Weekend slices: One Nation, One Subscription; How YouTube influences purchasing decisions; RIP Flash, Farmville; What's Sec 230 that Trump is obsessed with; Amazon buys Wondery in podcasting race
The draft Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy for India has sprung a pleasant surprise. The Govt plans to buy subscriptions to between 3000 and 4000 scientific journals and make it available to all. Even the top research establishments and universities find it difficult to buy too many subscriptions because of the prohibitive cost. From the Indian Express article:
‘One Nation, One Subscription’ is proposed as part of a new Open Science Framework that will ensure free access to scientific data for all. Towards this objective, the Ministry of Science and Technology, which has drafted the new policy, has proposed to set up a Science, Technology and Innovation Observatory that will serve as the central repository of all kinds of data generated from scientific research in the country.
From this Observatory, all data and information related to publicly-funded research would be made freely accessible to everyone under “FAIR (Fair, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) terms”. In situations where some data cannot be made available to all due to reasons of privacy, national security, or intellectual property rights, “suitably anonymised and/or redacted data” will be made accessible. And even if some data cannot be released to the general public due to these or other reasons, genuine researchers would definitely have access.
Akhilesh Gupta, head of the team that drafted the policy document, said that this direct buying of subscriptions by the Government has never been done before by any country. Truly impressive.
Now, if some kind philanthropist would do the same for some of the international business publications, it would surely add to the quality of executive decision making in India.
The fact that marketing through digital channels is rapidly gaining ground on other mediums is well known. Ability to measure, react, course correct is one of its charms. But this measurability reputation becomes real when you can correlate a particular digital channels performance on a metric like CTR (how many people clicked through) to actual sales. (Before you rush to the comment box, not all digital campaigns lead to a page for direct conversion).
So this article from MediaPost on a research by Gen.video was very welcome information. Gen.video layered on purchase data directly correlated to the sponsored (paid) YouTube videos to understand shopper activity, purchase intent, sales and basket size coming from this content.
Read the article for some fascinating insights into how different cohorts (by size of followers: micro, mid-tier, macro) performed. We know that campaigns of beauty products perform well online but interestingly grocery and consumer products (CPG) videos had better conversion leading to higher cart value.
It’s finally time to say goodbye to Adobe Flash and along with it, Farmville.
From the BBC article
Released in 1996, Flash was once one of the most popular ways for people to stream videos and play games online.
But it was plagued with security problems and failed to transition to the smartphone era.
Adobe will no longer offer security updates for Flash and has urged people to uninstall it.
It will also stop videos and animations running in its Flash Player from 12 January.
The article tells you why Flash was so popular, why Steve Jobs hated it, and why it is being killed. Actually, the last bit can be summed up by one acronym: HTML5. From the Wiki:
HTML5's interactive capabilities became a topic of mainstream media attention around April 2010 after Apple Inc.'s then-CEO Steve Jobs issued a public letter titled "Thoughts on Flash" in which he concluded that "Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content" and that "new open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win". This sparked a debate in web development circles suggesting that, while HTML5 provides enhanced functionality, developers must consider the varying browser support of the different parts of the standard as well as other functionality differences between HTML5 and Flash. In early November 2011, Adobe announced that it would discontinue development of Flash for mobile devices and reorient its efforts in developing tools using HTML5. On 25 July 2017, Adobe announced that both the distribution and support of Flash will cease by the end of 2020.
Zynga, the creators of Farmville (remember? of course, you do) had no choice but to announce the closure of the game on Facebook. Read here.
If you have been following the great American election drama, you could have not have missed out on Sec 230 and Trump’s obsession with it. Here is his latest communication on the matter:
What is Sec 230? If you cut through the legalese, this section of the Communications Decency Act shields internet companies from any legal liability from user generated content. Want to go in deeper? Read this TechCrunch piece.
One thing I am pretty confident of is that a large percentage (I am betting over 70%) of readers of this newsletter have heard a podcast or two in the last four weeks. Podcast listening is exploding and Amazon just made a $300 million bet on Wondery, a very interesting podcast player. One of my favourite podcasts of theirs is ‘Business Wars’ (sadly my interests don’t have much variety). This podcast takes big business rivalries and serialise them in a very interesting story format. Eg. Amazon vs Walmart, FedEx vs UPS. Uber vs Lyft and so on.
But why is Amazon (isn’t it an e-comm company) buying into podcasts? From the NYT article attempting to answer the question:
Podcasts have been exploding in popularity, with nearly a third of Americans saying at the beginning of 2019 that they listened to at least one monthly. They offer media companies a fast-growing medium and an opportunity to build out their offerings without having to go through powerful interests, like publishers and labels, when licensing music, and studios when licensing films.
Efforts to turn podcasting into its own celebrity universe have attracted the likes of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. Wondery’s founder, Hernan Lopez, a former Fox executive, has added Hollywood treatment to its podcasts, replete with tag lines, trailers and billboards. “Dr. Death” is set to be developed into a television series on NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service.
That’s it for this weekend. Happy reading and let me know in the comments section what you would like me to cover in depth.
As usual well curated and well weaved stuff across topics. Two slices were of particular interest ..the initiative of subscriptions in science and technology policy and the trends in success rates of online campaigns.
Plain, Milk, Whole wheat, multi grain whatever be your choice... this slice of bread from Suprio makes good reading.
Have been reading your content for a while now. Really interesting flow. Would love to read your views on India's Growth Trajectory and if you're an optimist for the future, especially for areas like education.