Do you have "linkophobia?

This amazing story on the City Desk blog page of the Washington City Paper site got me thinking this morning about something: B2B media execs, do you authorize your editors to link to the competition? or to other media, in general? If the answer is "no", maybe it's time to rethink this policy.

More on the story mentioned above, and why it illustrates one of the weaknesses of "old-media-think" after the jump.

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Launch on Friday, failure on Monday

This was a great way to start the Christmas week, with a laugh: here's a story from the The Business Insider on why the GQ and Esquire iPhone app launches are an abject failure.

That's right, Condè Nast and Hearst launch their magazine apps late last week and within a couple of days a columnist has already passed judgement: no one wants to read their magazines on a phone.

After a few days of sales, neither the January issue of GQ (featuring a near-naked Rihanna), nor the January issue of Esquire are in Apple's list of the top 100 best-selling paid apps in the App Store. (Each costs $2.99.) Nor is either in Apple's list of the highest-grossing apps, which sorts by revenue generated (versus strictly unit sales).

(By a weird coincidence, I am currently rereading a biography of Thomas Edison. As the book points out, Edison's work method was simply to try a million different ways to get the result he wanted, refining as he went along until he got something that worked. Thank God Edison didn't have to read this kind of nonsense or we'd still be in the dark. And I'll take this analogy one step further: the move from a successful print model to a successful online or mobile model is no less daunting than creating the phonograph or incandescent light bulb -- ask any publisher or ad director.)

As for whether people will read publications on their phones, the writer ignores the fact that both the New York Times and WSJ apps are doing well. Both apps are free, however.

So now publishers are experimenting with paid models. Will a paid app model work? I say yes; Dan Frommer says no, with a bunch of caveats where he speculates that a tablet reader might work better than an iPhone reader, etc.

But can we at least give it a full week before declaring the experiment a failure?

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Week in Review

Short reads on a Saturday morning:

• After 23 years of advertising on the Super Bowl broadcast Pepsi has decided to place those advertising dollars online. A 30 second Super Bowl spot will set you back $3 million, a bit less than the price of a banner ad on this site (hey Pepsi, what a deal! Call me.). 

• The Detroit Media Partnership get e-reader fever, signing a deal to appear on Amazon's Kindle device. Readers will be charged $6.99 a month for access to the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press.  Both newspapers are also working with Plastic Logic to develop a new edition of their newspapers in a different format.

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Update: Esquire issue now online

This is a quick follow-up to my content story here: you can now find the Esquire issue shown in the demo in the iTunes store (iTunes link).   Maybe iTunes links will become my version cat blogging.  In the spirit of holiday cheer here's another.

Consequences of the deal gone bad: GM to wind down Saab; Nielsen to wind down E&P

I couldn't help but think of Editor & Publisher this morning when I heard the news about Saab: GM was to begin shutting down operations at the Swedish carmaker according to the reports, and it all sounded very much like what is going on today at Nielsen.

In both cases, there was hope that a deal with a new owner was in the works. In the case of GM, a deal with Spyker Cars could not be completed; in the case of Nielsen, the final deal with e5 Global Media Holdings LLC did not include either E&P nor Kirkus Reviews.

I'm sure that both owners had already envisioned life without their properties, so that when the deals could not be completed they went to Plan B -- a shutdown. I'm also quite sure that both GM and Nielsen are still open to some sort of last minute deal that would either sell off the brands completely, or at least sell off the assets and brand.

The next week or two will reveal whether either brand will survive intact.

IAB revises "Standard Terms and Conditions for Internet Advertising"

The IAB released a revised standards statement for Internet advertising today. The new document includes sections on non-disclosure and data usage, ad placement and positioning language as well as other language usually found in media and advertising contracts and schedules.

“Streamlining business processes in interactive has been one of our main objectives as an organization and with the contributions from both advertising agencies and media companies we believe that we have accomplished this goal,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB in a press release that can be found here.