One quarter of U.S. households now have web access through mobile phones, creating a large new potential market for downloadable content. That’s my reading of a statistic buried in a Media Post article that excerpted bits from some research done by the Kelsey Group and ConStat.

The article said: “Nearly eight out of 10 households–79 percent–have wireless phones, up from 71 percent 17 months ago. And almost one out of three households–31 percent–have Web access via wireless phone, up from 26 percent in October 2003.”

If I did the math correctly, just shy of 25 percent of households have a web-enabled cell phone. That metric explains the why behind a Mobile Content News report that Major League Baseball’s advanced media division plans to deliver baseball action and ticket sales to cell phones.

A March 23 summary from the Center for Media Research, entitled “Mobile Phones are for more than phoning,” offers these insights into content downloads via mobiles: “13 percent of mobile subscribers reported accessing news and information via a mobile browser in the previous month.” The most popular categories were weather (57 percent), sports and national news headlines, (44 percent), maps and directions (41 percent), and movie and entertainment listings (40 percent).

I’m guessing all of this is repurposed major media content but as mobile devices grow as a download platform I would hope it offers licensing opportunities for mini media producers.

Separately and briefly, I’ll point to a New York Times report that three large newspaper chains, Gannett, Knight-Ridder and the Tribune Company, have taken a 75 percent stake in the Palo Alto startup Topix.net. Rafat Ali says “funding was less than $5 million” and that “the deal is non-exclusive.” I find Topix very interesting but don’t know nearly enough about the outfit to add any insights. This is just a placeholder to remind me to learn more as time permits.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media.

Ecosystem is a term often used to describe Internet business models. Given all the Web sites being acquired recently — including About.com, Bloglines, AskJeeves and Flickr — I wonder if we’re developing an Internet ecosystem populated by whales and krill.

The recent deals all seem poised to harvest advertising visits through the large Web sites that control most of the traffic on the Web. They would be the whales.

Whether you produce some content or merely consume it, you are probably krill. Some Internet whales, or wannabe surface feeders, are cycling some cash back to the more ambitious krill through programs like Google’s Adsense and competitors such as the Revenue Science behavioral system for linking ads to content.

Omar Tawakol, vice president for marketing at Revenue Science, recently noted that on the Web “you get one or two sites with a ton of traffic (like MSN or Yahoo!), and then 10 or 20 sites each with one tenth the traffic of those two, and 100 or 200 sites each with 100th of the traffic, etc.” This is not so bad, he wrote, because “if you add up all the traffic at the end of (the Web), you get a lot of traffic — and more importantly, a lot of very rich, specific user behavior.”

Revenue Science will need a very efficient seine to catch and process enough krill to allow it to swim with the whales. Say the company wanted to capture 44 million unique visitors per month from krill-sized publishers. Say we definedthese “small” publishers as those who generate 10,000 unique visitors per month. It would take 4,400 of these krill sites to generate the traffic equivalent of an AskJeeves. Serving 4,400 Web publishers would probably require much handholding, even assuming a high degree of automated account processing.

As for the krill side of the deal, that depends on the average value per unique visitor. Using a ballpark starting point of 20 cents yields a gross of $2,000 per month on 10,000 visits. Not bad but don’t quit the day job.

P.S. Let me close with two bits from the Center for Media Research.

1.) Final figures from TNS Media Intelligence put total 2004 advertising spending at $141.1 billion up 9.8 percent from 2003 (roughly twice as fast as GDP growth). Internet advertising rose 21.4 percent to $7.44 billion, to 5 percent of the total, and was the fastest growing category.

2.) A CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll said three out of four Americans use the Internet, but only one in four are familiar with blogs, and 56 percent knew nothing of them. The highest concentration of blog readers (47 percent of the sample) were persons in the 30-49 age group, which makes up 41 percent of the adult population.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

So it’s official — IAC/ InterActiveCorp. will buy AskJeeves to acquire 42 million monthly users in the continuing competition for search-based advertising. Yahoo also acquired the photo-sharing site Flickr (to match Google’s Picassa picture management software) as the Internet consolidation accelerates.

