • Available for public speaking around media transformation and opportunity. Please inquire for schedule and rates.

Content Bridges Services

Press Mentions

  • Marketwatch: Tribune newspaper executives exit
    "What we're seeing is the systematic dismantling of one of the nation's top newspaper companies....The idea of bringing in new blood to the newspaper industry isn't a bad one, because I think in a number of ways it does have old ways of thinking. But when you bring in new blood, those people have to bring in new strategies. Cutting pages and jobs isn't a strategy. It's just a way to cut costs, which all newspaper companies are doing."
  • KCRW: Newspapers in Big Trouble, Should Americans Care
    Appearance on program with L.A. Times editors, others.
  • Reuters: Number of Newspaper Analysts Dwindles
    In the absence of critical analysis from Wall Street, bloggers and industry executives have grown in importance. Outsell Inc's Ken Doctor and Alan Mutter, a venture capitalist and former newspaper editor who runs the blog Reflections of a Newsosaur, are two well-read commentators.
  • Fox Business Network: Bad Times for Newspapers
    “What happens in five years if it looks like more of the recruitment is coming through Yahoo’s Hotjobs,’’ said Outsell’s Doctor. The company may wonder if it can get a better deal going directly to Yahoo and cutting out the middleman, which in this case would be the newspaper. “That’s the huge question in this.” Still Doctor said that given Newspaper companies are skilled at selling advertisements they may be able to prove their worth to the likes of Yahoo by building bigger and better sales forces. “The core strength of a newspaper is its sales staff and its relationship to the advertiser,’’ said Doctor. “If they can keep that relationship it doesn’t matter what they are selling.”
  • Marketwatch: Cablevision to acquire Newsday for $650 million
    "The synergies are real here. If you put together the list of advertising clients Cablevision has with the list of accounts Newsday has -- and the combined contacts the sales teams have -- that's significant."
  • NYT: Cablevision Is Winner of Newsday
    “I’ve been skeptical, but this really is a tremendous opportunity for them,” said Ken Doctor, lead analyst with Outsell. “It’s just awfully hard to pull off.”
  • Bloomberg: McClatchy Plans to Cut 1,400 Jobs, 10% of Workforc
    "This is a permanent downsizing of newspaper companies,'' said Ken Doctor. "They're not using the word `permanent,' but it's a recognition that they will get much smaller as they try to find their way in a digital world."
  • Chicago Reader Blogs: Off a Cliff
    With Rupert Murdoch, who's 77, now predicting he'll outlive the print press has another 20 years or so and Steve Balmer, CEO of Microsoft, giving it maybe ten, the scriveners who populate the nation's despondent newsrooms are willing to concede that -- in the words of industry analyst Ken Doctor -- "It's the end of the world as we know it." All those scriveners -- the ones who know they don't know enough to negotiate a path from this world to the next on their own -- ask at this point is that they be led forward by people who do. Which is why it's so troubling to the hundreds of journalists at the Tribune Company when their new leader sounds like a nincompoop....The following observations about the news-ad ratio owe a big debt to Doctor, who's just addressed the subject on an Editor & Publisher podcast and in his own blog.
  • Bloomberg: GM, Motorola, NY Times Burn Cash Flow, Keep Dividends
    Dividend increases by newspaper companies are ``a core strategy'' to retain shareholders, said Ken Doctor. The Times is cutting 100 jobs this year, or 7.5 percent of its newsroom employees. ``They did that even before cutting their dividend, which I think surprised a lot of people,'' Doctor said.
  • NY Times: Cablevision Is Winner of Newsday
    “I’ve been skeptical, but this really is a tremendous opportunity for them. It’s just awfully hard to pull off.”

What's On My Netvibes

  • Steve Goldstein
    Fellow KR alumnus Steve Goldstein understands the research/info needs of end-use enterprise customers, and he's built a company that is helping satisfy them.
  • Peter Krasilovsky
    Centered on e-commerce of all kinds from Yellow Pages through classifieds and new ad models.
  • Mark Potts
    Mark Potts is an experienced journalist, observer of Internet journalism and an alumnus of the Backfence experiment.
  • John Blossom
    Thoughtful views on a wide-ranging mix of media change.
  • Jay Rosen
    Jay Rosen is a provocateur in the best sense, an NYU journalism professor deeply committed to keeping the press accountable and vibrant in the digital age.
  • David Meerman Scott
    David Scott understands web marketing of digital content. Check out his site and his new book, "Cashing In With Content"

My Work as an Outsell Analyst

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February 13, 2008

Rupert and Jerry Could Mean More than "Our Space"

Okay, I've pulled myself away from the larger American drama of Barack and Hillary, and her coming "Alamo Firewall." Which brings me to another reality show. Maybe we could call it "Rupert and Jerry's Our Space." (You know "Our Space is a very, very, very nice, place, with.......")

