Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

The Internet: Media’s Black Hole

May 29, 2009

With the ongoing destruction of traditional media’s business model, it occurred to me the internet is to the media what a black hole is to a galaxy.

Princeton Wordnet’s definition of black hole:

(n) black hole (a region of space resulting from the collapse of a star; extremely high gravitational field)

In media’s case; eventually few if any advertising dollars will have been able to escape the pull of the internet’s “extremely high gravitational field.”

What two forces gave birth to the extremely high gravitational field now sucking the life out of traditional media’s business model?

Attention and Economics.

Before a seller can ever make a sale, they first have to get the buyers attention.

Traditional media has long since lost its monopoly of consumer’s attention and along with it the dollars advertisers spent to get buyers attention.

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2009 Ad Spending Forecast and Media Attention Deficit (MAD)

October 14, 2008

Predicted growth in advertising spend per media for 2009 from Wachovia via the Wall Street Journal:

Growth of total U.S. advertising -0.8%

Internet +10%

Yellow Pages +6.3%

Cable TV +4.0%

Billboards +3.0%

Magazines -2.0%

Broadcast TV – 2.7%

Cable -4.0%

Radio -4.8%

Newspapers -9.8%

Don’t these ad growth – or lack thereof – predictions represent each specific media’s ability to reach, target and hold its audience’s attention?

When the overall economy contracts, aren’t general media those who first experience a contraction in their audience’s attention?

When media loses it’s ability to hold its audience’s attention doesn’t it soon thereafter lose advertiser support as well?

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Total Internet Traffic

May 19, 2008

Via the Wall Street Journal:

Cisco Systems reports total annual internet traffic will quadruple by 2011, reaching a size of more than 342 exabytes.

From the Internet Innovation Alliance:

One Exabyte is 1,073,741,824 gigabytes.

A “byte: is a collection of 8 bits. A “bit” is the smallest unit of information that can be stored in a computer, and consists of either 1 or 0 (or on/off state).

Common aggregations for bytes come in multiples of 1,000, such as kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, and so on. The progression is as follows:

Bit (b)     1 or 0
Byte (B)     8 bits
Kilobyte (KB)     1,000 bytes
Megabyte (MB)     1,000 KB
Gigabyte (GB)     1,000 MB
Terabyte (TB)     1,000 GB
Petabyte (PB)     1,000 TB
Exabyte (EB)     1,000 PB
Zettabyte (ZE)     1,000 EB

A way to put internet traffic into perspective:

“The Library of Congress holds more than 29 million books and magazines, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps and 57 million manuscripts. It took us two centuries to accumulate that collection. Today, we churn out an equivalent amount of digital information every 15 minutes, or about 100 times a day. Just last year, we created and copied three million times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written. That’s enough data to fill a stack of books that extending to the sun and back — a distance of 93 million miles – six times!’

If Cisco’s report breaks out traffic by type, I am sure video will be see the greatest percentage gains in internet traffic over all other categories if not all other categories combined.

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Internet Connection Speed Test

May 1, 2008

Today I was having problems with my Internet connection and had to jump through a bunch of hoops to figure out what was causing the problem.

After jacking around with my modem and wireless router for what seemed like an eternity, I determined the problem was the new unfiltered telephone I had installed yesterday.

While on my telephony science fair project, I got reacquainted with the internet speed connection test.

I found the Speak Easy test easy to use.

Internet Speed Connection Test
From their site: “By measuring the download and upload rate from the following locations you are able to accurately measure your current line throughput or internet connection speed.”

My Internet speed connection results were as follows:
Download Speed: 1277 kbps (159.4 KB/sec transfer rate)

Download Speed
Upload Speed: 313 kbps (38.6 KB/sec transfer rate)

Upload Speed

There are a lot of things that factor into your speed test results. Download and upload speeds, backbones, networks, latency, ping times, and DNS servers.

The following are some common internet speed connection terms to help you understand internet speed connection test results.

Download is a measure of how fast your internet connection delivers content to your computer or local area network.

Upload is the measure of how fast content is delivered from your computer or local area network to others on the Internet.

Download and upload speed should match or at least be very close for applications like VoIP, email, on-line gaming and other interactive programs. Upload speed is even more important if you are operating an email, web or file server at your location.

Kbps
Kbps transfer rate = kilobit per second transfer rate. There are 8 bits in a byte, so we would divide kbps by 8 to get KB/sec transfer rate.

Now get back to uploading and downloading…

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Confusion and Ignorance…

June 27, 2007

Are the parents of profit.

The internet is rife with both.

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