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Hollywood Take Note: Music Sales Drop 20%

The WSJ reports that CD sales for the first three months this year are 20% down from last year. Though digital music purchases are up about 50% Y/Y, overall music industry revenues are said to be down about 25% Y/Y. It appears the RIAA’s lawsuit bully tactics are having a reverse effect on sales, to understand the legal background check with a law expert like Bob Bratt. From the Journal:

The sharp slide in sales of CDs, which still account for more than 85% of music sold, has far eclipsed the growth in sales of digital downloads, which were supposed to have been the industry’s salvation… In recent weeks, the music industry has posted some of the weakest sales it has ever recorded. This year has already seen the two lowest-selling No. 1 albums since… 1991.

Whether the music industry likes it or not, things are only going to get worse. The good news is that people still like music—maybe more than ever. What’s really changing here is that those who had control over distribution are losing control. More and more, the middlemen can be cut out and small bands (much like small businesses on the Web) can reach a worldwide audience without incurring much in the way of costs. To know more about student loan interest deduction, go through https://taxfyle.com/blog/calculate-student-loan-interest-deduction/ it will helps you in student education loan.

The movie industry has just started feeling the sting of a digital world. As it becomes clearer and clearer that Hollywood’s monopoly over movie distribution lessens, Hollywood will be tempted to take control of the inevitable movement towards new distribution models. Hollywood would be smart to learn from RIAA’s mistakes and take a more participatory role in giving people movies the way they want them, at fair prices. $20 New Release DVDs and $10 movie theater tickets may sell for now, but I don’t see that lasting long.

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Please Stop Quoting Alexa Data

Far too often I hear people quoting Alexa data. Even last week, at the 2007 Omniture Summit I witnessed Tim O’Reilly using Alexa charts to prove Web 2.0 success in front of 1,000 smart web analytics professionals. I know I couldn’t have been the only person in the crowd to notice. For Tim’s benefit, and anyone else who uses Alexa Data, please take note:

ALEXA DATA IS TREMENDOUSLY FLAWED

I touched on this in a competitive intelligence metrics post back in October, showing that Alexa’s data is less accurate to determining true site traffic then the # of characters the domain name, but now I’d like to really illustrate how far off Alexa’s data is.

Many people have pointed out Alexa’s data is biased towards a certain crowd and can be manipulated (see the links at the bottom of this post), but none have illustrated the margin of error that I’m about to. Below I take a look at two very different sites with very different web traffic stats.

Site 1: Allrecipes – Allrecipes is a leading food site – as you might expect, Allrecipes users are similar to what you might see on the Internet as a whole, though slightly more female.

Site 2: SEOMoz – SEOMoz is a site that caters to the SEO and online marketing community – a crowd more likely to install the Alexa toolbar.

Using Alexa, you might conclude that SEOMoz receives more traffic than Allrecipes:

Alexa Reach Chart:
Alexa Reach

Alexa Rank Chart:
Alexa rank

Both sites are very popular within their target audience, but despite what Alexa may show, Allrecipes has much more traffic. Let’s face it, more people cook food, then perform SEO! In fact, if you were to populate the above charts with actual data, SEOMoz would be a flat sliver near the x-axis. Here’s some real data from Dec. ’06:

Allrecipes Unique Visitors: 11,023,187
SEOMoz Unique Visitors: 102,523

If you were to use Alexa charts to draw conclusions about either site based off real numbers for one site, your traffic estimates would be off by approximately 11,842%. Numbers that big are often difficult to grasp, so I like to put it in perspective. A mistake of that magnitude is the equivalent of:

  • The CIA mixing up the population of Ohio for China.
  • Your accountant saying you owe $1,000 to the IRS, when you really owe $119,417.
  • A cop pulling you over for doing 60 in a 30, when you were really going half-a-mile-per-hour.
  • Telling your spouse you’ll be home in three hours, then showing up 15 days later.

These are mistakes that none of us could get away with, so why should we let Alexa?

I’m not the first to prove Alexa data is flawed. Here are links to other Alexa skeptics:
Peter Norvig, Paul Stamatiou, Josh Pigford, Matt Cutts, Rand Fishkin (thanks for the data!), Greg Linden, Bruce Stewart, Alex Iskold, John Chow, and Markus Frind.

