Yet another person is figuring out how to make decent money off Twitter that isn't CEO Evan Williams: HarperCollins has commissioned former Valleywag editor Nick Douglas to collect and edit Twitter Wit, a book of ... well, witty tweets. According to Valleywag, Douglas is getting a "five-figure sum" for the book, which is slated for release this fall; Douglas and HarperCollins editor Kate Hamill set up a submission site that automates the collection of the tweets (from anywhere and everywhere) and gets each user's permission to republish. Given Twitter's seemingly unstoppable surge in popularityJohn Battelle compared its search potential to YouTube's, and NBC's Nightline dedicated a segment to it last night (via MediaMemo)who knows, it just might fly off the shelves. Anyone else care to wager?

Related

• Battelle: Twitter Is The YouTube Of Real-Time Search
• How Glam Made Money Off Twitter During The Oscars

Ah, lawyers. It's a love-hate relationship.

Just this week alone, I'm working with a literary attorney (publishing), an entertainment attorney (TV), and a corporate financing attorney (angel investments). All three are great.

Yesterday, though, I received the threatening letter below from Protocol Integrated Direct Marketing, whose call centers I recommend in the 4HWW. WTF?

Click to enlarge

But what did I say about Protocol specifically? Here it is, after an group intro where I indicate providers can also be compensated per-minute:

Protocol Marketing: One of classic sales-oriented call centers. I've used them for years.

I used them as a start-up CEO and felt the recommendation was valuable to readers. Blasphemer! Even if a correction were needed somewhere, the legal bitch slap isn't needed.

My response was simple: I called the lawyer and told him I would both have the mention removed and also announce the correction to readers (that's this blog post).

I suspect the CEO, Don Norsworthy, is not aware of this letter, as he would have no doubt approached it differently after recognizing a few things:

1. How you say something IS what you say.

Ever heard it's not just what you say, it's how you say it? I would go further: how you say something is what you say. A simple call or e-mail to Random House with we're getting too many calls for the wrong services; would you mind changing it to the following? would have sufficed. Have a normal human conversation and don't come off sounding like Robocop (video above).

But what if you need to be forceful? If someone's motives are clearly bad? I've dealt with this as well. First of all, if their actions are done with obvious malevolent-intent or law-breaking, you can be more forceful. Second, for those cases that fall in the middle, it's possible to be forceful and clear without being rude. For example:

It's come to our attention that [action your want them to cease in neutral terms]. I'm sure you are unaware, but this causes [negative consequences for you], which results in [other problems]. We thank you in advance for removing/stopping/correcting X as soon as possible [notice how less abrasive this is than 'immediately', but it achieves the same effect] and confirming when this has been done. Legal action is always a last resort, but if we do not receive confirmation within one business week, we'll be compelled to take appropriate next steps. Your fastest correction and confirmation is both important and appreciated.

2. It's counterproductive to threaten someone until you determine their incentives to refuse compliance.

In other words, what do I gain by refusing to remove them? Nothing. In fact, it's in my readers' best interest to make it accurate or remove it. Threatening me with Darth Vader-speak like compel compliance with [our] demand just pisses people off, and I could have still been a strong proponent of theirs. Too bad, so sad.

3. It's better to steer the golden goose rather than kill it.

If I'm sending them enough calls to inundate their phone lines (ironic in itself, since they're offering call center services), it would be in their best interest to just make the description more accurate, no? It's free advertising in a #1 NY Times bestseller to be published in 33 languages. How much advertising cost or cost-per-acquisition (CPA) does that save them if it's accurate? Knowing the revenue model and having worked with call centers, I'd guess hundreds of thousands of dollars at a minimum. To save what? A few thousand dollars in filtering out mom-and-pop callers at $.90 per minute? That's just penny-wise and pound-foolish.

4. Don't mistake symptoms with root problems, or confuse correlation with causation.

There are no income investment requirements that I can find listed anywhere on their call center site. It strikes me that their main problem relates to a system-wide issue with pre-qualification. The blurb in the 4HWW is just a symptom any successful PR or marketing that brings people to them will produce the same filtering bottleneck. Fixing the root cause instead of threatening the person who makes the root cause come to the surface.

If they have a problem with closer, Protocol might also consider removing the following from the second paragraph of their main call center page:

Whether you need a salesperson to close deals or specialized technical support services, Protocol's contact center services can help.

Confused? Me too.

5. If you threaten someone in a digital world, it might become what your prospective customers see first.

Principle one: Better not to threaten people whenever possible. Principle two: Google someone before you threaten them. If their PageRank and SEO beats yours, recognize that the public will see what they say first and foremost. Principle three: if someone is sending you business, and you threaten them because of a positive description (even containing inaccuracies), you are disincentivizing all partners, journalists, and customers from evangelizing for you if it becomes public. Given the new dynamics of personal branding in a digital age, being nice should be company policy, if not for cheap Google insurance.

Oh, and being rude sucks.

Be firm when necessary, but be nice whenever possible. Long-term, it doesn't pay to do otherwise.

In conclusion: Protocol, I'm sorry for endorsing you and reflecting my experience in a positive description. I was wrong and you are right. Readers, please pull out your Sharpie and strike Protocol from pg. 201.

Ah, lawyers. Use them wisely or the problem you create could be bigger than the one you solve.

Anyone have suggestions for good call centers that won't threaten me for recommending them?


To lighten the mood, a photo from the American Apparel factory, which I visited last Saturday. More pics here.

Nikon has announced their new D90 camera, a 12.3-megapixel DSLR that retails for $999.95 and includes the ability to shoot 24fps 720p HD video.

Commercial photographer Chase Jarvis had a chance to try out the camera in advance, making a video as he and his crew tested out several D90's.

In related news, Canon announced their new 50D DSLR.

Check out the D90 write-ups by Thomas Hawk and David Pouge (New York Times).

This is a blog post from Laughing Squid For more content like this, subscribe to the RSS feed, Twitter & FriendFeed.

New Nikon D90 Camera, Includes Ability To Shoot 720p HD Video

By sharing my statistics openly, it will now be obvious to the world how little real traffic I get, opening me to ridicule. The emperor has no clothes, it could be said. Also, maybe the traffic I receive isn't seen as "quality" traffic? I still get a lot of visitors from Google image searches looking for R-rated material in vain. Maybe I don't want everybody to see that, and, therefore, take the site less seriously?

By sharing my statistics openly, it could be shown we're bragging, highlighting traffic, growth, and the trends. Smaller bloggers just getting started might see the data as unattainable and could throw potshots.

