“Facebook asked me to pass this on to you. They require it of all visitors to their facilities. It only applies to things that you might accidentally stumble upon while you are there and covers nothing discussed during our news conference. Please either bring a signed copy or be ready to sign upon arrival.”

Journalists were a little upset needless to say, giving that their journalistic freedom was being, for lack of a better term, stolen. Journalists then got a little pep in their step as two hours later another e-mail was sent to agencies from Sarah Lane, the AG’s Director of New Media, stating.

“I’m writing on behalf of Dan Sytman. You may disregard the nondisclosure agreement that we sent earlier.”

So you may be curious as to what the agreement may have said. Well, partly it entailed:

“You may become aware of non-public information related to Facebook and its products, services, programs, features, data, techniques, technology, code, ideas, inventions, research, testing, methods, procedures, know-how, trade secrets, business and financial information and other activities through disclosure, observation or otherwise in the course of your visit … All Facebook Confidential Information remains the property of Facebook. You agree not to disclose any Facebook Confidential Information to any third party, and to take all reasonable precautions to prevent its unauthorized dissemination …”

The full agreement can be seen below.

If you were a journalist or if you are a journalist, how does this information make you feel? Do you feel it’s right, whether it’s legal or not, to ask journalists and media to pretty much forget what they see? We want to know what you think, leave us comments below.

New York Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. appears close to announcing that the paper will begin charging for access to its website, according to people familiar with internal deliberations. After a year of sometimes fraught debate inside the paper, the choice for some time has been between a Wall Street Journal-type pay wall and the metered system adopted by the Financial Times, in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. The Times seems to have settled on the metered system.

There are a wide variety of thoughts on the actual time that the announcement and then the service would happen so suffice it to say, it could be this week and it could be in a few months. The point is that there is pretty good chance that this will happen. When it does there will be plenty of interested parties looking on to help them determine what might be next. Apparently this has not been an easy discussion for the Times and they have looked at several options.

The Times has considered three types of pay strategies. One option was a more traditional pay wall along the lines of The Wall Street Journal, in which some parts of the site are free and some subscription-only. For example, editors and business-side executives discussed a premium version of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s DealBook section. Another option was the metered system. The third choice, an NPR-style membership model, was abandoned last fall, two sources explained. The thinking was that it would be too expensive and cumbersome to maintain because subscribers would have to receive privileges (think WNYC tote bags and travel mugs, access to Times events and seminars).

Now, the article in New York does examine how difficult this process is for the Times because in reality, they are trying to assess what their worth is to the English speaking world from a journalistic and reporting standpoint. Some feel that they could be the last one standing as others go away as a result of online media. If that were the case, the NY Times could garner plenty of ad revenue if they could hold on in the near term. Others are just watching the paper bleed money and feel that there may never be enough ad revenue in the new media world to support the level of reporting etc that they are used to promoting.

I am not sure where I am on this one. I would like to see news outlets like the New York Times survive. We need to pay people to cover stories and do the necessary digging to hopefully get somewhere near the truth. The trouble comes in whether the truth is ever the issue or not. Honestly, it doesn’t matter if a publication is on the left or the right of the political spectrum because the real concern is the bias that exists in many of these big publications. Everything that is reported is spun and often those who get to the position of being a Times reporter use that position as a power base. As a result reporting is out the window. It’s more like opinion and agenda with a few facts thrown in here and there. Sounds a lot like bloggers actually!

Anyway, here’s the easy question for our readers. Would you pay to get the New York Times content online? Yes or no. Oh and since we are a blog please let us hear your opinions as well.

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Well, sort of. The average amount an American was willing to pay for news was $3—and not $3 a day, but $3 a month. Not exactly the profits Rupert Murdoch dreams of, is it?

The survey also found that people were more willing to pay for news that was:

• Unique, such as local news (67 percent overall are interested; 72 percent of U.S. respondents) or specialized coverage (63 percent overall are interested; 73 percent of U.S. respondents)
• Timely, such as a continual news alert service (54 percent overall are interested; 61 percent of U.S. respondents)
• Conveniently accessible on a device of choice

And good news for newspapers: “consumers are more likely to pay for online news provided by newspapers than by other media, such as television stations, Web sites, or online portals,” especially since these other media have so much free competition. Interestingly, while Americans were more likely to pay for sites that offered access to multiple papers, only national and local—not major metropolitan-based papers—have that level of appeal. (I’m not sure which category The New York Times and Washington Post fall into here.)

Marc Vos, a Milan-based partner and leader of BCG’s media sector in Europe, tells newspapers that they “should be experimenting with paid online content. It will take trial and error to find what works.”

The prospects aren’t so bleak everywhere. In addition to 1000 US respondents, the survey also looked at results in Germany, Australia, France, the UK, Spain, Italy, Norway, Finland. While Australians also wanted to pay only $3 (USD?) for their news, other countries saw higher rates. The New York Times said that this may be because Western Europe has more consolidated news offerings, where news in the US is a very fragmented industry.

