Mecom's ad revenue slumps, prompting profit warning

With ad revenue decreasing by 12 percent compared with the first quarter in 2011, pan-European publisher Mecom announced Thursday it likely won't hit its profit expectations this year, MediaGuardian reported.

Mecom owns titles in the Netherlands, Denmark and Poland. According to the Guardian report, it cautioned a “modest reduction” in earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation compared with last year.

The profit warning comes on a double-digit slump at its flagship Dutch operation, which fell by 9 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2012, according to another report by the Guardian.

Financial Times reported that its Dutch titles account for almost 70 percent of the company's profits. The ad revenue recorded declines of 10 percent, 19 percent for Denmark and Poland respectively.

After the announcement, Mecom shares fell 4.2 percent to 147p in London. Analysts downgraded expectation of its earnings to €105m (US$139.1m) from €113.6m ($150.5m),  MediaGuardian reported.

"The advertising environment... has deteriorated further and although the impact is being partly mitigated by cost reductions as we successfully implement our restructuring programme, overall revenues have decreased," said Tom Toumazis, group chief executive at Mecom

Non-ad revenues displayed a flat performance. Toumazis attributed it to the strength of a 1.2 million subscriber base, Journalism.co.uk. reported.

According to the FT, the cost-cutting program will see jobs cut across the group, the possible introduction of a pay model for its top 10 newspapers and the closure of up to 65 titles.

Image: Journalism.co.uk.

Taiwanese lawmakers debate cross-media acquisition

A Taiwanese business tycoon with big holdings in China is looking to buy a cable TV network for US$2.4 billion in Taiwan.


The controversial deal would give Want Want Group chairman Tsai Eng-meng more power in the small democratic nation. His close ties to China are making many in Taiwan worried that “China is using big Taiwanese business interests to advance its agenda of bringing the island back under its control,” the Washington Post reported today.


Political parties on Thursday called for regulations that would not allow firms to own more than 10 percent of the shares in newspapers, TV or radio stations from operating cable TV services or owning more than 10 percent of the shares in cable TV service providers, according to the Taipei Times.


The Want Want Group’s bid for the cable network has led some lawmakers who were neutral on the legislation to now support it.


“I did not know how horrible [cross-media acquisitions] could be, but now I know,” Legislator Lo Shu-lei told the Times.


In 2008, Tsai bought the China Times group of media outlets for $680 million. This includes the China Times daily newspaper, the CTI cable news station and China TV.


Image: Paisawaisa.com

Digital ad revenue hit record high

U.S. Digital advertising revenue soared 22 percent in 2011, reaching a record high of US$31 billion, according to a report prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers and released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, paidContent reported.

Search revenues had nearly half of the share at $14.8 billion, with a 27 percent increase.

Display advertising accounted for $11.1 billion, up 15 percent on the year. One component, digital video increased by 29 percent to $1.8 billion.


The report also highlighted that mobile advertising spiked 149 percent to $1.6 billion.

"Clearly mobile has become a key category," said David Silverman of PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Los Angeles Times reported.

“Pushing past the $30 billion barrier, the interactive advertising industry confirms its central place in media. Across search, display, digital video, digital provides a wealth of opportunity for brands and consumers. With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, it is likely that the tremendous growth in mobile will continue as these screens become even more crucial to the marketing mix,” said Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of IAB, BusinessWire reported.

Rothernberg also commented it is indicative of an increased awareness from advertisers that they need to reach consumers where they are spending their time in digital media.

Image:GeekWire

Piano Media secures €2 million in funding

Online subscriptions system start-up Piano Media has scored €2 million in funding from private equity fund 3TS Capital Partners, TechCrunch reported.

The Bratislava-based firm is a platform that aggregates various online publishers in the test markets of Slovakia and Slovenia. Readers only pay for a single subscription fee and get access to all content on a national Piano site, a model similar to cable TV.

“Our €300,000 seed funding, raised in 2011, enabled us to launch in two countries and prove Piano’s model works. This deal represents the next step in Piano’s growth; helping speed our expansion, recruit top talent, ramp up our marketing, broaden our sales channels and keep improving our software,” Tomáš Bella, Piano’s CEO, said in a statement. 

“We are impressed with the depth and quality of the management team at Piano and believe that 3TS has the resources, skills and market experience to assist Piano in strengthening and expanding its unique market position,” added Jiří Beneš, partner at 3TS, who led the investment.

