Author Archive for silent

Is advertising-supported the magic potion?

Published by
silent
at March 27, 2008 in General. 1 

At the recent Future of Web Apps, Kevin Rose, founder of Digg and Pownce blessed us with his thoughts from open standards to Digg’s future.

What caught my attention was:

Are you concerned that if economic conditions get tougher and the ad market tightens up, that you’ll feel forced to sell?

Rose: Digg has 25 million people a month coming to the Web site. We’re not going anywhere. We have very strong financials, we have a very clear path to profitability, we have a small team. We’re 50 employees.

That’s Morse code for “We are not profitable now”.

Markus Frind, CEO of Plentyoffish.com, who is famous for raking in millions on the back of Google Adsense, one known official full-time employee and maybe 2 hours of work per week, recently blogged about his rough estimate on the running operational cost for Digg to be around USD$ 420k per month. Markus was also highlighted that Digg is nothing more than a collection of links to news stories that are indexed by Google – i.e. not as bandwidth intensive as media serving sites.

This got me worrying.

Digg teamed up with Microsoft in Advertising in 2H2007. The combined factor of an exclusive provider of display and contextual advertising deal with the timing when Microsoft was desperately searching for partners to extend their advertising empire means Digg probably got a great deal (Yes, I am speculating here). If under those circumstances, Digg is still on a very clear path to profitability, are advertising-only-supported web businesses sustainable?

What about sites like MuSMo who are expected to be rather bandwidth intensive? Are we doomed?

Or worse, what about sites such as Last.fm who are shouldering the burden of not just the high bandwidth cost but also the content licensing cost? Or are such sites, in general attractive acquisitions for mega companies such as CBS who can fund these projects under loss-leadership.

And content providers, do you really care? On the recent blog entry of David Porter who guess-timated the new internet radio royalty to be around 78% – David showed that the math doesn’t add up. Maybe content providers really do not need these internet radio sites…

My take, I sure do not want to be in a non-profitable non-sustainable business. But is it irrational of me especially when clearly, the new 2.0 mantra is to scale first monetize later? Can the mister who runs the Ad-supported-music blog point us all to an example of a well run, i.e. in profit, ad-supported music site – yes, it has to combine the twin evil of intensive bandwidth usage and licensed content?

Ezmo bites the dust…

Published by
silent
at March 5, 2008 in Media. 0 

Is the concept of music on the cloud too early? I received news today via musikkteknologen that Ezmo has announced their decision to shut down the service and terminate the company via their blog 2 days ago.

The reasons detailed including an unsustainable business model, terms by the record labels and difficulties in financing.

I would, however, be very interested in how Ezmo deals with their wind down especially to Ezmo-fans who have taken the time and effort to upload their music content.

It is great to see that Ezmo endorses Anywhere.fm and Mediamaster, but why not MP3Tunes?

Are we hitting the spot?

Published by
silent
at March 1, 2008 in Media. 1 

A friend of mine recently blogged (in Chinese) about his thoughts of digital music and it re-highlighted how we as music lovers are different today. With the complementary forces of the Internet, bad-boy MP3 format and digital devices, we are now exposed and listen to more music than ever before in the history of mankind. More amazing than that, we can access and listen to all these music with the mere touch.

In fact, I believe the digital music collection management is becoming chaotic. How? With music collection now accessible over multiple devices e.g. iPod, home computer, work computer, and mobile, we are forced to constantly transfer music files over multiple devices depending on use. And don’t get me started on the organization of my music collection or ensuring that the IDv3 tags are in proper order.

This is why my interest at the recent Digital Music Forum East spiked my interest, especially with the half hour interview between digital music consultant Jim Griffin of OneHouse, and co-founder of Pho List and founder of MP3Tunes, Michael Robertson. For notes on the half hour interview, Eliot covers it well at the Listening Post from Wired.com. Kim also covers the Debate Over Digital Lockers well at the Washingtonpost.com.

With the flow of new releases of MP3Tunes releasing Pandora-like features, it seems MP3Tunes are looking to solve both the issues of digital music collection management and your music listening experience. I will not dwell with the EMI lawsuits, but MP3Tunes does bring out a valuable proposition – a digital locker of your digital music collection.

Yet, I cannot help but wonder if Music 2.0 is all about creating social music discovery websites, when are we going to refocus our attention on MUSIC?! How we interact with digital music? How we engage with digital music? Or are we happy to settle using technology to modernize (not revolutionize) our music experience?

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