Just as it makes sense to visit Salary.com and determine what other people with your title in your geography are commanding, viewing other's statistics can give you a reference point for how you are performing against your peers.

One of the most interesting things I find from my statistics are where people are coming from, in the referral logs. It's likely that those people caring enough to send a link my way might be interested in the same topics I am, and, using the transitive property, my readers would be interested in what they are as well.

Despite one's best efforts, not every single story gets the same amount of solid traffic. There are peaks and valleys. Making this data public could better give guidance to other writers as to what topics are most interesting, might get the most engagement, or views.

Whether the total number of unique visitors, page views, referrals is in the hundreds, thousands or hundreds of thousands, by establishing that data publicly, your traffic now becomes part of the conversation, relative to yourself and relative to others, so you'll need to come to terms with this in advance.

A good blogger who knows their statistics can get used to specific readers. With a good combination of MyBlogLog, and location-based visits, I have a good idea of who the most frequent visitors are, and I think I know what stories they read, if I get the time to look it up. Maybe others could be as aggressive and figure out the same information. Some visitors might not like having this potential to be snooped expanded to the masses.

It's one thing to post data at your peak when things are going well. But if you have a slow week or months, and your numbers collapse, there's no hiding it. You can't undo a number once it's out, so that too would be a risk.

My last 2 pay checks where paid thanks to home equity loans taken out by [the] CEO and president. I have also had a hard time getting my final pay check from them. They claim they are unable to pay me ( $400 after advance repayment ) until they receive funding. The last few months I was at the company they kept promising funding would be coming "this friday we should have it..." was said at least 4 times. In the 2 years I worked there, I never once heard the term "profitable" mentioned, only the far off idea's of being snapped up by [some] big company

February 2008:

Four large newspaper companies are joining forces to sell advertisements on the Internet, hoping that the combined heft of their Web sites will encourage large advertisers to spend more money.

Each of the four companies the Tribune Company, the Gannett Company, the Hearst Corporation and The New York Times Company is transferring a portion of its online ad space to quadrantONE, a new company that will be announced Friday.

The purpose of the joint venture, which will be based in Chicago and will hire 17 people [commitment!], is to let national advertisers place ads on local Web sites with a single phone call [phone call!].

The sites belong to papers like The Los Angeles Times (which is a Tribune property), The Des Moines Register (Gannett), The Houston Chronicle (Hearst) and The Boston Globe (The New York Times Company).

Some of the companies' flagship sites, however, will not be included, because they are not considered local. These include the sites of USA Today, a Gannett paper, and of The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, which are owned by the Times Company. [These are also known as the ones that actually have reasonable numbers of readers.]

Executives involved said the newspaper companies understand [by which they mean, "used to have a local monopoly but don't anymore"] the local market better than Google, Yahoo and Microsoft...

The companies were also all part of the New Century Network in the late 1990s...

Source: New York Times.

March 1998:

[W]hen New Century Network was kicked off last April by nine [newspaper] giants teaming up to conquer electronic competition, even the launch party bombed...

In a ballroom at the Newspaper Association of America convention in Chicago, a thousand bottles of champagne emblazoned with ''New Century Network: The Collective Intelligence of America's Newspapers'' awaited the hordes expected to come to toast the watershed new-media joint venture. When fewer than 100 people showed up, Chief Executive Lee de Boer made an abbreviated speech before retreating...

The reception was the first public humiliation for New Century Network, but only one in a series of blunders that culminated in the company's abrupt shutdown on Mar. 10. Created in 1995 to unite newspapers against Microsoft Corp. and other competitors girding to woo electronically advertisers and readers, New Century Network came to embody everything that could go wrong when old-line newspapers converge with new media...

Started with $1 million each from Knight-Ridder, Tribune, Times Mirror, Advance Publications, Cox Enterprises, Gannett, Hearst, Washington Post, and New York Times, New Century seemed an entrepreneurial dream. The Internet had just opened to the world, creating vast new competition for readers--and for the advertisers that pump $40 billion into newspapers. But it also gave newspapers a chance to capture national accounts that favored the one-stop-shopping convenience of TV and national magazines...

[T]he [newspaper] companies had wildly diverging philosophies about how newspapers should make the electronic leap and what role the new venture should play. ''You had private companies and public companies and companies that were risk-averse and those that were risk-tolerant,'' says Harry Chandler, head of new media for Los Angeles Times. ''You had big-city papers and small chains. We shared a need. But it was frustrating trying to come together.''

While the wired world moved at warp speed, New Century spent 18 months hiring a permanent ceo and two years creating an electronic doorway to 140 newspapers... ''This [Internet] thing is really racing,'' says Al Sikes, the former Federal Communications Commissioner who is president of Hearst New Media. ''Organizations of a number of co-equals can't turn on a dime.''...

The partners ultimately invested more than $25 million in the virtual venture... The board decided... to pull the plug, coming to a remarkably quick agreement--for the first and final time...

Source: Business Week.

[With apologies in advance to Martin Nisenholtz, who I believe is genuinely fighting the good fight, and who will no doubt end up with a great job at some fine Internet company.]

The hiring of Bill Kristol was the last straw.

I can't take it anymore.

I hereby inaugurate my New York Times Deathwatch, which will continue until the last Sulzberger has left the building.

Recent dispatches that are fit to print:

Leading the way [in terrible end-of-year news from the newspaper industry] was The New York Times Company, where total [quarterly] revenues fell 1.7% to $865.8 million, due mostly to a 4.1% drop in ad revenues... Advertising revenues at the news media group in particular fell 5.6%.

Source: Media Daily News.

Actually, that's being perhaps overly fair, since it takes into account an extra week last year. The straight year over year performance was:

[F]ourth-quarter revenue totaled $865.8 million, down 7.1% from $931.5 million a year earlier. The decline included a 9.1% drop in advertising revenue and a 4% fall in circulation revenue... [T]he company had an extra week in the final quarter of 2006, which boosted the year-earlier quarter's revenue by $50.8 million and its pretax income by $14.3 million.

Yes, we are dealing with a business where missing a single week means the difference between revenue falling 1.7% and 7.1%, and advertising revenue falling 4.1% and 9.1%. Go figure.

Source: Forbes.

Now, normally, beating up on someone like this isn't very much fun. But we are talking about a profession that specializes in passing judgment, often snide, on everyone else. And so, onward...

Turns out that December 2007 was particularly bad, and things may be getting even worse:

Separately, the [New York Times] reported that December ad revenue dropped 25.2%. Excluding an additional week in December 2006, ad revenue declined 12% for the month.

