AOP research digital future

New research from AOP and Deloitte finds publishers much more comfortable about the digital future. On average publishers say digital will make up 40% of revenues by 2012. Advice, distilled from the research, follows….

1. Make it simple Develop and clearly articulate a simple overarching strategy that sets out how your offline, online and mobile offerings interplay. Ensure it delivers incremental value to customers;
2. Know your customer Get to know your customers and grow with them. Don’t ignore the young – they are your future;
3. Profit from personalisation Personalise to provide what customers want at the right price and they will come. Don’t be afraid of breaking your traditional one-to-many publishing model;
4. If you can’t beat them, join them Embrace those who won’t opine about or contribute to your product; they will ultimately enhance and support your brand;
5. Fee or free Look beyond the printed word and focus on the brand at the centerpiece for generating revenue.

Open source community software

I came across Pligg, open source community platform at the moment in beta, a while ago but lost sight of it (that will teach me not to blog it in the first place! It looks quite good and the best thing is the licence lets you use it for free and change the software as you see fit.

The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the Affero General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software–to make sure the software is free for all its users.

New term for a new phenomenon?

Jeff Jarvis suggests a new term: “networked journalism”

I think a better term for what I’ve been calling “citizen journalism” might be “networked journalism.” “Networked journalism” takes into account the collaborative nature of journalism now: professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story, linking to each other across brands and old boundaries to share facts, questions, answers, ideas, perspectives. It recognizes the complex relationships that will make news. And it focuses on the process more than the product.

AOL’s big gamble

According to PaidContent.org, AOL is considering offering its entire menu of services — including e-mail, virus protection and other security software — free to anyone who has a competing Internet connection, WSJ reports.

Says PaidContent, “Under this proposal, which AOL CEO Jonathan Miller presented to top Time Warner executives in NYC last week, AOL would stop charging a subscription fee for outside users, but subscribers who have traditional dial-up through AOL would still have to pay their monthly fee of as much as $25.90. The company expects that 8 million of its existing dial-up customers would cancel their subscription to take advantage of the new offer…it could be giving up as much as $2 billion in subscription revenue in a gamble aimed at boosting ad revenues.”

Massive layoffs would follow reducing costs and advertising revenue increases would offset the rest of the subscription decline.