January 5th, 2009 at 3:32 pm by Ari Shohat
get a 90% penalty on their pitch the moment their email comes in. Who on earth would still want to use some_email@aol.com and expect to be taken seriously for a project or colloboration?
Very rarely I still see older folks use it who are actually talented, and I feel someone just hasn’t clued them in. If you are one, take heed:
- Using an AOL email address is lame and uncool
- It implies you might be on average 55 years old.
- It implies that you are set in your ways, which are very old, and are not playing around with anything new.
- It implies your technical and/or social skills online are severly limited to a bubble universe.
- It implies your offer would have to knock me off my feet for me to treat it seriously coming from an AOL account.
- At least it also means you save me a lot of time. I can safely refuse or delete your pitch without having to find out your limitations after more due diligence.
Just this weekend someone wrote to me using an AOL account pitching a new channel. There’s no way this will work, and some of the content in the email naturally gave away other inconsistencies. I wouldn’t notice them at first if red flags didn’t go off right at the start when I saw AOL in the email address.
If you are still in the workforce AND use AOL as your main account, you have no idea what kind of damage you are doing to your credibility. Time is short, and people judge you in a split second. Don’t let your choice of email prevent you from being considered normal. Go use Google’s Gmail instead. Full post here
January 5th, 2009 at 2:21 pm by Ari Shohat
Happy New Year everyone. I will have something interesting to post soon, stay tuned.
Full post here
December 30th, 2008 at 8:18 pm by Ari Shohat
Excerpt from here:
“In 210 BC, Xiang Yu led an army against the Ch’in Dynasty. While his troops slept, he burned his ships and smashed all the cooking pots. He explained to his troops that they had to either fight their way to victory or die. His troops won 9 consecutive battles. Eliminating options improved the focus of his troops.”
I like this Xiang Yu guy.
Now, what manager never dreamed of setting deadlines or else 
Full post here
December 30th, 2008 at 2:03 pm by Ari Shohat
Michael Arrington writes that starting with the new year content sites are all expecting a considerable slowdown in web advertising.
Display advertising revenue is going to fall of a cliff in January according to a number of content sites I’ve spoken with who rely on advertising for revenue. “Sales through December were mostly strong as advertisers used up their marketing budgets,” said one sales exec. But, he added, “there are few buyers for this next fiscal quarter, and those few that are buying are looking for steep discounts.”
Just how bad will it be? I’ve heard estimates of 30%-80% revenue drops over the next three months from companies that serve a variety of content (games sites, tech news, celebrity news, political news, etc.). The median pessimism point is around 50%.
This very closely matches my expectations. While online advertising has been “okay” thus for up to December, I am still waiting for that dive.
Here at Digitally Imported roughly half our revenue comes from advertising, the other from subscriptions to our Premium offering.
The advertising revenue is further split between visual ads (banners) and audio ads on the radio streams. And I can already tell that future orders of audio ads are significantly down, there’s just not much in the pipeline.
Internet radio is a very tough medium to keep profitable even without royalty concerns, this will just further decimate a few more shops.
Luckily we have the subscription stuff to fall back on, in bad economic times I don’t see people scaling back on this too much since it’s cheap, and it’s entertainment. But, almost no other small Internet radio outfit does subscriptions, so it’s going to be back to day jobs and living with mom for those folks – if they can find a job by that time that is. Full post here
December 23rd, 2008 at 1:05 pm by Ari Shohat
You might find this of interest from the “domain king”. Interesting perhaps if you aren’t into following the domain market.
We are about to see a rash of retailers go under. Some very big ones. I think one of the the biggest will be Sears. They are already hanging on for dear life from what it looks like to me. Same with restaurants, jewelry stores, spas etc. Main St and the malls are about to look a lot different. Malls going out of business? Yup!
The beneficiary to all this will be the Internet in general and domains in particular. Especially income producing domains as banks and TBills start paying 0% interest.
