This is not a job inquiry letter that I received. I found out about this from The Bad Pitch Blog. As  you might have guessed, the Bad Pitch Blog killed the author, a columnist responding to a job ad. I loved the response. Absolutely loved it.

I liked it a little bit because the author doesn’t pull any punches.  He says he isn’t looking for a low end paying job. Which makes it easy to either include or exclude him from consideration. As he suggests, he doesn’t want to waste time.

But the larger point and I think the key to why I really liked it is that it came from columnist with 30 plus years of experience.  In this day and age if you have been published for 30 years, you are stripped professionally naked.  Your entire body of work is out there for anyone to see. You can’t sell yourself as something you are not. Which is exactly what I believe the author is trying to say. Which I love.

If you have had your job for 30 years and your “work history” is online. If you have been doing business in an industry for 30 years and there are any number of contacts for me to talk to about you, I don’t want to hear a salespitch.  It is very analogous to hiring an NBA player.  A letter from an athlete telling me how wonderful he is and how he can help my team is worthless.  I am just going to watch his games.  If his salary expectations are beyond the pay scale for the job, I want to know it up front and save myself the time.

We all know that jobs are scarce. That people are losing their jobs or being forced to take pay cuts.  It means the volume of inquiries for every job is off the charts.  If you are a rookie looking for a job, you need all the bullshit you can muster, along with a willingness to work for less. If you are a grizzly veteran, your bullshit days are over. Everyone knows most of what you can do.   I want to know if you are willing to work for what Im willing to pay. If not, we are wasting time. If you are, if I like what I see online , then you can start with the bullshit of why you can do so much more than the body of work I saw online. Then we can see if you are the right person for the job.

If the author of the mentioned pitch was in his first job out of college or younger, it would be a horrible inquiry letter. For a veteran of the wars, feel free to send that letter to me anytime

Here is the letter for those too lazy to click over.  If you would like to see the PR company response, the link is on the website above

“As a journalist for 30 plus years and a newspaper columnist the past 12 at The Kansas City Star, I am eminently qualified to be your public relations specialist — despite no paid experience in public relations.

Frankly, if there’s a pr person above the pr specialist, I’m probably qualified for that job, too.

After all, I’ve been dealing with public relations folks from the other side for three decades as a reporter, editor and columnist. Don’t get me wrong. Many PR people are skilled at what they do. Yet many others are simply nice but don’t have a clue how to sell a story.

The former are usually former newspaper journalists. The latter are not.

That said, I would be happy to submit an application, but I’d hate to be wasting your time and mine if it turns out this is some minor league position with a paltry salary.

Yes, I’m not supposed to mention money. But we’re both adults and recognize that, in the end, that’s what it comes down to. I still write a column at The Star. I make a decent salary. I’m not looking for a pay cut.

I could submit my resume, but doing so would imply that this is my job pitch. It’s not.

The job sounds enjoyable. But I’d also like to know that it’s a good fit.

Thanks for your time.

Mike Hendricks
Metro columnist
The Kansas City Star

PS. By the way, my wife and I (identifying info) haved great interest in many of the topics in your publications, (identifying information).. Our book on (identifying information) in KC will be published in September by the Kansas City Star book division. (Italics mine.)”

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I have a google alert that searches for mentions of the term “prosecutorial misconduct” . It’s a never ending flow of events, which is unfortunate in and of itself.  Its a reminder that power corrupts on a daily basis. This morning’s email brought my attention to an article written by Cornell Law Professor Michael Dorf.

The title of his article ? “Did The Supreme Court Recognize an Innocent Person’s Right Not to be Executed ?“

When I read the title, I thought it was a trick question of some sort.  When I read the article I got sick to my stomach. In particular notice the bold paragraph.

“Twenty years ago, off-duty police officer Mark McPhail was shot and killed in a Savannah, Georgia parking lot. Based on information provided by Sylvester Coles, the police sought Troy Davis for the murder. Davis turned himself in and was charged with the crime. He was found guilty and sentenced to death based on the testimony of eyewitnesses.