After I mentioned a report last week lamenting the dominance of large sites over Web-based activity, Andi Silver dropped me this comment on Sunday: “I question whether the internet (or “online”) ever was the “people’s medium” … domination of the Internet passed directly from academic geeks to big media … A “people’s medium” is still in the future.”

Apropos of Andi’s last remark, I got a note yesterday announcing the launch of the grassroots content site Ourmedia. I urge you to visit it. At the moment, however, access is tough. An announcement on Slashdot apparently drove so much traffic to Ourmedia that its servers were overwhelmed this morning. I’ll return when I can. Meanwhile you might look at a few comments that I made about Ourmedia while awaiting its launch.

Returning to the Jeeves news, I wonder where all these high-level combinations leave Mark Fletcher’s Bloglines, whose accomplishments are summarized in a 2005 Wired Rave Award ?

Rafat Ali at Paid Content was justifiably pleased with his observation, made back in February when Jeeves acquired Bloglines, that the deal made Jeeves “a more palatable acquisition target…but who would buy it? IAC?” Yesterday he quipped, “I either need to stop making predictions, or become a soothsayer and charge money for it.”

Though I searched for more about Bloglines, I found nada about its future in the expanded family of IAC. I did learn, however, that the first hint of its sale to Jeeves in February came from a posting by online and grassroots media author Mary Hodder . Perhaps she or some other bloggers will provide some insights into whither goest Bloglines.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Yahoo 360 exemplifies the genius of the big websites in building audiences and expanding traffic to continue dominating the Internet. The stories written about 360 last week billed it as an experiment in social networking. But I think it’s more useful to consider it an attempt to push the frontiers of personalization.

According to the Associated Press report, “The service is designed to enable Yahoo’s 165 million registered users to pull content from the Web site’s discussion groups, online photo albums and review section to plug into their own Web logs, or blogs, the Internet shorthand used to describe online personal journals.”

Yahoo director of community products Paul Brody told MediaPost Publications last week, “users (will have) the choice to show as much or as little of their personalized content … as they like.”

Perhaps it’s splitting hairs to argue over whether this is social networking or personalization, and if it builds traffic then the name doesn’t matter. But the discussion may be instructive because other sites ( Topix for example) are taking a different approach to personalization by using algorithms to mold news to fit user tastes. I like the Yahoo way because it uses people to create small islands of content that lure others. In essence Yahoo is empowering a group of opinion leaders who will draw others.

This is not to say that algorithms won’t be useful at personalization — especially if you’re trying to build a business without the advantage of a Yahoo-sized user base. And the two techniques can be used together. But given the choice between algorithms or personal pages, the personal pages seem to have the built in advantage of coming with their own marketing agent — the person who will serve as editor to pull in a group of friends, family and associates, large or small.

Paid Content recently highlighted an ongoing Google experiment in personalization that follows the path of customizing the news to fit the beholder. That piece also pointed to an 18-month old interview with Google news director Krishna Bharat that offers insights into his thinking.

Call it customization, or social networking, but I think personalization is the new Holy Grail of media outfits from large wire services to cutting edge entertainers, like Major League Baseball. According to Mobile Content News, MLB’s advanced media division plans to announce a series of initiatives to deliver baseball action and ticket sales to phones. “The launch is on hold until geo-location services are in place that will allow MLB to implement blackouts where games are broadcast on local television.”

This is personalization by device and interest. There are some media people will choose to consume in larger volumes, provided it is convenient. Take music. As for information, I think people will choose to personalize by following trusted voices — Yahoo’s 360 is creating new set voices to inspire trust This will spill way past news areas like culture, sports and lifestyle.

Meanwhile, the last institution to jump on the bandwagon, whether it’s social networking or personalization, may be newspapers. Paid Content last week pointed to “A nice and comprehensive story ( in Online Journalism Review) on how news and newspaper sites are not utilizing the full potential of social networks.”

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

A new report entitled State of News Media: Online by the Project for Excellence in Journalism points out that the new media, just like the old, are already concentrated when it comes to owning audience attention and the advertising dollars that follow the eyeballs. I was pointed to the report by a recent edition of Paid Content, which suggested special attention to sections on ownership and economics. I have excerpted some factoids apropos of my Mini Media interests.

