I used to correspond with a man who was a self-professed Luddite. He's a great fellow, but he was born in the wrong century and hates computers, email and the internet. Then one day, out of the blue, I got an email from him. I asked what was up, and he said he couldn't find …
In March of this year, Wired said … “Facebook steadfastly resists categorization as a traditional media company. Instead, CEO Mark Zuckerberg insists on calling the social network a technology platform—even though nearly half of all American adults get their news on Facebook. ” Facebook has — at least at times — wanted to be seen …
Continue reading ‘Is Facebook a “media company,” and why does it matter?’ »
I’ve been reading a bit recently on how to improve the online shopping experience, and how to solve the dreaded cart abandonment problem. You’ve probably seen calculations along these lines … You have 100 transactions a day that are worth $50 each, but 50% of the people who start a transaction in your store don’t …
Continue reading ‘No, you’re not losing *that* much money in your cart’ »
The main cause of the decline in print magazines is not consumer demand. It’s advertising. Survey after survey shows that consumers continue to like print. There are some people who read digital editions, and some people who find what they used to find in print magazines on web pages. But the main reason print magazines …
Continue reading ‘How Alexa and Google Glass will revive print publishing’ »
I’ve heard that saying many times over the years, and there’s some wisdom to it. You want to make the best possible offer with the customer in mind, not the offer that makes your systems people happy. But … the more I get involved in the back end — either from the IT side or …
Continue reading ‘“Don’t let the back end run the front end”’ »
Why are advertisers putting so much of their money in digital and generally leaving print? One big reason is that advertisers can do so much more with digital ads, both in targeting and in tracking. But why is that limited to online? What if we could change printed magazines to make them more like a …
Continue reading ‘Please join my thought experiment on print publishing’ »
As you know, advertising is in a slump, and it’s hurting many publishers. While print should be doing just fine, because readers continue to like print, print advertising is not doing very well, except in some small niches. Most of the ad money is going to digital, so some people want to abandon print and …
Continue reading ‘Will Google micropayments rescue publishers?’ »
This is worth your time. I don’t agree that online advertising in inherently corrupt, but he makes some good points. Online Advertising Is Corrupt At Its Core.
I hate to disappoint my loyal readers, but this is the rare Krehbiel Report where I don’t suggest an answer. Not even a half-baked one. I’m curious what you think about this. Yesterday I was listening to a podcast a couple of my kids said they liked. It was sponsored by Audible — the audio …
Continue reading ‘From free podcasts to for-pay audiobooks?’ »
A lot of interesting currents in popular culture are raising questions about the ethics of publishing. The two most obvious are (1) free speech issues, and (2) whether profit or management drives content in the daily news. The main free speech question is whether a publisher should censor what it publishes based on some moral …
Continue reading ‘Should publishers censor their content to further social goals?’ »