Piano Media was launched in May 2011, with nine major publishers in Slovakia. It took in €40,000 in its first month of operation within an online population of 2.5 million. Subscribers pay €3.90 per month (raised from €2.90 in March this year), press release explained. Earlier this year, Piano Media expanded to Slovenia, and made €26,000 in its debut month, according to paidContent. Subscribers in Slovenia pay €4.89 per month to access content from 20 participating publishers, encompassing more than 60 websites, according to a press release.

Payments are split between publications according to where a digital reader enrolls in the Piano system, how much time is spent on each publisher’s sites and the type of content consumed. This means the most-read publications receive more. Then, Piano Media keeps a commission of 30 percent, Bella said at the Guardian's Changing Media Conference, and this payment system generates a revenue six times more compared to the individual system (publisher-specific).

Image: Piano Media

Mail Online tracking to be profitable earlier than expected

While more news websites are turning to pay walls to earn revenue, Mail Online, the United Kingdom's most read newspaper website, is proving it can still be profitable without requiring a paid subscription.

Launched online on 2008, Mail Online, owned by Daily Mail and General Trust, is performing well enough to nearly break even this year, being profitable earlier than anyone expected.

“Last year, our revenues were £16 million. This year, Mail Online is very close to breaking even on revenues of a little over £25 million,” the publisher stated Wednesday, paidContent reported. Martin Clarke, the editor of Mail Online, shows his confidence by pointing out that within five years, Mail Online is expected to generate £105 million a year.

From DMGT’s perspective, Mail Online was “an early-stage business” that was not expected to turn a profit until well into 2013, DMGT CEO Martin Morgan noted last year, according to paidContent.

Though DMGT’s profit is shrinking due to falling national advertising revenues and higher newsprint and promotional costs, Mail Online's ad revenue surged by 69 percent this year, according to DMGT’s financial website, This is MONEY.

The Mail Online website cost £25 million to build and employs just 35 journalists in the UK and U.S., yet its potential and popularity is big, overtaking The New York Times as the top online newspaper, according to figures from tracking firm comScore this year, media website BuzzFeed reported.

"We are now one of the biggest players in terms of Internet news, as is The New York Times - and I'm sure we both will be for a while," Clarke told BuzzFeed in an interview.

By emphasising that Mail Online’s content attracts readers, Clarke pointed out to paidContent that their referrals "are organic; a one-off referral won’t make people come back time and time again. The stories which do make people click are those on our homepages; it’s those people addicted to the homepages who drive our growth."

Image: THE DRUM

UK press inquiry: Self-regulation receives support from Ofcom

The UK broadcasting industry got support this week from the country's radio and TV regulator, Ofcom, MediaGuardian reported Wednesday.

"Properly constituted, effective and independent self-regulation could be the basis of a new model of press regulation," Ofcom stated in a paper written to Lord Justice Brian Leveson, who had asked how the press could be regulated "in a way which preserves their independence and the rights of free expression."


However, for such self-regulation to work, "certain elements of the new regime, such as rules governing membership, may need to be recognised by a statute," the MediaGuardian report stated, explaining the paper.

British Prime Minister David Cameron set up the inquiry last summer, due to the News of the World phone hacking scandal that rocked the UK and eventually spread to the United States. Justice Leveson is in charge of finding out how the current regulations failed and proposing new rules, which could end up limiting press freedom in the country, Bloomberg Businessweek explained Nov. 14, which then inquiry began.

Graham Shear, a lawyer for celebrity victims whose own phone was also hacked, told Bloomberg Businessweek that he thinks illegal tactics by reporters at News of the World went unchecked partly because the Press Complaints Commission didn’t have the power to investigate misconduct.

However, statutory regulations are seen as a hazard to press freedom and democracy by media professionals, Lord Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust, told The Telegraph. The best way forward is for self-regulation to continue, he said.

"Statutory regulation of the press would, in my view, be more than wrong-headed. It would pose a real danger to the public discourse that underpins our democracy. So the responsibility to ensure high standards of professionalism rests with journalists, their editors and their proprietors.'' he said. 

Image: The Telegraph

E-book antitrust case: Justice Dept. sues Apple and 5 publishers

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit last Wednesday against Apple and five major book publishers, accusing them of conspiracing to fix e-book prices in 2010.


HarperCollins, Hachette, Penguin Group, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster teamed up with Apple to set the price under the condition of giving the giant a 30 percent commission.

