The new co-presidents of Walt Disney Co.'s digital media group used the platform of the company's investor conference in Anaheim on Thursday to say what Wall Street has been longing to hear: that the money-losing division will achieve profitability in 2013.
John Pleasants, co-president of Disney Interactive Media Group, said the division made significant layoffs in January and plans an additional 25% cut in operational overhead "in our march to profitability." No details on timing were offered.
"In the last 90 days, we've focused on getting the right team and scaling the team to where the business is today," Pleasants said, adding that the earlier wave of job reductions had already "taken millions of overhead out of the Interactive media group."
Pleasants and Co-President Jimmy Pitaro talked about refocusing the business to take advantage of new opportunities online and on mobile devices -- a theme Disney Chief Executive Robert A. Iger has underscored in earnings calls with investors.
The interactive group will begin shifting resources away from developing games for the mature console market, reducing spending by 50% over the next four years, Pleasants said. "That does not mean we won't be making boxed product," he hastened to add, noting the popularity of the Epic Mickey title released late last year.
Pleasants, who oversees games and social media within the division, talked about better capitalizing on opportunities -- not only on emerging technological platforms, but in burgeoning international markets. He said the division will narrow its focus to "four to six major franchises," creating content to take advantage of growth areas, while experimenting with business models -- from free to subscription to micro-transactions, in which players pay modest sums to enhance their online experience.
The group aspires to create its own world-class character franchises that can flow to other parts of the entertainment giant's businesses, much as Pixar Animation's "Toy Story" characters or Marvel Entertainment's superheroes fuel merchandise sales.
One such home-grown franchise Pleasants highlighted is Club Penguin, an online world for children that has grown by 400% in the last three years.
Pitaro, who has oversight of the Disney.com portal and a collection of websites for mothers and families,talked about creating a more personal experience that's shaped by a user's interests.
"When we deliver the right content to the right user at the right time," Pitaro said, "we'll grow reach and engagement and have a more powerful platform to surface the fantastic content we have across our company,"
-- Dawn C. Chmielewski
Google has gotten a lot of attention for the launch of One Pass, the all-in-one subscription plan for publishers that the search giant revealed earlier today — primarily because it made for a nice counterpoint to Apple’s new in-app subscription system, which launched on Tuesday. While Apple’s offering is closed and takes a big chunk of the revenue from publishers, Google’s takes a much smaller cut — and because it’s based on the web and not on controlling access to a walled garden, Google’s system is much more open. That said, however, it’s not at all clear that publishers will get anywhere by signing up for it, open or not.
The main benefits of Google’s plan are fairly obvious: It doesn’t force publishers to provide the company with preferential access to their customers, the way Apple does by requiring in-app purchasing for all subscription services, and Google is taking only 10 percent of the revenue any publishers bring in via its payment system, while Apple takes 30 percent of all subscription fees. On top of that, as MG Siegler notes, the One Pass system provides publishers with access to information about those who sign up — names, email addresses, zip codes and so on — which is crucial data that content companies use to market their services to advertisers. Apple turns this option off by default, and users have to opt in.
That’s the good news. The bad news? Google’s One Pass is pretty much just a warmed-over content paywall. All it does is collect the money for publishers who want to put up a toll-booth around their content. In fact, the thing it resembles the most — as Josh Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab notes — is the Journalism Online Press+ system that entrepreneur Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal executive Gordon Crovitz have been peddling to newspapers and magazines for the past year or more, without much success.
Like that system, Google’s service is essentially designed to handle the payment processing for multiple subscription sites, so users can theoretically sign up for dozens without worrying about being nickel-and-dimed by each one. There’s just one problem: There’s no sign that users have any interest in doing this — or at least, not in large enough numbers to make it work for anyone other than perhaps The Economist and the Wall Street Journal. Those who have put up new paywalls, including The Times of London, have seen the vast majority of their readers disappear into the wind.
One of the reasons users of Apple products like the iPhone and the iPad seem a lot more willing to pay for things like apps is because the experience is so much better and paying is so easy. Despite that, magazine and newspaper publishers have have had little success so far in getting people to pay for their apps. Why would it be any easier with Google’s One Pass? If anything, it’s likely to be even harder, because it’s based on the open web — and users are likely to notice that free content is all around them, while iPhone and iPad apps do a fairly good job of disguising that fact.
So congratulations to Google for making some hay with its launch, but any publisher who sees One Pass as some kind of golden ticket is dreaming in Technicolor.
Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d):
- How Media Companies Can Compete Online
- Demand Media — Search Spam or the Future of Content?
- Google Needs to Fix Its Spam Problem Even If It Hurts
Post and thumbnail courtesy of Flickr user David Kozlowski
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Bad <b>news</b> gets worse on Gulf beaches: 80 dolphins and counting <b>...</b>
Bad news gets worse on Gulf beaches: 80 dolphins and counting. Posted Mar 5th, 2011 at 10:22 AM and seen. times. Only a few weeks ago, scientists were alarmed at the unusually high number of baby dolphins washing ashore on the beaches ...
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