Since then, however, nearly all of those witnesses have recanted, claiming in affidavits that they were pressured by police to name Davis as the perpetrator. Meanwhile, additional evidence has been found indicating that Coles, the prosecution’s star witness against Davis, was the actual killer. Yet despite national and international attention–including pleas by former Georgia Governor and U.S. President Jimmy Carter, former Georgia Republican Congressman and federal prosecutor Bob Barr, and even Pope Benedict–neither the Georgia courts nor the Georgia Pardons and Parole Board has seen fit to stop Davis’s execution.

Last week, the Supreme Court offered Davis a ray of hope. In response to his petition for a writ of habeas corpus, the Justices ordered that a federal district court in Georgia “should receive testimony and make findings of fact as to whether evidence that could not have been obtained at the time of trial clearly establishes [Davis's] innocence.”

The Court’s order in Davis was not unanimous, however. Justice Scalia, joined by Justice Thomas, dissented. Justice Scalia said that even if the district court were to find Davis to be innocent, there would still be nothing unlawful about executing him.“

The article then goes on to discuss the various legal issues involved in this issue.

I come back to a single issue. Its not illegal to execute an innocent person. Maybe its time for a constitutional amendment ?

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The internet has been dead and boring for a while now.  It has reached a point of stability where flashes  of technological creativity are rare, but  every now and then some new technology can put a spark back in the ole gal (no sexism intended).

If you haven’t heard of WebHooks or PubSubHubBub its about time you did. Both are designed to  simplify and optimize the web.

Webhooks let applications talk to each other using very simple HTTP. Webhook enabled applications run (so far) on app hosting sites in the cloud.  What makes them different is that they constantly scan  for POSTS to a designated URL.   To use the application, you register your application with the other webhook enabled application and provide  a callback URL.  You POST   data from your app to the url of the receiving app, and monitor the callback URL for its response. Your app then takes the POST it received and processes it.

I will give you a simple example. Your accountant sets up an app for all their customers that has all the sales tax rules for every community in every state.  Every time your company makes a sale, your oline store application sends the transaction ID, amount of taxable goods and the long zip code where the sale was made.  The webhooks enabled  app receives it, calculates the correct salestax  and immediately sends back the result to your online store which  incorporates  the local sales tax information it received in the invoice as the customer checks out.

This is a very simple example of using Webhooks, you will be able to come up with much better.

Pubsubhubbub (PSHB) is a realtime, multicasting webhooks enabled  publish and subscribe system.  Historically on the net, most information is received after it is pulled.  For example, we set up receive intervals for our email. Our browsers update our RSS feeds at pre determined intervals. We repeat the same searches over and over, just looking to see if there is anything new. Even when we get alerts for new email or information, the alerts are generated by actively polling the source. PSHB changes that.

The PSHB hubs are cloud based distribution centers.  Publishers choose to distribute their data through any number of publicly availabe hubs.  Subscribers choose to receive their “subscriptions” or data through the Hub. The beauty of the hub and why this makes sense is  because the HUB multicasts the data to each publishers’ subscribers, is easily scalable  and it distributes to subscribers in realtime. Every time a publisher has something new it can post the data to the PSHB, which knows who that publishers’ subscribers are and immediately multicasts the new data to all the subscribers. In real time.

The implications and opportunities to change business on the web, and actually to any device that can subscribe to the HUBs are huge.

This could be an open door for the content business. For instance, currently aggregators have to get their news the old fashioned way, through RSS feeds and news alerts that they retrieve throughout the day. That is not realtime news.  Using The Associated Press as an example, AP could post their stories to a HUB. In realtime, the HUB can update member websites so that they will always have information first, before any aggregator.   It may not take long for aggregators to recognize the new data on the member sites, but they won’t have it first.

The New York Times could do the same thing. Subscribers could get everything first, in realtime. Then after some delay which might be 1 minute, it might be 30 minutes depending on what the paper thinks is the value related to timeliness, it could post on the website and on twitter and facebook as updates. Would NY Times online readers pay $1 a month to be guaranteed that they get their news first, before anyone else ? I dont know.

In the sports world, text based play by play websites could be updated in realtime rather than pulling every 30 seconds or requiring the user to hit refresh every few seconds.

