X
    Categories: MediaShift PodcastOnline Video

Mediatwits #45: Rafat Returns!; Cord-Cutting Rising?; Google Surveys Instead of Pay Walls

Rafat off the coast of Nioumachoua village in Moheli

Welcome to the 45th episode of the Mediatwits podcast, this time with Mark Glaser and the Rafat Ali as co-hosts. That’s right, Rafat Ali is back in the saddle after a nearly three month trek to India, Burma and Iceland. And he’s back just in time to talk cord-cutting once again, this time after new research showed that cable lost 1 million subscribers last year. Special guest Seth Shapiro, an analyst and educator, tells us that the reality is that 1 million is a drop in the bucket for cable companies that have more than 100 million subscribers. Shapiro details why Netflix, Hulu, Google and Apple have a very long road ahead in trying to compete with cable and satellite services.

And now for something completely different. Google is offering up Customer Surveys that will allow people to answer a question or two in a simple survey instead of paying for content behind a pay wall. The marketer pays 10 cents to 50 cents per survey answered and the publisher gets 5 cents each, with Google pocketing the difference. Special guest David Cohn helped pioneer this survey model at Spot.us with its Community Focused Sponsorships. He explains what they learned about surveys at Spot.us and how Google might be doing an even better job with this idea, which could prove to be a worthy alternative business model for online publishers.

Check it out!

mediatwits45.mp3

Subscribe to the podcast here

Subscribe to Mediatwits via iTunes

Follow @TheMediatwits on Twitter here

Intro and outro music by 3 Feet Up; mid-podcast music by Autumn Eyes via Mevio’s Music Alley.

Here are some highlighted topics from the show:

Intro

0:20: Rafat Ali is back as co-host

1:10: Rafat misses the Pinterest craze

3:30: Burma has changed drastically with more optimism, openness

Seth Shapiro

5:45: Rundown of topics for the show

1 million people cut the cord to cable in 2011

7:45: Special guest Seth Shapiro

9:30: Popular TV shows have been subsidized by cable revenues

11:20: Shapiro: 105 million to 115 million paid TV subscribers total, so 1 million isn’t that much

13:50: “Modern Family” would rather not be available in streaming services

16:20: Cable companies don’t care if you pay for cable or streaming — just pay them!

18:00: Shapiro: Even Steve Jobs couldn’t get TV content despite his power at Disney

Google surveys to get around pay walls

David Cohn

20:50: Special guest David Cohn

22:10: Spot.us pioneered surveys, but they were more extensive than Google surveys, and they charged $5 per survey taken

26:00: Reader could avoid survey by signing up for publisher’s newsletter

28:20: Rafat would consider using surveys at his new website to make revenues

More Reading

Over 2.6 million U.S. subscribers have cut out cable since 2008 at VentureBeat

Cord Cutting is Real: 1 Million TV Subscribers Lost to Streaming Services at The Wrap

Netflix, Hulu drive U.S. consumers to cut cable cord at CNET

Estimated 1 Million Pay-TV Users Cut Cord for Web in 2011 at Bloomberg

Google Unveils New Revenue Option for Web Publishers at Adweek

Google gets into market research, turns online surveys into paywall replacements at VentureBeat

Google offers paywall alternative at ITWeb

Google Consumer Surveys

Take a Survey Instead of Paying? Google Follows the Spot.us Model at Idea Lab

The Battle for the North American Couch Potato: Online & Traditional TV and Movie Distribution report from Convergence Consulting Group

Weekly Poll

Don’t forget to vote in our weekly poll, this time about what you’d do to help pay for quality journalism:

Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit. and Circle him on Google+

Mark Glaser :Mark Glaser is founder and executive director of MediaShift. He contributes regularly to Digital Content Next’s InContext site and newsletter. Glaser is a longtime freelance journalist whose career includes columns on hip-hop, reviews of videogames, travel stories, and humor columns that poked fun at the titans of technology. From 2001 to 2005, he wrote a weekly column for USC Annenberg School of Communication's Online Journalism Review. Glaser has written essays for Harvard's Nieman Reports and the website for the Yale Center for Globalization. Glaser has written columns on the Internet and technology for the Los Angeles Times, CNET and HotWired, and has written features for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, Entertainment Weekly, the San Jose Mercury News, and many other publications. He was the lead writer for the Industry Standard's award-winning "Media Grok" daily email newsletter during the dot-com heyday, and was named a finalist for a 2004 Online Journalism Award in the Online Commentary category for his OJR column. Glaser won the Innovation Journalism Award in 2010 from the Stanford Center for Innovation and Communication. Glaser received a Bachelor of Journalism and Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of Missouri at Columbia, and currently lives in San Francisco with his wife Renee and his two sons, Julian and Everett. Glaser has been a guest on PBS' "Newshour," NPR's "Talk of the Nation," KALW's "Media Roundtable" and TechTV's "Silicon Spin." He has given keynote speeches at Independent Television Service's (ITVS) Diversity Retreat and the College Media Assocation's national convention. He has been part of the lecture/concert series at Yale Law School and Arkansas State University, and has moderated many industry panels. He spoke in May 2013 to the Maui Business Brainstormers about the "Digital Media Revolution." To inquire about speaking opportunities, please use the site's Contact Form.

Comments are closed.