A concentrated participator medium?

One recent study showed that only 20 domains (websites) capture 39% of all time spent online by US users. Considering that the Internet is technically an open medium, this is an amazingly high level of user concentration. Mysapce.com, which is owned by News Corporation, commands an astounding 11.9% of US users time online. Bearing in mind the USA has well over two hundred million Internet users this kind of concentration of online website usage creates huge vectors of power.

Chief among the online brands are the ever popular social networking website. In the period between September 2006 to February 2007 the number of visitors to the social networking website Facebook.com jumped 75 percent to 24.8 million worldwide and the number of visitors to MySpace.com grew 26 percent to 98.5 million visitors in the same period. “More than half of all Americans between the ages of 12 and 17 use some online social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook.

Many of the most powerful online media websites are owned by some of the largest media corporations. Fox Interactive Media(NewCorp) spent $580 million to acquire MySpace.com. Google, a large and evermore powerful media corporation, owns one of the most popular blog platforms: BlogSpot.com. Google also purchased Youtube, the most popular online video site on the Internet, for U.S.$1.65 billion. Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL Time Warner own other popular platforms. Googles chief executive officer Eric Schmidt, recently estimated that Google buys start-up web companies every few days, and is quoted saying, “I think the pace [of Google buyouts] will accelerate”.

In Who’s Interest is the Internet Being Shaped?

This level of power over what is the most powerful medium the world has ever seen begs the question; how are major web owners using these online properties? New commercial incursions by big online media enterprises including the widely distained “Facebook Beacon” make explicit what new media giants have been doing quietly for some time; searching for new and evermore effective ways to sell our attention, our clicks and our private information to advertisers and marketers.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg described the facebook advantage to advertisers this way: “you will be able to select exactly the audience you want to reach, and we will only show your ads to them. We know exactly what gender someone is, what activities they are interested in. their location, country, city or town, interests, gender”. The new Beacon system monitored facebook users activities on partnering websites and notified the users friends about purchases made. It’s not surprising that this both ruined a few Christmas surprises and outraged many when they realized the level of surveillance they were exposed to.

Facebook may have misjudged it’s audience and taken privacy invasions a step too far for it’s users to passively accept, but this kind of surveillance and data collection is the norm with the new media cartel. Myspace has its own “HyperTargeting” system described by Michael Barrett, chief revenue officer for MySpace parent division Fox Interactive Media as “an ad platform that translates our massive amounts of self-expressed user data into highly targeted, interest-based segments, enabling us to better serve the exact right ad to the right person at the right time”.

Media companies are working with marketers to segment online participants into target groups, and (to quote a marketing company) “corralling your next online movement–by controlling and limiting what’s headed your way, in the form of packaged, personalized content”. The marketing company Future Now’s boasts of something called a “Persuasion Architecture” that…

provides a detailed process for persuading your visitors to take the actions you want them to take. Nothing is left to chance. You design persuasive paths based on personas to provide visitors with the information they want, when they want it, in language that speaks to their individual needs.

The marketing industry is also investigating, and refining measurements of responses to ads, including brain behaviours involving both cognition and emotion. Lets also consider that Google has applied for a patent for

a method by which an end user accessing the Internet via a wireless access point (WAP) would be served advertisements based on factors such as the geographic location, a behavioral profile and local vertical market.

According to the head of the multimedia department at Nokia, 180 million Nokia phones will ship or be downloaded in 2008 with the ability to beam “location-aware content” Using various new technologies together online media conglomerates will be able to beam you a real time ads on your phone while you’re talking with a friend, the ad could be based on your conversation, location, and the known reaction you’ll have – based on emotional and cognitive brain research. And kids are on the front line of this scary future of ubiquitous commercial surveillance, last January Nickelodeon launched its kid virtual world Nicktropolis. Vice president of Nickelodeon online properties Jason Root recently said “We’re going to have a great immersive experience both with kids and advertisers.”

Nicktropolis has 5.5 million kid users

Concentrated Power Must Be Challenged

Clearly we cannot allow this big business regulation of the Internet to continue unchallenged. There are three levers we can use to keep the new media cartel in check:

1. Push for public interest policy that limits the new media cartels ability to exploit web users. The Center Digital Democracy, US PIRG and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are fighting these battles on our behalf in Washington.

2. Build public campaigns to limit and roll back exploitation of web users by new media giants. MoveOn’s recent successful campaign to get Facebook to reframe from the worst of its predatory practices is a great example.

3. Support new media public benefit spaces and services that respect web users privacy and our right unencumbered online navigation. This last lever is perhaps the most effective and successful but maybe the least acknowledged.

The prime success stories of public benefit online media are probably Wikipedia and Firefox. Both of these projects use open-source code (meaning the software is openly available to use and build upon), and are owned by non-profit foundations. The FireFox browser has a miniscule marketing budget, yet has grown to become Microsoft’s number one competitor in this area — even surpassing the very savvy Apple corporation. It is the openness of FireFox that attracts developers to add applications that allow you to block advertisements and other highly sought services. Firefox has been downloaded over 448,764,680 times. The non-profit, open-source, citizen produced Wikipedia is touted as “one of the 15 most visited websites in the world”.