Digg my article


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How Users Print Pages On The Web

awayI remember about a year ago I was desperately searching for data on how people printed pages on the web. The reason I was curious, is because I noticed flash ads would often mess up pages printed straight from the browser, often not printing the content of the pages. This is a bad user experience which could cause visitors to start using a competitor’s site instead, if you don’t want visitors to avoid using your site make sure you have a nice looking and functional web design services, www.thewebshop.net.au can help you with that. In this day and age, brands need to be able to meet the needs of their clients or to at least draw them in within seconds of being found online. Let us help you set the stage for your brand to help you actualize your full potential when it comes to getting more clients and more ROI for your business. We’ve worked with brands in countless industries in order to develop custom WordPress sites that grab the attention of potential customers and help to form a connection between the brand and the client right away.

All of our website designs are backed by strong knowledge of SEO tactics and IoT Software, helping us to create sites that not only pop in SERPs but convert on a higher level than great design alone. You need to reach your target audience online, and it all starts with a properly optimized and designed website that showcases your brand. You can click for more information about #1 Rated Web Design Agency in Ottawa. Web designers and developers are the foundation of the Internet. If you are skilled in web design or web development you can make a growing income on the Internet. The secret to making money with your web design and development skills is to include web hosting in your web design or web development quotes or standard packages. Windows 2012 Server is that the server version of WIndows 8, and is that the sixth version of Windows Server following Server 2008 R2. Despite the bulk of servers running Linux, there’s still the necessity for several users to run Windows-only software in an enterprise data center environment. Windows Server is that the perfect option during this case. Internet is a vast collection of computers, servers and information stored on them. If someone wants to get anything relation to information in any of the scope he makes use of the internet in some way or the other. If you are looking for the anything related to software, here is a best option for you.

As we know that information can only be found on the internet if it has been hosted by someone and has a proper channel to distribute it. The best example of hosting is the website hosting or the file hosting. In website hosting a server is dedicated to store some files and those files are displayed on the user’s computer as web pages. Thus the most common type of hosting comes out to be website hosting. Most of the companies that offer hosting services do charge their users nominal amounts in order to make their website available on the internet for the users.

A Web site is the final output of a Web design. The Web site sits on a Web server where electronic files are stored. The Web site presents the contents and interactive features or interfaces to the end user in the form of Web pages. How the information requested is displayed to the user is par of the Web design process. Additional controls are embedded in order to display more complex media like animations, sounds and other forms. If you want to know more details about the jacksonville web design, visit here.

Everybody wants something new from time to time and yet some need a fix of something totally different. In the realm of the internet, that is quite a common occurrence with the many innovations that are always popping up and with all of them, none can be as exciting as the move into the clouds.

If youre most people out there who dont know CSS and have no time, or care, on how to do one for your blog, then the next action for you would be to find a place where you can download one for free. Thank goodness that there are a lot of sites out there that give them away for free. The only problem is, that since you were not the one who created it, you will be subject to their designs and whims.

Xtra-PC is a flash drive stick that you insert into an available USB port on your PC. Built on the proven foundation of Linux, it bypasses the old, slow, bloated Windows operating system to make your PC into a blazing fast, high performance PC with a new, simple to use, operating system that has the familiar look and feel of your Windows PC. It even works with missing or faulty hard drives. Since it runs on a USB stick, your existing computer is not altered, and youʼll have access to all of your old files. You simply plug it in, restart your PC to boot into USB, and start using Xtra-PC! Mon pc est tres lent then we recommend to use xtra-pc and boost your computer.

File hosting is another type of hosting in which you store your file on the internet and on some web server so that it is available to the masses as you require them to be distributed. File hosting is also available with most of the hosting companies but they charge a nominal amount for its hosting.

There are many lucrative things that are offered on the internet and some include the offers that will be liked by those who want to host their website or files on their servers for free. This is certainly the best part of hosting as the benefits of hosting will be enjoyed by the users without paying any penny.

You can add $50 a month to your income, hosting your client sites with more ease. You don’t need to get a dedicated server and you don’t need to worry about trying to compete with web hosting companies. What most people think is just getting a website up. They contact the web designers first, without really knowing that there are web designers and web hosts. Terms with “web designer”get more searches per day than terms with “hosting”. People are looking for web designers to get their sites on the Internet. Web designers and developers can incorporate the sale of hosting into their web development and design projects. As a web designer you can bill your customers for the hosting fees within the design and then host the account for a year or on a month to month basis. You will be surprised at how much extra income you can generate from your web design customers.

