Groupon, iPad and Twitter: Not so fast!

Alan Mutter has an excellent post in which he seeks to moderate some of the wild projections surrounding Groupon, the iPad and Twitter.

Newspapers and the iPad: Publishers are pleased that the iPad is beloved by “exactly the sort of wealthy, middle-aged men who read newspapers,” says Mutter. Unfortunately, “58% of iPad users think the device is such a good substitute for print that they are ‘very likely’ to cancel their print subscriptions in the next six months… [Meanwhile] newspapers have yet to find a way to extract as much advertising revenue from the digital media as they can from the print product.” Mutter concludes: “An alternative to porting the daily paper to the iPad is to use the platform to develop new and differentiated products to serve new audiences and advertisers.”

Groupon’s problem: “Instead of attracting new long-term customers for merchants, Groupon is bringing in one-time bargain hunters who take the deals and run… Some consumers feel ripped off, too, when they are unable to redeem the prepaid certificates they bought for massages, dinners, classes and other goods and services. In an online survey at HubPages.Com, 44% of consumers called Groupon a ‘scam’ and 28% thought it was ‘very good’. The balance of respondents were neutral.”

Twitter: “Although Twitter will tell you that it has 175 million registered users and investors reportedly deem it to be worth $3.7 billion, fewer than 20 million American adults actually use the service [and while a] quarter of users avidly check for the latest tweets several times each day … a fifth of the registered users never use their accounts after they open them. This indicates that Twitter, at best, may be effective in reaching only the limited cohort of consumers who crave a steady diet of 140-character News McNuggets.”

Read Mutter’s entire post at http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/search?q=Groupon%2C+iPad+and+Twitter%3A+2+much+2+hope+4%3F

Predicting if Murdoch’s iPad Daily will be the salvation of newspapers is a crapshoot

The board on which the news media plays is constantly moving and the only certainty might be that most newspapers are toast and that whatever we predict today will be history tomorrow.

So it’s curious that Rupert Murdoch — who’s in the process of purposefully eliminating his newspapers’ online audiences — is banking a chunk of NewsCorp’s future on a newspaper, albeit an electronic one.

NewsCorp and Apple are reportedly set to announce details of a jointly developed project — a daily newspaper built expressly for iPad-like devices. No print version, no Web version (but “The Daily,” as it’s being called, is likely to be heavily promoted, and its features teased, on both platforms). NewsCorp is said to have invested $30 million in the launch, and has assembled a staff of 100, including five-star journalists, so that The Daily will feature mostly original content (plus, presumably, at least some Fox video).

With each day’s Daily expected to cost 99 cents at the iTunes store, its sales scheme replicates the single-copy hawking of newspapers on newsstands. The product will publish once a day with just minor refreshing between “press runs” (a departure from the Web’s frenetic minute-by-minute updates).

Mediaphiles should have learned by now not to bet against Murdoch in any game, particularly the newspaper game for which Murdoch has a special fondness, and there are sound arguments on both sides.

In a Mashable post on Sunday, Ben Par asks, “Is Rupert Murdoch’s iPad-Only Newspaper the Future of Journalism?” His conclusion: “Murdoch Gets It”:

While I may not like some of Murdoch’s ideas, (see Murdoch: Take Your Google Ball and Go Home), I give credit where it’s due. Murdoch’s commitment to a digital future for journalism is commendable and forward-thinking. He realizes more than his competitors that the future of news isn’t in propping up print publications, but creating truly immersive digital experiences. He may very well be creating the template that brings other newspapers into a profitable digital age.

Meanwhile, David Carr in today’s NY Times is less enthusiastic:

If you want a good look at the past and future of the News Corporation, compare the Web site of The New York Post — surely one of the ugliest, least functional in the business — with its snappy new iPad app. It’s a charming product, one that well reflects and amplifies the spice and excesses of the mother brand.

The night-and-day bifurcation is understandable given that Mr. Murdoch has never entirely trusted the Web, with its terrible advertising economics and brutal fight for revenue from consumers.

If nothing else, the arrival of The Daily early next year will likely push me into the legions of iPad-totters (while I’m a reasonably early adopter, I try to wait at least until Apple’s first post-launch hardware revision before buying).

Meanwhile, I await speculation on The Daily’s prospective impact on the 2012 elections. FoxNews revolutionized television news and helped set the tone and slant of political discourse for all media; can we expect The Daily — itself a revolutionizing vehicle — to do any less?

• • •

Click here for additional reporting from The Guardian UK.

Putting iPhones to work on the subway

They made music on a NYC subway — in an entirely new way.

Atomic Tom‘s purportedly “impromptu” performance of “Take Me Out” — in a B Train on the Manhattan Bridge, using only iPhones and captured on an iPhone — quickly went viral, and after just a few days it is approaching 1 million YouTube views. Previously, their YouTube count, for a different tune that was recorded conventionally, topped off at 24,000 over 9 months.

The Atomic boys get credit — but they weren’t the first to generate buzz by their use of iPhones as music instruments rather than music players. Here is the British girl group The Mentalists, performing in February 2009—

Click here for more videos by The Mentalists (now renamed The New Mentalists) making music on their iPhones.

A Mashable post found the Atomic Tom performance “quite heartfelt — we’d even go so far as to say it’s the best iPhone band performance we’ve yet seen.” Mashable lets its followers judge for themselves — the post links to other groups strumming their stuff.

Back to NYC, subway riders love this stuff, by the way — a friend commented on FB: “Working in MSG area means I get constant subway music, some of it truly incredible. It’s one of the great things about living / working in NYC — it’s the best!”

Fish wrapper

Newsday used to be a great paper. Now, at best. it’s mediocre. Its Website is one of the worst big-paper venues, and its business model is a poor rendition of milk-and-dump.

So, no one should be surprised by this funny (600,000 YouTube views) — but counterproductive — Newsday ad that calls its iPad app “better than the newspaper in all kinds of ways.” But it won’t wrap fish.

UPDATE: Newsday has pulled its commercial. Click here for report.

Stepping into the future

While News Corp is best known in the US for Fox films and Fox TV, the company has lots of newsprint on its hands as well (including the NY Post, Wall Street Journal, Times of London, and more).

Now, Rupert Murdoch is moving forward with plans to enter the uncharted world of tablet publishing.

Peter Kafka reports that Murdoch’s yet unnamed digital publication — they’re trying not to call it a newsPAPER — will be headed by Viacom’s Greg Clayman; editorial will be run by NY Post Executive Editor Jesse Angelo.