Onto Digital Publishing

I don't know a whole lot about publishing but I have an Internet enthusiast's feel for some of what is going on. There is a tectonic shift underway.

"......so I'm interested in your thougts on the matter. I'm a magazine publisher, and we're transitioning from print into digital media...so I'm trying to figure it all out...like everybody else in print and TV....."

That is such a huge topic. A paradigm shift is under way. And there will be winners and there will be losers. The winners will be those who choose to ride the wave. The losers will be those who stay stubborn and get washed away.

Murdoch said while buying the WSJ, people don't want to pay. As in, he was thinking of turning the WSJ into something entirely ad supported, give everything out for free. No subscription, nothing. Print will not go away completely, and subscriptions will not go away completely, but that top dog just might have a point.

(1) Focus like crazy on serving ads. Have a good ad team. Gawker Media asked for and got premium prices. They did not exactly do AdSense.
(2) Your site should be a multi media experience.
(3) There should be the latest web functionalities. Which these days seems to mean the web experience should feel social.
(4) Remember, you are serving content, but you are also building community. But never forget content, your number one offering.
(5) Keep an open mind. Change should be not a decision for today, it should be a lifestyle, or rather, workstyle.

"I felt like I was previewing the future of media." (on the CNN Facebook collaboration for January 20)

Case in study. Plum. Comes out once a year. Has a niche market that I am going to call prime real estate, beachfront property. Some of what might apply to Plum would also apply to the New York Times. When the New York Times goes completely online, it gets read globally. Its readership expands like huge. But the revenue per reader is less than it was with print circulation. You lower the price and you make money on volume. Check out the 99 cent pizza place on 41st and Ninth.

There are pregnant women above 35 in America. Well, they also exist in Europe, and Japan, and India, and elsewhere. In going digital a media property like Plum could go global with no additional cost in terms of content creation. And if you manage to build community, many users create content for you for free.

You are looking at becoming a global brand name, and a media powerhouse. From coming out once a year, it becomes a web destination that people visit every day. It already has a great ad base, it looks like.

What makes Plum cutting edge is it has a very sharply defined niche, this collection of rich women, to put it mildly. So Plum is digital edge cutting edge. The new medium is all about niches. And the niche you find can be global. Plum got there in terms of concept before it got there in terms of technology.




http://upendra.shardanand.com My friend Upendra seems to be doing some cutting edge, insane quality work, right at the edge.
Daylife Select a game-changer for online publishing: the mind-bending Daylife Select. ...... gorgeous new pages of constantly updating content ...... lets publishers launch instant content portals containing thousands or millions of pages, with stories, topics, photo galleries, search (much like you see on our showcase, daylife.com), all in their own brand, voice, look, and feel. And without developer resources. It all happens through a simple point-and-click interface, not unlike launching a social network on Ning or a blog on WordPress. ........ through our integration tools, it can blend seamlessly with (or around) your existing property. ...... a content cloud computer ...... not only Daylife-collected content, but a huge range social media sources ...... videos from YouTube, photos from Flickr, topical streams from Twitter, search results from Yahoo!, comments from Disqus, and entries from Wikipedia. ....... ANY Google Gadget. .... not only do you have millions of pages – but every piece of every page is embeddable and shareable – so you now have millions of widgets ........ Smart Context automatically inserts hyperlinks into topical keywords ....... increase your URLs exponentially, which have huge downstream impacts on SEO and, of course, organic traffic acquisition. ...... let’s you curate the world around your content – do what you do best and outsource the rest.
The New Architecture of News news consumption is, if anything, increasing – it remains one of the top three activities on the web ...... news organizations are just now turning from self-preservation to re-invention ...... all about offering superior navigation to the content ...... do what you do best and link to the rest. ........ More than ever, publishers need something unique - in voice, brand, content - around which to build. ...... even more need for differentiation. ...... unique, differentiated content & products can see increasing returns. ....... intelligent, malleable technology platform for organizing news from thousands of content-creators ...... News will do more than survive. It will flourish.
Ethic of the link, revisited « The Future of Journalism

