business model

Advertising, paywall or a bit of both?

May 21, 2013

GigaOM posted the audio to a fascinating session at last month’s paidContent Live conference. In it, there’s a great insight/throw down by Bob Bowman, CEO of MLB, Advanced Media. Right around the 15-minute mark Bob calls those that read metered sites such as nytimes.com without subscribing, rooting around their 25 articles/month limit are, “professional freeloaders” of [...]

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Unbundled Lectures and the Napsterization of Education

November 18, 2012

In the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it’s a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it. And if some of the hostages having trouble coming up with the ransom conclude that our current system is a completely terrible idea, then [...]

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The Customer is God

August 3, 2012

I am a bit surprised that there was not more buzz around Doc Searls’ recent article, The Customer is God, where he re-hashed his argument for a new world of merchant/customer relationship that he has been noodling on for the past several years. Since the Industrial Revolution, the only way a company could scale up [...]

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Is Next Issue the Spotify for Magazines?

July 11, 2012

Over the weekend I posted a question wondering why no one has done what Spotify has done for music and Netflix for movies. The fact that no one has stepped in to offer a bundled subscription for another “old media” type, the magazine & newspaper, seemed like an opportunity to me that made economic sense. Yesterday, [...]

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Subscription Bundles

July 7, 2012

Very interesting experiment over at the Chicago Tribune. The Chicago Tribune will at last begin charging for its online content through an innovative scheme that will also give readers access to a premium package of third party content, the newspaper has told paidContent. Under the plan, readers will see selections from the Economist and Forbes [...]

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