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Don’t write off Murdoch’s paid iPad newspaper quite yet

Eight months after News Corp. launched the iPad only newspaper The Daily, some observers are claiming that – with only 80,000 paid subscribers – it isn’t doing very well. There are another 40,000 people currently on a free trial, according to reports.

At the time of its launch, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch – who may be the world’s most aggressive evangelist for the concept of people actually paying for digital content – said he would consider The Daily to be successful when it has 500,000 subscribers.

Assuming The Daily maintains its average of 10,000 new subscribers per month, that puts it at its defined level of success in another 42 months – less than five years from startup.

For a big-deal project that utilizes new technology and depends on changing some of the most basic behaviors of its intended audience, that doesn’t sound like a bad ramp-up to me.

USA Today took far longer to become successful. Facebook became bigger faster, but it has never charged users and it took at least as long for the company to deploy a meaningful business model. Netflix expected to LOSE nearly 600,000 subscribers in 2011’s Q3 – simply because it removed DVD service as a cheap add-on for its paid digital (streamed) content. Compared to these, The Daily appears to be moving toward its goals very nicely.

The Daily also hasn’t expanded beyond the iPad platform, which has limited potential subscribers. If/when it’s made available for Droid devices and the new generation of e-readers, I expect that paid subscriptions will begin to increase beyond an average of 10,000 per month. By the time it has 250,000 or so subscribers, enough people will hear about The Daily in the course of their ordinary comings and goings that it will also pass a threshold of importance for a whole new audience of people who, at this moment, still refuse to spend money on a digital subscription.

Over time, the notion of paying for digital content will become normal; at that point, many of the media that are waiting for The Daily to fail will begin to benefit from the expensive groundwork that Murdoch’s company has chosen to undertake. They too will begin charging for their content; they too will struggle until reaching a level of critical mass. But they’ll have the luxury of doing that work without the scrutiny that The Daily is receiving now.

I’m saying all this without ever having read The Daily, as I’m not an iPad user. Perhaps it’s not a great product. Perhaps even people within News Corp. are disappointed that The Daily has just 80,000 paid subscriptions.

But I’ve learned over time that the toughest sell is the one that requires prospective buyers to change their behavior before spending money. At that, it sounds to me like The Daily is already successful.

The choice to be a tiger mother

I admire Lance Armstrong; he is an amazing athlete with an iron will. But I wouldn’t want to be like him. I wouldn’t make the sacrifices he was willing to make along the way.

That’s the truth: People like Lance Armstrong choose to go all-in. Most of us choose otherwise.

Amy Chua went all-in. Her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, has attracted widespread disapproval. And venomous response. And death threats.

She is a Yale law professor and author of (now) three books. Her parenting style can best be described as uncompromisingly tough. It included rejecting her daughters’ homemade birthday cards because they weren’t good enough; demanding straight A’s; refusing to allow her daughters on play dates and sleepovers; making them play a piano piece to perfection before being allowed to go to the bathroom.

I am not the parent that Amy Chua is. I have chosen to be more permissive and indulgent with my children. So far, I’m glad to report, they seem to be turning out just fine – even if I have an uneasy feeling that Chua’s kids are likely to have a higher career trajectory than mine.

Why did I chose not to be more like a Tiger Mother? Let’s be honest: I didn’t want to work that hard. There are other ways to justify it, but why bother?

That’s probably why people are having such a strong reaction to her and her book. It plays into Americans’ anxiety that we are being eclipsed; it seems to affirm our most secret fear that this isn’t happening due to circumstances beyond our control, but because we’re soft and lazy.

I suspect those who wish Chua harm are most upset by the fact that they too could have aspired for their children to be exceptional. But they chose not to.

For them, Chua’s parenting isn’t upsetting as much as it is threatening.

Why the URL is less important every day

I remember reading, in the early days of the Web, how large companies were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase meaningful URLs. For instance, McDonald’s wasn’t the first owner of www.mcdonalds.com.

About 9 years, ago, I tried to sell a URL that I was abandoning. I found a broker who promised to auction it off, estimating that it might be worth $15-20 thousand. The bubble burst, the auction never happened, and the URL simply expired — sitting unused until sometime in the past year when another company started using it.

The URL remains a most important locator for online information. But the importance of branding a URL — or of obtaining a URL that perfectly matches your brand — is declining.

Jonathan Richman at iMedia Connection offers 4 technologies that are responsible for its declining importance.

They are:

Search engines: The power of search is well-known. More people find websites through search than by typing in the URL;

Browsers: New-generation browsers like Google Chrome and Firefox skip the need for going to a search engine; just type a search term in the address box and they deliver search results;

URL shortening: Sites like Twitter, with strict limitations on size, force URLs to be shortened dramatically. Tools like TinyURL and Bit.ly exist to do this. Which means the URL for this page, as an example goes from https://themarketfarm.com/themarketfarm/wordpress/2009/09/08/why-the-url-is-less-important-every-day/ to http://tinyurl.com/nq6d2y — which is pretty efficient, except any unique branding disappears.

The QR code: Popular in Asia and Europe, you take a picture of the QR code on your smart phone, and it will take you directly to the related website.

Overlooked in Richman’s blog, which is more detailed and well worth reading, is a fifth technology of social networking. More and more businesses are using Facebook, Twitter and other sites to attract audience; these work based on the names of companies and communities — not web addresses. So the brand of the company once again becomes more important than the brand of its URL.

The ultimate point, though, is that if you have a URL you like, don’t spend too much to brand it. And if you have a URL you don’t like, you can work around it.