MediaTalk; A Journal for Women Pregnant Later in Life - New York Times
Plum, the first pregnancy magazine aimed at women over 35 .....
produced by Groundbreak Publishing, is described as a joint effort
with the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists. ........
Rebekah Meola, Groundbreak's principal ..... The 200-page glossy, to
appear annually ...... 400,000 readers who are typically well-educated
and affluent.
http://www.plummagazine.com/content/story_65.php award-winning
title's creative team. ..... Plum magazine, the award-winning
publication for pregnant women 35 and older .... world-renowned
publication designers ...... "We immediately recognized in Plum the
spirit of a great magazine," says Milton Glaser. ...... Plum's
commitment to continued excellence in both editorial and design. In
just its second year, the magazine is building on the successes of its
landmark debut by aligning itself not only with the leading
practitioners in the fields of obstetrics and gynecology, but with the
best the design industry has to offer. ....... wide range of
editorial subjects, including health, fashion, child care, personal
memoir, celebrity and personality profiles ......... text,
photography, illustration, and exclusive graphic elements .......
educated, sophisticated, established women facing motherhood at a
critical phase of their lives. .........
www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/25364.php New York-based publisher
Rebekah Meola ...... scheduled to be published only once per year and
distributed exclusively through doctors' offices, is "a cross between
a woman's beauty and lifestyle magazine and a health/pregnancy manual
...... "one of the country's fastest growing demographics" -- older
pregnant women. ....... between 1990 and 2002, the birth rate among
women ages 35 to 39 increased 30%, while the birth rate among women
ages 40 to 44 increased 51%
www.telegraphindia.com/1040905/asp/look/story_3715336.asp women who
do not know what to expect while expecting .... Plum, the first
pregnancy magazine aimed at women over 35 ...... Rebekah Meola,
Groundbreak's principal, said older, expectant mothers shared many of
the same concerns as younger ones, but often had greater anxiety about
medical complications, infertility and return to work.
www.spoke.com/info/c5x1RHN/GroundBreakPublishingInc
http://www.newsweek.com/id/150312 Many of these women put kids on
hold as they climbed career ladders. Translation: they're smart,
they've got money to spare and they want the absolute best for their
babies. As a result, advertiser interest in the magazine--which will
be distributed free to patients by the American College of
Obstetricians and Gynecologists--has been "exceptional," says Plum
publisher Rebekah Meola, with heavy hitters like Volvo,
Hewlett-Packard and Johnson & Johnson signed on.

Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter

43 is my lucky number. Mitch Kapor, a legend in the industry, is now following me on Twitter. This is not like Guy Kawasaki following me. That guy is officially the number one Twitterer in the world, but then he follows as many people as follow him, which is about 50,000. Which means he does not follow anybody. He just makes them feel good. It is like when you first signed up on MySpace, you automatically got one friend, I believe some guy called Tom, a MySpace staffer. Tom was everybody's friend at MySpace. Guy Kawasaki, great guy, a legend in his own right, Guy Kawasaki the Rich Dad Poor Dad guy, is the Tom of Twitter.

But Mitch Kapor. He is not trying to become a celebrity. He was a celebrity before anyone knew who Bill Gates was.



So when I saw he was my follower number 43, I immediately sent him a direct message. I am honored to have you follow me here on Twitter. He is only following 331 people. What that means is that once in a while he will read your twit.



The Hare Rama Hare Krishna people aspire for a Krishna consciousness. I think today on Twitter I have come to acquire a Kapor consciousness. Now on when I twit, I am going to ask a question, not What Would Jesus Do, but How Would Kapor React?

I don't believe this. I kept Twitter at arm's length for the longest time. Then I came in kicking and screaming. Within days I became an addict. (I Get Twitter) I mean, I want to snatch Guy Kawasaki's title away from him, but not by fraud following as many people as might be genuinely following me, but by becoming a genuine celebrity, someone who people want to follow, because they are interested in knowing what you do, what are you thinking about, what you are reading.

I almost want to lock up my account. As in I already got Mitch Kapor, I don't want any more people following me. But instead I decided to immortalize the moment with a blog post.



I do want more followers, more than most. This is PR at its best. If you think about it, this is Reverse Paparazzi. The paparazzi follow you e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e. Twits follow themselves everywhere.

We have become our own paparazzi. But this is fun. In a way this is the ultimate mindfood. Suddenly all my news browsing has become a social activity. I am not some loner reading a ton of news. Almost every news item I read these days, I feel the urge to share. I feel the urge to comment and share. I don't have enough followers yet to spark conversations, but I will get there.

I have met so many amazing people here already. For the longest time I thought the tech world was all male and boring. Then I saw all innonate was following. And I found all sorts of outrageously gorgeous women on the New York tech scene who I also decided to follow, one of whom I have kind of sort of become friends with. She has an exciting YouTube channel. By the way innonate is the Organizer of the New York Tech MeetUp, the top tech event in town. He was voted into that position. Used to be my friend the MeetUp CEO Scott was the Oragnizer.



