Time to deconstruct the “platform” hype. On the face of it, developers’ obsession with Facebook Platform makes no sense — build an application on Facebook and you can reach 30 million users. Build it on the web, and you can reach 10 (even 20) times as many users. On Facebook, there are automated mechanisms for [...]

Henry Copeland of BlogAds points out the great paradox of blog monetization — advertisers have embraced unedited bloggers as trusted media brands, but they still don’t trust the people who comment on those blogs (via paidContent):
The appeal of blogs to marketers is their singular brand identity, making it possible to accurately target their ads. Copeland: [...]

There is a massive wave of media consolidation going on, but it’s very different from how media companies traditionally scaled.
The archetypal consolidated media company was, in many ways, the newspaper chain, which consolidated monopoly media channels across non-competitive local markets, guaranteeing that the whole would exceed the sum of the parts. But on the web, [...]

I read this article about the rise of free daily newspapers in the US and had a sudden realization about the perceived failure of news organizations to charge for news online. The New York Times has torn down the TimesSelect pay wall — does that mean that reading TimesSelect content online is now FREE?
What I [...]