...[W]eakness across several national [advertising] categories including health care, books, technology products and transportation hampered results in the month. Classified ads, the traditional lifeblood of newspapers, saw steep declines in help-wanted, real estate and automotive sales. [Craig, you bad bad boy...]

"To date in January, the percentage decline in advertising revenue is trending similar to that of December..." said Janet Robinson, chief executive of New York Times...

As they say, sometimes it's darkest right before it goes pitch black.

Source: Marketwatch.

How are the company's other papers doing?

The [New York Times-owned] Boston Globe will soon announce cutbacks at the newspaper, including hundreds of layoffs, and an increase in the per copy price of the paper to 75 cents as of Feb. 1...

The Globe saw a nearly 7 percent decrease from 386,417 to 360,695 in its daily circulation between Sept. 2006 and Sept. 2007, according to numbers released in November by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. That report showed the paper's Sunday circulation down about 6.5 percent...

When you have an obsolete, inconvenient physical product that nobody wants in an era of universal online access, the appropriate strategy is clearly to raise the price.

Source: Metro Boston, which amusingly itself is 49 percent owned by the Boston Globe, which is owned by the New York Times.

How about revenue at the Globe?

At the New England Media Group, which includes the Boston Globe, ad revenue fell nearly 16%. Circulation revenue fell 7%.

Source: Marketwatch.

How about the company's smaller newspapers?

The company's regional-media group, including papers in medium-sized markets such as Wilmington, N.C., and Santa Rosa, Calif., saw ad revenue decline almost 17%, while circulation fell 7.4%.

Source: Marketwatch.

Meanwhile, the Times faces its second assault from a major hedge fund in the last two years:

A hedge fund manager who acquired a stake in the New York Times Company and is pushing to gain seats on its board sent a letter to the company on Sunday in which he criticised directors as "ineffective" and called for it to shed more non-core assets.

Scott Galloway, founder of Firebrand Capital, who sent the letter, has joined with another hedge fund, Harbinger, to try to put forward their own nominees for the four independent seats on the media company's 13-member board at its meeting in April. The funds have amassed a combined 4.9 per cent stake in Times' shares.

Source: Financial Times.

An ineffective board? What could they be talking about?

Hmmmmm. That's not the direction you want to see those things go.

Well, given that the Internet is the central force dismantling the company's business, I'm sure that by now they've stocked their board with noted Internet experts. Let's see:

• Brenda C. Barnes -- CEO of Sara Lee; noted snack cake expert
• Raul E. Cesan -- former CEO of Schering-Plough; noted Levitra expert
• Daniel H. Cohen -- president of DeepSee LLC, "an oceanic exploration and submarine leasing company"; noted Jacques Cousteau expert
• Lynn G. Dolnick -- former head of exhibits for the National Zoologic Park in Washington DC; noted marsupial expert
• Michael Golden -- current publisher of the International Herald Tribune; former head of the company's Women's Publishing Division; noted sundress expert
• William E. Kennard -- former head of the FCC; noted "seven dirty words" expert
• James M. Kilts -- former CEO of Gillette; noted smooth, smooth shave expert; prior to that, unindicted coconspirator at Philip Morris; noted expert on your grandfather's hacking cough
• David E. Liddle -- here I have to take a pause as I actually know this one; based on what's happening at the company, it could be reasonably asked whether he's actually attending the board meetings.
• Ellen R. Marram -- former CEO of Nabisco; noted Oreo expert. Oh, wait, she actually ran an Internet company: "From 1999 until 2000, Ms. Marram was president and chief executive officer of efdex Inc. (the Electronic Food & Drink Exchange), an Internet-based commodities exchange for the food and beverage industry." Ooh. I wonder if that ended well.
• Thomas Middelhoff -- former CEO of Bertelsmann; noted expert on complicated family politics -- well, that's probably coming in handy...
• Janet L. Robinson -- current CEO of the New York Times Company; noted expert on horrific business implosions
• Doreen A. Toben -- CFO of Verizon; noted 30-year debenture expert
• And finally, Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. -- the Big Kahuna -- the Man -- the Guy In Charge -- the chairman and scion -- the dude with the cojones to actually defend Judy Miller. Not noted Internet expert.

So, if you want to issue bonds to pay for FCC-approved snack cake manufacturing in a submarine on display at a national park by a sundress-wearing cigarette-puffing Levitra-popping Judy Miller, you're pretty much set.

Go team!

Verizon seeks unspecified monetary damages and wants Cox blocked from using the patents in the future.

Below is a list of the specific patents and links to the actual patent. Four of the eight patents are ones that Verizon alleged Vonage had infringed. A federal appeals court affirmed Vonage infringed two of Verizon's patents. In October of last year, Vonage agreed to pay Verizon up to US$120 million.

This case against Cox is significant because rather than seeking the same win it got from Vonage from other similarly situated companies, Verizon is now seeking to expand the breadth of its winning patent portfolio to fixed VoIP. To the extent that Verizon wins here, this could have broad implications for other fixed services using Docsys (as Cox and the rest of the cable industry generally use), presumably other fixed VoIP that doesn't use Docsys, and depending on which if any patents are upheld to VoIP billing systems, routing systems, network management, and other technologies. So while this is the first major suit against a fixed VoIP services, my quick read of the patents suggests that only in a few cases (like the 930 patent) are the patents limited to fixed functionality. Among analysts, there is still speculation as to why Verizon chose to go after Cox cable instead of a cable company like Comcast who presumably uses the same technology, shares a greater competition footprint, and has a larger number of customers.

The patents Verizon says Cox is infringing upon:

U.S. Patent No. 6,970,930 available here (not in Vonage case) Method and system of providing differentiated services

U.S. Patent No. 6,104,711 available here (Vonage was found to have infringed) Enhanced Internet domain name server to translate information from a public, packet-based network

U.S. Patent No. 6,430,275 available here (Vonage found not to have infringed) Enhanced signaling for terminating resource

U.S. Patent No. 6,137,869 available here (Vonage found not to have infringed) Network session management

U.S. Patent No. 6,282,574 available here (Vonage was found to have infringed) Method, server and telecommunications system for name translation on a conditional basis and/or to a telephone number

U.S. Patent No. 6,335,927 available here (not in Vonage case) Multi-protocol telecommunications routing optimization

U.S. Patent No. 6,292,481 available here (not in Vonage case) Inter-carrier signaling and usage accounting architecture for internet telephony

U.S. Patent No. 6,636,597 available here (not in Vonage case) Method of and system for providing services in a communications network

It's no secret that consumers are quickly turning to Internet voice services because they are exciting, innovative and often do things never before possible with traditional PSTN phones. It's just disappointing that rather than trying to win over consumers, companies have tried to win over judges. As TeleGeography notes as Vonage's growth has slowed, "US VoIP subscriber growth is falling well behind the blistering pace set by European VoIP service providers." It means that "by 2011, VoIP penetration in Europe will be approximately twice as great as in the US." One of the key differences as TeleGeography points out is that in Europe, incumbent service providers have had to compete against VoIP providers and now themselves account for 26% of VoIP subscribers, while in the US incumbents have remained largely on the sidelines in terms of VoIP.