I am honored you are following me now on Twitter, I said. Promptly I pitched. I thought I was done with round 1 fundraising back in June 2008. But I will save the details of the story. I am still a little short. I pitched the Plenty Of Fish: Online Dating King Markus Frind yesterday, but now I believe it that his company is a one person operation. I have not heard from him.

I mean, I could not resist. Mitch and I have exchanged a few emails since. At Twitter those emails are called DMs. They are Direct Messages. They also have that 140 character limit. Whoever came up with that random number? It feels scientific to me. Good enough for one unit of expression, especially if links are allowed.













Mitchell Kapor
Mitchell Kapor: Biography a pioneer of the personal computing revolution and has been at the forefront of information technology for 30 years
Mitch Kapor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mitch Kapor’s Blog
Glue Keynoter: Mitch Kapor
Stanford's Entrepreneurship Corner: Mitch Kapor, Foxmarks

Plenty Of Fish: Online Dating King

AdSense Millionaire, alternate name for this blog post

PlentyOfFish.com
Markus Frind, CEO of Plenty Of Fish, Blog

How I Started A Dating Empire by Markus Frind By the end of March my site went viral and started growing 2 to 5% a day and it was off to the races from there...... made a whole $5.63 cents my first month, but that was more then enough for me to realize that I wouldn't go broke running the site and I could make a business out of this with enough traffic. ...... I refused to accept defeat of any kind, and I constantly forced myself to test new things. ...... When 2004 rolled around and word of mouth REALLY kicked in and as they say the rest is history. .... I look back now at how ill prepared I was, I didn't know anything about SEO, Advertising, community and I didn't even know what Venture Capital was. Just goes to show you anyone can do anything.

Plenty Of Fish is my idea of a budding Web 5.0 company. (Defining Web 4.0) The fact that it does not have sexy looking 2.0 software, just something barebones, makes it a bigger candidate for 5.0. I am a fan of the site. I am a user. Finding dates is not easy, online or off. Finding The Person is harder. Creating a relationship is not something an online dating site can do for you. But a site like Plenty Of Fish takes some of the unnecessary frills away. Who you like might not like you, who likes you you might not like. In online dating that can be quite painless. Next. Overtures are plentiful. Rejections come by the truckload. You might get an occasional date, a first date but no second date, an email conversations, a chat, no phone number. Race and class issues do come into play, just like offline. Chemistry and communication issues come into play. And ultimately online dating is not really offline. You are trying to get an offline date. Just that you are trying to get that online. But the stats look good. 800,000 relationships per year. That is good.

The business model is fascinating. I have long dreamed of a free online dating site, a Craig's List style site. And this is it. I am excited aboot Plenty Of Fish the way I am excited about Facebook, the way I am excited about Gmail and Blogger and YouTube.

Markus Frind, you got something going on.



The site could just grow and grow and grow. It could keep performing the same basic functions and just keep adding more and more people all over the world. And it could also keep improving its basic algorithms. The profiles you browse through helps the site determine what kind of profiles to show you.

