The Wall Street Journal reported on a study commissioned by GfK and the Interactive Advertising Bureau on how we spend our time online.
The study was commissioned to help sell advertising, so billions of dollars are riding on the accuracy of the information and how the advertising community uses it.
Love that you support my blog … but isn’t it shocking to see that readers spend as much time reading blogs as they do online newspapers and online magazines … combined?
Please read the article from The Wall Street Journal, here.
It was just over a year ago when I started interviewing radio broadcasters, and publishing those interviews for Smarts Broadcast Systems. Each interview publishes on the Smarts website as well as in a weekly radio industry email, the Small Market Radio Newsletter. Since I started, I’ve had the opportunity to meet some great broadcasters … some award winners, and some that just quietly serve their communities.
It’s what radio is all about.
Please enjoy these 25 profiles that have published in the last year:
The LA Dodgers were sold in 2012 by the hated Frank McCourt for $2 Billion. LA rejoiced.
In 2012 and then again in 2013, the new management of the Dodgers spent and spent on payroll to build a better team … at least, that was what LA hoped. The Dodgers now have the highest payroll in baseball.
The team got better. They went to the playoffs in 2013, and made it to the National League Championship, which the beat up team did lose. But the run was exciting, and LA couldn’t wait for 2014, when the team is favored to win the World Series by the oddsmakers in Vegas.
And that is when I learned what this team would cost me.
I’m a Dish Network subscriber. They’ve got the best HD channel line up (IMHO). They’ve got the Pac 12 Network. They’ve got the SEC Network this fall … so I get to follow all of UCLA sports, and all of Mizzou sports.
Wonderful.
But now, I find out, Dish doesn’t carry SportsNet LA – owned by Time Warner Cable – which will carry the Dodgers in 2014.
Dish won’t do a deal with Time Warner Cable (TWC). You see, TWC agreed to pay the Dodgers over $7 Billion over 25 years (yes, almost 4 times the purchase price of the team!) to secure the exclusive TV rights.
According to news accounts, TWC is now asking other cable/satellite companies to pay $4/month for every subscriber in order to secure the rights to SportsNetLA.
Which I would gladly pay. But Dish won’t, apparently. I’m sure there are many, many Dish subscribers in LA that wouldn’t want to pay that much, which I understand.
So I have a choice: take Dish, and watch UCLA and Mizzou. Or, switch to TWC, and miss every UCLA and Mizzou game. And watch the Dodgers. My three favorite teams are the Dodgers, the UCLA Bruins and the Mizzou Tigers. How do I get them from one cable/satellite/online provider? I can’t.
That’s my choice, and that’s what the Dodger deal will cost me.
Another annoying trend of news sites these days is finding tricky ways to get you to click on sponsored links … and get paid for tricking you.
I appreciate that journalists need to get paid, I truly do. However, publishers need to pay them using revenue from real journalistic work … not thinly disguised ploys to get you to click on sponsored content. In some cases, sponsored content is almost impossible to discern from normal content. That is always a case of a publisher getting greedy – they are willing to sully their brand by associating with poor content, all in the name of getting your click. That’s just bad curation … like we see here:
1. Don’t read “Around The Web” sections. These are mass-produced articles … made to get you interested enough to click through. When you do, you’ll find almost no content, surrounded by ads.
I was reading about the inauguration of President Wilson in The Atlantic … and these are the ads that accompanied that historical article on my computer. For the record, I don’t drink wine, I don’t buy bikinis, I don’t have a fuel efficient car and I am not looking for a job. The Rockler ad makes sense … but I’m not interested in any of the pictured products. All in all, an advertising FAIL.
2. Don’t read Facebook’s “answer 10 questions and find out what kind of a _________ you are.” Or find out where you belong. Or what character you are like. These are simple things, yes, but they are asking you to spend time answering a survey to find out what some faceless dweeb has determined that your answers qualify you to be. No thank you.
3. Don’t read anything on Facebook that’s sourced from BuzzFeed. Or Thrillist. See # 1. Solution: click on the carrot in the upper right hand corner of an offending story, and select “Hide everything from BuzzFeed,” and Facebook will remove it from your feed, permanently.
This is exactly the kind of FB advertiser I’m talking about. I don’t know who Mike the copywriter is … but I’m pretty sure this isn’t his picture.
4. I respect Facebook advertisers … but those idiots that pair their message with a picture of a pretty young lady that has nothing to do with their product (like a “start a new career with woodworking” site I saw this week) are beneath contempt.