At the dawn of a new era, we should be trying to lead the world in broadband based communication technologies and putting new ideas into action for consumers. It would be a shame if because of policy and patents, that America lost its leadership in a key enabling technology because we argued more over who invented which aspect rather than how we advance it.

We can and should do better.

-----

Readers of my blog are invited to join me on both twitter and Facebook.

Tags: Vonage, Patent, Cox, Verizon, VoIP, Jeff Pulver

I've been getting asked by lots of people lately, How do I break into new media?

I'm a firm believer that all the tools are out there and the great thing is that anyone can start today if they want to. There is no velvet rope, no casting couch, everyone is invited to the party. But, I do think that if you really want to do this as a career (which is what most people are asking me about) then there are some other things you need to think about.

I didn't state the obvious which is to get in on the ground floor with a company working in the space. I completely forgot to say this during the show, but it is a great way to do it. While The Advance Guard isn't hiring at the moment we are always open to the idea of interns who are willing to work hard and get some great experience at the same time.

It is more about hard work, passion, curiosity and determination then about any tool, trick or tantrum. Get out there and make it happen. You've got the tools, but do you have the drive to make it happen?

On the show I mentioned that I'd love to hear what your goals for the year are. Call them into 206-309-4729 or drop me an e-mail.

Tags: new media careers, podcast, cc chapman, podshow, the advance guard, tag, marketing podcast, career advice

All economists know that when American jobs are outsourced, Americans as a group are net winners. What we lose through lower wages is more than offset by what we gain through lower prices...
Suppose, after years of buying shampoo at your local pharmacy, you discover you can order the same shampoo for less money on the Web. Do you have an obligation to compensate your pharmacist? If you move to a cheaper apartment, should you compensate your landlord? When you eat at McDonald's, should you compensate the owners of the diner next door? Public policy should not be designed to advance moral instincts that we all reject every day of our lives.
In what morally relevant way, then, might displaced workers differ from displaced pharmacists or displaced landlords?...
If you're forced to pay $20 an hour to an American for goods you could have bought from a Mexican for $5 an hour, you're being extorted. When a free trade agreement allows you to buy from the Mexican after all, rejoice in your liberation -- even if Mr. McCain, Mr. Romney and the rest of the presidential candidates don't want you to.

Well, for one thing, this isn't a matter of morality, it's a matter of equity, not to mention enlightened self-interest. And for another thing, it's entirely consistent to both rejoice in being able to buy cheaper goods, and attempt to help out those who have lost their jobs as a result.

But it doesn't really matter: I suspect that Landsburg lost about 95% of his readers when he found himself forced to start his argument with an "all economists know that" sentence.

Update: Rodrik weighs in.

Whether you were just invited to speak at an international industry event, a regional conference, or a local event, it is up to YOU to make the most out of the speaking opportunity. This is one of the times where a little bit of planning will go a long way.

Should you accept the speaking opportunity? The choice is up to you. Before you accept the invitation you might want to take a look at the tentative schedule and see whether or not this is an event you would have wanted to attend if you were not invited to speak there. If when looking at the content, there are no sessions you can relate to, chances are that you might not want to be speaking there. Over time you will learn to be more selective about your speaking opportunities.

Once you make the decision to speak and accept the chance to speak, you now have an opportunity to prepare for you chance to be in the spotlight. The chance for you to shine amongst your peers. A chance for you to stand out. It is now your responsibility to get the most out of your commitment to speak.

Once you commit to speak at a conference, you should find out what hotel the other speakers will be staying out. If this is an event in one hotel, the answer is simple. If you are speaking at an conference at a convention center which has multiple conference hotels, you should contact the event organizer and ask them which hotel they are recommending to their speakers to stay at. Traveling a great distance to speak at an event and staying at the wrong hotel during the event is one way to ensure yourself that you will feel not as productive as the person who spoke at an event and stayed at the hotel that all of the other speakers were staying in.

One of the things I love about conferences are the chance meetings that occur. Staying at the same hotel as the other speakers just increases the chances you will also have chance meetings that amount to something. Sometimes it is the late night conversations that take place in the lobby of your hotel that make the entire trip worthwhile.

Whenever possible, try to avoid Hit and Run speaking opportunities. Whenever you hit and run a conference, you lose any chance you had to connect with the community and network and you might damage your standing within the industry / group of people who you did connect with during your talk. Conference organizers appreciate it whenever the people they invite to speak decide to stay for the entire conference and become active members of the event community.

When preparing for the speaking opportunity, you should spend some time understanding the demographics of the community of people attending. Look at the conference program and make sure the talk you are working on is on target. If the event organizer contacts you and asks what you will be talking about, be as specific as possible. Listen and think about what they have to say before you say a word. Being on target with your message is important if you want to get invited back to speak again.

When I plan my attendance at an event, I scan the conference brochure and identify the people I want to meet. I recommend finding out the social networking platforms being used by the community and join the appropriate networks. Look for the people you want to meet on these networks and try to schedule meetings in advance. Within the online community do whatever you can do to get noticed. Stand out in your own unique way.

As the conference gets closer, take another look at the conference program.

Be aware of when you are speaking in the conference schedule. If you are speaking early in the conference, there is a good chance you will be noticed by your peers in the audience which will help your on-site networking. But if it turns out you are speaking in the second to last session of the event, you may need to make a special extra effort during the event to network with everyone else, unless you are speaking at an event where you are well known since the audience will be introduced to you just an hour before the conference is ending.

Look at the conference schedule and look for when the networking opportunities are. If you are speaking at the event because you want to benefit from the on-site networking, make yourself available and plan to be on-site at the conference early in the morning. Surprise the event organizer and show up during breakfast. Sit down at a table of strangers and have coffee with seven new friends. Get up and grab some food and sit down and meet another table of people. Repeat this for as long as you can. Position yourself in a strategic location during the scheduled breaks so you can be nearer to the people you are looking to meet. I'm not advocating that you stalk anyone but just taking advantage of any and all opportunities that present themselves.

