Category Archives: News

Original posting on PaidContent – Apply here. Observer Digital Media, New York, NY GENERAL MANAGER, Observer Digital Media JOB DESCRIPTION RESPONSIBILITIES: The Observer Media Group is looking for an energetic, entrepreneurial, and extremely organized General Manager to build, grow, and … Continue reading →

A recent eMarketer article announced that there are now one billion mobile applications. The main player benefiting from this dramatic increase in mobile applications over the last several years is of course Apple, with its iPhone and the mobile application store.

While the iPhone was the not the first ‘smart device’, I believe it is the single smart device that will change the market – and these mobile applications are the main drivers of iPhone’s sales growth. It is likely that the “cellphone” as we knew it from 1995-2006 will quickly fade out over the next several years and be replaced by these smart devices which, in addition to being a mobile phone, are a camera, an internet browser, email and text messenger, and, most importantly, a mini computer running all of these new applications.

Allowing open source software developers to create applications for the iPhone was a brilliant move by Apple because it served to drive the sales of iPhones, which could do more for users everyday. It fits with the web 3.0 model, where users are the ones driving trends. While many of these applications are silly trivial games, others have proven to be extremely useful (like iWant) and innovative (like Shazam, which can recognize songs name simply by holding the iPhone next to a speaker playing music). While other smart devices will eventually eat into Apple’s market share, the iPhone has developed a huge “first mover” advantage by anticipating the tremendous growth of these open source applications.

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This recent articleby Catherine New, posted on the Columbia Business School homepage, brought up some interesting insights as to the future of content on the internet.

Catherine details the growing possibility that online content providers will begin charging for their services. While many of these sites, such as Hulu.com, offer ad-supported content, where viewers must sit through various video advertisements around the featured content including prerolls and overlays, a new subscription model may be emerging. Because there are so many other sites where content can be accessed for free, like youtube.com, New wonders what “necessary value” these sites could offer in order to convince web surfers to pay for content that they are traditionally used to accessing for free.

This is related to the same issue that I previously posted about on the music industry – how can you convince people to pay for things that they feel that they should receive for free? The “necessary value” might be faster upload speeds, no advertisements, or higher quality content (at least when it comes to video). But is this something that customers are willing to pay for? And if so, how much?

I am skeptical that a paid content site will be able to gain traction – at least not yet. While the amount of content accessed via the web is large and growing fast, the broadband infrastructure needed support to support high quality video, which is much larger in size than the cheap-looking, compressed content on sites like youtube, is not yet in place. Secondly, users may want to “own” the content that they pay for much like paying for a DVD. Until internet video is on equal ground with cable TV, I doubt whether such a model will be successful.

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