Market Data

2010

Amazon.com said Monday that it would give magazine and newspaper publishers more of the revenue that it collects from the periodicals sold via the Kindle Store.

Amazon will increase the royalties to 70 percent beginning Dec. 1. Publishers previously received about 30 percent, though royalties varied by publisher.

By making the royalty rate more attractive to publishers, Amazon is trying to encourage them to sell digital versions of their periodicals in the Kindle Store, perhaps at prices that are more attractive to readers.

Amazon is betting that in the competition with other e-readers and e-book stores, the available reading materials, rather than the devices themselves, will be most important to consumers.

Readers of Kindle books — and, soon, magazines and newspapers — do not actually need to buy a Kindle to have access to the store’s products. They can download free Kindle apps on other devices.

But, in exchange for being able to buy a publication once and read it anywhere, they must buy their reading material from Amazon.

To qualify for the 70 percent royalty rate, publishers must agree to offer their periodicals on all Kindle devices and applications, and in all geographical areas where the publisher has rights.

Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/technology/09kindle.html?_r=1

2010

BERLIN — The global debate over how access to the Internet should be determined and paid for has attracted free speech advocates, telephone network operators and big online businesses like Google and Facebook.

This week, arguments over so-called network neutrality move to Brussels, where the European Commission and Parliament are holding a daylong meeting that is expected to draw speakers from industry, government and academia.

In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission attempted this year to bar operators — telecommunications and cable companies that offer connections to the Internet — from selectively managing the data flowing over their networks to assure that all customers got adequate service.

The commission tried to prohibit their extracting payment from big traffic generators like Google, but the proposal is bogged down in legal challenges. In Europe, the debate is not as far along, but the outcome is equally clouded.

Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/technology/08iht-neutral.html?_r=2&ref=technology

2010

As social sites like Twitter () and Facebook () build their empires and seek to remedy their own financial instability in the hope of turning profits, news organizations are experimenting with ways to monetize their social media presence and leverage the social web to complete an online revenue puzzle.

The revenue is there, but the social web won’t necessarily solve that puzzle. “There’s no silver bullet,” Jim Brady, the general manager at TBD.com, said at the Online News Association Conference last week. “There’s just shrapnel, pieces of revenue.” Brady, who launched TBD.com this summer, said display ads are certainly not the future in revenue for news and that it will come from multiple revenue streams. News () organizations have certainly been experimenting where they can to get revenue in pieces, from mobile applications to launching group buying sites. Here’s a closer look at some of these efforts.

Full article: http://mashable.com/2010/11/05/news-social-media-revenue/

2010

U.S. News & World Report, the magazine that in recent years has gone from a weekly, to a semimonthly to a monthly, will no longer exist as a regularly printed publication.

The magazine’s editors announced on Friday that U.S. News would become an online-only source of news. Its last issue will be mailed to subscribers in December. Beyond that, the magazine will exist only to publish occasional single-topic issues.

The decision is part of a broader refocusing of U.S. News’s business strategy, which has emphasized its profitable and influential ranking guides — for hospitals, colleges and graduate institutions — over the printed news magazine. All its news content will now be on USNews.com and be available free.

“Our emphasis on rankings and research content is the right path, making us an essential information source,” the staff was told in a memo. “We can’t sit still. We have to keep improving the existing products while selectively creating new ones.”

Full article: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/u-s-news-to-cease-printing-become-online-only/?src=twt&twt=mediadecodernyt