Daily Archives: July 25, 2006

It took a study to tell us!: “Newspapers That Attract Teens Retain Them as Adults.”

Philip Meyer already showed us how that trend works.

… the idea is that newspapers should have content aimed at teenagers. The foundation estimates that only 220 newspapers across the country have special teen sections, many written by teenagers. The study also noted that roughly 800 papers carry some sort of syndicated youth content for all ages.

I might have endorsed that idea of special teen sections 15 years ago. Now, where newspapers need to be concentrating their resources on growing young audiences is on the Web.

There are two reasons: That’s the media teens are adapting to, and most teens are the children of parents who never acquired the newspaper habit, which makes them much tougher to reach.

The Web opens a world of inexpensive opportunities to grow audience with a variety of products, some of which could appeal to teens very much.

Continue reading →

Tweet

In a previous post, I expressed my concern that this may be the golden age of YouTube, and that those days could be numbered.

John Battelle gives fans of YouTube hope by pointing out that YouTube is basically a company nobody with deep pockets could ever buy. All of that copyrighted material on YouTube is something of a poison pill, however unintentional.

So who might buy YouTube? A major entertainment company, like the ones mentioned in the Post piece? No way. That’s buying a lawsuit or ten – if Time Warner bought YouTube, how long do you t hink it’d be before competitors sued to get their copyrighted stuff off TW’s new service? . . . What about a new media giant buying YouTube – Yahoo, say, or Google? Or Microsoft? Nope, nope, nope. Yahoo is a media company, and acts like one. Google doesn’t have it in its DNA to run a service like YouTube (though Google, with its Switzerland like approach to content, is the best fit, in my opinion). And Microsoft? They don’t need any more legal headaches over in Redmond right now.

YouTube is a great idea without a business model, which is okay if the only people it needs to support are its owners and a few employees (if that many people), along with enough servers and bandwidth to power the thing (which isn’t all that expensive). At this point, they could probably throw up a PayPal donation button to cover all that.

I’m guessing, however, that YouTube does have some initial investors who would like to see a return, plus the current owners (if they’re normal human beings) don’t want to pass up a unique opportunity to become filthy rich.

Continue reading →

Tweet