So, first off Bill, let’s talk about customer relations. I argued on this media blog that the market for matching journalists with journalistic outfits (and PR people with PR outlets) is still somewhat inefficient — an observation that others in similar positions to me (aka: your customers) have noted too. I also granted, respectfully, that the closest thing there is to a good buyer-seller exchange is Mediabistro. And for that I got a “smackdown” from Mediabistro’s director of strategy. Perhaps a better approach would’ve been to say “thanks for noting that we’re the place to go, we continuously work to improve the system, and appreciate the feedback,” or even “we beg to differ and here’s why… ” but “smackdown?” Really?

Now let’s dissect this dispute. So, according to you, if I’m reading this correctly, there are two reasons why employers like my peers and me struggle to find people (neither of which have anything to do with the efficacy of the recruiting sites, of course).

The first is that we are living in a time of “close to full employment,” for people with a college education. Even if that were true, and there’s a lot of college-educated people with no regular paycheck today who’d beg to differ, that’s kind of a broad statement. We’re talking here specifically about the media industry, an industry in which there’s been a dramatic drop-off in supply of jobs, even as there’s been an increase in J-school graduates. So, introducing this notion of full employment, seems specious at best.

Your second reason is that employers like me have the wrong jobs for the people who are applying. You state this case thusly:

“The most common reasons we hear are that potential candidates are not interested or compelled by the job description or career prospects of the job, or the company’s reputation as a great place to work is lacking. What this tells us is that the job market is working well from our point of view.”

That’s a strange statement. You seem to be saying that the market is working well when the employment available is unattractive to the employees available? I think you’re trying to make a Keynesian argument here along the lines that demand for journalists is strong, supply is weak, a situation that would lead to a shortage of job seekers and wage inflation. Is that really how you would characterize the market for journalists today? Because the media world is just overbrimming with happy, gainfully-employed journos enjoying salary increases?

Secondly, when you put the blame on potential customers like me for having the wrong jobs, or describing them wrongly, or underpaying, you seem to be overlooking the fact that response to our ads on sites like yours is usually overwhelming. The problem is that most of the respondents aren’t qualified for the jobs in question – or are clearly sending the same email they’ve sent to dozens of other employers in an enthusiastic but not very targeted bid to find work – which I’d say was evidence of inefficiency rather than of us having crappy jobs or copywriting skills.

Furthermore almost anytime I’ve done my own research and found a candidate I’ve liked, I’ve been able to interest them in the job in question, as have other people I know who’ve taken this approach, which would seem to suggest our jobs aren’t quite so horrible and that people are absolutely willing to consider switching (an idea borne out by the musical chairs in, say, the magazine business this year.)

Finally, my argument didn’t entirely rest on the quality of response to job ads. The media world is also lacking a quality database of potential candidates that I can browse when I want to — not only when I have a very specific job to fill. At Breaking Media, we’re proactively looking for areas into which we can expand and the best way to do that is to begin with the right talent. And the best way to find the right talent is to be able to search a database that listed journalists along with the qualifications, experience, and interests.

Bill, I would prefer to live in this place where journalists are sought-after and prosperous, but unfortunately for me and my kind, I’m not sure that’s America in 2010.

I used to think it was just me who had to dig for days to turn up a single good candidate. Maybe, I just didn’t know where to look. Maybe, as editor of Ad Age, or editor-in-chief of Breaking Media, I just wasn’t offering sexy enough jobs, after all the jobs I was looking to fill definitely required some business reporting skills. But over the last couple of years I’ve had the discussion with countless editors and publishers. In just the last month I’ve spoken to the editor of a section of a major national newspaper, the editor of a pretty-damn sexy magazine/web brand and a couple of editors of online properties, all of whom have been struggling to find the right candidate.

You might think that this makes sense. Maybe students have been forced into a sad-but-probably-practical conservatism by the pay-for-play education in this country, and are simply deciding not to rack up monstrous debts in an effort to join a poor-paying profession in which the largest employers have been cutting their staffs every year for a decade. But that’s not it. In fact, even in the mainstream-media maelstrom of 2009, the J-schools continued to report increased applications and graduate numbers have tended to tick up in recent years too.

So there are still eager wannabe-journalists out there. And while many J-schools still don’t seem to have fully evolved their offerings for the digital age, I refuse to believe that some of these young folk aren’t smart enough to adapt to many of the exciting roles being created by the evolution of the media industry, or, indeed, to provide some cheaper labor for the mainstream players who are looking for greater cost efficiencies.

What’s more when you do that digging that I was talking about, mainly spending hours on Google looking for people reporting the kind of stuff you want them to report, you almost always uncover the gems. Maybe they’re writing their own blog, tweeting some great stuff, or reporting (unpaid or barely paid) for HuffPo.

It’s just that there’s no single hub effectively bringing together employers in the media space with the right potential employees in the media space.

That might sound like I’m snubbing Mediabistro, but I’m not. I have nothing but respect for Laurel Touby’s entrepreneurship in building that brand, and certainly it’s the closest thing we have to what I’m talking about. But even the folks at Mediabistro know (and privately admit) that jobs posted to that site often result in an e-mail flood of unqualified candidates whose pitches very rarely seem to have been tailored for the employee – in fact, in launching their new service ‘Scoop Jobs’ for would-be employees they touch on exactly this problem.

