What is a subscription worth?
News from Davos that the WSJ intends to increase the price of its online subscription and add extra content — perhaps there is life in the model yet?
It is interesting in two respects. First what additional content can the Murdoch Empire bring to the service to justify a price increase? Second, does Murdoch’s view of the advertising world diverge from that of Google that online advertising will remain strong in a down-turning market and he wants to hedge his bets?
Is HMV an anomaly?
HMV recently announced that it had a great holiday season with year on year sales up in the region of 14.1% with strong performance across all digital media. Interesting that Waterstones performed less well with a year on year of 4.0%.
HMV has been active in developing its digital focus over the past year and this seems reflected in these results. Games and Movie DVDs were cited in the interview of the CEO on the Today programme.
This comes in the week where both Amazon and Apple place emphasis on developing a focus on distributing movies representing a challenge to this form of resurgence in times ahead. The fact that the games industry has managed to maintain a Platform based distribution model has provided some security for this form of channel, but one wonders for how long will this last?
Library of Congress goes for value-added via Flicker
An exciting new collaboration has been announced between the Library of Congress and Flicker, which essentially sees the library piloting open availability to some 1500 of its most popular prints, photographs and visual material (where no known copyright restrictions exist) available via Flicker. One of the main objectives is to utilize the power of the flicker community to “tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flicker photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves.”
According to the Library, “many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flicker members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images.”
This strikes me a good trade off flicker users add 20 million tags on a daily basis, so the library and the future will benefit by the augmentation of its collection and flicker gets to add new communities and interests to its portfolio. It will be an interesting value added experiment to watch.