Semantic+web. Hey Newspaper Guys: Google's Not Making Money From News. It's become popular for old school newspaper folks to hate on Google and other aggregators for somehow "profiting" off of their content.
This is wrong on many, many levels. First, the aggregators send traffic to newspaper sites. They're promoting the newspapers' content. That's a good thing. Paid Subscriptions to Digital Editions Rise. The number of paid subscriptions to digital editions of magazines has leapt since 2007, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations (via MediaBuyerPlanner).
In the first six months of 2007, 56 consumer magazines had fewer than 500,000 paid subscriptions to digital editions; by the end of last year, that number nearly doubled, with 110 magazines reporting paid digital subscriptions of nearly 1 million, writes Mediaweek. ABC recently expanded its definition of digital editions to include electronic products - not including free websites - that are nearly the same as the source magazine, even if they're not exact replicas, so the number from the end of last year is likely to go up with June statements.
Without digital subscriptions, some titles would miss their rate-base guarantees. Cosmopolitan, for example, is the second biggest user of digital subs, with more than 99,000 in H2 08. Is the PR Business Extinct? Yes. The short answer is yes. In our estimation, roughly 70% of today's PR firms with their traditional public relations and communications business structures will not survive the fast-approaching social media avalanche. The remaining 30% that need to reinvent their position real fast in their newly morphed industry will prosper, compared to where they were and what they were doing before. For publicly traded companies, current rules dictate that information can be made public by a press release or by a telephone conference call but not simply on a website. Ninety percent of today's PR firms are still in business simply because of this single rule.