Whenever I attend an event, besides speaking at the event, a series of questions goes through my mind. I ask myself: Why am I really here? Is it to generate business for my company? Am I here to prospect for leads? To share a vision? To promote a cause? To validate a concept? To raise money? To get noticed by the media? To sell an idea? To find the people for a team? Or something else. And it doesn't really matter what the answer is but the point is always know what the answer is. Understanding your goals and objectives gives you a much better chance of being able to satisfy your goals rather than going home feeling unfulfilled.

If I'm looking to maximize the networking with the other speakers, what I always do is look at the conference schedule and take note of the times the people I'm looking to meet are speaking. I then make it the point to show up in the Speakers Lounge or Green Room up to an hour before that person is scheduled to speak and hang out and wait for them to show up. While not every speaker shows up in the speaker's lounge before their talk, many do. Being a speaker gives you full and unfettered access to the areas generally reserved only for fellow speakers. Use the status of being a speaker to spend time in the speakers lounge. This is your ticket for premium networking opportunities.

Most of the time, your speaker badge will also be your ticket to get access to the press room. Just tell the person at the door you have an interview scheduled. Once inside, it is up to you to get yourself into a story by making yourself available to the media. Politely overhear a conversation and share a comment. You never know who may be listening.

If you are invited to a speaker's dinner or lunch or breakfast make it a point to be there. These are usually special VIP events which offer great networking opportunities.

And should you have a conflict and can no longer meet your speaking commitment, the event organizer appreciates it if you can let them know as soon as possible that you are not able to speak. Do not wait until the last possible minute to tell them. And do not wait until the day of the event and just not show up unless you want to be assured that you won't be invited back.

---

Good luck with your speaking gigs. And please feel free to share your own tips on how to get more out of speaking opportunities.

---
Readers of my blog are invited to join me on both twitter and Facebook.

Tags: conference, speaking, trade show, Social Media, Jeff Pulver

We all deal with the problem of needing to build support for our ideas. Maybe you're trying to sell your boss on a new program, maybe you're trying to get a loan or grant to start a small business or to undertake a research project, or maybe you're just trying to get a job. What do you have to do to convince your audience, whoever they are, that you're ready and able to handle whatever's thrown at you?

Writers face this all the time. In publishing, the quality of the writing alone rarely speaks for itself. Publishers need some assurance that a new title will sell, and alas, that involves far more than just whether a book is any good or not. Readers don't know a book is good until they've read it, which means quality doesn't play much of a role in getting them to read something. Instead, reader's choices are made on the basis of perceived expertise, name-recognition, and familiarity the same factors we use to make most of our other decisions in life.

In publishing, the combination of all these factors is referred to as an author's platform. In Bill O'Hanlon's book Write is a Verb, O'Hanlon (author of 28 books)describes the following elements or planks that are part of a writer's platform:

1. credibility
2. marketing abilities
3. marketing channels
4. mass media presence
5. media abilities and experience
6. track record in publishing
7. celebrity
8. reputation
9. unique topic or slant
10. borrowed planks

While not all of these apply beyond the publishing world, with a little tweaking we can adapt O'Hanlon's description to just about any situation where you need to show others that you are capable of taking on a task or project.

The Planks of Your Platform

• Your credibility: How much relevant education or experience you bring to a project. If you have a PhD in physics, you probably have a lot of credibility when it comes to talking about lasers but not so much when it comes to talking about fashion design.
• Your willingness and ability to push a project: Your passion and desire to stand behind a project, your leadership qualities, your demonstrated competence, and your skill at promotion all come into play here. If you are lacking in any off these, you run the risk of seeing someone else given control even when the original idea was your.
• Your network: Who you know and, more importantly, can draw on to advance your project. The channels marketing, word-of-mouth, influence you control and can exploit.
• Your media presence: Outlets to the public, whether as a whole or in your niche, that you control or have access to. If you have a TV show, a monthly magazine column, a popular blog, or a series of books, you can easily get the word out about a new project attracting attention, financial investment, and other resources to move your project forward.
• Your track record: Your demonstrated record to get projects done, and done well. If you've launched a dozen successful marketing campaigns, you are going to be more desirable to start the next one than someone who has launched a dozen failures or someone who has launched just one successful one, all other things equal.
• Your reputation: What people know or have heard about you. If you have a reputation for being brilliant but lazy, hard to work with, or disloyal, people will be hesitant to work with you. On the other hand, if you always get your work in on time, are easy-going but professional, and bring a single-minded focus to your work, people are going to want you on their team.
• Your celebrity: The fame and recognition you bring to a project by your involvement, even though your fame is derived from another field. People want, say, self-help books written by pop stars, even though most pop stars don't have much of a background in psychotherapy. This probably doesn't apply to most people, but it's worth including as food for thought.
• Your uniqueness: Brilliance, insight, an off-beat sensibility the value you add to a project simply by your own unique talents and abilities. In writing, it's your unique slant on your topic; in, say, design, it might be your distinct style.
• Borrowed planks: The support of others with big platforms. Endorsements, recommendations, awards, outside research anything from other people with credibility, reputations, celebrity, etc. that supports your idea.

How Big is Your Platform?

As you think through this list, consider how your own experience and life details can be described in a way that contributes to your platform. How can you describe your own experiences in a way that shows how credible, well-connected, successful, or unique you are?

Consider, too, the gaps in your platform what can you do to add planks that aren't already there, or build up the ones that aren't particularly strong? It's not necessary to have every plank above most people do well without celebrity, for example, and those with celebrity often do well without many of the others but the more planks you have, and the stronger they are, the more likely others are to see you as someone they can trust to get the job done.

And that means they are more likely to support you, whether by hiring you, promoting you, putting you in charge of a big project, offering you a contract, buying your product, investing in your business, or whatever. In the end, this is about confidence give people a reason (or many reasons) to have confidence in you, and leverage that confidence to do the things you want to do.

Dustin M. Wax is a contributing editor and project manager at lifehack.org. He is also an anthropology and women's studies professor in Las Vegas, NV where he lives with his partner and three children. His personal site can be found at dwax.org.

Bookmark or Share this with a friend!

