virtualeconomics

Contra Farmville for Dummies

The appearance on Amazon of the book Farmville for Dummies - a self-consciously dummed-down how-to for Zynga's Facebook "game" that is absolutely nothing more than a time-sink without an iota of mental challenge - so depressed Umair Haque today that he declared it the end of culture.

"You know what's really cool about our culture?" he tweeted. "Oh wait. I can't think of anything."

Hyperbole is hyperbole. But since this is a cultural golden age, I do not like to see the odd bump in the road cause one of our greatest minds to write off the whole thing. Contra Farmville for Dummies, therefore, a handful of points in favour of the culture at the start of the second decade of the third millenium.

Optimise what?

The web is shrinking, says Ben Elowitz. Strip out the growth of Facebook and the rest of the web, the "searchable web", shrank by 9% in the 12 months to March 2011.

This is game-changing for publishers, possibly the emergence of a whole new strategy cycle. If all you're doing is optimising pages of content for Google, well...

(1) you're part of a zero-sum game in which every publisher in your category uses the same publicly-available data to chase the same audience as they search on the same keywords;

(2) the stuff you write for Google isn't all that appealing to people so you'll get them through the door and watch them bounce out after they've seen one page; and

(3) that pie you're fighting for a share of is shrinking anyway (hee hee, mixed metaphors are funny).

Privacy and publicity

Three things interest me about the John Snow debacle (if you haven't followed the saga of a Soho pub kicking out two gay drinkers for kissing, summary here), two of them mainly about Facebook.

First, the incident itself seems to indicate that the internet has made the maintenance of private little fiefdoms of bigotry harder than ever. Run a covertly homophobic, racist or otherwise unsavory pub even ten years ago and it was non-trivial for anyone to do much about it. Now that a protest as peacefully whimsical as a kiss-in can be knocked together on Facebook, not once but as often as the pub tries to lock the protestors out, it's much harder. I'm as much a fan of cultural diversity and people being allowed to do what they like as the next virtual federalist, but one of the consequences of freedom, even the freedom to be a bigot, is bearing its consequences - including nationwide calumny and what looks increasingly for the John Snow's current management like financial disaster.

News International seeks to establish a print/online equivalence that simply isn't there

So the latest numbers are in for the Times paywall. Now eight months old it deserves, perhaps, to no longer be dubbed an experiment. Charging for people to look at the Times online is now business as usual in the Wapping fortress, and business as usual is doing...ok. Over at Paidcontent there's a copy of the full release and Robert Andrews takes a more detailed look at what the numbers mean.

At the end of the first four months behind a paywall they'd racked up 50,000 actual subscribers (people paying £2 a week) plus 105,000 other "digital purchase events" - people buying a one-day pass. Four more months on, at the end of Feb, they have a total of 79,000 monthly subscribers and a total 222,000 "sales of digital products" - people buying a one-day pass, plus sales of the Sunday Times iPad app. So, as Paidcontent notes, subscription sales have slowed down but sales overall have increased.

New York Times experiments with perverse incentives

The New York Times paywall (don't call it a paywall? Right...) is a strategic error, and not even a very complicated one.

So there's some science behind it, and the number of articles you can see before you have to pay (20) has been calculated from actual traffic data rather than just pulled out of the air, which is a good start. And it's always good to see a news org putting in some serious R&D, which at $40 million just to develop NYT's paywall definitely counts. It's not as if there's nothing about the move to like - it's considerably more thoughtful and nuanced than TimesSelect or the other, many, failed experiments in charging for (non-porn, non-finance) content that have failed over the past decade and a half.

Six signs of a new net bubble

I've been thinking about the new Internet bubble for a while: today I saw what, for me, clinched it that the bubble is back. Here, in order, are the six signs that we're in a new net bubble.

(1) Hugely improbable specialist etailers like iwantadoor.com advertising (indeed sponsoring) prime-time TV shows. When I saw them appear in the sponsorship slot tonight I immediately knew I was looking at the next Pets.com. That's not a happy connection for any company and it's not a happy moment for our market. 