How PlentyOfFish Conquered Online Dating Inc. serving up 1.6 billion webpages each month. ..... Plenty of Fish is on track to book revenue of $10 million for 2008, with profit margins in excess of 50 percent. Then, six minutes and 38 seconds after beginning his workday, Frind closes his Web browser and announces, "All done." ...... unknown and undistinguished. He hasn't gone to MIT, Stanford, or any other four-year college for that matter ....... bouncing, aimlessly, from job to job, but he is secretly ambitious. He builds his company by himself and from his apartment. ....... Frind takes it easy, working no more than 20 hours a week during the busiest times and usually no more than 10. Five years later, he is running one of the largest websites on the planet and paying himself more than $5 million a year. ........ Quiet, soft-featured, and ordinary looking, he is the kind of person who can get lost in a roomful of people ......... introverted, smart, and a little awkward. "Markus is one of those engineers who is just more comfortable sitting in front of a computer than he is talking to someone face to face" ......... Frind can be disarmingly frank, delivering vitriolic quips with a self-assured cheerfulness that feels almost mean. Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), he says, is "a complete joke," Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is "a cult," and Match is "dying." ........ the 23 hours a day in which he doesn't work ........ most comfortable with the world at arm's length. "He never raises his voice," Kanciar says later. "And he doesn't like conflict." ......... prefers to remain a silent observer of others ...... seems perpetually lost in thought ......... In a way, he's thinking about the company all the time. ........ a lonely childhood ....... graduating from a technical school in 1999 with a two-year degree in computer programming ...... got a job at an online shopping mall. Then, the dot-com bubble burst, and he spent the next two years bouncing from failed start-up to failing start-up. ........ For most of 2002, he was unemployed. ....... When he did have work, it felt like torture. His fellow engineers seemed to be writing deliberately inscrutable code in order to protect their jobs. ............ cleaning up other people's messes taught Frind how to quickly simplify complex code. In his spare time, he started working on a piece of software that was designed to find prime numbers in arithmetic progression. ......... He finished the hobby project in 2002, and, two years later, his program discovered a string of 23 prime numbers, the longest ever. (Frind's record has since been surpassed, but not before it was cited by UCLA mathematician and Fields Medal winner Terence Tao.) ......... would devote a couple of weeks to mastering Microsoft's new tool for building websites, ASP.net, and he would do it by building the hardest kind of website he could think of. .......... Online dating was an inspired choice. Not only does the act of building an intricate web of electronic winks, smiles, and nudges require significant programming skills ...... Hot or Not was acquired for $20 million in cash ......... Working a few hours an evening for two weeks, Frind built a crude dating site, which he named Plenty of Fish. It was desperately simple -- just an unadorned list of plain-text personals ads. But it promised something that no big dating company offered: free. ........... Rather than try to compete directly with Match, the industry leader, he created a website that cost almost nothing to run ......... Even better, he had created a perfect place for paid dating sites to spend their huge advertising budgets. ........ a picture of determination and naiveté. ........ From March to November 2003, his site expanded from 40 members to 10,000. Frind used his home computer as a Web server -- an unusual but cost-effective choice -- and spent his time trying to game Google with the tricks he picked up on the forums. In July, Google introduced a free tool called AdSense, which allowed small companies to automatically sell advertisements and display them on their websites. Frind made just $5 in his first month, but by the end of the year, he was making more than $3,300 a month .......... Frind has few friends in business, no mentors, and no investors. ............. Websites that venture capitalists would have spent tens of millions of dollars building in 1998 can now be started with tens of dollars. ............. has stayed simple, cheap, and lean even as his revenue and profits have grown ....... Plenty of Fish is a designer's nightmare; at once minimalist and inelegant ........ "I don't listen to the users," he says. "The people who suggest things are the vocal minority who have stupid ideas that only apply to their little niches." ........... When a member starts browsing through profiles, the site records his or her preferences and then narrows down its 10 million users to a more manageable group of potential mates. ......... the site creates 800,000 successful relationships a year. .......... almost no staff ....... been able to run a massive database with almost no computer hardware ......... the social news site Digg generates about 250 million page views each month, or roughly one-sixth of Plenty of Fish's monthly traffic, and employs 80 people. Most websites as busy as Frind's use hundreds of servers. Frind has just eight. ............ comes from writing efficient code ....... Frind approaches business in much the same way. "It's a strategy game," he says. "You're trying to take over the world, one country at a time." .......... "I spent every waking minute when I wasn't at my day job reading, studying, and learning. ....... returned to one of his old Internet hangouts, a forum called WebmasterWorld, and posted a brief how-to guide entitled "How I Made a Million in Three Months." It contained a blueprint for the success of Plenty of Fish: Pick a market in which the competition charges money for its service, build a lean operation with a "dead simple" free website, and pay for it using Google AdSense. ............ By 2006, Plenty of Fish was serving 200 million pages each month ....... $10,000 a day through AdSense ........ "He came out of nowhere, and he didn't seem to give a shit" ............ the stunt worked. Frind's site was the talk of the blogosphere, driving gobs of new users to the site. Plenty of Fish's growth accelerated dramatically, hitting one billion page views a month by 2007. .......... He still hadn't figured out how to get e-mail on his cell phone. ........ a guy who works an hour a day, who doesn't travel much, and who doesn't have any hobbies beyond war games .......... an aversion to doing harm can be more valuable than an overeagerness for self-improvement.

How I started A Dating Empire « The Paradigm Shift
Looking To Acquire I’m letting hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues slip through my fingers every year by sending people to competitors sites. ..... paid sites are currently consolidating and the growth for the industry is flat ...... I think there is a lot of opportunity right now and a opening to create a major paid site right now.

Special Report: Angel Investing 2009