The ownership section begins by asking “Has the people’s medium been taken over by big media?” In short the answer is yes, if that means large and meaningful traffic flows. “The big are getting bigger, something we saw a year earlier,” the report notes. CNN, Yahoo and MSNBC are the Big Three with more than 20 million unique visitors a month. There is a big drop off to fourth placed NY Times digital at just above 8 million monthly visitors, followed by what was a stranger to me, Internet Broadcast Systems, an amalgam of local television stations and other traditional media outlets. The two newest sites among the top 20 destinations were the Associated Press CustomNews Service and Google News.

The ownership section concludes by noting that more than half of the top 25 online news sites are owned by the 20 largest media companies “so the data point to the heavy concentration of ownership of the news the public is getting online.”

The economics section focused on advertising. It confirmed other suggestions that online advertising continues to grow at rates faster than dollar growth on competing media but still accounts for only four percent of total ad spending. Search ads increasingly dominate the mix, accounting for about 40 percent of the total as of second quarter 2004. Display ads, or banners, slipped to 20 percent of the mix, down from 21 percent in 2003 and 29 percent in 2002. Classifieds were a flat 17 percent in 2003 and Q2 2004, up from 2002’s 15 percent.

One piece of information new to me at least was a chart showing online revenues as a percentage of total revenues for 10 publicly traded newspaper chains led by Knight Ridder, which earned about 3.7 percent its gross from Web sources, up from 2.5 percent in 2003.

A chart shows how the growing share of local ad spending (a projected $2.7 billion in 2004, up from $2.1 billion in 2001) goes mainly to newspapers (39 percent) followed by online verticals (26 percent) which the report did not define, and I can’t think of a representative example in the category.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Competition is heating up in the contextual search arena, with Microsoft joining Google and Yahoo among the big brands offering the service, Rafat Ali’s Paid Content alerts us. Meanwhile a recent ClickZ article finds that smaller challengers offer advantages in comparison to Google & Yahoo-style context.

Microsoft announced its plans at a March 16 “advertising summit” attended by Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Yahoo search President Terry Meisel among others. According to a Microsoft news release, Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president of the MSN Information Services & Merchant Platform division, demonstrated a “pilot program (in paid search that) will begin within the next six months in Singapore and France” and will seek to “provide keyword buyers with in-depth audience intelligence including geographic location, gender, age group, lifestyle segment and time of day.”

Meanwhile the ClickZ article by Hollis Thomases, which came out before the Microsoft announcement, notes that neither Google nor Yahoo give advertisers an easy way to control the dispersal of their ads to the sites that have signed up for their contextual programs. She references an earlier ClickZ piece when she says, “No wonder marketers are still split on contextual advertising effectiveness.”

Thomases then goes on to write: “Enter true, advertiser-controlled pay-per-click (PPC) contextual ads. Networks such as Quigo’s AdSonar Exchange, IndustryBrains, and Kanoodle’s ContextTarget and newly launched LocalTarget, plus smaller providers such as ContextWeb and BidClix all offer advertisers far more control over their contextual ad campaigns and contextual ad dollars. These networks, still in their naissance, address the advertiser’s need for more and better control.”

The piece gives one-pagagraph comparisons and contrasts between these offerings. Publishers and advertisers not already expert on the topic would learn from her summaries, as did I. However, I do not yet know enough about the topic to say whether her list is complete or the comparisons on point. If you have any additional thoughts please post a comment.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

An unexpected emergency has taken me out of town for a few days and disrupted my schedule for postings. I snuck onto a guest machine this morning to make my regrets. I may be able to post intermittantly, but for the next week or so I will be off my regular routine.

P.S.
InfoWorld says Burst will get $60 million from Microsoft to settle a patent infringement suit involving video-on-the-web technology. The Santa Rosa company said it would use the money to pay debt, extend its technology and licensing efforts and reward investors. That’s a good chunk change for a Northern California new media pioneer.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media