Week of July 9, 2007

Even Old Online Communities Are Threatened

Friday, July 13, 2007

We often talk about how it is important for traditional media to move online and create a place for their fans to gather. This is the essence of social networking: Creating a gathering place online for people who gather offline. The longer companies wait to do this, the more likely it is that an upstart online company will fill the void for you.

A perfect indication of the need to move quickly is the recent launch and angel funding of Chesspark.com. Chess is one of the few sports with a massive amount of online usage and interaction. Most of the online chess community is centered around the free freechess.org site and gameplay server and the similar paid chessclub.com site and server. You would expect that online communities like these two would be at the forefront of moving into a more robust social network. You would be wrong.

So embrace online community, because if you don't, someone else will.

No Relief For Webcasters

Thursday, July 12, 2007

The Federal Appeals Court has declined to give webcasters a stay on the upcoming increase in royalties, meaning that the new fees kick in Sunday. This doesn't mean that the appeal is dead, however, just that the emergency stay was not granted. The appeals process will continue into the rest of this year.

MySpace holding its own versus Facebook

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Facebook is getting all the press and certainly getting plaudits for opening it platform up, but how is that translating to new accounts and users? Well, very well. And how is MySpace doing in the face of this? Well, they're doing very well, too. But the interesting story is in page views. MySpace always had a system where it generated a lot of pageviews, so its gain is no surprise, but take a look at Facebook--they've LOST page views. This may be due to better technology not showing page view changes (see yesterday's PMG Trends), but it is still startling.

Here are the ratings data:
MySpace, May to June user gains: 1.6 million
Facebook, May to June user gains: 1.3 million
MySpace, May to June page views gain: 2 billion
Facebook, May to June page views loss: 1.1 billion

Nielsen Changes The Rules Of The Online Ratings Game

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

We tipped readers of our New Media Landscape report off to this way back in January, but it's finally coming to pass: Nielsen will now rank websites based on time spent browsing, as opposed to page views. The core reason behind the death of the page view is that new technologies allow users to update parts of the page without a full refresh, making multiple views of one page look like a single page view.

This is receiving some real negative press from the online world, who are used to the faithful metric of page views and the possibility that sites with heavy traffic and very little "stickiness" will get harshly penalized.

Last.fm Signs Up SonyBMG

Monday, July 09, 2007

While Last.fm has gotten a lot of press for its social discovery of new music for consumers, it's service has been crippled by the inability to stream music from half of the major record labels. Well, with the announcement today that SonyBMG is on board, Last.fm only has Universal holding out music rights. It's still a tough situation for Last.fm, as Universal has a huge number of artists in its catalog, but moving one step closer to giving its users complete access to their favorite music is good news for the company.