http://emediavitals.com/article/38/advice-naa-and-mpa-monetize-microsoftyahoo-deal

Oh, Jeff: By the by, the past says hello. Says you were great on “Moonlighting.”

Good for those publications, but most news is fungible and/or not valuable, so what works for them may not work for other publications.

The supporting evidence for Levine’s argument that Jarvis is wrong is that certain publications are successfully using a different strategy than what Levine attributes to Jarvis. However, that’s relevant only if Jarvis had said that all publications should use that strategy.

Jarvis has pointed out that Levine mischaracterizes Jarvis’ advice. So, I’ll ask the other question – where did Jarvis say that everyone should use the same strategy, regardless of their circumstance?

> Since you ask so many questions about how I make money, what do you do?

One is “so many”? In fact, I didn’t even ask what Levine did to make money. I asked what strategies his publications used.

> Why are you rooting for them to fail?

How about some supporting evidence for that claim? I’ll happily concede that I’m pointing out why they’re going to fail. Does Levine really think that that’s the same as rooting for them to fail?

> It’s people like you and Jeff who want to make us sharecroppers, depending on the Great Lord Google for any scrap of traffic it throws us.

Huh? Who ever said that Google was the only source of traffic. (In fact, I’m working on a project to generate traffic outside of Google.)

Jarvis and I have both written repeatedly that publications should monetize traffic they get as much as possible, by whatever means works for them, and that they should get as much profitable traffic as they can.

We believe that different things work best for different publications because of the different characteristics of their content. Does Levine really disagree with that?

>>>I wonder what strategies Levine’s publications use?

As I’ve told you several times, I work for Billboard. We do a little of everything – sell ads, charge quite a bit for subscriptions and run a thriving conference business. We’re doing very well – *because we have proprietary information protected by copyright law* in the form of SoundScan data.

Since you ask so many questions about how I make money, what do you do?

>>>To outsiders, many of you folks sound like sharecroppers trying to save the owner’s way of life in hopes that you’ll be allowed to keep living in misery.

It’s people like you and Jeff who want to make us sharecroppers, depending on the Great Lord Google for any scrap of traffic it throws us. That’s a dangerous game. What if Google starts charging for traffic, changes its search terms, enters the journalism business or – more realistic – if online CPM continues to fall as the amount of online ad space continues to expand.

As Think Differently points out above, depending on ‘Googelejuice,’ simply won’t work for a sizable newsroom. Even Jeff knows this. It’s time for a new strategy. Maybe the WSJ’s will work. I hope it does. Here’s my question: Why are you rooting for them to fail?

Please don’t run and hide behind your “professor” persona. What you presented with your new models is just DIY mini-newspapers. Even the participants at the conference said you looked like you were “reinventing the wheel.” To which you responded, “that’s what I do.”

It does appear that you have gone to great effort to promote the idea of bloggers as a replacement for the large newspapers we have today.

Oh really? How about some actual numbers? You know – newspapers that Jarvis said should “go link” and made more money when they went paywall and/or cut-off search engines?

> If a paywall would reduce the WSJ’s traffic by half but raise the revenue-per-reader by a factor of 10, wouldn’t that be a good thing?

If you want to suggest that Jarvis would disagree, some supporting evidence would be nice….

The wisdom of that strategy depends on two numbers. If their values are different, if the 10 is closer to 1.5 or the half is closer to 90%, or both, it’s a dumb strategy.

For the WSJ, those numbers may be correct. A couple of newspapers may have numbers for which that would make sense, but most don’t.

> Look at Bloomberg – doing pretty well, last I checked. . . .

Bloomberg and WSJ have good, valuable, and non-fungible content. Strategies that work for them won’t necessarily work for most journalists because their content doesn’t have all three of three properties. Jarvis has pointed that out.

And no, changing copyright law won’t change that.

I wonder what strategies Levine’s publications use?