Tag Archives: online

Subscriptions, not paywalls

Karen Fratti thinks publishers need to stop using the word ‘paywall’ to describe ways online sites charge readers. She prefers we talk about subscriptions.

Fratti writes:

 let’s stop talking about putting up walls to keep people out. The paywall has only led to griping from consumers who’ve reached their monthly article limit, and unique ways to get around them. We’re wordsmiths, we know words matter, and ‘paywall’ is another relic of the old media-new media debate. Knock it off.

I agree with Fratti on this, rightly or wrongly paywall makes me think of the watch towers and armed guard that patrolled central Berlin during the Cold War. The paywall is the new media’s equivalent of Cold War thinking.

Can’t We All Just Subscribe? Why ‘Paywalls’ Won’t Get Us Anywhere – 10,000 Words.

New Zealand shows Australia how to do FTTP

Auckland's first fibre

Steven Joyce installing Auckland’s first UFB cable – Albany – 24 August 2011

While Australia’s politicians continue to wrangle over that country’s FTTP (fibre-to-the-premises) project, New Zealand’s is progressing nicely. However, New Zealand’s relatively low fibre uptake could yet inform Australia’s FTTP debate.

Figures releases yesterday by communications minister Amy Adams show that 134,000 homes and businesses are now able to connect to the  UFB (ultrafast broadband) network. Building is taking place in 24 of the 33 towns and cities that will eventually be on the government’s network.

Meanwhile 89,000 rural homes and businesses are able to connect to the Rural Broadband Initiative through fixed wireless connections and a further 36,000 rural users can now use fixed-line services.

To date only 3800 customers have signed for UFB fibre services. That’s a relatively low take-up rate – less that 3%.

The priority at this stage is to sign businesses, schools and medical facilities. Yet the fibre companies deliberately started their residential build in areas where they expected the highest uptake.

GIven that fibre isn’t any more expensive than existing copper-delivered broadband plans, this suggests there could be problems persuading consumers to switch to fibre.

There are two reasons why more haven’t moved. First, the big ISPs, who account for the overwhelming majority of the market, have yet to begin selling fibre services. That’s likely to happen  in the coming months – having more people on the UFB will give them more incentive to move into the fibre market.

Second, the government and the people boosting fibre have done a terrible job selling the advantages of the technology to everyday consumers. Instead of telling people fibre is fast and reliable, there’s been a focus on ridiculous and, to most people, irrelevant high-end applications. Telecom and Vodafone are likely to do a far better sales job than the government.

Related articles

Dump Yahoo now

Telecom NZ temporarily cancelled 60,000 Yahoo Xtra email passwords at the weekend. The move follows ten days of spam messages swamping New Zealand in-boxes.

The biggest email outage New Zealand has seen.

Yahoo is the problem. Not just for the sloppy security which meant the Yahoo Mail site has a cross site scripting vulnerability.

That’s bad enough. But Yahoo lied about the fault. Then it hid the vulnerability’s seriousness both from partners like Telecom NZ and from end-users.

Yahoo repeated claimed to have fixed the problem. It hadn’t.

The company simply cannot be trusted. That leaves us with no alternative: dump everything Yahoo.

That means you and I should have nothing to do with Yahoo. It also means Telecom NZ needs to pull the plug. Telecom’s lawyers should already be pouring over any contracts. Telecom NZ needs a transition process for customers locked into to Yahoo Xtra mail accounts to disengage, the sooner that gets started the better.   

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Does Telecom NZ even need Yahoo?

Telecom NZ’s Chris Quin says the company could walk away from its outsourcing deal which sees Yahoo look after mail accounts on the xtra.co.nz domain.

That’s a possible response to the security breach at Yahoo. The Internet company seems unable or unwilling to deal with the problem.

It is hard to see what value Yahoo gives Telecom NZ in 2013.

When Telecom NZ outsourced its mail service to Yahoo in 2007. It needed a way to manage the 800,000 or so Xtra mail accounts.

