Keep it up Mike - but post more often. It’s like one post a day at the moment. Don’t make me read NetImperative….please…..

Mike - always respected your opinion but you just lost it there. Traffic as a way out? You crazy? Page impressions are unimportant, but that’s because of editorial considerations and a quest for increased usability - Yahoo adopting Ajax, CNET putting reviews all on one page instead of three etc etc. That’s the reason for looking at unique users, it’s about reach and engagement, not page impressions.

Traffic as a business model is like saying events doon’t make money from attendess, or that virtual events will repleace real life events.

Traffic is vital. The majority of the display ad spend is bought on CPM’s -that may change to users in time. But that market as a whol is not on its wayout. It’s not just about the user, it’s about the environment that user is in. Where the article is read is still important.

No, all publishers are not going to suddenly put full feeds in RSS format. Really. When in-feed advertising is on a par with current site CPM yields and can comfortably replace it as a business model , then maybe. But that isn’t anytime soon, and the agencies and publishers are way too far down the line in their existing revenue lines.

When, before writing this reply, I consulted the bizdev director of Europe’s 2nd largest online-only publisher (note I said publisher i.e. a company that invests in proper journalists), he laughed his head off and asked me if I was crazy, then added if they could make him $50 million in a year which is what they did in CPM then they would look into it.

Does the BBC make programmes that ITV can sell ads against on a rev share basis? Does IPC generate content for EMAP to monetise? No. So why the hell would any sane publisher generate content for people to use off-brand? Sure you can syndicate, as most do, at a premium and with strict brand controls. BVut what about the peripheral navigation, the concept of discovery of other things that interest people on a website?

In a UGC world, people need guides and experts pointing the way, and the content owners know this is them. There has been no serious commercial threat from the blogosphere (the UK buying points don’t take them seriously).

Also, we have to get out of our media heads and realise that actually the use of RSS in the general population is minimal - about 8%.

Come on, Mike, get with the programme. The publishers aren’t going to disrupt the business model they have spent ages migrating to anytime soon.

What’s going to kill Mippin is the big screen phones - soo they’ll mostly be able to manage to display the web how it is.
btw Prashant - those view statistics are so low they are not a sales point.

We have over 500 sites in our directory and another 1500 that are searchable. And we focused on full feeds. Certainly there are some big names that are excluded but over time this will change and we’ll have some great case studies based on the content we currently have. These are the top 20 most popular sites so far, all with full feeds:
BBC News (2742 views)
New York Times (1224 views)
TOTAL FILM (1208 views)
Glamour (1022 views)
DesiHits! (890 views)
Click Music (845 views)
The Bastardly (785 views)
T3 (720 views)
Mobile Games (694 views)
OK! Magazine (666 views)
Pics of the Week (627 views)
Blogs on Mobile (609 views)
Perez Hilton (538 views)
S60 applications (534 views)
GQ (527 views)
IntoMobile (478 views)
Daily Star (421 views)
Biskero (400 views)
SMS Text News (381 views)
Funny Pictures (374 views)

So you still have to click through to the clunky site to read full articles, unless Refresh can peruade media owners to give them a full text feed. Which they won’t do until money is on the table.

So I son’t really see how ths is going to work, I guess refresh has to persuade media owners to supply full feeds against a promise of revenue. So I hope his sales team is up to scratch, which may not be the case as I saw in NMA this week they had let 20 staff go (ouch).