Related Posts

• Lead, Follow, and Get Out of the Way
• Eliminate Common Writing Mistakes
• Would I lie to you?
• What Kind Of Leader Are You To Your Team?
• Leadership and the Human Stain
• Leadership is Influence, Not Control
• Sticky Ideas Workshop (Part 4): Credible
• 10 Quick Tips To Boost Self-Esteem
• Why You Need To Be A Toastmaster
• Increasing your Credibility in 30 days: How to Brag without Bragging
• The Art of Humble Confidence
• The Five C's of Champions
• Elements of Great Managing
• The importance of enthusiasm
• Training the Trainer: 5 Basics

David Berlind at TechWeb files a report on the new machines and includes a video of our competitive analyst and uber blogger, Matt Kohut. I thought I would share.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Gawker's Noah Robischon, in the memo, spins this as a way for Gawker "to dispense pay increases automatically," without writers having to curry favor with individual editors. And in an interview in December, outgoing Gawker editor Choire Sicha declared himself happy with this scheme:

I think I'm one of the few who's really in favor of it, essentially. Conceptually what paying people for their traffic does is it puts income in the hands of the worker; it puts control of the income, in some slightly messy way, in the hands of the people actually doing the writing. I think that's actually kind of a huge advance.

"Messy" is right, given management's ability to change pageview rates at whim. But even Robischon admits this system isn't perfect.

For one thing, it essentially marks the official death of the Gawker Media blog as something you can read by reloading the home page every so often. Since home-page pageviews don't count towards individual writers' pageview counts, everything depends on driving readers to individual story pages.

But given how rare it is for a new pay scheme to be made public in such detail, it's worth examining the economics here.

For one thing, the relationship between base pay and bonuses is exactly the opposite of what it is at most companies. Generally speaking, people with higher salaries get higher bonuses. At Gawker Media, however, it's the other way around: ceteris paribus, the lower your base pay, the higher your bonus is going to be, since you have to "earn out" your base pay before you get a penny in bonus pay. Consider this anecdote from Robischon:

Four sites are already using the new bonus system (Gawker, Wonkette, Gizmodo and Defamer). One guest editor on Wonkette landed a huge exclusive and walked away with an extra $3k in his paycheck.

I reckon that Robischon is referring to this post, which has received over 380,000 pageviews so far. It's worth noting that the "guest editor" didn't even have posting privileges: he's not credited in the normal byline space but rather at the foot of the post, as "Princess Sparkle Pony". (Which means that his base pay is very low and might even be zero, thereby artificially increasing his bonus.) What's more, the post is a fortuitous one, a result of the fact that Mr Pony has known the source of the exclusive for "several years". Clearly this is not the kind of thing that your average Gawker Media employee can expect to produce on a regular basis.

In contrast, Gawker is meant to be a news site, and Denton is looking to poach newspaper reporters at competitive salaries. My feeling is that those reporters won't be able to expect much in the way of bonuses for some time after they're hired, just because their base pay is going to be high enough (definitely more than $3,000 a month, in any event) that they won't be able to earn it out.

On the other hand, long-standing Gawker Media employees are in a much better position:

You will be eligible for a bonus based on the number of pageviews your posts receive each month. This total includes any pageview on any story with your byline that was read during the month, even if the story is months or years old.

This is music to the ears of anybody who's been writing on sites like Lifehacker or Gridskipper for some time - those posts can remain fresh for years. On the other hand, it's unlikely to be much use to Gawker writers, and not only because there aren't any longstanding Gawker writers. And more generally, this pay scheme makes it harder to join Gawker - since new writers don't have an archive of old stories generating page views - and also (marginally) harder to leave it once you've been there for some time.

At least two things remain to be seen: whether the new pay scheme will increase the amount of salaciousness at the expense of the sites' broader credibility, and whether the new pay scheme will adequately reward the kind of old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism that Denton wants to encourage at Gawker. One thing I've noticed in my years blogging is that your most popular posts are never your best posts, and that it's pretty much impossible to predict which posts are going to catch on and get lots of pageviews. The new Gawker pay scheme, then, might well end up simply rewarding the lucky, rather than the good.

When this adventure began it was a lark, a no-brainer (who wouldn't want to send a rover to the Moon and make a lot of money?), but I could hardly call myself a space expert in any regard. And two months of research isn't enough to make me a space expert today. But as a guy who has been evaluating technologies and technology programs for 30 years, the nature of the space culture is beginning to emerge.

On the government level, which is to say NASA, the space culture is one of risk aversion and budget preservation: all budgets are spent but most projects are cancelled. Space technology is moving forward at a very slow rate, with propulsion systems, for example, little changed from 40 years ago. Moore's Law has described many things, but serious space advancements aren't among them. The result is that hard-won knowledge has retired with the men and women who developed it and we are substantially LESS able to go to the Moon today as a nation than we were 30 years ago.

There may be other nations doing great work in space, I simply don't know.

Private space exploration has become a great hobby for Silicon Valley tycoons who bring to it fresh money, some fresh ideas, and by their sheer number compared to NASA a greater pace of change through accelerated natural selection. Yet I worry that this is a fad, that it will fade over time as space enthusiasts lose the 10 percent of their fortunes their wives will allow them to risk, then go back to building big boats or big houses, or whatever they would otherwise have done with that money.

Against this the Google Lunar X Prize is refreshingly different yet also sadly the same. Each of the teams I know about (there are many others I don't know about, so this generalization may be weak) is building a little Apollo Program, spending a LOT of money to launch an ambitious lander and rover with the promise of cracking open space, starting whole new industries, getting in on the bottom floor for a whole new economy. Only it won't, for the most part, work out that way.

The Google Lunar X Prize is $20 million. I haven't heard of a team other than Team Cringely planning to spend less than $50 million and many are in the $100 million range. This is both laudable and dangerous. It is laudable that there is so much capital available yet dangerous if that capital doesn't result in some truly significant advance in both space science AND space industry. If $1 billion is spent on Google Lunar X Prize entries, most of which can't win (there is only one first prize) and many of which will never even fly, does it help space exploration or hurt it? I suspect that it will hurt space exploration as mad money that could have been put to better use gets burned in little or no use at all.

You won't find, for example, any traditional space companies lining up to compete for this prize. Lockheed Martin and Boeing will gladly work for any team, but they "know better" than to vie for the prize themselves, because they are profit-making enterprises and they could never win the prize at a profit despite all the knowledge they would have coming into the contest.

But this doesn't at all mean I am down on the Google Lunar X Prize. Just the opposite. I think it is a fabulous gesture that will ultimately have positive results IF somebody actually wins.

Whether Google realizes it or not, they have taken a revolutionary step with this prize, because the only way to win it -- the ONLY way to win it -- is by taking a completely new approach. The safer route would have been for Google to offer a $100 million prize rather than $20 million. That would have made practical the efforts of these other teams and would have pulled one or more traditional space contractors into the race. There would be a winner and that winner would look like any one of these teams.