Huge databases can talk to huge databases and exchange data more efficiently, hopefully increasing the value of the information. Medical databases, crime databases, any database hosted by different organizations could use webhooks and HUBS to agree to keep each other up to date.

This is all JUST beginning. Its all brand spanking new.  Already  extensions like Superfeedr are starting to appear, designed to scale.

Dive in and take advantage of the opportunity, ignore it at your own peril

m

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Has anyone else noticed the irony that Redbox, a company that rents DVDs for a dollar from a kiosk that people have to drive to, is the most disruptive force in the video business ?

Or the irony that the most successful video delivery business, Netflix, makes almost all of their money shipping DVDs in red envelopes from distribution centers across the country ?

Or that even with the dominance of Apple’s Itunes, they only account for about 1/3 of music sales, in an industry that is becoming less dependent on music sales.

I’m not suggesting anyone run out and start a video sales and rental store, or open up a record store. But then again, I never would have agreed that opening up kiosks in 7-11s and Grocery Stores to rent DVDs for a dollar would be a good idea either.

On the flipside, conventional wisdom says that the most disruptive and dominant force in video is youtube.com . In reality, they are just a very large online media company doing business in the most old fashioned of means. They license and aggregate content and then sell advertisers their viewers. They are big, which by definition makes them a force. However, there is absolutely nothing disruptive about what they do. They are no different than Broadcast Networkz on Television.

They  have the same problem as Networks like NBC, ABC, CBS.

At some point, when online video consumption reaches 100pct penetration, like Broadcast TV before it, Youtube will have to find a way to license hit shows so that they can build  or just retain viewership. With advertising as their single revenue stream (as opposed to subscription revenue like cable networks have ), they may find themselves once again being subsidized by Google just a few short years  after they reach the profitability they covet.

The sweet irony in comparing Google/Youtube to Broadcast Network TV, is that despite being online, Google has no idea who their viewers are any more than NBC, CBS, ABC do. Could Facebook Connect be in Google’s future ?

The point is that when everyone is looking in one direction, sometimes industry change and profits can come from where everyone is telling you not to look

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I get deal pitches daily.  I want all of you to understand the code words that IMHO are sure fire signs that the entrepreneur has no idea what they are doing and is destined to fail.  This is from an email today, redacted of course to protect the guilty.  My interpretation of the letter is in bold.

My name is John Doe, CEO and Founder of John Doe Unlimited Innovations and Technology, LLC. JDUIT is an innovation conglomerate, designed for many different industries and is dedicated to improve the quality of life for individuals throughout the world, one step at a time.

The first thing I do at this point is look at the senders email address. Is it an email with the company name in the URL ? If it isnt.. ding, ding, ding.  They sender has come up with a name, but doesn’t have the focus or confidence to put up a website. This person was using a gmail account. Next my #FailDar was ringing louder than Larry Kudlow talking nonsense on CNBC about green shoots when I read the “designed for different industries and is dedicated to improve the quality of life of individuals throughout the world, one step at a time” Im sorry, but could anyone possibly invent and write anything that is more full of shit than this person ? That has to go down in business letter history as one of the all time worse lines. If you want to get someone interested in your company, DO NOT tell them you are going to save the world.  You are not. No one will believe you will. Save that nonsense for your grandma when you are trying to make her proud of you.

First, I want to thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to overlook a great opportunity we have for the near future. As you may know, with the steady progression of time, there are rapid advancements in technology and trends through innovation. We have devised a revolutionary and lucrative idea that will produce much success to all parties involved. We have created a plan with four separate projects that together ensure short- and long-term success. We have adopted a cutting-edge engineer consulting alliance to bridge our vision and planning with technical expertise. In addition, Famous Person   is  our President and Co-Founder.

Quite a few words to say absolutely nothing. But here is the more important point. Ready ? If you have someone who is famous, which suggests they are wealthy, or who actually is known to be wealthy, involved in your company and you are pimping that person in order to increase my interest, I will tell you what goes through my head: If this is such a great fricking idea, why aren’t they funding the entire thing. If you were able to buy dollars for 50 cents, would you go out and get outside investors, or would you keep this sure thing to yourself and your famous friend ? You would keep it. The fact that your famous friend doesn’t think enough of the idea to keep it all to you and him/her tells me I should be very, very careful.

