eBusiness
The Times paywall, discipline and game theory
So today’s the day that thetimes.co.uk starts charging for access. You can still access the front page without paying, but if you try to read any stories it prompts you to pick a payment option (£1 for one day’s access, or £2 for a whole week).
Now I have to be honest and say that I was all set to pay my £2. It’s a legitimate business expense, and I reckon we could manage £104 per year; I know I’d use it, too, because I currently visit The Times once a day, and often more. However, perversely, this is what put me off.
How websites reward ambition
In a nutshell: Because they scale really nicely.
This was brought home to me recently when I was drawing up a proposal for a client who plans to set up a new business networking group, or more accurately, a network of networking groups. Our M.O. involves a lot of upfront business analysis, so it was clear that the optimum solution involved much more than a simple website with some card payments for bookings.
Growing in a recession
I know there’s a recession on, and we’re all supposed to be hiding under blankets waiting for it all to be over, but the problem I’ve been facing for the past 6 months is that Prominent Media has been busier than ever. I have a couple of ideas as to why that might be, based on conversations I’ve had with new and existing customers over that period.
Slowly backing away from 3G?
I love my 3G laptop card, even though it nearly cost me £1,050 the last time I used it (in Spain, watching video highlights of the US Presidential debates). Yikes!
Now I see on TechCrunch that AT&T has bought Wayport, a US WiFi hotspot operator, in a $275 million deal. I wonder if that will prove portentous for the UK, where mobile carriers are still trying to recoup their £22 BILLION investment in 3G licenses. If the operating costs are significantly higher than WiFi, will we see the same thing in the UK? And if so, who are the big players in the WiFi hotspot market?
The Cloud already provides a similar service for O2 and Orange (although they levy a monthly fee, unlike AT&T), while the others are either doing their own thing (T-Mobile) or ignoring WiFI altogether (Vodafone). If WiFi continues to grow, while being much cheaper to support than 3G, will we see the incumbent carriers invest more heavily there?
Should be interesting to watch, in any case.
Moving the ‘millionaire’ goalposts
In amongst an interesting post from Lisa Everitt over at BNET on the online shopping habits of the rich, I saw this:
Google surveyed the shopping habits of 263 millionaires (shoppers 25 to 64 with an income of more than $1 million [emphasis mine]) and 730 ultra-affluents (net worth of $1 million, household incomes of $250,000 or more for married couples).
Given that the usual definition of millionare (‘A person whose wealth exceeds one million units of any currency’) would cover all of these people, I feel almost sorry for the ‘ultra-affluents’ whose million-dollar net worths and quarter-million incomes just don’t cut it any more. I wonder who is going to break the bad news?