5. “You Might Also Like” … no, no, I won’t. This so-called feature runs below news and sports stories on several sites. In light gray type to the right of that headline, you’ll see “Promoted Content By Taboola.” This is simply pay-for-play from all of these “news” sources. The content is not good, no matter how interesting the pictures and how intriguing the headlines.
6. Bleacher Report, one of my sports sites, has a habit of producing stories that gather quick summaries on just about any topic, and then packages them for every team in the league. Or every team in college football. Or every Top 25 team. Whatever. In each case, the coverage is brief, to be kind, and the result is you click though 10 or 15 or 25 pages just to find a small nugget of information on the 2 or 3 teams or players that you’re interested in. Waste. Of. My. Time.
7. Here’s my new rule of thumb with Facebook videos. When a friend shares them, I check out the displayed link. If I am familiar with the website, I may click through. If I don’t know the website … I probably won’t click, unless my friend explains why I should in their post. But I probably won’t click if I don’t know the host site … because it’s probably another “pay for click” type presentation, and I just don’t have time to watch another cute animal video. Or see what the policeman’s dance moves are like during Mardi Gras.
8. Pop-overs & pop-unders are those annoying new web pages that open on your browser without warning when you enter or exit a site. The former opens on top of the content you’re trying to read and is, of course, the most annoying and the highest compensated by the annoying insurance and home loan companies that seem to always buy them. The pop-unders are actually more insidious, as you often don’t know the source of the ad … you don’t even see it until you start closing down your browser. There’s only one solution: close them quickly & don’t support the sponsors’ annoying marketing practices with your business.
I’m probably getting my curmudgeon on here. Sorry about that.
Simply, I don’t have time to wade through all of the low-quality content attempting to masquerade as journalism … I have little enough time for the good stuff.
It was 10 years ago, and it changed The Game forever.
It only lasted 9/16 of a second, but in an era before Facebook (!) and before DVRs were standard fare in American homes, what became known as The Wardrobe Malfunction became the most watched and re-watched event in the history of TiVo.
35,000 more people signed up for TiVo immediately after The Game.
Justin Timberlake actually coined the term, “Wardrobe Malfunction,” which just missed becoming the word of the year, according to the American Dialect Society (they wisely chose red state, blue state instead).
Superbowl XXXVIII was on CBS that year, and the NFL had hired MTV to stage the halftime show. During the show, Justin Timberlake sang Rock Your Body from his first solo album … and while singing “gonna have you naked by the end of this song,” he reached over and ripped part of Janet Jackson’s bustier away to reveal her right breast.
America was stunned. I remember standing in my living room and thinking, “What did I just see?” That’s what happened at Superbowl parties all across the country. What did we just see?
There was a congressional investigation into what we saw, why we saw it … and how to keep it from happening again. Congress reached a bi-partisan agreement (back when that was still possible), and promptly raised the indecency fines that could be levied by the FCC from $32,500 per incident to $325,000 per incident.
Eventually, CBS (who could have been fined for every single television station that aired the offensive 9/16 of a second) settled and paid $550,000.
The NFL banned MTV from producing future halftime shows. After this cultural, uh, low point, here are the featured performers since:
2005 – Paul McCartney
2006 – The Rolling Stones
2007 – Prince
2008 – Tom Petty & The Heartbrakers
2009 – Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band
2010 – The Who
2011 – The Black Eyed Peas, Usher, Slash
2012 – Madonna, Nicki Minaj, MIA, Cee Lo Green
2013 – Beyonce, Destiny’s Child
2014 – Bruno Mars, Red Hot Chili Peppers
As you can see, it was six years before the NFL allowed a female to be a lead performer at the Superbowl halftime show again. Because, clearly, it was all Janet’s fault.
So, what really happened? Conspiracy theorists love questions like this.
Apparently, Timberlake and Jackson conspired and then agreed to do the bustier rip-a-way without rehearsal. Without telling the producers. Without telling anyone. Maybe it was their intent to rip away the leather and leave some red lace covering Jackson’s skin (which prompted the creation of the term “Wardrobe Malfunction”). Maybe this was just out of control attention-grabbing by Pop stars that went too far on a national stage without supervision. To this day, Timberlake won’t discuss what happened. Jackson won’t comment on it any more, either.
Read the ESPN article below for an exhaustive account, with some revealing pictures.
Just don’t look at them longer than 9/16 of a second.
I seem to have lost my way. Perhaps I no longer understand what sportsmanship is in today’s culture, as we approach Superbowl XLVIII.
Robert Sherman’s postgame interview after his team won the NFC Championship became something as a sensation, as this amped-up, child of the inner city and Stanford graduate became a cause celebre. Here’s his confusing interview that made him one of the top stories heading into the Superbowl.
