Google and Privacy Shields
Research compiled by Clyde Bentley
Print takes the backseat to technology in this fortnight's roundup of research. Google's on the bus, but can't drive through a new privacy shield. We now have links for deadwood editions, but that online-only plan may not fly. Remember, researchers glance behind to look ahead.
Just Naver It - Many of us think of Google as the world's omnipresent digital genie. Not so. The search-engine-and-more company does so poorly in the world's 10th largest economy that it slapped its logo on a double-decker bus and drove it around Seoul to drum up business. That's right, only 3% of South Korean computer users Google around the Web. Most use Naver, a wiki-like search engine owned by NHN, the country's largest Internet portal.
Falling behind - Speaking of Web leaders, the U.S. is not - at least in terms of broadband penetration. The Point Topic analysis for Q4 2008 showed that the U.S. dropped to 19 from its 17th place in 2007. At 25.78% broadband penetration, we come in just tenths of a point behind Estonia. The big dog in broadband is little Monaco, with 40.63% of its users on broadband. The other members of the top 10 (in order) were Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, South Korea, Sweden, Finland and Luxembourg. Website Optimization did a nice summary of Point Topic's technical report.
The Disappeared - Clicks are cheap. But to an advertiser, some clicks are gold. Marketers crave readers who have all the makings of good customers, which is why so many sites ask you to fill out a profile upon registration. But what if all that data on gender, race, political persuasion and favorite NASCAR driver was to suddenly disappear? That's what Michael Learmouth of Advertising Age asked after reviewing the Hotspot Shield privacy service.
The free-download program may be a blessing to surreptitious porn watchers, but it and its inevitable clones stick a dagger in the heart of online advertising. Hotspot Shield uses common Virtual Private Network security in a novel way - the program gives you a new homepage routed through a secure server. If you surf the Web from the Hotspot Shield portal, you are just an anonymous (and fleeting) set of digits with no profile to interest marketers.
But wait, there's more. Unfortunately. Hotspot Shield not only locks out advertisers, but for a price also gives them exclusive access via the HS homepage. To make matters worse, that homepage is also filled with Yahoo-driven news headlines. Sure, you can click your way to a WSJ blurb or Sacramento Bee feature, but the papers will neither know where you came from nor whether you are really a "unique" visitor. So much for metrics.
The News Tweet - It may be time for news folk to seriously examine the Twitter phenomenon. ComScore reports that use of the mini blogging service attracted 9.3 million American visitors in March, up 131% in one month. OK, we knew that from all the tweets buzzing on our iPhones. But a curious Andrew Lipsman of ComScore wanted to know what sort of people were spilling their guts, 140 characters at a time.
Answer: Our kind of folks. Lipsman found that the average Twitter user is often two or three times as likely to visit the top online news sites as was the average U.S. Web wanderer. Lipsman ponders what that means on his ComScore blog:
"But the chicken-and-egg question continues to gnaw at me: Is it that the real-time 'newsiness' of Twitter inherently attracts news junkies, or is it that the mainstream news attention on the site is pushing more and more news consumers to get on Twitter for the first time?"
Newspapers are setting up Twitter accounts and tweeting headlines by the gigabyte, but there has been little time to determine what is driving the phenomenon. Is it the specific and unduplicable platform itself, a la EBay? Is it just a means of text messaging information that we can provide on our own? Or is it one of those trendy social networking parties at which the press is not really welcome? If you have the answer, tweet me at http://twitter.com/MizzouBentley.
From Print to Beyond - Canada's National Post this month became the first North American newspaper to adopt the 2D barcode system to put Web links onto paper. The 2D barcode isn't a "bar" at all and is more accurately called QR code. It's a square of squiggles that can be read by many cell phone cameras even if it is printed as a tiny smudge. It can pack a tremendous amount of information into a thumbtack-sized image and can be read by computers very quickly - hence the abbreviated "quick response code" moniker.
The codes were first used to tag automobile parts, but now are showing up everywhere. They can be printed in any size and enhanced with color to include logos. But like a hyperlink, the image itself is only half the story. A scanned QR code can direct a computer to a Web site or download 4,296 characters of text. That's 30 tweets, by the way.
I first ran into them in 2006 while teaching in London. I noticed the squiggles on the posters I browsed while waiting for the next train at my neighborhood Tube station. Occasionally someone would go up to a movie or theater poster and wave a cell phone at it. Later, when Nokia let me test a smartphone, Mark Squires explained that the camera on the phone read the code and beamed up ticket information.
Scandinavian, Japanese and Korean phones have had QR readers for several years. There is now a QR app for the iPhone and another for Android. You can also easily generate your own code with free software - that's a whole bio of me to the right.
Not So Fast - My colleague Neil Thurmon at City University London just released another of his startling research reports on the newspaper industry's clash with the Internet. This time he and Finnish researcher Merja Myllylahti found cause to warn publishers to ease off of plans to go all-online.
The pair studied the Taloussanomat, a 75,000-circulation national business daily that turned off the presses on Dec. 28, 2007. Costs dropped by half, but the loss of print advertising and subscription revenue cut the paper's income by 75%, they wrote in "Taking the Paper Out of News." The scholarly paper was published in Journalism Studies and reviewed by the Wall Street Journal's Andrew LaVallee and The Guardian's Bobbie Johnson.
The drop in cash wasn't the surprise, however. The researchers also found that five months after the conversion, unique visits to the Taloussanomat Web site were actually down 22%. Thurmon had speculated Web visits would go up when print readers no longer had something to hold in their hands.
"It's always, I suppose, a bit dangerous to generalize from one case, but obviously there are implications in our findings for what's been happening at the Seattle P-I, the Christian Science Monitor and probably a number of other newspapers that are going online-only pretty soon," Thurman told the WSJ
But if a paper is in really bad shape, as the Taloussanomat was, Web may still be a good move.
"Only if your income is 31% or more lower than your costs, based on this case at least, would you be better off going online-only," Thurmon told the Guardian.
Old, slick and effective - Don't write off magazines, at least if you want to sell something. A study by the McPheters and Co. research firm showed that magazines trounce both TV and online for effective delivery. The researchers had people watch a sitcom, read a magazine or surf the Web for 30 minutes. Then they were tested on their retention of information in four ads placed in the media. Magazines effectively delivered twice the number of ad impressions than TV and six times as much as online. Eye-tracking data showed that the Web surfers saw only a third of the online ads and skipped over 63% of the banner ads.
So we are back to the modern media quandary. People love the Web editorial content we give them, but they want nothing to do with the ads that pay the way.
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E-mail - bentleycl@missouri.edu Twitter: http://twitter.com/MizzouBentley