We have designed a perfect plan that fits the standards of the 21st century; advanced and revolutionary ideas, solutions, and projects though innovation. We have acquired an excellent project support team, complete with scientists and engineers as well as an extensive list of connections. We are seeking to add our only missing piece, an investor(s), to become a partial owner. We are seeking investment for the first of our four project. Through thorough research, our scientists are confident in their ability to create and perfect a novel, consumer-friendly “Kick Ass System” based on proven Kick Ass physics. We ask that you consider this opportunity, as we are confident you will find it to be revolutionary and profitable.

Once again, did this person actually say anything ? No. Reminds me of a line from a DMX song… “talk all day and say nothing”. At this point I am reading this email and actually smiling, thinking it must be a joke. That someone sent me this because it won a literary prize for the worst introduction letter of all time.

Attached is a copy of our executive summary. If you could be so kind as to take a moment of you time to overlook it, I am positive you will be as enthusiastic as I am for an opportunity like this. I look forward to speaking with you soon and the possibility of a working relationship. Once again, thank you for your time and consideration. Have a wonderful day. God bless.

The above is acceptable. At least they are polite.

Im not going to show the entire executive summary. I dont want to give away the company, but I will share some lowlights

In our plan, we bridge together technical expertise and vision to jump-start the next generation of living. The JDUIT Plan will be the key part of a stable, invigorated economy by providing secure jobs and generating great wealth

Anyone for jumpstarting the next generation of living. ? Does the person who wrote it, seriously believe it ?

II. The Mission
JDUIT intends to ignite the next generation of living, providing groundbreaking solutions to current economic issues, while continuing to encourage people to grow with everexpanding innovations. It is a lifestyle.  We will not only make life easier, but dramatically improve the quality of living by helping people rethink their lifestyle choices. We do not merely seek to expand our business volume, but we are dedicated to the use of our unique, advanced technologies to contribute to the safety, benefits, and welfare of people worldwide. Our success is directly linked to the prosperity of our customers, management, employees, investors, partners, advisors, and shareholders; the
entire JDUIT family

Now if this isn’t a mission statement that makes you want to get out your checkbook, I don’t know what is.

Thats about as much as I can post without giving the company identity away. I’m not saying this company can not be successful. I don’t think they can, but I have been wrong before. But one thing I know for certain, their pitch to me is one of the worst , if not the very worst I have ever received and I can not take it or the company seriously.

If you are an entrepreneur who is looking for capital and is sending letters or emails of introduction, leave out the Bullshit.  Say who you are. What you have. What makes it different than the competition. What you want to accomplish. How you plan on getting there and how I can help. Everything else will usually hurt more than it will help

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I got some interesting questions via email and I thought I would share them, along with my answers.

1. Does he feel that the economic crisis make him more or less confident in Rand’s objectivist philosophy?  Why?

1. Does he think that massive pay packages are warranted at financial institutions accepting government bailout money?
   

2 types of pay. Salary and performance bonuses based on outside criteria (stock performance), and commission. if a guy is busting his ass and is great at his job. More power to him if he makes 100mm dollars. If he made his bank 300mm, he helped solve the problem, he didnt contribute to it. If an executive gives him/herself a ridiculous compensation package , thats a different story. Given is far different than earned. I dont have a problem with earned. I do have a problem with given.

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Bust your ass and get rich.

Make a boatload of money. Pay your taxes. Lots of taxes. Hire people. Train people. Pay people. Spend money on rent, equipment, services. Pay more taxes.

When you make a shitload of money. Do something positive with it. If you are smart enough to make it, you will be smart enough to know where to put it to work.

I don’t care what anyone says. Being rich is a good thing. Not just in the obvious sense of benefiting you and your family, but in the broader sense.  Profits are not a zero sum game. The more you make the more of a financial impact you can have.

