Week of August 21, 2006

AOL Joins the Video Space

Friday, August 25, 2006

AOL has announced an agreement with all the major motion picture companies to distribute content via its video.aol.com site. The downloads will all be download to own, with no rent option, which you can find at sites like CinemaNow. Television downloads are also on the horizon for AOL.

The Value of Youth to Mobile

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Here are the figures for the UK as to how much money a person each demographic will spend on mobile in their lifetime:

• Age 10 $27,996
• Age 15 $27,198
• Age 35 $13,368
• Age 50 $5,364

Clearly, building brand identity with the 15 year old and up crowd is crucial to tapping that $27K in mobile expenditures.

The report has a lot of other interesting findings, and I highly recommend you check it out

Mobile Users Most Interested In Streaming Audio

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Digital communications researchers In-Stat (www.in-stat.com) have released a new study on the adoption and future of media in cell phones. They predict modest growth in video usage via cell phones (14.2% of respondents were tagged as likely to adopt mobile video), but the overall numbers are still large when you consider mobile penetration in the United States.

The interesting part of the study was on mobile audio. Streaming audio holds the most interest with consumers. In-Stat analyst David Chamberlain stated in the report: "Streaming music, which could be marketed like satellite radio services, such as XM and Sirius, holds the most interest of all mobile multimedia for consumers, and it may be easier to deliver than video."

Can you monetize a station blog?

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Well, Business 2.0 just did an analysis of blogs making very real money on the web. As noted on the GigaOm website:

The story keeps its eye on the money, pegging Gawker's revenue at $3 million this year, Boing Boing and paidContent at more than $1 million per year, with TechCrunch making $60,000 per month (making an additional $50,000 from sponsors at that party last Friday) and Fark "soon" making $600,000 to $800,000 per month.

Note that this revenue is solely from advertising done via blog traffic. Considering that major market radio stations could conceivably push traffic to more than the levels seen at TechCrunch and Fark, there is certainly money to be made via station blogs.

Google, Web 2.0 Slayer

Monday, August 21, 2006

Some of the more exciting developments in the Web 2.0 world over the past year have involved custom web programming called AJAX and the applications derived from it. Some high profile Web 2.0 start-ups based their business models on creating web applications of desktop versions, including calendaring, word processing, e-mail, and other office-oriented programs.

But this strategy has hit a major snag, and its name is Google. Via internal development (G-Mail, Google Calendar, etc.) and purchases (Writely), Google has quickly squashed the hopes of several Web 2.0 high-flyers. The latest example is Kiko, a web calendaring company that, in the face of the release of Google Calendar, just put itself up for sale on E-Bay.

With practically everyone expecting Google to roll out a comprehensive web office suite, it is only a matter of time before Web 2.0 darlings in the presentation, database, and other spaces find that being first to release means little when faced with "Google Office."