In those days ISP customers expected to get email accounts as part of their Internet services. Today’s ISPs sell data pipes with a little support and little else.

Many Xtra customers already have webmail accounts with services like Gmail and Outlook.com.

A YahooXtra account is almost unnecessary.

I say almost unnecessary because there are two reasons Telecom can’t immediately dump them altogether.

First, history – what technology people might call ‘legacy issues’. Some of my email still comes via Xtra even though it is routed through Gmail. Figuring out which contacts have my old address and getting them to update my details isn’t straightforward.

Second, webmail address are second class citizens online. Some services don’t allow customers to sign up with Gmail, Hotmail or Outlook.com addresses. Not every Telecom NZ customer wants to buy their own domain for a mail address, so keeping the Xtra domain as an option would be a good move.

Telecom NZ can walk customers through the process of setting up webmail accounts on alternative services – not a difficult job. And I’m sure Google and Microsoft would be only too happy to help sign up new business.

Related articles

Digital magazine sales still tiny overall, but titles like Reader's Digest see huge growth

Reblogged from paidContent:

Nearly 65 percent of U.S. magazines now have a digital replica edition, but those editions make up just under three percent of overall circulation: That's the latest news from the Alliance for Audited Media (formerly the Audit Bureau of Circulations), which on Thursday released its report on U.S. magazine circulation in the second half of 2012. For some individual titles, digital growth was a lot more impressive -- though in some cases that's because they're giving away the digital edition free.

Read more… 345 more words

Readers like magazine web sites or even magazine apps on tablets and smartphones. I've never understood the attraction of what PaidContent describes as 'replica editions' that is the same editorial as the print magazine wrapped in a digital format. Digital replicas have clumsy user interfaces - sometimes its a proprietary piece of nonsense requiring a download. Others are effectively PDFs on something similar. Many have relatively low resolution and just don't look good on-screen, Hell, some even mangle the text making it hard to read. Either way, it seems there is a market for them.

How I moved back from self-hosted to WordPress.com

Vittore Carpaccio - The Ordination of St Stephen as DeaconA year ago I moved my site from a local New Zealand host back to the WordPress mothership. The goal was to make life simpler. That worked: at least for now.

The move wasn’t technically difficult, there are things to watch:

1. Permalinks. These are not customisable with wp.com. You’re stuck with the WordPress format. I’ve no idea if this is good or bad for search engine optimisation. I don’t care.

2. If you worry about search, the trick is to switch format a couple of weeks before making the move, otherwise Google gets confused. I started on this path, but the rest of my preparations went so quickly the new format was only in place about five days before the switch.

A year later Google Webmaster Tools tells me traffic is still looking for those old format links. The lesson here is if you think you may switch to WordPress’s host in the future, start using the permalink format now.

3. I moved the domain name. There was no control over the time this happened, it happened at 11pm so I was effectively offline for about nine hours – this may not bother you. I don’t know how many people saw a dead site, in those days it would have been around 100 visitors. Any damage is fixed now. Another time I’d need to rethink how I’d do this.

4. I paid extra for WordPress.Com’s custom design and used my own twenty ten child template. It didn’t look great, so I had to switch to a new template – this was the trickiest part of the process and I still don’t have it perfect. A year later I’ve shut all the custom stuff down and have a stock WordPress theme. Dammit, this is THE stock theme. People come to my site for words – I can use pictures to make it look better.

5. Originally there was zero flexibility over the iPad and smartphone templates – this was almost a deal breaker for me. A year on and the problems are largely solved thanks to a responsive theme.

6. There are a few minor irritations. Mainly lack of design flexibility. I wanted a simpler life, so I’ll just have to put up with them.

7. On the plus side, the .com site is seven times faster than my hosted site, requires almost zero maintenance, has barely gone offline in a year, gets more accidental traffic and is free. The downside is I’m less in touch with WordPress coding – something I think journalists ought to get used to. To get around this I’ve built a couple of other sites.