However, before Western European news sites get all excited, note that the highest amount on the survey, in Italy, was $7 a month.

What do you think? What would you be willing to pay for news?

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From a Bloomberg report, paidContent shows that, for some shows, CPMs on Hulu are actually greater than they are for broadcast TV. And when I say broadcast TV, we’re talking primetime, new episode, time-slot-leading network television. (None of that cable syndicated rerun stuff!) Bloomberg’s example:

Marketers typically pay $20 to $40 per thousand viewers for a prime-time ad. On Hulu, which began offering shows to the public in March 2008, an ad on the animated series “The Simpsons” costs $60 per thousand viewers, Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. wrote in a June 18 report.

How can the Internet, with demonstrably fewer viewers (another example, the NCAA basketball championship game, drew 17.6M TV viewers and 7.52 Internet viewers), command such high CPMs?

A couple factors: first, that the Internet is so measurable. As CBS’s chief research officer put it:

“The reason people are paying such a high premium for these ads on the Internet is they do have a captive audience,” Poltrack said. “You know you have eyes on the screen.”

Plus, Bloomberg says, there’s an extremely scarce inventory. A typical Simpsons episode on Hulu carries only 37 seconds of advertising, versus nine minutes on television. But that also means that their overall revenues per-episode are far lower, even with more dedicated viewers. Many analysts and networks worry about television companies “cannibalizing their core business.” But maybe their core business should be shifting online.

Justifying those high CPMs, Hulu commands 10% of the online video advertising market place. Hulu is a distant third in online video viewership, after Google’s properties and Fox’s properties (including MySpace and Fox News). They have only 2.4% of the overall video market and 2.3% of the Internet’s total unique video viewers. So 10% of the online video ad market is pretty impressive.

Screen Digest’s report states that broadcasters direct control 44% of the ad market, while cable operators command 22%. “Other” controls 15% of the market, Hulu 10%, and portals 9%.

Let’s look at that again—Hulu is the only website singled out there. It commands 10% of the market by itself, while the rest of the categories listed are just that—entire categories of sites.

So where does YouTube fall in there? Screen Digest says:

In contrast, third party platforms such as YouTube, Joost and other portals, which have no direct vertical affiliation with major rights holders, nor direct access to premium content rights, will struggle to aggregate ad-supported movies and TV shows. The Hollywood Studios and major rights holders will continue to limit such deals, instead preferring to build their own syndicated ad-supported online video services – such as Crackle, developed by Sony Pictures, and the CBS Audience Network.

What do you think? Is the Internet, specifically Hulu, the future of television and video advertising? Will YouTube ever be able to catch up to Hulu in terms of monetization?

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As those who have followed the saga of Google bidding $3.1 billion to acquire DoubleClick know, Google has billed the deal as one that brings companies with vastly different ad operations together. Google does search ads, DoubleClick does display ads, so the FTC and the European Competition Commission should not have a problem.

Google’s favorite mantra may come back to haunt them, as it appears Rupert Murdoch and FIM president Peter Levinsohn realize the old rule about playing with house money applies to Internet advertising just as it does at the casinos. Levinsohn told Reuters Media Summit attendees that FIM Serve, an in-house display ad network, was under construction:

"Ultimately we’ll take the company off network and become an ad network for assets outside of the News Corporation empire."

"It could happen as early as the first half of next year," he said. "We’re ready to go … we’re starting to have conversations outside now."

Levinsohn also said FIM Serve would not conflict with their Google deal, citing the separation of graphical display and contextual search advertising. That could be news to Google, which obviously hopes to do more display ads with DoubleClick’s network than it currently achieves through its AdSense network.

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Online retail sales in the United States jumped 23 percent, to US$28.4 billion, during the third quarter of this year compared with the same July-September period in 2006.

The retail surge was led by sales of video games, consoles and accessories, which showed a year-to-year increase of 199 percent.

And the not-so-good news (emphasis mine):

“Online retail spending continues to grow at rates in excess of 20 percent year-over-year, which suggests that the market is still far from maturity,” comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said. “Even online travel commerce, which is a more developed market, continues to experience double-digit gains.”

Of course, a lack a maturity in an industry doesn’t mean that it’s more liable to talk back, flounce off to sulk and slam the door behind it. Despite these negative connotations, the immaturity of an industry may only indicate that we can expect a lot more growth spurts from it.

But you know if online retail slowed even the slightest bit—even if its growth were only in the single digits—naysayers would come out of the woodwork from every quadrant to tell us that they knew eCommerce was a fad.

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Fox News Partners With Maven Networks

The Maven Internet TV Platform allows media companies to make video libraries available for syndication to online media outlets, while keeping control of their content and advertising.

"The popularity and demand for Fox News online video content are enormous," said Jeff Misenti, General Manager and VP of Fox News Digital.

