Archive

Archive for March, 2008

Increasing Energy Prices Good for Some Aussie Shares

March 28th, 2008

How can BHP expand production at Olympic Dam without a new source of power? Can Australia really increase production volumes in its minerals and metals industry without increasing the number of natural-gas fired plants that run on gas from the North West Shelf? These must be the questions that keep mine executives up at night, among other things.

As always, a very interesting piece of analysis from the guys at The Daily Reckoning…

FREEDOM: Economics, Politics and Business

John Howard for President?

March 20th, 2008

The famous right-leaning US magazine, National Review, has made a big call: John Howard for President!

My favourite quote is:

some conservatives might read this or listen to Howard’s speech and pine for a time machine to go back to his prime ministership in Australia and take a political vacation in an ideological heaven.

If they think Howard was good, imagine what they’d think of Costello?

The one hitch – isn’t there always one? – is that he’s an Aussie. But constitutions are made to be amended.

FREEDOM: Economics, Politics and Business

Lunchtime is the new prime time

March 14th, 2008

Australian workers are using lunch breaks as an opportunity to keep up with gossip, goings on and breaking news via video streams on Australia’s largest news media sites. So much so that lunchtime is becoming the new primetime.

I presented at the Frocomm New Media & PR Summit in Sydney recently, and one of my fellow speakers was Pippa Leary from Fairfax Online (one of Australia’s largest media groups, owners of broadsheets Melbourne’s The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, among others).

She described the huge growth in video delivery over the Fairfax Online network, from approximately 500,000 videos served in January 2007 to over 4.5m videos served in the month of January 2008 (with a particularly big spike when Heath Ledger died). The biggest spike, however, was during lunchtime, which Pippa described as the “new prime time”. She described how many people watched their short videos over lunchtime at their desks – when they had a spare 10-20 minutes.

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People aren’t getting home in time to watch the six o’clock news, so they’re watching it when they want, and have the flexibility to watch what they want at that time. Another sign of the decline of appointment based media.

Other interesting points:

  • All Fairfax journos and sub-editors are being trained in Search Engine Optimisation – so that their opening paragraphs and headlines are search engine friendly. They’re also being encouraged to write tags for many of their articles which are incorporated into the meta tags for the page.
  • There is only a 20% crossover of readers between print and online for Fairfax.
  • Fairfax Online is relatively unpopular amongst people aged 55 and over, mainly because that age group assumes that the online version of the newspapers shows what’s already been printed, rather than breaking news. As most of them have already read the paper in the morning, they don’t think the online version will add anything new. An interesting perception issue – and something I’d assume would be similar to other traditional print brands around the world?

FUTURE: Digital Media, Marketing, Insights and Trends , , , , ,

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