(2) Massive valuations placed on stocks that have never returned a profit. Demand Media (even with all its weird accounting) still wasn't making a profit when it got listed at $2bn. HuffPo just got bought as it went into marginal profitability. People are spending billions to own businesses that have yet to return a penny. That's not healthy, rational investing. That's dumb money hitching itself to a rising bandwagon (yes, I just said "rising bandwagon") and hoping to offload the shares before it falls. 

AOL's big bet that advertisers will get a bit (but not a lot) smarter

So AOL buys HuffPo for $315m, valuing (as Chris Tolles points out) their 26m ComScore users at $12 each. We're not (yet) in the Broadcast.com league but it's still an excitingly bubbly valuation at ten times 2010 revenues, five times even management's own 2011 revenue forecast and god knows what multiple of the presumably nominal profitability they claim the site achieved in the fifth year since it launched.

AOL is betting the farm on monetising professionally-created content via display advertising. That's a big bet, but of course for AOL it's not a new one - acquiring HuffPo is simply a continuation of the strategy that AOL has been pursuing since it parted company with Time Warner. Engadget, Politics Daily, Techcrunch and especially Patch are all long bets on paying writers and then serving display ads over the results, and if that's the strategy this is a smart push for more of the same.

We know that it's a crocodile

Outrage (and disappointment) is just breaking out over the Facebook "like" button, which allows FB to track not just the browsing habits of its users (which, let's face it, is now most of the online population) but also non-users. According to Arnold Roosendaal's paper (pdf), "the tool is also used to place cookies on the user’s computer, regardless whether a user actually uses the button when visiting a website."

Wikileaks tips over one million Facebook "likes"

Some time in the last hour Wikileaks passed the one million Facebook "likes" mark. In the world of investigative journalism, Wikileaks is now ahead of the New York Times and every other major newspaper in terms of Facebook popularity, and behind only The Colbert Report and The Daily Show, both with "likes" in the 1.5m to 2m range.  

Is it a big deal? It's a significant milestone, and one that other news organisations have so far failed to reach so nods to a shift in the journalism landscape. And if you see the Wikileaks drama in terms of power vs The Internet, which is a popular enough narrative, then of course it matters that Wikileaks can raise this level of popular support. Power vs the Internet only makes sense if the Internet is really on board and this is one of the key markers that it is (or, one should say, we are). As John Naughton wrote in the Guardian (HT Emily Bell)

"The most obvious lesson is that it represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet."

It's perfectly clear where they stand. Let's make sure they know where we do. 

Never mind Twitter's strange trends: Wikileaks on course to become most "liked" source of investigative journalism in the world

Correction: EasyDNS has done nothing of the sort, and I stand corrected on this point. For more details see their blog or Techdirt. In fact they have been added to the new DNS delegation for Wikileaks.ch and are in this case on the side of the angels. 

Original post: Not only is Wikileaks a media entity: given its current trajectory, it is on track to very shortly become the most "liked" source of investigative journalism in the world.

At more than 913,000 "likes" at time of writing, and with its phenomenal rise* from nowhere to one of the most popular pages on the social graph, Wikileaks should now touch a million likes before the New York Times (hovering around 980k) does, putting it in global first place for serious investigative journalism "liked" by Facebook users voting with their clicks. Amongst comparably serious journalism practitioners the Guardian's main Facebook page sits at 54k likes, BBC News at 51k, HuffPo at 171k. Only crypto-serious news satire like the Onion, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report are ahead with likes in the 1.5m to 2m range (nothing to sneeze at, since satirical news audiences are the best informed in America); the biggest media channel of any sort by likes is Disney at 14.5m, assuming we exclude Facebook's own almost 30m.  

Yesterday it looked (a lot) like Twitter was censoring Wikileaks from trending - see this excellent research for details, though Twitter has a semi-plausible, Googley "our algorithim is really quite complicated" explanation for why it's all above board. (Google itself has refused to respond to enquiries from The Atlantic as to whether it would take down Wikileaks cables if they were published on Blogger.)

But even if Twitter doesn't want to show, or for complex and thoroughly counter-intuitive reasons uses an algorithm that doesn't show, the fastest-rising social media trend of the last fortnight, Facebook's likes show the trend unambiguously.