The partnerships were made as two things were happening: Apple was preparing the launch of the iPad and Amazon was gaining too much bargaining power, as it had at that time an estimated 90 percent share of the e-book market, the Wall Street Journal explained.

Since Amazon launched the Kindle, it offered newly releases and best sellers at for US$9.99, which worried publishers, who want to sell hardbacks at higher prices. When Apple came on the e-books scene, it offered an "agency pricing" arrangement, in which 70 percent of of the retail price went to publishers, and the rest went to Apple, rather than the seller paying 50 percent to the publisher and then choosing how much of a discount to offer readers. However, under the agreement with Apple, publishers could not sell more cheaply to Apple's rivals, according to the WSJ.

However, according to US Attorney General Eric Holder, this strategy can ultimately increase prices for consumers, making them pay more for the most popular titles.


"Our investigation even revealed that one CEO allegedly went so far as to encourage an ebook retailer to punish another publisher for not engaging in these illegal practices," he said, according to Wireless Week.

Hachette, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins have already agreed to settle with the Justice Dept., while Penguin was determined to go to court if necessary and Macmillan denied any collusion, responds John Sargent, CEO of MacMillan.


Apple refused to comment.

Peter Pachal from Mashable writes that the winners of the case are Amazon and consumers. The former has the law on its side and the latter can enjoy spending less money. On the other hand, Emily Bell, from The Guardian notes, despite the Justice Dept.'s efforts to protect consumers, the regulators are still unfamiliar with handling the digital world.

Previously, in December 2011, the European Commission also launched an anti-trust case against Apple and four publishers of colluding the retail price of e-books. The publishers were Simon & Schuster, Harper Collins, Hachette Livre and Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtizbrinck. Last Wednesday, Joaquín Almunia, the EU's competition chief, received their proposals to close the probe and said he is engaged in "fruitful discussions" with the companies, Reuters reported.

 Image: Tech Crunch

Google's Brin preaches Web threats

"Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google's Sergey Brin,” a Guardian headline pronounced Sunday, suggesting the Internet has come to an important crossroads.

There are “very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world," Google co-founder Brin told the Guardian in an exclusive interview.

What are these forces? There are three, Brin said: governments trying to control what their citizens have access to and how they communicate, the entertainment industry trying to clamp down on piracy, and a growing number of "restrictive" walled gardens, which control the software that can be used on their platforms.

"I am more worried than I have been in the past…It's scary," he told the Guardian.

It is understandable that those at Google have cause for concern. The online giant's top competitor - Facebook - is enormous. According to its official website, we know the social network accounted for one in four page views in the U.S. weekly, which is nearly four times the views of YouTube, and five times the page views of Google.

Google has several access points to the web including a search engine, a Web browser and a Web-based operating system, whereas Facebook is a platform on its own, the STATE of SEARCH noted when comparing the two web players.

Facebook integrates into existing services, while Google is busy "connecting its own services and trying to develop 'better services,'" SoS explained. The question has become whether Facebook is "luring the users to Facebook or is Facebook coming to users outside of Facebook.com," the article noted.

Brin expressed his frustration to the Guardian: "You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive….The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation."

Brin’s dissatisfaction was not bought by everybody.

“Google playing the open and free card is highly cynical. Google's view is that it's great to be open as long as you are logged into a Google account where your web browsing behavior is efficiently tracked under one login and password, for the benefit of their advertising business,” one netizen named “Nortonfulgate” pointed out in the comments section.

And Google’s belief in freedom is also tainted with a recent government investigation into its using Google Maps cars to sweep up sensitive personal information from wireless home networks while mapping streets.

Also, last month Google introduced a new privacy policy that allows more comprehensive tracking of its users’ actions, provoking a firestorm of criticism, The NewYork Times reported.

Image: NYDailyNews

Google fined for impeding data collection inquiry

U.S. federal regulators on Saturday charged that Google has “deliberately impeded and delayed” an investigation into its collection of data from wireless home networks and fined the online giant US$25,000, The New York Times reported.

In 2010 Google admitted that its famous cars used to map streets were also collecting private information people send over unencrypted wireless networks. At the time, Google said the data collection was inadvertent, and due to a programming error,   according to The New York Times blogs.

The Federal Communications Commission seems to be losing its patience, sending out a report on the matter written in an "exasperated tone," The Times noted. This is in contrast to the Federal Trade Commission's report two years ago. In that investigation, the FTC accepted Google’s explanation that it was “mortified by what happened” and made a promise to impose internal controls.

