(keitai-l) Re: imode JP news in English 2006

From: Michael(tm) Smith <smith_at_xml-doc.org>
Date: 12/28/05
Message-ID: <20051228060545.GA26461@sideshowbarker.net>
Nick May <nick@kyushu.com> writes:

> On 28 Dec 2005, at 01:28, Michael(tm) Smith wrote:
> 
> > Or how about the Guardian[1]?
> >
> >   [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian
> >
> > That Guardian has been the winner for six years in a row of the
> > British Newspaper Awards for Best Daily Newspaper on the World
> > Wide Web.
> 
> ... and the site loses money hand over fist,

Care to cite some source for that info? Provide any real data? I
have a hard time quantifying "hand over fist".

> and the company is  losing money (I think),

You "think"?

> or at least - not doing terribly well - on  the newspaper side
> of things.

I also have a hard time quantifying "not doing terribly well".

> The Times, The Indie and the Telegraph  have all moved to a "pay
> for some content" model.

Exactly what is the "some" content that they charge for? Certainly
not their main daily news content, which is what I thought we had
all been discussing up to this point. 

> Even the Graun has  "paid" access methods.

The fact that it has such does not seem relevant at all to whether
they are charging a fee for users to read their main daily news
content.

> High quality journalism is seriously expensive. Keitai suffer
> from lack of screen real estate on which to put ads

Really? Is the screen size really that much of a liability when it
comes to advertising? Do you have any data on that?

I could imagine that a study with real users might just show that
the screen size helps to give the ads even greater prominence.

In a keitai browser the ads are in a single column, and I must
scroll through them to get to the content I want to read.

In a PC-based browser, it is much easier for me to miss and ignore
ads, because they're typically placed in the left and right
columns and top and bottom of the page -- parts of the page that I
(and I think most other users) have now grown accustomed to simply
ignoring.

When viewing pages in a mobile browser, I find the ads pretty hard
to miss or ignore. I'm certain that I'm more likely to remember
them when viewing them on a page in a keitai browser than I am
when viewing exactly the same page in a PC-based browser, where
the ads are typically in page parts that I reflexively ignore.

> and the like making a  business model for a keitai-only site
> rather difficult.

So who was talking about making a businees model for a keitai-only
site? What I had pointed out was that users now have full browsers
with which they can view the exact same sites they can view on
their PC-based browsers.

> In fact there are very few "web only" general news sites that deliver  
> high quality news reports that is other than a re-write of agency  
> reports, or a rewrite of other "real news organisation's" reports.

So who was talking about "web only" general news sites? Not me,
that's for sure.

The two sites I mentioned and the ones you mention above are not
"web only" news sources. They are the online arms of "real news
organizations", not secondary sources. 

  --Mike

-- 
Michael(tm) Smith
http://tokyo.metblogs.com/
http://sideshowbarker.net/
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/890
Received on Wed Dec 28 08:06:42 2005