Want more? He’ll have another interview with Erin Andrews, airing in the “5-6 hour” of pre-game Superbowl coverage. When is that? No idea, but that’s what ESPN told me last night in a pre-game promo interview.
Sportsmanship is considered old fashioned in some circles … but is there anything wrong with shaking hands with a competitor after the game?
The second strike against my believing I understand today’s media is from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This bastion of old school journalism has hired a hater … called The Hater … whose job is to hate for his readers. Just in case they can’t find enough things to hate in the sports world without him. Here is what they say:
In the city that’s too busy to hate, but where our most-cherished rivalry is considered “clean, old-fashioned hate,” let The Hater find the latest in sports that just needed to be hated on.
I never knew that I needed people to hate for me. Thank goodness old media is leaping into that breach.
Finally, I subscribe to the RSS feed of Bruins Nation. This week, I was banned from commenting on the board because I disagreed with the opinion of one of their authors. This author was incessantly attacking the UCLA basketball coach – incessantly. This coach, new to UCLA, came in with a regrettable past, but he’s contracted to be the coach for 7 years. The author takes total exception to this situation, and blogs about his lack of desire to even watch UCLA basketball games. Remember how he’s a blogger on a sports blog? Here’s what I said:
When a sports journalist blogger thinks that not watching games qualifies him to comment on the game, it’s time for a re-evaluation. As much as I agree with some … SOME … of what you write, this is the last column of yours that I will read.
Endless whining is not effective commentary. I suggest you get a new hobby, since you don’t like watching basketball anymore.
I was immediately banned from the blog, insulted publicly and repeatedly, and thrown under the bus for not hating the coach like the author does.
Apparently I don’t always understand sports reporters.
There’s a new radio station that’s trying a new format: all of the hits, edited to two minutes in length. They can play 25 songs an hour and still have time for commercials & such. More music ever hour! Well, no, it’s really just more songs every hour.
Because we don’t have time to listen to the whole song.
You won’t have any trouble streaming the Catching Fire soundtrack today … even though you can’t buy the “album” until the “official release” on 11/19/13.
Just like we don’t have time to listen to the whole album … in fact, the album is dying. As the article from Variety attests (link below), it’s not that the album is dead already. Not really. But it has surely been mortally wounded by the iPod and the return of the single as the only thing most consumers will buy. The idea that we want to listen to a band’s 45 minute work of art is now seen as … quaint. Old fashioned.
Most people don’t bother to buy albums: they buy individual tracks from iTunes. They listen to music from radio, or from a streaming service like Spotify or Pandora. The idea that pop music artists have to create a multi-track body of work, and then release it in a group of ten or twelve tracks doesn’t embrace the realities of today’s marketplace. As Brad Hill points out in Friday’s RAIN (link below), the concept of an album has gotten a lot fuzzier with the introduction of digital releases that are not driven by a single piece of vinyl or plastic.
This is the album cover for The Who’s Tommy, released in 1969. The movie soundtrack – with performances by Eric Clapton, Elton John, Tina Turner, Jack Nicholson and Ann-Margaret, followed in 1975.
Rock & Roll developed with bands that “made it” getting to do a concept album, like The Who’s Tommy that spawned a movie. There is no equivalent to that kind of artistic commitment in today’s marketplace … record labels won’t fund it. Bands won’t fund it.
Will consumers buy it? We won’t know until someone decides they need to follow their muse and fulfill their artistic vision – a vision that cannot be fully realized in one 2-and-a-half minute song.
There’s nothing wrong with just playing the hits. It will be interesting, though, to see if long-form music will make a retail come back and again become a part of consumers’ listening habits.
Why was it so incredible? Because radio is theater of the mind. With a minimal amount of information – a soundtrack – your mind fills in the blanks to visualize what must be happening. And that is exactly what happened on October 30, 1938 … and it made people quake in fear.
It’s a classic science fiction story by HG Wells, written in 1898, introduced the idea of an alien invasion into British literature. Orson Welles took that idea, and ran with it to create the radio show that literally sent its listeners running into the streets in terror. His Mercury Theatre produced a radio drama with disclaimers before and after the performance that the told the audience that the show was a fiction; that there was nothing to fear.
It’s estimated that 6 million people listened to that original broadcast on WCBS-AM and the Columbia Broadcasting System network. The next morning, their reaction was on the front page of every major newspaper in the United States. A somewhat contrary view is espoused by Slate.com, link below … but there is no contesting that this radio event is the most famous single broadcast in radio history.