The FCC, despite its irritation with Google, found that the search giant's collection of data was legal, because that data was not encrypted.

A Google spokeswoman responded to the investigation on Saturday that “we worked in good faith to answer the F.C.C.’s questions throughout the inquiry, and we’re pleased that they have concluded that we complied with the law.”

This is Google's second privacy issue in the past three months. Earlier this year, the company's new privacy policy was heavily criticised, especially in the European Union The Washington Post and Guardian, among others, reported at the time. The new policy says that Google will place 60 of its Web services under a unified privacy policy that will allow the company to share data between any of those services.

Image: Google

Google unveils new social reader app

Google Currents, the Internet giant’s social reader app, released its latest version on Wednesday, responding the requests from users since it launched last year and revealing its ambition to attract readers and publishers around the world.

With its U.S. performance (nearly 400 publisher editions and more than 14,000 self-produced editions), the newest version, Google Currents 1.1, is also going abroad and competing with other social media reader apps like Zite, Flipboard and Palse.

Google Currents 1.1 allows local publishers to upload their content, decide where to make it available globally and whether to use auto-translation functions from Google translation, Mussie Shore, Google Currents product manager, write in the Google Mobile Blog.

The Guardian in the UK, LaStampa in Italy, Financial Times Deutschland in Germany, ABC News in Australia, Neue Zürcher Zeitung in Switzerland and Hindustan Times in India have already started publishing editions with local content, the blog stated.

NME’s publishing director, Emily Hutchings, told MediaWeek that “Google Currents is yet another way in which our audience of avid music fans can connect with their favorite music brand, keeping them up to date with everything that's happening in live music on a daily basis.”

The partnership "illustrates the growing power of Now in the digital space. Our new Google Currents edition will give our consumers yet another great way to get close to the celebrities making the headlines," Sandy Gale, publishing director of Now, told journalism.co.uk.

Readers can use the app for offline reading and the Google Translation works with 38 languages.

“The previous versions of this app were terrible due to slow syncing. This has finally been fixed in this version, which makes it a really excellent app," one reviewers said, according to Metro.

Another noted that the update is "faster and nicer than the original version. And it's a great example of android tablet apps design. Five stars.”

Image: Google Play

Privacy commission: Hong Kong magazines breached stars' privacy

Hong Kong's privacy body has clamped down on two magazines, Sudden Weekly and Face, for allegedly infringing on the privacy of three artists by secretly snapping and then publishing photos of their private lives last year, South China Morning Post reported.

The two magazines collected the stars' private information "by unfair means," including showing an actor while nude, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data stated. They used long lenses from one kilometre away to take the photos of the celebrities at home, according to the report.

The three TVB artists involved, Bosco Wong Chung-chak, Yoyo Chen Chi-yiu and Vincent Wong Ho-shun, issued a high-profile complaint to the commission last June, The Standard reported. TVB is the largest local TV organisation. 

However, the two magazines argued that it was in public interest to prove Bosco Wong and his girlfriend Myolie Wu Hang-yee, and Vincent Wong and Chen were cohabitating when the two couples denied it. 

According to Privacy Commissioner Allen Chiang, there are three criteria to determine whether the media is infringing privacy: the complainant’s reasonable privacy expectancy the degree of intrusiveness of means used in photo-taking and overriding public interest. 

It is the first time in Hong Kong that the Privacy Commissioner has ruled a media organisation to have infringed on a celebrity’s privacy by secretly taking photos. It also ignited a public discussion on laws concerning the balance between press freedom and personal privacy.

Privacy issues are always sensitive in Hong Kong because the law also protects the media’s freedom of expression. It is in a heated public discussion because Hong Kong is different from other international cities. Once a colony of Britain, Hong Kong has mixed culture; both Chinese and Western,  as well as conservative and open. 

While Western readers might be more used to private photos in the magazines such as OK!, Hong Kong readers are still in the process of embracing private and bold photos of celebrities. Thus, news organisations have to adjust their content to readers’ values in specific cultures. 

Image: The Standard

How your ideas make money for Facebook

Facebook is paying US$1 billion for Instagram, CBS News reported. So why is a price tag in the billions placed on the photo sharing service?

Poynter explained that "What separates Instagram from other social networks is that people share photos not just of a thing but of an abstract idea — like 'how I’m watching news of bin Laden’s death' or 'what spring’s arrival looks like to me.'"