But for whatever reason Google decided to offer only $20 million for the first prize, giving us what will emerge over the next few months as half a dozen or more America's Cup-sized teams with America's Cup-sized budgets, each pinning its hopes on a single rover and arguing that there is a business case for investment here, somewhere, if only you squint just right.

Then there is Team Cringely. Our budget to win the Google Lunar X Prize has grown from $3 million to $5 million, where it will stop. That's because (controversial statement coming) I am firmly convinced that we can win the prize with $5 million, but if we spent $10 million we probably couldn't.

So far we have raised $500,000, with the biggest single investment being $100,000 from a guy whose motivation is to share an adventure with his nine-year-old son. It's a lot of money, sure, but this is money that will never be regretted by those who invested it because it isn't enough to have any impact on their lives -- that is unless we win the prize. It's true mad money. One Team Cringely investor is also bankrolling the iPhone Dev Team hackers group simply to pull Steve Jobs' chain.

We'll raise more money over time from similar folks and add to that some corporate sponsorships that will eventually reach our $5 million goal, I am sure. The goal is modest and within reach.

And the pitch is simple: win the prize, make money, save the future of space exploration.

The method is simple, too: build smaller, cheaper rovers and send a bunch of them to the Moon.

If you have 20 shots at hitting the Moon for $5 million versus one shot for $100 million, it changes your whole day.

And the idea is appealing to more than just giddy amateurs. Without making any effort to recruit them, Team Cringely has begun attracting real rocket scientists who are drawn by the simple idea that winning this prize at a profit could change completely the way entrepreneurs and governments look at space. The symbolism of what we are doing is as important as the work, itself.

So Team Cringely now has a Program Manager, a role I gladly hand over so I can go back to evangelizing and raising money. Our Program Manager is Tomas Svitek, who has a PhD from Caltech, was a systems engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the NASA Mars Scout, Mars Surveyor, Mars Sample Return and various Discovery Missions. He was the Principal Scientist for Orbital Sciences Corp., Project Leader for the BlastOff Lunar Lander project and AeroAstro's miniature spacecraft project. He has managed and completed projects for NASA, the U.S. Air Force Research Lab, Microcosm Inc., and SpaceX Corp.. He was lead engineer for Jeff Bezos' Blue Origins crew capsule and has long run his own space consulting company in California.

With the help of Tomas and the rest of Team Cringely we will within 18 months land on the Moon and claim the Google Lunar X Prize. Doing so -- and doing it at a profit -- will show the world there is another way to explore space, drawing new players with new rules into this exciting future.

You're feeling stress about your RSS feeds? Talk about self-created problems. The real solution to managing RSS feeds is to stop reading RSS feeds. It's simple when a purely optional convenience technology is causing stress, it's time to re-evaluate at a pretty fundamental level.

I read this and thrashed and spluttered like Yosemite Sam for a while before I admitted it: he's right. It is a self-created problem, and I need to understand what makes me feel the need to consume the equivalent of a Carnegie library every day, instead of just finding a more efficient way to choke it down.

When I read discussions about managing RSS and information overload, I tend to see three justifications for why people need to subscribe to 842 news feeds:

1. I want to stay informed about the world - Meaning, I never want to be one of those idiots on Jay Leno who can't name the Vice President. I identify with this impulse the most strongly.
2. I need to for my job - Particularly for IT folk, usually along the lines of, I need to stay on top of developments in programming/web design/cat herding so I can advance my career.
3. I need to for my blog - As in, I need to follow all these different feeds to find interesting stuff to pass along to my readers. Everybody wants to be Jason Kottke or John Gruber.

After thinking about my own motivations and admitting that I've uttered all three of those at some point as well, my answer to every one would be, Really? Are you really going to miss that promotion if you didn't hear about the JDK update the second it was released? Are you really going to lose readers if you don't link to that third Boing Boing post? And are you really going to turn into a sheltered, mouth-breathing Epsilon if you happen to skip the news cycle one day?

For me, it's always been a matter of identity. I like to view myself as an informed, plugged in, man of the digital world, and to be this person, I think I need to see all the latest news, comment on the hot blogs, post things on del.icio.us. That's all fine and dandy if that's the person I want to be, but within reason. I should know by now from experiences with other jobs, other vocations, and other vices, that if they start to cause me this kind of concern, something needs to change.

This isn't to say that we should all chuck our newsreaders and smash our TVs, but that we should, like terceiro said in that comment, keep a little perspective. In terms of those first two reasons above, we don't give ourselves enough credit for being the smart, inquisitive people that we are. Even if you shut down the RSS reader for a few days, you'll still know everything you need to know to do your job right. The fact that you possess such a powerful thirst for knowledge will cause you to absorb it passively wherever you go, from snatches of overheard conversations, TV, and radio. It will be enough until you have more time and energy to read it yourself. And the world won't end without you knowing it. Trust me, your mom will call.

In regards to #3, we can also get a little full of ourselves at times. Despite wishful thinking, there aren't many bloggers who would be missed if they took a day off here and there. Take this site for instance; I bet you didn't even notice Merlin was gone. Unless it really is your job, you should probably pull up short when it starts to feel like one.

Here's a suggestion: over the holidays when you're traveling, or when things are slow because everyone else is traveling, remove yourself from the news cycle for a few days and see if you don't shrivel up and die. Take long walks. Cancel something. And when you come back and open your newsreader again, hit that Mark All as Read button and start from scratch. I've started doing that 2-3 times a week now, and it feels glorious.

A really effective way of bootstrapping your start-up is to offshore and outsource your development. But doing this also carries risks, how can you be sure that you are going to get a developer who'll see it through and has the right experience? This post lays out an effective process to find the right developer.

From starting the search, to the first developer writing code, should take around 3-5 months and there may be further delays whilst you complete your documentation. In this article I'll talk you through what you should be doing at each stage, and what the objective of each stage should be. Here's an overview of the process:

• Build a long list of development companies
• NDA all the companies on the long-list
• Issue a Request for Information (RFI)
• Analyse responses and short-list the developers
• Issue a Request for Quotation (RFQ)
• Analyse responses and select a preferred vendor and a spare
• Negotiate contract with preferred vendor
• Commence development based on your documentation

This is a long process, and therefore I've split it up into 4 sections. These will be posted each week for the next four weeks. Regular readers of this series can relax: the whole lot has been written in advance, so there won't be any month long gaps in between!

Finding a great development company is one of the most important decisions your company will make. Changing developers mid-way through a development is near impossible and so it is important that you select a company which you are confident has the ability to see it through. The purpose of this 8-step process is to stack the odds in your favor by finding out as much as possible about the development company before you sign the contract.

