EU study: 20% might pay for content online

George Gilder promised and heralded it; the authors of "Blown to Bits" and "The Innovators Dilemma" warned about it close to ten years ago now; Chris Anderson has explained it in "The Long Tail" and now in "Free:" When the cost of a product and service decline rapidly, a couple of things are pretty likely to happen: new players will enter the market, unburdened by legacy cost structures and business practices (including past success); prices will fall, incumbents will suffer, and new business models will emerge. Nowhere has this been more dramatic and public than in the media industries I've worked in and around for almost all of my careers: books, music and movie delivery (MTV, Showtime, Movie Channel); consumer electronics (remember the Sony Walkman?); subscription newsletter; newspapers... Two items today are only the most recent among many to address this: Jeremiah Owyang's commentary on the first Cisco Eos contract with the big Hollywood media brands: http://bit.ly/ynaV3 and the European Union's large survey and report that, among other things, notes that P2P technology is not the reason media companies have lost sales. As I tweeted a few minutes ago, it's the business model, stupid (thanks to James Carville for the appropriation).

Great market opportunity: Two-thirds of Young People in EC might pay...

A new study has the wrong end of the stick as its headline: "Third of Young People Won't Pay for Online Content."  More good news in the study, throughout, but remember, in this paidcontent summary, to take the other side of each statistic.

E-marketers confess they don't test email campaigns

Very sad news, since it is easy to test, and you get results very quickly. It's a foundation of the innovator's best practice of "fail fast." From directmag: http://tr.im/utPh

The end of "command" for corporations

CIOZone published a review of the state of social media, itself reviewed in corporateeye.com and linked to linkedin.com -- illustrating how things travel. Here's the key quote: “'Like the fall of the Berlin Wall, many observers say we are witnessing the collapse of the command-and-control power of corporate mass marketing.'"

"That’s a much bigger message than 'you can’t afford to ignore Twitter.' That’s the end of the world as we know it."

Patterns and depth of social media engagement correlate with financial success

Of course, as ReadWriteWeb points out, correlation does not necessarily equal causation, but it is worth studying Charlene (Groundswell) Li's database and analysis of the top 100 brands and their social media activities at her new site, Engagementdb. Those companies that have focused and deepened their social engagement according to Li's analysis, have made the highest profits, while those least engaged have lost money over the last year or so.

Sobering security tale: 'Ecosystem' of web services makes breaches easy

It's worth reading through the detail of this anatomy of the attack on Twitter staff to understand how our all-too-human laziness in the face of dozens of individual password plus secret question systems makes for an overall weak system. It's not just individuals that are "at fault" for not following the advice to make individual, hard-to-guess passwords unique to each site, but companies/websites that act as if they are your only service.

Can your business afford not to offer "free" as a price?

Chris Anderson of Wired has long promoted this idea, and now his book is about to be published -- July 7th, at a price, and in the days following, to show his consistency and perhaps prove his point, free, in various forms. One example is in England, where an abridged version is available for free along side the hardbound unabridged edition. The paperback is sponsored by Adobe, which itself is a couple of years into its "freemium" business model: free, quite functional online versions of expensive software otherwise available for a price. Where might you apply it in your business?