What these and many the public benefit web hasn’t quite tackled yet is the ever-popular social networking community. However, Freespeech TV is in the process of doing just that. They are building a social networking and video sharing community that is non-profit, non-commercial, and built an open-source software platform called Drupal.

What these examples begin to show is that we already have a reliable and growing public benefit web infrastructure available to us. While fighting for public interest policy and organizing web users remain key activities in the fight for our right to an open Internet, nothing scares this new media cartel more than real competition. The public interest group MoverOn recently was able to get over 50,000 people to sign a petition against the Facebook Beacon. Facebook recently back off from the worst of their Beacon service due to this profound expression of public preference. This should serve as a reminder that the new media cartel needs us more then we need them. The second we collectively decide we want a more open, independent and free web we will have it.

It’s Our Web, Not Theirs.

Find out more about the independent public benefit.

Living up to it’s name The Newstandard truly redefined what independent media can be. For several years TNS made good on its’ mission to provide “bold, hard-hitting daily news coverage, providing a vetted forum for the voices and issues often ignored in the establishment news arena… (while) managed by a collective of journalists and published by a reader-funded nonprofit organization.” A closure look at this mission reveals the multifarious ways TNS broke the independent media mold.

Hard News:
The independent media ecology is dominated by commentary, opinion and analysis, much of it from the same well-known figures. The reason for this preponderance of interpretation is quite simple; producing commentary is much cheaper (often free) than producing investigative hard news. It also doesn’t hurt that there is significant demand for these recognized commentators. Recognizing that independent hard news was almost impossible to find, TNS focused exclusively on hard news. In addition to providing a well-rounded news website, and weekly radio show, TNS produced at least one (often several) hard news pieces every weekday. At COA News we try to put emphasis on hard news ourselves, and we found The NewStandard to be an indispensable resource.

Reader Funded:
If focusing on the most labor intensive news production wasn’t enough; TNS also remained 100% reader funded for the entire three years of operation. Considering the quality of journalism they produced coupled with the fact that TNS was run by young people, they would likely have little trouble getting foundation money. For most of us in the independent media world foundation money is highly sought, yet TNS refused to even consider it. The TNS collective members remained defiant until the end, refusing to go after foundation money, as they believed it would take away a degree of their independence. In fact, TNS also for most part avoided fundraising through merchandise sales as well. To my knowledge, TNS is the only media organization in North America to have several full time staff (although perhaps underpaid), and receive 100% of their resources through membership dues.

Non-profit Non-Commercial:
Despite financial pressures TNS also remained non-profit non-commercial. Many Independent media organizations have this quality as well, but more than a few have commercialized their websites and other operations when faced with resource shortages. Many independent media organizations (particularly some of the recent start-ups) have gone with a for-profit model. One reason for this trend is that it is easier to marshal capital if you are a for-profit entity. It’s easier to get investors for a for-profit project since there is the possibility of getting a positive financial return investments (whereas non-profits depend on donations). Recognizing how that would impact their organizational and editorial independence, TNS steered clear of this option from the begging and never wavered. The recent decision by the OurMedia.org board of directors to transfer (without consulting members) what was a non-profit project into a for-profit private corporation is notable on this point.

Egalitarian:
Despite espousing progressive values some independent media organizations (as well as many NGOs more generally) are run as highly hierarchal enterprises, with cultural and other forms of capital concentrated at the top. In contrast, at TNS: “All staff participate in ‘balanced job complexes’ which provide a mix of tasks that reflect various levels of empowerment, from managerial to content production to administrative and clerical. All receive equal pay for comparable work and participate fully in collective decisions.”

In our society where hierarchy has been internalized by most, keeping an egalitarian organization going for three years is a success story in itself.

In their announcement to readers, The NewStandard was relatively mute on their reasons for closing down. They simply said they were not satisfied with their level of audience penetration or financial support. TNS has some explaining to do: why not continue to struggle? Why not try accepting a small grant? Why not merge with another project to alleviate some of the administrative work? Are there any future plans for the members of TNS? Any reflections or advice for other independent media makers? TNS did imply that further reflections from the staff would be forthcoming.

As TNS passes into history it is put upon those of us who feel passionately about independent public service media to reflect on how we can avoid further attritions. While we do so lets keep in mind that this is more a trend than an isolated incident. In just the past year two other independent media projects closed their doors; LiP Magazine and Clamour Magazine. Now is the time to analyze this critical situation, and answer important questions; what is causing this trend to occur? How can we advance mechanisms of support for independent media?

These are questions that some have been writing about for some time, most notably Michael Albert, Don Hazen, Jeff Chester, Danny Schechter, Jessica Clark, and Tracy Van Slyke. We need to widen this discussion, so that we have more voices, more ideas, and more opportunity to find a model that works. After all, this is about saving, reviving and bettering not just our media system, but also our democracy.

I can think of nothing else more deserving of our attention.

Update: MediaChannel.org is considering ceasing operations.

This from Media Channel today: “After seven years and a new website redesign, MediaChannel.org may have to cease operations because of a financial emergency. As most of you have already noticed, we have started to run advertising on the website in an effort to deal with our funding challenge. To put it bluntly, the future of Media Channel is in question.”

Media Channel has been a long standing pillar of the independent media landscape, losing them will be another major loss.