I’m not against government involvement in times of need. I am for recognizing that  big public companies will  continue to cut jobs in an effort to prop up stock prices, which in turn stimulates the need for more government involvement.  Every cut job by the big companies extracts a cost on the American people in one way or another.

Entrepreneurs are needed to create and grow companies to absorb those people in new jobs. If entrepreneurs dont create those jobs, the government ends up having to spend more money to help them one way or another.

So be Patriotic. Go out there and get rich. Get so obnoxiously rich that when that tax bill comes , your first thought will be to choke on how big a check you have to write. Your 2nd thought will be “what a great problem to have”, and your 3rd should be a recognition that in paying your taxes you are helping to support millions of Americans that are not as fortunate as you.

In these times of “The Great Recession” we shouldn’t be trying to shift the benefits of wealth behind some curtain. We should be celebrating and encouraging people to make as much money as they can. Profits equal tax money. While some people might find it distasteful to pay taxes. I don’t. I find it Patriotic.

I’m not saying that the government’s use of tax money is the most efficient use of our hard earned capital. It obviously is not. In a perfect world, there would be a better option. We don’t live in a perfect world. We don’t live in a perfect time. We live in a time where the government plays a big role in an effort to help lead us out this Great Recession. That’s reality.

So I will repeat my point. Get out there and make a boatload of money. Enjoy the shit out your money. Pay your taxes.

Its the most Patriotic thing you can do.

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This is in response to Michael’s Newser response to my blog on selling content online

MIchael,
I think we agree more than we disagree. let me address some specifics.
1. Respect the fact that Im fat
2. I do have friends.  I didnt realize we were boys, but anytime you want to hang, just holler.. I obviously need as many friends as I can get.
3. Im arrogant and I think that Im smarter than everyone else. Except for my daughters.

As i said in my post, I agree that news has always been free and it always will be. Other than the WSJ, there is no chance of charging per website, article or at all.  Nor do i think the current and traditional model of ad supported will work either.
If selling ads wasnt an issue, we wouldnt be having this discussion.   Old media and new would all be happy.
But it is. Which is why  you have so many  ads per page of Newser. Thats the reality of today.
Its also an outdated model, whether its used by print, tv or the web.

That is where we disagree. I think the summary and aggregation sites, supported by ad sales is already an old, outdated model. Sorry.

My post wasnt about charging for news. It was about getting consumers to pay for content. IMHO, your model still uses the old silo model. This is news. If you want news, you come here. To a news site.
My model is that companies should inventory all the assets they have and try to find optimal ways to deliver those assets in a way that is profitable to the company and of value to the consumer.  In an era where the marginal cost of delivery of digital assets, and many cases physical assets are falling, why not package those assets in a manner that consumers want to buy ?
I gave the example where Newscorp could leverage all their content and deliver it in a profitable way. Which I think could work. I also said it would be a challenge for newscorp (which i know you understand far better than me) to break the old divisional P&L mindset to package cross corporate assets into a marketable package.

Which leads us to the part where i become arrogant.

I try to find solutions to problems that arent necessarily easy, but that I think are better. Even when people think the thought makes be a big fat idiot. I was a big fat idiot when I got lucky and started HDNet when no one thought HDTVs would be mainstream. When we changed up film windows with Magnolia, 2929 and Landmark Theatres, premiering movies for pay, 3 weeks prior to their theatrical release it was criticized by many.  (btw, all but 2929 are profitable). In the 1990s trying to convince people that the net was going to be ubiquitous was somewhat of a challenge, particularly for audio and video.  Being a big, fat idiot has gotten me lucky many times.

Today tweaking websites, as you have done with Newser,  is not transitional. The internet is a utility and websites will be updated and tweaked forevermore.  When it comes to news and its presentation, there isnt a whole lot that can’t be copied from one site to another. I promise you that if the NY Times wanted to buy a cool URL and create a Newser Knockoff, they could. Easily. But it would be moving deckchairs on the Titanic. A waste of time. Its not the format of news sites that is the problem.

In this era of social networks, content companies/media conglomerates  need to develop new business models that create business relationships between their  companies and consumers.