At the core of the proposition we know is a MySpace for 20% of Yahoo swap, providing a News Corp tentacle into the web's largest aggregator. We can debate relative values of that swap every which way. What's the real value of Yahoo; Microsoft's current or next offer? Jerry's $40 number? A real break-up number? The future value of MySpace itself? That's a big number if you look at the out-sized duration and frequency numbers of MySpace and Facebook. That's a smaller number if you absorb the lessons of Facebook's Beacon -- it's hard to find socially acceptable ways to monetize a social site.

But beyond that path, I think News Corp's further interest in Yahoo has all kinds of interesting angles. We can talk gaming (News Corp's IGN/Yahoo Games), movies (News Corp's Rotten Tomatoes/a struggling Yahoo Movies) and endless potential for sports (News Corp's highly successful regional sports networks and Yahoo Sports. That's just a few of them. You can play your own mix and match; just check out News Corp's "Other Assets."

All those have interesting potential, but let me focus on two others, both of which seem like naturals of this moment in web time.

First consider business news.

Remember the justification for Rupert's 60+% premium for Dow Jones? It was global domination of business news, in print, online and on cable/satellite (in addition to mobile, no doubt, as it develops). Sure, Rupert's pulled back from a free wsj.com -- apparently accepting the advice of his execs that the market for business advertising on the web, while lucrative, just wasn't ready to support a free product. But that doesn't mean he won't relentlessly seek new audiences to monetize that costly content.

So put together the Dow Jones brands with the considerable power of Yahoo Finance. For Yahoo, the semi-exclusive ability to display DJ content would help Yahoo Finance break away from the pack of too-indistinguishable Google Finance, MSN Money and AOL Money and Finance.  It could integrate lots of Marketwatch and selective WSJ and Barron's content. Then there's the fledgling Fox Business Network, which produces lots of content, but, oh, doesn't really have an audience yet.

For Dow Jones, Yahoo brings many more eyeballs to the content and the parties can figure out how to sell and share the advertising. Wouldn't that make a lot of sense for both companies, especially if Rupert has an equity piece of Yahoo as well?

Second, consider news video. One of the first areas that News Corp has moved on in achieving synergy out of the DJ deal is in video. Remember, Fox produces lots of news video and it is gearing up to produce even more with the web now firmly in mind. So just recently we've seen (check the brand) lots of Fox video showing up at wsj.com Video Center and the Marketwatch Multimedia (the two now offering the same videos).

Already, those in and around the industry tell me that $25 is the average CPM for news video, with top-branded business video selling out at $90 and now surpassing $100 CPMs. So if News Corp can gain preference on the web's largest news audience, it can make a lot of money fast. Preference, you know, like Yahoo newspaper consortium members are getting on Yahoo Local pages. Preference works, creating new pages views and new monetization.

How well-equipped is Fox video to compete? Well, let's think about what we watch.

Of the breaking news we watch, how closely do you watch and know whether the breaking news video is coming from? Whether it's coming from Reuters or AP -- now in fierce competition and producing more than 1000 news videos a month -- or CNN or....Fox. If Fox can gain greater access to audience -- beyond the newly bought Dow Jones properties, the monetization of that video can skyrocket.

Yahoo itself, as in so many other areas, has been behind the curve on video, with Comscore assigning a 3.4% of the video market to the company. Hence, its Maven purchase.

What's news video worth? 2007 revenue totals weren't huge -- $500-750 million is the range of estimates -- but it grew 40% YOY. It's expected to grow 40% again this year and credible estimates put 2011 market size at about $4 billion. So yes, a News Corp/Yahoo video play could yield big and growing dividends as well.

If, against Microsoft odds, Jerry and Rupert do team up, expect a scorecard that goes well beyond social networking.

 

February 13, 2008 in Advertising , Google, Syndication, Video, TV, Yahoo, Yahoo Newspaper Consortium |

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