So what on earth does an idea cost? Ten of a user's thoughts today are probably worth a penny, an analyst calculated, Bloomberg reported. According to that formula, every "share" on Facebook is worth 2.4 cents.


Meanwhile, a tweet is worth .1 cent, a search on LinkedIn is worth 12.4 cents, a check-in on Foursquare is worth 40 cents and a review on Yelp is worth a whopping $9.13, the analyst found.

Along those same lines, photos must be growing money-makers for Facebook, which recently began placing ads next to images. 


“Video startups have YouTube. Now photo startups have Instagram,” Andres Blank, co-founder of Pixable, told Marshable Business.

In analysing the reason for the purchase, technology blogger Om Malik wrote in his blog that the acquisition is driven by keen market competition: “Facebook is essentially about photos, and Instagram had found and attacked Facebook’s achilles heel — mobile photo sharing.” He supported his idea by giving the evidence of a dropping market valuation of Facebook, from the rumored $500 million to $100 million.

The market value of a top company that is churning out the hardware that enables us to share our ideas, Apple, is going to overtake that of approximately 500 public companies in Spain, Greece and Portugal combined, Bloomberg reported.

Meanwhile, MashableTech reported that this year the forecast of tablets sales (119 million) will double that of last year (60 million), with iPads taking a 61 percent share, at approximately 73 million.

Image: CBSNEWS

Study: Smartphones for on the go, tablets for long-term media consumption

Some usage habits overlap between smartphones and tablets, but there are significant differences marketers should know to effectively use the devices, according to a new study by Forrester.

For example, smartphones are most likely to be used for task-related activities, such as sending e-mail, going online and sending text messages, while tablets tend to be used at home and for long-term media consumption. This means that text message and shorter ads have been successful on smartphones, while longer ads, as long as they don’t disturb users’ media experience, should work fine on tablets, AdWeek reported.

The study, “Mobile Marketing: Not the same on tablets as on smartphones,” surveyed 549 U.S. online adults who own a tablet, and found that almost nine out of 10 (77 percent) use it in the living room, about four out of five (79 percent) use it in the bedroom, while only 24 percent use it at work.

These users access their tablets not only for Internet access, but also for other long-term multi-media consumption. More than 80 percent use it for web browsing and e-mail; 72 percent use it for playing games; and over half of these users view pictures or watch videos on their tablets.

“Long video ads are better suited to tablets, whose screens are bigger and whose users are likely to be at home and able to view them,” the study stated.

Forrester also surveyed 22,292 U.S. online adults who own a smartphone. More than 70 percent (72 percent) use it on the go, 64 percent use it in a restaurant or a coffee shop, 63 percent use it in a store while shopping, while 47 percent use it in a car.

More than 90 percent of these smartphone owners use the device for Internet access, as well as SMS/text messages, the study found. 85 percent use it to send or receive personal email, while about seven out of 10 use it to access social networking sites and play games. Another half of respondents use it to research products for purchase while shopping, while 46 percent use it to watch video or TV.

Compare to a tablet, “a smartphone is largely a personal device that ties one phone number to one person,” Forrester stated in the study.

Infographic: Carlos Monteiro via AdWeek

Magazine's print version mimics tablet

Digital content layouts have mimicked print versions for a long time, but the tables could be turning, as magazine publishers are beginning to consider redesigning their print versions to mimic what's on the screen.

Hearst magazines UK has launched today a new quarterly publication called Good Ideas, both in print and digital formats, paidContent reported. The print edition has been designed with tablet-friendly features such as smaller articles, greater emphasis on visuals, smartphone-friendly typefaces and an interactive contents page.

The magazine has 164 pages and writes about beauty, health, fashion, food, homes and gardens, as well as consumer issues and finance. Good Ideas is produced by the same editorial and design team as Good Housekeeping. The first issue costs £3.99 and will have an initial print run of 150,000 and 300,000 downloads of a free iPad edition through the iTunes Newsstand.

"Designing Good Ideas to be as accessible digitally as in print is a natural next step for our business and provides an exciting platform for advertisers to engage with a new audience of women," said Judith Secombe, UK group publishing director at Hearst.


A coming unification of print and tablet versions can re-shape magazine design for the future, and publishers are considering several factors, as Hearst president David Carey recently told paidContent: "Tablet engagement metrics almost perfectly mirror what you see in magazines."


As print now begins to mimic digital, confusing a print magazine with an iPad could be a problem of the past.