I may read Newser, but i dont do business with newser. If some company out there entices me into a relationship with them that i consider valuable enough to pay for, and that company happens to bundle in a news source that i think is even close to newser, or maybe they are even smart enough to knock of Newser, Im going to use the resource I pay for more than those I dont.

Because I have a financial relationship with them, Im going to be more likely to interact more openly with them, and Im going to expect them to customize their offerings to me. They need to continue to earn my business.

Some think this is out of the realm of big media. That they dont get it. The arrogant part of me says the “internet people” dont get it.

IMHO, the future of paid content and probably even beyond content is in direct relationships with corporations. Why now ? Because people are now trained to indentify themselves and share information about who they are and what they want. There is nothing to stop that from happening directly with  content and companies. They are allowed to use Facebook Connect too.

Companies now are also able to handle the backend technology. The prices of handling mass amounts s of data whether in house or in a cloud, has fallen off a cliff. So its feasible for corporations to maintain  direct relationships w millions of people.
Let me gve you one new example. On Amazon I subscribe to my favorite cereal. I get a couple boxes every month. In exchange for my commitment I get a discount. There is no reason why this “subscription” cant happen directly with the company and fulfilled either by amazon or by the company. Its the model Amazon already uses with 3rd party vendors.  If you give me the right deal, I will subscribe to soap, toilet paper, even Newscorp’s News Junkie program that I suggested.  Its easy, it saves me money and it gives me a direct connection to the company.
I dont think this is easy for all companies to conceptualize and implement, but so what ?  That doesnt mean its not the right thing for them to do. Someone will come along and do it.  IMHO, the biggest opportunities today arent in using the internet to dis-intermediate big  companies. The biggest opportunity out there is for big companies to leverage their assets to re-intermediate their customers and develop direct relationships with them.

Proctor & Gamble are you listening ? Give me a nice discount for committing to your products and have them show up on my door as scheduled and I will make an annual commitment to your products. I will let you ding my credit card monthly.  And give you feedback. Give me a bigger discount and I will let you show my public Facebook Profile as a customer. Do we have a deal ?

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If you are like me, you have reached your limit of 10 saved searches on Twitter.  Searching Twitter to keep track of trends and topics that matter to you is probably  a daily function.

The problem with Twitter Search is that  you can’t tell the difference between a tweet going out to 100,000 followers and a tweet going out to 3 followers. Icerocket.com (a company i am involved with) has solved and simplified the process.

If I want to see if anyone has tweeted about one of my blog posts, now i can also check to see the number of followers that person has, and using links right on the page, quickly reply to, or re-tweet their post. Now when I get cursed out , called names or praised in a tweet, I know how many people could possibly be reading the tweet. Its also a good indicator as to how many times its been retweeted.

Icerocket.com’s twitter search also allows you to save far more than 10 searches. So if you track quite a few topics, you are no longer limited to 10 searches.

It’s also interesting to put in trending searches to see just who is tweeting about the topic and how many followers they have.  Those bizarre trending topics sometimes have a lot of tweets from people who have 10 or fewer followers. It makes it easier to determine if there truly is something unique going on, or if someone is gaming the system

Im curious what people think about this function from Icerocket.com and if they have any better alternatives

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Rupert , you didn’t ask my opinion on this, but since when has that ever stopped me.

First the good news.  You can sell content on the internet.  People pay for content on and off the internet every second of every day. It’s easy to do. If you do it right. But before I get to the how to, let me throw out some interim suggestions:

1.  Block  aggregation sites that point to your content.

Too many that’s heresy. The conventional wisdom suggests that all traffic is good traffic. Every page view is more money. Why not take it ?  Because its limited and you aren’t selling it.

The value of the traffic sent by most sites is minimal at best. Lets look at your best friend Michael Wolf’s site Newser.com.  According to Quantcast he gets about 24k unique users every day.  If  1 pct  of those users went to a Fox Site, say the NY Post, and each looked at 5 pages, that would be a total gain of 1.2k Page Views. If you were able to sell 1oopct of those at $15 CPM, which you can’t. You would make $18  per day. About $ 6.5k  per year. Best case.