Pandora radio: maybe the best thing the ‘net has ever offered

After hearing about Pandora.com for months, I just loaded it on my Blackberry. And then on my laptop.

Pandora is internet radio; you pick an artist or song that you like and it builds a station of music with similar qualities. If it plays a song you don’t like, a click on the thumbs-down icon helps Pandora refine what it plays for you.

I’ve never used an application that loaded any easier or was more intuitive to start up. Over the course of a 45-minute drive in which I was the passenger, I loaded it, got familiar with the controls and set up about 15 stations — all of which play music that I could listen to all day. When I got to my laptop, I loaded the application in less than a minute, then typed in my password, and got to precisely where I’d left off on the Blackberry.

With a $6 cable from Radio Shack, you can plug the Blackberry (or iPhone) into the utility port of a car radio or a set of powered speakers.

Which means that with no learning curve, and for the cost of my cell phone data plan — which I was already paying — I can have the best of all musical worlds (mental note: start a new Pandora station around Candide or Leonard Bernstein).

It’s better than my iPod, because I don’t have to select each song and be my own DJ.

It’s way better than Sirius/XM because the channels I create are better focused than anything satellite radio offers; and I don’t have to pay the $6.99-$12.99/month subscription fee.

I don’t think Pandora is going to hurt the sale of MP3 players; most of them do more now than simply play music files.

But Pandora is everything that Sirius/XM could hope to be — yet easier, better and cheaper. It is the ultimate disruptive technology; it delivers radio at no cost, using technology that lots of people already possess, and it strikes a magical balance between doing all the work and giving the user control.

Last I heard, Sirius/XM was losing more than 100,000 customers a month. I can’t imagine that pace has continued. But I’m guessing the downward trend has. And with its dependence on expensive space-based satellites and human-programmed channels, satellite radio is a precarious business model that has yet to make money.

In Greek mythology, Pandora carried a magical box that contained all things harmful to humans — disease, fear, unhappiness, etc. Zeus instructed her not to open it, but when her curiosity got the best of her, she spilled its contents into the world and upon mankind.

To most of us, this Pandora is a welcome innovation. But to Sirius/XM — and broadcast radio over time — Pandora and the others that will inevitably follow it must look like the thunder from Olympus itself.

With all our communication channels, face-to-face is still king

BtoBOnline.com reports on a study from Forbes Insights that executives still strongly prefer in-person meetings over web-meetings or other virtual get-togethers.

I couldn’t find the study myself and no link was provided, so I’m taking everything that BtoB reports on it as my only source and at face value.

According to the the study out of 760 business executives surveyed in June:

84% prefer in-person contact to virtual;
85% said it helps them build stronger relationships;
77% said it provides a greater opportunity to read another person;
Still, 58% said they travel less for business now than in January 2008.

All of which strikes me as obvious.

Face-to-face contact will always be the highest form of human interaction, and nothing replaces it.
The question is NEVER whether it would be better to have a face-to-face meeting. The question is always whether the circumstances justify the cost/inconvenience.

At any given time, a video chat or Webex presentation might accomplish the immediate goal, but don’t ever confuse that with being just as good as a personal meeting.

Happy anniversary Hawaii

50 years ago today — Aug. 21, 1959 — Hawaii became the 50th state. My personal thanks to Hawaii for providing us with surfing, luaus, the IronMan Triathlon, Israel Kamakawiwo’ole (Iz: Somewhere Over the Rainbow), Barack Obama and, of course, the state fish: humuhumunukunuku’apua’a, which looks like this:

The new phone books have arrived and been duly discarded

Two large, orange bags just appeared on my front porch the other day. Each contained several pounds of phone books. There was the Yellow Pages, the White Pages, the Business-to-Business Yellow Pages and the Yellow Pages Supplement. Two complete sets of them.

Without taking them out of the bag, I put them on the curb for recycling.

“Hello, AT&T? It’s Alexander Graham Bell calling and he wants his business model back.”

Seriously, this is just one of at least three sets of phone directories I’ll receive this year. Two other companies produce similar volumes of phone books and surreptitiously drop them at my front door at various times during the year.

It’s been about five years since I’ve even opened a phone book.

In every industry I know, printed directories are disappearing faster than money from the cash-for-clunkers program. For the companies that produce them, printed phone books are like crack; they’re addicted to the revenue, but it’s not doing anyone any good. The effort to keep phone books alive is distracting their publishers from the need to find a more useful business. And you don’t have to be a tree-hugger to cringe at the tremendous waste in resources these unwanted products represent.

OK, I confess that having a residential phone book is a small comfort (though I still don’t remember the last time I used one). But if you’re running a business I wouldn’t spend much on Yellow Pages advertising. No matter how small or local the business might be, your resources would be better spent building an affordable little website and making sure it’s listed on every free online directory you can find.

A thought on leadership

Team Blue Thunder, rally in progress

I’m coaching my son’s youth baseball team. I’ve found that leading a group of 11-year-old boys is pretty much the same as leading a group of adult professionals.

In both cases, the job involves:

keeping them focused
keeping them motivated
removing roadblocks to allow them to remain productive
assigning each individual a role that benefits the entire team while complementing that person’s skills, interests and style.

Finally, here’s a quote on leadership, with which I wholeheartedly agree, that’s attributed to the book, The Four Agreements: A practical guide to personal freedom:

“The primal responsibility of leadership is to prime good feeling in the people we lead.”

How does one do that other than by helping them fill a role they enjoy, and then helping them to stay motivated, focused and productive?

OK, there may be one difference between adults and kids: Adults aren’t as motivated by the promise of pretzels and a juice pouch.