A domain making $10,000 a year is like having $1 Million in the bank at 1%, $500k at 2%, $250k at 4%. The safest places to put your money are likely paying close to 0%! So a domain making just $27.40 a day with a history really is an attractive investment today and one that should be exploited. Domains ARE a great long term investment. Something we as an industry have known for many years. Now others are going to be looking for safety and domain names are in their direct path.
December 17th, 2008 at 8:29 pm by Ari Shohat
Earlier in the week Charles had yet another brilliant Triage post.
One of the things that he mentioned is something that I’ve been trying to tell people lately when I hear things like – “see where Capitalism got us.”
I don’t see the implosion of the financial system as my kind of capitalism – which is not, simply, accumulation of capital. So here’s the quote, which distinguishes the two more clearly, as well as notes the problems of defending capitalism from the opposite side.
Michael Hudson has drawn a key distinction between the classic “capitalism” of putting capital at risk in entrepreneurial enterprises to create wealth and “rentier capitalism” which risks no capital, launches no new enterprises and which skims off rents (interest is the “rent” from capital) and non-productive gains from “financial innovations.” It has more in common with feudalism than with capitalism.
That key distinction is precisely what the propaganda machine of TPTB [the powers that be] strives to blur. Any attack on the rentier class is fended off with wrapped-in-Old-Glory appeals to the beauty and wonder and rightness of free market capitalism, as if Madoff and Steve Jobs are equivalent players. Protect one “capitalist,” and you protect them all–even the ones who aren’t truly capitalists.
Point is this: just because the rentier capitalism is being exposed for what it is, it doesn’t mean it’s a wise idea to abandon the classic sense – the one at the core of building value, products, and innovations – altogether. Full post here
December 2nd, 2008 at 4:33 pm by Ari Shohat
Firstly
Charles Hugh Smith from OfTwoMinds doesn’t get linked enough here.
In a recent post on his expected “Obama Spring” Rally, I quote the type of lines that have me coming back for more:
But isn’t the stock market based on the fundamentals of the economy? Hahahaha, please don’t make me laugh this hard–I might hurt myself. As noted here many times: the markets have only the thinnest connections to reality–and that’s even without massive intervention/manipulation. Markets reflect the emotions of the participants–and nothing else. Any other connection–price-earnings ratios and all the rest–is illusory.
Secondly
And of course, Seth Godin never misses a day without making great points.
Just a few days ago I was writing to a colleague about something, trying to put across that marketing something of ours a certain way has too much friction.
The bottom line is that friction in marketing means you would have to do so much extra work, and sometimes you still can’t accomplish your goal as a result. An example of friction? Our website is DI.fm (a dot FM domain) - not a .com. This already creates endless friction (and lost pageviews through word of mouth).
Well, here comes Seth putting this and much more in another way – Market Gravity instead. Very much worth reading. So simple, so true – that’s what makes it a classic Seth read.
And if you read it, then my question is this: is everything that isn’t marketed as clearly as gravity is by default friction in itself? Full post here
November 26th, 2008 at 7:24 pm by Ari Shohat
I’ve announced that DI Magazine is over and done with now.
I’ve had some time to think about it. These days, I am trying to refocus as much as possible. It all came down to the fact that Digitally Imported is really about the music. About hearing the music, and in a wide spectrum of electronic genres.
DI Mag, even when it would reach full potential, would not be about “hearing” the music. Neither can it attract a large loyal following by catering to many electronic genres.
With radio, you can get away with it. Everyone comes for their style, they don’t mind other styles there being listed. Ultimately you tune into your channels, and never have to hear those you don’t like. With editorial, that kind of compartmentalization is hard to do. You’re almost better off creating completely separate mags for Trance vs House, etc..
What that means is that doing it in one place will always cause a favoritism problem, incredibly more than with radio/audio. And that would rub off on our main authority of providing electronic music radio. I don’t know if I can explain it more than this without writing a novel. Suffice to say, it’s good to refocus.
Just one thing that still bugs me. I hate to give up on stuff I’ve started. Here on one hand, I know it’s the right call to make. But it leaves me feeling a bit incomplete knowing that it was cut short before it reached the potential I had in mind. Someone should still do it with a separate brand, we just don’t have the time. Full post here