More likely, in this economy,  you are not selling 90pct of the inventory he sends you. Heck, you aren’t selling a big chuck of the inventory that you get on your sites anyway, so the marginal value of the traffic sent by Newser.com might be about zero.

Why would you help a site, that is a direct competitor for minimal incremental revenue  ? It’s not worth it.  You know what is worth it ?  When someone is sent from the site,let them fall on a page that lets them know that you don’t consider Newser.com a valid news or reference site.  Newser.com has chosen to front end our content and we don’t appreciate it. As a result, we are blocking access. To get up to the minute news, please go directly to NYPost.com  (or whatever site). Of course Newser.com will quickly stop sending you traffic. But the loss will be theirs. There will be stories that you cover better than anyone.  Michael will have to find someone else.

The real question of course is whether other major news site copy what you have done ?  What if the NY Times and the Washington Post do the same thing ? What if CNN, Tribune Papers and MSNBC join in ?  I will tell you what happens. The aggregator sites that try to front end the content you invest a ton of money to create will find themselves all relying on AP, Reuters and individual bloggers.

This is where all the netizens jump in and tell me Im crazy. That news sites won’t ever do this.  Thats not the internet way. Which of course is exactly how they respond to every business question involving the net. The major news sites are keeping the aggregators that don’t originate news content alive. From Drudge Report on down. You are crazy to do so.  Let the search engines send you traffic. Block the rest.  Your revenue impact will be minimal. The competitive impact significant.

2.Other than the WSJ, don’t ever sell content ala carte. It only works for content that impacts company’s and individuals bank accounts  in real time.  The Wall Street Journal can sell subscriptions because if a businessperson or trader doesn’t have the information the minute its published, they could be in serious financial trouble.  The WSJ moves markets. You can charge for it. Page 6 doesn’t move markets. Foxsports doesn’t move markets.  People won’t pay for it by story. They won’t pay for a general interest or newspaper, tv or sports  website by the day, week or month unless they absolutely have to know what you publish for business reasons. There aren’t enough of those people around to pay the bills per site.

So what should you do to sell your online content ?

The first thing you have to do is realize that internet consumers are only fine with paying for content when the following two criteria are met:

1. It is easy to buy.

2. It is easy for any consumer to assign a “perceived value” to the content and you charge less than that amount.

2a.  Remind yourself that just because you assign a specific value, doesn’t mean the consumer will.  Case in point are newspaper sites. Consumers might  adamantly believe that your writers are better than AP writers. They might  believe that your site uncovers news that MSNBC.com doesn’t, Unfortunately for you, because it’s all free to this point, they aren’t saying to themselves “wow, the only way I have EVER been able to get this is news is by paying $2.99 a week and now I can get it from Fox for only $ 2 per month. It’s not going to happen.  Instead, it will be “I like the NY Post. I love Page Six. But I’m not going to pay to get what I have always gotten online for free.  Not going to happen.

So what Fox, and any media conglomerate has to do is find DIGITAL or INCREDIBLY  HIGH MARGIN products that have a perceived value to the consumer, that you can bundle with your online content.

Let me give you an example.

You could offer a “Newsjunkies Subscription”  that includes:

a.  Access to every Newscorp news website from around the world (excluding the wall street journal). From the NYPost to the UK’s Sunday Times, Sun and more.

b. Your choice of any 2 books from our Harpers Collins collection. That’s right. Pick any 2, from our Best Sellers list, or from the special list we have put together specifically for newsjunkies like you. Its your choice if you want them in hardback, paperback or e-book format.

c.  A subscription to our news magazine, The Weekly Standard. The choice is yours whether you would like it delivered to your emailbox, printed and mailed to you or both !

d. A $99 credit at a special edition of  The Fox Store that we put together exclusively for our News Junkie Subscribers. You can pick from newly released to DVD movies or from our classics. Its up to you !

So to summarize. In addition to Fox websites from around the world, a $ 79 dollar annual value, you get:

2 books from our Harper Collins collection, with a value of up to $79.

a subscription to the Weekly Standard, worth up to $ 64 (in a deal with its new owner)

a special $99 credit at The Fox Store where you can pick from an amazing selection of movies and tv shows.

