Since instituting its metered paywall in late March, The New York Times has 100,000 paid subscribers to it website, according to a Times' article on its own earnings statement.
The number does not include print subscribers, who get access to unlimited articles on the website, or promotional launch offers, according to a tweet from Times' senior VP of corporate communications, Robert Christie. The article states, "For the first time, the Times Company provided information on how digital subscriptions were faring. The company said that since it started limiting the number of articles readers could read on NYTimes.com for free, it has signed up more than 100,000 subscribers. While it said the program was still too young to judge a success, 'early indicators are encouraging.'"
You remember those social news shows and segments that debuted over the last couple of years, right? Right? I hope you do because I don't, and neither do any of the other writers here. Al Jazeera is hoping to buck that trend with "The Stream."
The Stream draws for its stories from the flow of social media in the Middle East, a flow that's grown positively torrential over the last six months. independent participants on Twitter and Facebook have frequently outpaced even the most competent and committed reporters. And the best of them have in turn contributed to the stream.
Flipboard, the social magazine iPad app, is on everyone's mind right now. It just raised $50 million in funding on a $200 million evaluation, partnered with Oprah and is showing us what the future of media consumption can be while scaring the toenails off of publishers.
Yet, what if Flipboard and other app makers could work directly with the publishers and create a new ecosystem? One that drives Apple and the others out of the middle-man equation and creates a prosperous new model for both content creators and aggregators alike?
It looks like that is what Flipboard is trying to do.
If you thought Wikipedia had seen its heyday, you'd have thought wrong. A small study performed by Wikipedia staff and published today found that new Editors are signing up and making edits to the site at a far greater rate than they were years ago. A slight majority of their first edits are acceptable or better.
The number of new editors registering on the site has grown from 60 on an typical day in 2004 (when the site was 3 years old) to now 1800 people joining English Wikipedia and making at least 1 edit in a given day today. Vandalism is way up but still makes up less than 25% of edits from new editors. 55% of first edits by new editors today meet the site's (increasingly) stringent quality controls and require no clean-up by other editors. While that's down from 72% in 2004, it's still pretty good.
As of March, the social entertainment service GetGlue has passed the million user mark, a significant milestone for any startup. It now also boasts 100 million data points - likes, reviews, check-ins - representing connections between entertainment, people, and each other.
Those impressive numbers are an indication of the company's rapid growth since the introduction of its mobile check-in apps last summer. Indeed the million-user milestone is just one of several statistics that GetGlue can tout, all pointing to the fact that when people tune in to TV, movies, and sports events, they're also tuning in to their social networks - and specifically to GetGlue.
Google has released results of a survey (PDF) on user behavior with regard to tablet computers, the vast majority of which are iPads. Responses indicate that tablet ownership significantly changes our media consumption habits and computer use.
As one of the fastest-selling consumer technology products of all time, the iPad is an important technology to study the use of. There's something really futuristic and joyful feeling about it, at least in my experience. Given how much other people apparently use theirs, it seems I'm not alone in that feeling.
On April 3, 2010, Apple officially launched its much anticipated tablet: the iPad. It was the most hyped tech product of the year, but for many of us the hype turned out to be justified. My own Web browsing habits were immediately changed by the iPad. Indeed, I'm writing a whole series currently about how the iPad and other non-PC devices are changing the way we consume media. For some people the smartphone has had the biggest impact so far on their Web browsing habits, but for me it's been the iPad.
To celebrate the iPad's one year anniversary, I'm listing out my favorite 10 iPad apps over the past year. I've attempted to put them in some kind of order too. Some apps have had a bigger impact on the way I interact with the Web than others, notably apps that have changed my reading and media consumption habits. Read on to find out how!
When the iPad launched in April last year, news media companies were among the first to create applications for the new tablet device. We're now a year into the iPad era and some of those news apps have dramatically changed how we consume news. But it hasn't been the apps from traditional news media. Rather, it's been two iPad native apps that have enhanced our news consuming user experience: Flipboard and Newsy. Some big media companies have attempted to be revolutionary, with less success. Rupert Murdoch's The Daily launched in February with claims of being the "future of the newspaper." However its user experience fell flat, especially in comparison to Flipboard.
This is the second post in a new RWW series looking at how the user experience of consuming media has changed with the increasing popularity of devices other than the PC. Yesterday we explored the thriving world of music on smartphones. Today we look at news apps on the iPad.
At this week's SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, we got a sneak peek at a new Twitterized "newspaper" application for iPad called BroadFeed, just prior to its iTunes launch. Designed by marketing agency Organic, Inc., the app has publisher appeal because it won't "steal clicks" (i.e., page views) from content providers when displaying articles your friends linked to in their tweets.
On the consumer side, BroadFeed offers several features to entice new users in this increasingly crowded "social magazine" space. It automatically works with your Twitter account and your custom Twitter lists to organize the topics based on popularity, allowing you to read the most important items first. This gives the app a level of intelligence that some of its competitors don't have just yet.