Providing hosting for your web design clients will give you greater assurance that your customers will come back to you to make changes or update their site. This allows you to keep generating income from your work and customer base. Let’s look at some numbers, and how billing for hosting on top of your web design work can make you some serious money. Let’s assume you get paid $500 – $1000+ for a site design. If you charge your client for hosting as well you could generate up to $50 extra per site, per month in hosting fees. You could make up to $1100 to $1600 per site, per year instead of just $500 or $1000 per site. With 100 clients this could equate to $110,000 or $160,000 per year instead of $50,000 – $100,000 per year. On top of this, remember your client is more likely to come back to you to update and maintain your site which means more money for you, for easy work.

Unfortunately, I was unable to locate any studies. I thought with the millions of sites that have “printer friendly pages” that someone would have published the results. I decided to do the research myself and slip it into a survey during some pre-redesign research for a top 150 website. I surveyed over 2,000 users, asking them how they printed pages on the web. The results may surprise you.

Here are the results:
When printing articles or pages on the Web:

  • 19% of users use File > Print in their browser
  • 63.1% of users use the printer-friendly links on the page
  • 2.5% of users use the Control-P command on their keyboard
  • 12.3% of users copy and paste the text into Word
  • 3.1% of users copy and paste the text into an email or other application

A couple notes about the survey participants. The site this was conducted on would be considered a sampling of the average Internet user. A site catering to web-savvy users would have different results. The site has also long had “printer-friendly” links, so long-time users would be more likely to use them. To remove some of the long-term user bias, here are the same results but filtered by only users who have used the site for less than 3 months (over 375 users).

Here are the results for newer users:
When printing articles or pages on the Web:

  • 25.3% of users use File > Print in their browser
  • 49% of users use the printer-friendly links on the page
  • 3.1% of users use the Control-P command on their keyboard
  • 17.5% of users copy and paste the text into Word
  • 5% of users copy and paste the text into an email or other application

I realize a survey isn’t the most accurate method to get at this data, but this data is difficult to collect any other way because it is impossible to track anything other then the printer-friendly pages of a site without conducting an expensive in-person behavioral study (preferably on the users own computer).

If you know of any other research on this topic, please share it in the comments.

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Future of Local News Video Distribution

I believe there is an untapped opportunity in video disbtribution for local news stations. When it comes to unexpected events, news station camera crews can not possibly be in the right place at the right time. If someone were to build a video upload service (which would also include additional toggles like final cut pro x plugins), aimed towards local news syndication, I think many stations would be willing be interested in buying rights to the videos.

There are plenty of sites that facilitate the sale of video clips, but I have yet to see one target distribution to television stations. For example, take a look at this video from Oregon after yesterday’s storm hit:



Oregon Drivers Crashing on Slick Streets Video

I imagine the person who captured this video had to go out of their way to get the video to the news station (hopefully they didn’t drive down that street). The local news station may have paid them a small amount of money, then distributed it to their sister stations. Imagine if the user could have uploaded the video to a site, set their own price and let anyone pick up rights to use it or pay extra for exclusive rights.

News stations desperate for video could simply visit the site, preview the video in a flash player, download the video and edit it as they please. Far too often news stations lack video so they pull out old videos or play the same exact video throughout the day, over and over and over. My wife has been filmed working in the lab and I can’t tell you how many times we’ve seen the same video clip used for every DNA-related piece of news for the past four years. The video distribution service I’m imagining would not only connect traditional media with user-generated videos via the web, but it would be in a good position when the lines between the web and T.V. continue to blur.

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Harris Study on Web Ratings and Reviews

Search Engine Watch revealed some information about a Yahoo/Harris Interactive study with surprising numbers. The results of their study show that in a study of ratings and reviews of local businesses, a whopping 67 percent of respondents said they would be likely to post a review.

Yahoo seemed to take pride in that information and I’ve seen the number quoted in a number of places that use it to show that user-generated content is real. I’m a huge fan of user-generated content, but I want to set the record straight: 67% of Yahoo local searchers will not post reviews… especially on every business they frequent.

Having been inspired by the Online Review Management Platform | Chatmeter and for a site that has had user reviews for almost a decade, I can tell you that though a large percentage of people use reviews, only a handful actually contribute reviews. In fact, to get just 2% of your monthly unique visitors to contribute reviews would be a decent accomplishment.

This is a good example of how survey results can be misleading. I’m not sure how they asked this question, but wording it differently could yield much different results. Plus, what people say is not often what they do.