For a total value of  $ 321.

Because our Fox News Junkie Subscribers are critically important to us, we are offering this special package for a limited time only.  This amazing package can be yours for the low low price of only…

$ 9.95 per month with a minimum commitment of 15 months !

Add a subscription to the Wall Street Journal  Online for $ 5 more per month, or get both the WSJ online and daily delivery to your home for an additional $9.95 per month.

This example should serve to make the point. Its of course stealing a page from the old record and book clubs.  Give the subscriber a significant start up value. The hard cost of all the products involved is probably close to $ 100. With some tweaking and limiting of product selection, it can be pushed dramatically lower. The important take away is that you can acquire subscribers for lower marketing costs and probably generate just as much money in margin dollars in the first year as you would selling subscriptions to the NY Post or UK Sunday Times outright.

Of course you could put together movie and tv lovers packages that you use to sell Rotten Tomatoes. You could put together sports lovers packages that you use to sell foxsports.com and other sports related sites.

Once you have the subscriber, the onus is on Fox to keep them happy. It’s really not that hard. This is where you use digital assets with a minimal marginal cost of delivery. You could let movie lovers, as part of their subscription,  have a download to own title from a selection that you make available quarterly. You know which titles aren’t making you money on sell through. So why not use them to increase the value of your subscription ? Or given the number of DVD returns that are repackaged and sold at a discount, why not offer them to subscribers first ? “For subscribers only, first crack at our returned DVDs, pick 1 title a month and pay only for shipping and handling. Or if you are really in the mood to watch some great movies, pick any 10 titles for a one time charge of $19.95, plus S&H.

For sports lovers, you could do the same with sports movies. Free Fantasy Sports and other value adds.  You could have chats limited to subscribers. Sponsor get togethers with athletes around the country that are limited to subscribers.

Im sure the people at News Corp are a lot more creative than I am.

I don’t know the culture of News Corp. But i can guess with the best of them. At this point, my guess is that  everyone who works there  is saying. “Yeah, it all sounds great, but you  know what the chances of all these divisions working together are ?. They have their own P&L that they are responsible for. They aren’t going to help the internet group sell subscriptions. “  And there in lies the rub.

The challenge to Rupert and company is not whether or not they can charge for their content and make money. That is actually not the hard part. The hard part, as it always is for big, publicly traded conglomerates is to align all of their business units to a common goal. I know they can sell their content if they package it right. I don’t know if they can take care of corporate politics.

And while Im on the topic of Fox/Newscorp, lets jump over to MySpace.  Here is my suggestion for MySpace. You have a strong (although appearing to weaken) position in Music.  Take a close look at the economics of music and see how you can leverage them to your advantage.  In this day and age, it seems like no one makes money from music.  In fact, the “pundits” say no one should make money from music. They all should give it away and make their money touring. Well, its not my money, but I think MySpace should spend some money on music.  I would take a page from Walmart. Walmart buys exclusives of CDs from artists that fit their target demo (older and still buying CDs). I think they have a deal with Foreigner coming up for their first CD in more than 10 years. They guaranteed them a minimum number of units with no returns (if its like other deals I have read about ). You will only be able to buy the CD from Walmart.

So why wouldn’t MySpace do the same thing with artists that fit their demo ?  i don’t know how much money the artists on the Billboard lists will make in a given year from the sale of their music, but they all have a number. I would find out what that number is, and for the artists that match your demo, see if its economically feasible to buy them out for a one time payment and offer their music exclusively on MySpace. Then you can offer a subscription to their music for some number that seems ridiculously low. Say $1.49 per year for all the music the band releases in the year. Since you paid some finite amount (with some probable volume bonuses only if you make money),  your mission is to sell enough subscriptions to cover the cost of to the band/label and then some.

At this point, MySpace’s core competency becomes arbitraging its ability to buy and sell music to its user base. The user base thinks they are getting a great deal, and the bands have a source of revenue that they are paid up front.  I dont know if it will work, but it is sure worth exploring !

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