"Online video opens up an untapped and arguably limitless landscape of inventory for media companies looking to grow their advertising revenue-creating an extremely valuable opportunity for businesses today. It is critical for us to be on the cutting-edge of innovation in Internet video syndication, monetization and user experiences."

As video consumption grows beyond Fox New’s current streams per month, Mavens scalable syndication platform will improve the delivery of Fox New’s online content to its affiliates around the globe.

"News Corp. in general, and Fox News in particular, have been at the forefront of transforming the online experience. We are excited to be partnering with a true Internet media innovator to bring the market-leading capabilities of the Maven platform to Fox’s millions of viewers worldwide," said Hilmi Ozguc, Founder and CEO of Maven Networks

Portals are the single most important source of news on any medium for online users aged 18 to 24. Around 57 percent access news through portals compared to 21 percent receiving information from a cable news site. According to the report online users trust portals almost as much as traditional news media.

"Not only must content producers embrace intermediaries to serve their own audiences and reach out to new ones" explained Barry Parr, Analyst at JupiterResearch, "They should exploit opportunities to become intermediaries for their core audiences."

The report notes the role of intermediaries on the Web is a challenge and an opportunity for content producers. The challenge is they will lose control of their distribution systems. Those who try to maintain control of their distribution will risk falling behind their competitors, they can instead learn from progress made by established portals and blogs and incorporate best practices to their sites.

"To thrive on the Web, news sites must become more network-focused and aggregate content from other sources while distributing their own content through intermediaries," said David Schatsky, President of JupiterResearch.

"By paying closer attention to the tendencies of the end user, these sites will be able to evolve and meet the needs of a wider online audience."

In effect, this is a step towards “crowdsourcing” of the news, but in a very focused way. Instead of allowing anyone to comment on a news event or story, Google’s plan is to only allow comments from those who are a part of the story (although how the company plans to verify that remains to be seen). I think — as Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests does — that this has the potential to expand the journalistic process.

For many newspapers and other news organizations, a story has a limited lifespan, unless it is one of a small number of big headliners that get followed up day after day, or month after month. Whoever responds in time to get their comments included in the story makes it into print, and those that don’t are rarely heard from.

Google’s proposal has the potential to allow some of those unheard-from participants to make themselves heard, and thus make news stories more complete — as pointed out at Poynter Online and by my mesh friend Mike Masnick at Techdirt — and I think that would be a great idea, at least in principle. In any case, it will be interesting to see how it turns out.

Update:

As Mike notes at TechCrunch (courtesy of Gabe “Techmeme” Rivera), the terms of service at Google News prevent anyone from crawling the site and aggregating any of its content — but this doesn’t seem very kosher if Google is now effectively creating (or expanding on) the news. And Danny Sullivan has some responses from Google to questions about the new feature.

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Online, Harry Potter hype seems rather warm from the user standpoint, even if there are something like 3,000 articles on the first results page of Google News. Where they store the books, I’ve heard, they have armed guards on duty 24/7 like they’re guarding Fort Knox.

And Scholastic is more than a little upset over the leaked photos of the book published online and distributed via BitTorrent. The company says it is copyright infringement even if the book was faked, and has digital detectives working to track down the perpetrator. Who knew your digital photo files carried the serial number of the camera they were taken with?

Canon knew that, and are looking to see if the leaker has had the camera serviced in the past three years.

So, while the press is hyping and the publisher is protecting its literary goldmine, readers seem to be avoiding Harry Potter news in the hours leading up to the book’s release. Perhaps it is to spare themselves any spoilers.

Pew says that while 44% of adults in households with teenagers say they or someone they know plan to buy the book, only eight percent reported following the news very closely.

Indeed, Harry Potter searches have barely made a dent in Google’s Hot Trends list*, with a crooked NBA referee, Tammy Faye Baker, and even Hillary Clinton’s cleavage (oh…my…God…can’t believe I just typed that phrase) peaking searcher interest than Potter.

To be fair, Potter does make the most appearances in the top 100, starting with the number 29 query: "does harry potter die"?

Other popular Potter searches, according to Google:

65. harry potter book review
78. harry potter theme park
82. barnes and noble harry potter
84. harry potter and the deathly hallows review
94. what happens to harry potter

But it sounds like most people don’t want to know yet.

In the meantime, searchers seem more interested in seeing the movie version of Potter, Daniel Radcliffe, naked, and finding out who Emma Watson is dating these days.

But if there are those that are jonesing to the point they may crack and burglarize the local bookseller, they can always check out all the fan sites out there, complete with fan fiction, some debating the innocence of Severus Snape at itrustsnape.com, or forever (at least, unless they’re proven wrong tonight) proclaiming that Dumbledore is not dead at BeyondHogwarts.com.    

_{*These stats fluctuate by the minute, but as of 5:00, they are what they are.}