At several stages I've included sample documentation to give you more guidance on what should be included. You can download these examples from the documentation bank on Aroxo.

Before we start, one word of advice. Running a vendor selection process will involve giving a large number of developers bad news (and only one company good news). When I first started doing this I found the process of giving bad news quite unpleasant. It is, but it is still important to do it. Vendors are used to receiving rejections, so they tend to take it more easily than expected and I also find that giving the bad news, along with some personalised feedback, is always much appreciated.

Step 1: Build a long-list

Before we start populating a long-list, it is worth spending a few minutes getting properly organised, as running a vendor selection process involves a lot of time, organisation and communication. I find it easiest to run these off a spreadsheet. There's a sample vendor dashboard included in the documentation bank.

Building a long list involves populating this dashboard. The aim is to get 20-30 companies into the dashboard that satisfy your broad requirements for the type of system you want to build. You want to make sure that each company has:

• Experience in building the type of system you're looking for (if you think your system is entirely new, it almost certainly isn't, there will be parallels which you can look for - even if those are purely functional elements)
• Experience working with start-ups
• Offices somewhere in the world where you are happy doing business
• Experience in the technology you want your system built in (if you don't have a preference, then ignore this)

By far and away the hardest of these objectives to meet is the first. You may need to contact many companies to determine whether they have built a similar application to the one you're looking for.

In order to find companies, there are a few tricks you can employ:

• Use your network: ask anyone you know who works in the software industry for 2-3 development company recommendations
• Use referral companies to provide connections and act as a filter
• Use associations to help pinpoint development companies
• Use tools like eLance, Scriptlance and Rentacoder to find developers
• Use Google to help find companies
• When you've found a company you like, do a reverse search for their homepage on Google to see if they belong to any associations with links to other companies

You may need to look through a large number before you've found 20-30 companies which can meet the 4 requirements set out above.

Step 2: NDA everyone

You're a start-up (I'll return to this point later), so an NDA offers no protection. If you've got funds to sue a company then, frankly, they would be better spent fixing the mistake with a new developer. However, it is still essential that you NDA all the vendors, even though you are not going to be providing them with any confidential information (other than of your existence, just yet).

First thing you'll need is an actual NDA. There are plenty you can download for free on the web, so I've not provided one. Read it to make sure that you are comfortable with everything included in it. If you've selected a lawyer at this stage, ask them to provide an NDA, but don't pay them to write out a new one.

Email it to all the developers on your long-list and ask them to fax or scan signed copies back; and make sure there's a deadline for return in your email. When you receive one back, open up the Vendor Dashboard and update it so that you don't forget you've received it. Then print it out and file it.

When you hit the deadline, ignore any further submissions. If the development company can't meet this simple deadline. they are not going to meet any further deadlines.

In next week's post I'll detail how to write and issue an RFI; and then short-list your developers.

For one thing, the WSJ scooped everybody else on this story, so I can guarantee you that they didn't spend a huge amount of time phoning up "people in the music industry" before they ran with it. Those "people" are in fact almost certainly just one person, who probably came up with the number off the top of his head.

I talked some numbers yesterday with Peter Kafka, who's been running Silicon Alley Insider's coverage of this deal. He's also been hitting the phones, and has come to this conclusion:

After talking to industry sources, we think the breakeven per album is closer to high single digit millions per album -- this assumes that 1) Madonna is getting as much as $45 million in advance for all three albums upon the deal's close and that 2) Live Nation will have to pay onerous distribution fees to get the discs in stores.
There is a debate about how many albums Madonna sells: The only audited numbers available are from SoundScan, which only counts U.S. sales. Some websites provide unsourced numbers that claim her last album sold 11 million copies worldwide; music industry sources say the number is closer to 6 or 7 million.

I'm much more upbeat on the Live Nation deal than Peter is, for many reasons.

For one thing, Madonna is not getting $45 million for all three albums upon the deal's close. More likely only half of the deal is upfront, and a large chunk of that will be in stock, not in cash.

But let's assume, for the sake of argument, that Madonna is getting a $45 million advance against royalties for three albums. And let's say she gets $3 in royalties per album. Then Live Nation basically gets to keep Madonna's royalties for the first 15 million albums sold before paying Madonna any extra. But Live Nation, as the music label, makes its own profit on every album sold as well. Yes, it will have to pay larger-than-usual distribution costs, since it's not a major record label, and it will also have to pay marketing costs and the like. But after all that it's reasonable to assume that Live Nation's profit per album will be at least $2.50.

In order to recoup the up-front $45 million advance, then, Live Nation would have to sell just over 8 million copies of all three albums combined. Which is not far off Kafka's low estimate of the global sales of Madonna's last album alone.

If Madonna sells 7 million copies of each of her next three albums globally, then that's 21 million albums moved in all. Live Nation's profit on those albums would be $52.5 million, while Madonna's royalties would be $63 million. In other words, even if Live Nation pays Madonna a total advance of $60 million at the top end of estimates it's quite easy to get to a point where she earns that out over three albums, and makes a lot of money for Live Nation on top.

But that's not all. On top of album sales there are single sales, which are increasingly popular in the age of iTunes. And on top of single sales there are ringtone sales, which are huge in Europe and getting big in the US as well. And then on top of ringtone sales there are all the licensing fees that Madonna will charge people who want to use her latest song in their TV advertising or whatever. And then on top of the licensing fees are the videos sold on iTunes and the expensive remixes and "special edition" CDs and DVDs sold to completists, etc etc... It all adds up.

Live Nation is a concert promoter, so one assumes that they know what they're doing with the $50 million advance for the right to promote her concert tours: certainly concert-ticket price inflation doesn't show any signs of slowing down. And the $17.5 million for everything else think merchandising, which has insanely enormous profit margins seems pretty low, especially given that Live Nation is divorcing Ticketmaster and will henceforth pocket for itself all those exorbitant "convenience" and "handling" and "shipping" fees which get tacked onto every ticket sale.

And the bigger picture is even better for Live Nation, which is using this deal to get out of the razor-thin margins of the concert-promotion business and into the world of music-industry home runs. It's conceivable that Live Nation will lose money on this deal, although I doubt it. But it's equally conceivable that they will make a fortune on it, if the stars align. Live Nation has very few opportunities to make that kind of money, and it makes sense to grab this one. Warner, by contrast, has hundreds of artists who might break out into megastardom and make them the same kind of fortune so they're less concerned about the loss of Madonna, especially given that they retain all the rights to her enormously profitable back catalogue.