Medialoper

We're Not Who You Think We Are

Archives for August 2006

The Daily Loper – August 2, 2006

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Today’s links of interest:

Why MySpace Won’t Live To See 25

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It was only a few weeks ago that MySpace was claiming to have passed Yahoo as the most popular site on the internet. Now it’s being reported that YouTube has passed MySpace. MySpace’s reign at the top lasted about three weeks. I’m guessing that’s not what Rupert Murdoch paid over $580 million for.

Has MySpace peaked? Probably yes. There have been plenty of reports indicating that MySpace’s target demographic no longer finds the site to be cool. Part of the problem is that dozens of new social networking sites seem to pop up every week. MySpace has lots of competition and no longer seems cutting edge to a generation of kids who live online and spend a good deal of their time looking for the next great thing. You only have to look back to the rise and fall of Friendster to realize just how bad things might get for MySpace.

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The Daily Loper – August 1, 2006

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Today’s links of interest:

More Fun In The Digital World

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Isn’t it curious that the most profitable aspect of the publishing business is also the hardest to control? Backlist, especially those lovely older titles with lower associated costs, prop up the houses — much like the catalog of motion picture studios. It is this evergreen product that keeps the lights burning and air conditioning cooling.

For years now, the smarter studios have been digitizing their backlist. This is an expensive — extremely expensive — and time-consuming process. Yet the industry has been moving toward digital with grim determination. They don’t like the free-wheelin’ ways of the Internet, but the lure of digital distribution, satellites and fast wires and sometimes no wires at all, is irresistible. Even now, as they step warily into new media markets via services like CinemaNow and Movielink, and even now, as the dollars are relatively small compared to the initial investment, they worry about piracy.

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MTV Looks Better Than You Did At 25

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MTV turns 25 today, and love it or hate it, it’s hard to imagine a pop culture landscape without it. Like the iPod, it took an that took an existing type of musical content — music videos had been around for decades — and turned it into a disruptive force.

And then abandoned it almost immediately. If they first made their name by the novelty of the music video, they kept their name by slowly turning their focus away from those videos. (Variations of the “MTV doesn’t play videos anymore” jokes started almost immediately and have aged worse than the channel itself.) Even though I have pretty much stopped watching MTV, I have always admired how they’ve managed to stay relevant. And I think that the they fact that they made it part of their programming philosophy to continually change in the same way that pop culture continually changes is how they’ve done it.

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