Links - the future of media

Advertising

Pop-ups in TV shows are being considered as a possible near-future form of advertising. For instance, viewers might see a commercial playing in a TV in the living room of the set. Then the commercial would pop full-screen.

Netvibes is a stie that gives its users to build a web page that gathers their favorite sites, blogs, etc, together. It does not accept paid advertisements. Instead, it makes advertisers create a Netvibes that provides a useful service to its community.


Online businesses

Over at GigaOm, there's an article about how the toughest part of a new venture is to get your users to pay you anything at all.

"The biggest gap in any venture is that between a service that is free and one that costs a penny."

As Anne Zelenka says,

"the reason there’s a huge gap between people paying you nothing and people paying you something is because that’s where you go from hobby to business. Between zero revenue and positive revenue lies your business model. Going from zero pay to a penny is where you’ve discovered how to make money–and that’s what businesses are about. The penny gap separates the winners from the losers, economically speaking.

Downloads, Music, & DRM

If every music listener in the world paid $50, they could have access to every song ever recorded while maintaining or increasing music sales. That's according to Cambridge-educated economist turned music-manager (Pink Floyd, The Clash, Ian Dury And The Blockheads, Billy Bragg) Peter Jenner.

Here's the story of how one man's terrible DRM experience trying to legally download a single piece of music has led to him giving up on online music altogether. Over-reaction or flawed business model? You can decide.

CD sales keep declining. The artificial demand for replacing all your old music with CDs has been over for a while. Now, sales in the first quarter of 2007 a 20% lower than the same quarter last year.