Image: pressgazette.co.uk

Responsive websites: Boston papers show what’s next for media sites

The Berkeley Beacon, Emerson College’s independent student newspaper, is ahead of most professional media; its new HTML5 website is responsive, Nieman Journalism Lab reported today.


The site is now completely mobile device friendly, the paper’s editors announced.


A responsive Web design addresses the problem of constantly changing devices on which to view websites. “Instead of responding to today’s needs for a desktop Web version adapted to the most common screen resolution, along with a particular mobile version (often specific to a single mobile device), the idea is to approach the issue the other way around: use flexible and fluid layouts that adapt to almost any screen,” MSDN Magazine explained.


The Boston Globe unveiled its new premium content mobile initiative in December last year, Read Write Web noted, calling it “a win in the fight against mobile device fragmentation and screen sizes and the future of how content is displayed on mobile devices.”


Emerson College is located in Boston as well, and “it’s no coincidence the Beacon site looks a lot like BostonGlobe.com,” according to Nieman.


Alexander C. Kaufman, the paper’s editor-in-chief, and coder/designer Ryan Catalani studied the Globe’s new design carefully.


The new website doesn’t contain advertising yet, but it will when traffic levels reach a more steady pace, Kaufman told Nieman. And when it does, the goal is for the Beacon to look “closer to BostonGlobe.com than Boston.com.” This means looking more like a print newspaper, with fewer ads.


To create its new site last year, the Boston Globe hired design and development firm the Filament Group, according to Read Write Web, which sat down with the group’s partners for a helpful Q&A on how the new design was constructed for all devices.


Images: Screenshot and ReadWriteWeb

Spammers grow along with social media

The development of social media has brought enormous business opportunities as well as spammers, which are evolutionarily part of this growth. Sometimes it is difficult to tell who the pioneer is.

But in this week’s lawsuit against five major web tool providers, Twitter was determined to strike first to gain strategic advantage, WIRED reported. The document can be viewed through the link via WIRED.

The five defendant are TweetAttacks (tweetattacks.com), TweetAdder (Tweetadder.com), TweetBuddy (Tweetbuddy.com), James Lucero (of justinlover.info) and Garland Harris (of troption.com), according to Mashable.

The sued tool providers inject irrelevant marketing messages into one’s tweets once a trending topic is being tweeted.

“One challenge in battling spam is bad actors who build tools designed to distribute spam on Twitter (and the web) by making it easier for other spammers to engage in this annoying and potentially malicious activity,” Twitter explained in a statement.

CNNMoney reported that Twitter has spent around US$700,000 in anti-spam efforts to combat the defendants’ marketing blitzkrieg, meanwhile seeking injunctions against each defendant as well as monetary damages.

More often, such behaviour is taken as beating the dog before the lion. Twitter also stated in its blog that “we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter.”

Lawsuits against spammers were also brought to the court by Facebook and Google previously.

Image: CNNMoney

'Stupid game' makes the most of digital

The New York Times embedded a game in the magazine article Just one more game… last week, illustrating the concept the article presents.

The game that was inserted into Sam Anderson’s article is based on a two-year-old game, “Kick Ass.” Through its open source model, Jon Huang, The New York Times’s multimedia producer, modified the game, putting it on the Web page to attract readers.

Readers can control the spacecraft to shoot everything on the page. “We realized we could tweak the nose or the ear a little bit and share a joke,” Huang told New York Times blogger Samantha Henig. “I wanted to share a joke with the reader.”

With full support from The New York Times’s advertisement department with letting the ads on the page be blown up, the game successfully keeps readers on the page longer.

“It’s cool that [Huang] made a game that invades that space,” Zach Gage, an indie game designer, told Henig. ”It’s very easy to read The New York Times in print and read The New York Times online and think reading The New York Times online is functionally the same. But it’s not. It’s really different. You’re existing in a digital space that has other people in it and is a manipulatable experience.”

And, the space game illustrated the article's point perfectly. “While [the author] waxed poetic about the implication of “stupid games,” we were busy shooting ads on the site.” CBS News noted. Zack Whittaker, a ZDNet’s blogger also wrote that he spent more time blowing up the website than he did on reading the article itself.

Despite being known as the “Gray Lady” of journalism, The New York Times keeps trying new things to allure readers, Mashable noted. For instance, a homepage ad in February for Met Life let you play piano like Schroeder, the Peanuts character.

Image: Future of Media