Matt Gemmel’s media survey results →

I had somehow missed this. Following how people relate to their media, this is fascinating. I especially found the length and frequency of content interesting, something I’ve been thinking of at ArcticStartup.

The most popular choice was to see a new post at least weekly (47%), followed by 35% who chose a few times a month. Only 19% would impose no limit at all.

I struggle quite a lot with this. While we publish 3-4 posts a day on ArcticStartup, people would probably value our content more if we published less with more in-depth articles. Then again we reach quite a diverse crowd and I’m sure there’s always something for people with different backgrounds.

Regarding keeping comments off:

The vast majority (75%) agreed with the decision, saying that comments should remain off. 19% said they didn’t care either way, leaving only 6% who preferred that comments be reinstated (I don’t have any current plans to do that).

This is something I decided to also do on my own site with the latest redesign (and change of hosting). Having constantly zero comments on articles does not make the site very appealing, as you clearly fail at capturing discussion. However, when you don’t enable discussion at all – it sounds more natural with no comments.

Good read though.

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First one and a half weeks with Unfair Advantage

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We published our first episode of Unfair Advantage some one and half weeks ago. I had done quite a bit of analysis on podcasting and its potential, but I have to say looking back at the ten or so days – podcasting in itself has surpassed my expectations.

As of Sunday 22nd, we’ve delivered some 21,4 gigabytes of data. If the average of our two episodes is about 30 or so megabytes, this means over 700 full episodes have been delivered to listeners. In addition to this, we’ve received almost 5000 get requests for these files by the look of Amazon S3 logs.

Having proper analytics in place for podcasting is very hard, because very few companies actually offer any solutions. There are a few commercial solutions out there, but I didn’t really believe in their offering so I decided to go the Feedburner + Amazon S3 logs.

21,4 gigabytes may not seem all that much, but when you put it in the spotlight of the internet trends it is very interesting.

Different studies on trends usually suggest that people want shorter content in snack size, furthermore, in such a way that they can digest it quickly. Our episodes are far from that. They are over 30 and over 50 minutes in length.

To me, this tells that there are numerous people who are willing to subscribe to content like this. Naturally content is king, but too much focus has been put on the different aspects of content, length and brevity.

I’d also argue that people are willing to pay for good long form content with their time and money as well. Companies too often talk about money being spent, but more precious currency we all have an equal amount of is time. If people are willing to give time for your content, there’s surely a way to make money with it as well.

Therefore, it surprises me even more how much attention is given to pageviews when time spent could be an even more interesting figure to follow for media companies if they are looking for ways to make money. Naturally, time spent isn’t going to convert to click throughs via banners, but I think that’s the interesting part of it all.

I’m thrilled to continue creating Unfair Advantage in the future on a weekly basis. We have a very interesting line up of people we want to talk to (and people we have already agreed an interview with).

Megaupload verifies why we don’t need SOPA →

Megaupload is actually a great anti-SOPA argument: it’s an example showing that we already have the means to fight online piracy without SOPA. Maybe we can’t fight it as quickly, cheaply, and effectively as SOPA would, but our current procedures also have very few negative side effects and much less potential for abuse.

Marco Arment says it best. We already have the effective legislation in place to take down criminal sites.

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