In a discussion/promotion for his business at LinkedIn, Mike Nobels writes that Facebook users spend a total of 5 billion minutes there every day.
That’s 9.5 people-years per day spent on Facebook. I don’t know the source of his information and I haven’t bothered to look at how many people use it; I don’t know the average time spent per user. I don’t even know why this is meaningful.
But it amazes me nonetheless.
Anyone living through the media meltdown will enjoy this clever 9-minute rewrite of the old Don McLean anthem.
At the time, he was talking about the fast advent of TV. But if you want to see the truth of his statement in action, you’re already in the right place: online.
There are at least dozens more kinds of electronic media where you can place your messages. I know people who market themselves online using all of the above media and more. But if you want to get people to pay attention to what you’re writing, you can’t just cut and paste your blog post onto Facebook and Twitter and Squidoo, etc.
In some cases, there are limitations such Twitter’s infamous 140-character limit. In all, there is the simple and unarguable feedback from the market. If you do it right, people will pay attention. If you do it wrong, they won’t.
Doing it right means integrating strengths, weaknesses and peculiarities of the medium into whatever it is that you’re writing, videotaping, podcasting, etc. If you want to give a lecture, don’t bother putting it on YouTube unless you have strong visuals to go with it. And don’t simply post the transcript of your lecture as a blog if you want anyone to say anything nice about it.
Today, as newspapers face their toughest economic environment ever, they’re trying to figure out how to get people to pay for content online. When I ask people about this, the usual response is that they aren’t sure they’d find an electronic newspaper to be worth reading, let alone paying for.
But they’re imposing their view of newspapers as a print medium on the coming reality of newspapers online.
To be sure, some publishers will make a mess of it. They’ll try to do exactly what they’re doing now — but without the paper costs. And they’ll fail.
Others will figure it out. The paper of the future may provide headlines to your cellphone in the morning, with updates all day. On a Smartphone, the headlines may link to the full story. You may have the choice whether you want to get one section (world news, for instance) in-depth, and another (perhaps sports) on only a cursory basis. The website might offer configuration and search tools, letting you scan for all articles containing a specific keyword, or filter out stories from the opposite side of town. It could give you Tweets as news breaks, video clips of big events, or full context about ongoing, longterm stories. It may led you contribute news in the form of short video and photos. You might be able to read it on a Kindle, on screen or hear it through your ipod. And somewhere in there, they’ll figure out how to not only collect a critical mass of paid subscribers, they’ll also figure out how to serve advertisers.
In other words, newspapers will survive. But they won’t look like they do today, and they won’t DO what they do today either, because they’ll come to us not just through the same old medium, but through a Dagwood sandwich of media.
So McLuhan’s old saw really is more important than ever. When he wrote it, he was dealing with print, TV and radio. Today, because the medium is the message, it means the message changes many times a day depending on where you happen to be when you choose to accept it.
From ContentNext, with link to same
Warning: If you have more than 20 years already invested in your career, this is going to make you very tired and at least a little bit scared. Here, from ContentNext.com are 10 young entrepreneurs to watch. By young, they mean really young — no older than their 20s.
What’s most instructive and startling is the transformational nature of what these kid are doing. Their businesses are, largely, based on ideas that couldn’t even have existed 5 or 10 years ago.
If you have any questions about the power of the Internet to foster change; or if you have any doubt that the next generation does things very differently than you’re used to, then you ought to spend 10 minutes scanning this article. Then resist the temptation to take a nap.
According to a consortium of advertising agencies, ad budgets are down this year. Who woulda thunk?
Seriously, according to B2B, a survey of 40 ICOM agency members indicated that more than half the agencies have seen client budgets drop at least 21% this year.
That seems to have translated directly to the magazine sector. The Seybold Report cites data that consumer magazine pages were down 25 percent in Q1, with a corresponding decline in “rate card revenue” (that is: it’s just a calculation) of more than 20 percent.
According to the Magazine Publishers of America, this is just more of the same; pages were down about 12 percent in 2008. And various reports put them flat or down slightly in ’07. So this isn’t just about the recession.
According to Seybold, more than half the respondents to the ICOM survey agreed with this statement: “Budget cuts and new challenges have served as catalysts for clients to come up with new ideas and experimentation to market their products.”
Again, this isn’t just about the recession. This is about businesses deciding that their marketing departments can and should play the role of publisher.
I started observing this bypass about 10 years ago, as my biggest and most sophisticated advertisers literally started publishing their own magazines. Since then, it’s become easier and less expensive; today you can become a publisher with a website, a blogger and some folks who are really good with Facebook and Twitter.
Is it possible to have two deja vus at the same time? Or is that simply schizophrenia?
According to Venturebeat, Facebook is raising money to buy back stock from its employees. It hopes to borrow $150 million to buy back 15 million shares at $10 each. These shares have been given to employees of the private company 
over the past few years, and those employees have the right to sell up to 20% of their holdings, according to the article.
And now that the market for IPOs is so rotten, this is apparently the only way the company can help them cash in anytime soon.
That’s where the first case of deja vu comes in. Just 10 years ago, during the first Internet boom, people couldn’t cash in quickly enough on their foundation-free stock. Yes, Facebook has an astounding number of users, but I’m not so sure about its business plan. The company will undoubtedly go public some day, but I simply don’t believe it’s monetizable to the same extent as Amazon, eBay and Google.
Facebook really has only one asset: a bigazillion eyeballs. Which is impressive in itself, and there ought to be a way to make money from it. But with ad markets drying up and Facebook’s genuine incompetence when it comes to figuring out how to let businesses participate in a way justifies their spending money, I don’t know what the company is going to do to pay back this next $150 million that it borrows — let alone the previous $460 million it’s raised, according to PaidContent.org.
Facebook is undoubtedly an 800-pound gorilla in the white-hot social networking arena. But there were scores of 800-pound gorillas a decade ago, whose names I can no longer recall, that went bust because they couldn’t figure out how to turn eyeballs into cash.
I’m not predicting Facebook is going to go under anytime soon. In fact, I’m sure it will be around to cash in on an improved IPO market sometime next year. But if I were an employee and could get $10 a share for stock that I hadn’t paid for, I would sell as much as I was allowed at the first possible moment.
Here’s another deja vu-inducing part of the story: Facebook can’t get the money from its usual investors, so according to the reports already cited above, some portion of the money is coming from Asia. I remember when Japanese investors bought (and overpaid for) Rockefeller Center in the late ’80s. At the time, it was assumed to be a disheartening sign that U.S. economic dominance was ending.
It’s clear to me that, no matter how strong and innovative the U.S. may be, the world is becoming a more competitive place; any perception that we are falling probably has more to do with the fact that others are rising. Still, do we need to make it easy for them?
It’s always bothered me when people complain that we’re losing our mojo as a world power, but they don’t seem to make a conneciton between that observation and our willingness to let Asia — China in particular — lend us the money to finance our foreign wars and deficit spending.
If China comes to own a third or more of Facebook, do you think these people will notice? Do you think they’ll care?
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