The market inefficiency appears to be at least as severe in PR. As the former editor of PRWeek, I frequently talk to agency CEOs who find re-stocking their ranks, and, in particular, hiring for account manager/director level people, to be an arduous if not impossible task. Every week I get at least one call/email/FB-message from someone looking for a good PR person, and, incredibly, they’ve sometimes already spoken to one of the candidates I suggest, which can make it feel like the pool of good junior PR people is about eight-deep.

The technology is there for someone to create the definitive and immaculately-searchable database of journalists and would-be journalists (or PR people, or business-side media execs).

It must be beautifully-simple to use, comprehensive, preferably include candidates in jobs as well as candidates actively seeking work. It also needs to get to the nitty-gritty of the candidates’ experience quickly (more quickly than the average resume), and allow the employer access to the most-recent work from that person, as well as a reliable means of contacting them.

Could Mediabistro improve on what it has now? What about Gorkana? LinkedIn? As-yet-unnamed entrepreneur? Surely there’s some big bucks to be made by someone.

Budweiser 2, Other brewers 2.
Budweiser will be happy to have moved on from Germany, where the official beer sponsor was soundly pounded as spulwasser (that’s dishwater to you) by a populace that takes its beer seriously and didn’t appreciate the lack of local brews at the games. In South Africa it seems to have scored a few more fans and won’t have done its developing world distribution any harm at all.

As you can see from the Nielsen numbers, however, Carlsberg managed to score too with its legends World Cup ad. And Dutch brewer Bavaria stole some headlines too with its 30-women in orange mini-dresses. However, booze is an overall winner during the World Cup, with bars jam-packed even in the avowedly-disinterested United States.

Hooray beer.

ITV 0, ESPN 2.
No one saw this coming. ITV the leading commercial channel in football’s homeland outplayed not only by the BBC as usual, but also by Disney’s finest. Firstly, ESPN scored by simply buying the rights. This was good for those of us in the States who wanted to watch all the games without subscribing to some random cable network or putting more moolah in Murdoch’s pocket, and good for them because at $100 million those rights were a snip.

The U.S. vs. Ghana game drew 15 million viewers on ESPN and another 4.5 million on Univision which, as the Times pointed out, totals about the same number that Fox averaged over last year’s baseball World Series. Not bad for a sport that many still claim hasn’t ‘caught on’ in the States. And ESPN finally gave us something a little better in terms of commentary than Tommy Smyth (who frequently sounded like he’d never watched the game before, much less heard of the players). Martin Tyler is a bit of an old fart, but he knows the game, while Jurgen Klinsmann and Ruud Gullit brought some almost professorial insight to the studio analysis.

ITV meanwhile had two shockers. It recorded its lowest ever daily rating last Sunday while the BBC was screening the England vs. Germany match. But that was a relatively proud moment compared to the mess it made of England’s opening game against the U.S., when ITV HD accidentally cut away to a Hyundai commercial at the precise moment that England scored their first World Cup goal — it also, of course, turned out to be precisely a third of all English goals in the tournament.

I suppose ad trafficking and serving is a bit like goalkeeping, more likely to get our attention when it goes wrong. Perhaps ITV’s ad ops folks presumably felt a little more sympathy for Robert Green than the rest of us.

Fifa 0, Fifa 0.
Actually, there were a clutch of own goals in this clash, but Fifa disallowed them for imaginary offsides or because they only went a yard or two over the goal line.

Where to start with this report? We could talk about the online ticketing process that made it hard for Africans to experience the Cup on their continent and limited their attendance to just 40,000. We could talk about the mean-spirited and cowardly enforcement of sponsorship rights laws that’s seen small-time local vendors penalized for trying to make a few bucks, while Nike’s been allowed to hang enormous outdoor banners in the host cities.

But probably the most blatant example of Fifa’s ineptitude is the terrible refereeing that’s ruined a number of games at this World Cup and prompted Blatter to apologize to England and Mexico (both of whom were outclassed, but unhelped by travesties of footballing justice). As ruling body for a beautifully simple game, it really shouldn’t be that hard to oversee the refereeing aspect of this sport.

Since 1966 we’ve all known that we needed some kind of laser or video camera to help the referees decide when the ball was, or wasn’t in the goal. Those technologies have now been available for several decades.

So what reason, other than Fifa’s arrogance, could possibly prevent the biggest sport in the world adopting tools used by just about every other sport in the world? And don’t give me that crap about having to have the same rules at every level of the sport, because you know as well as I do that putting a camera on the pitch at the top level isn’t going to change the enjoyment of a bunch of kids in the favela who are using a random spherical (if not as spherical as the Jabulani) object as a ball and bricks for goalposts.

Fifa, raise your game.

Castrol 0, Visa 1.
If a sponsor’s checkbook opens on Sepp Blatter’s desk and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Castrol is not the only marketer to pony up tens of millions for official Fifa sponsorship rights, only to fail to leverage its outlay, by, you know, letting the rest of us know about it. (Did you visit Continental Tires’s site? Are you more likely to fly with Emirates than you were before the tournament? What about the chances that you buy a solar panel from Yingli Solar?)

Visa, one of many brand giants that sometimes seems to be applying the somewhat questionable “well, it’s a global event and we’re a global brand” logic to its sponsorship, at least found a few ways to activate its purchase by offering cardholders access to tickets in pre-sale events and making this thoroughly likable ad.

South Africa 4, English-language media 0.
There were plenty of journalists and bloggers who seemed to be channeling their inner colonialist before the tournament, writing half-baked pieces about South Africa being unready to handle the world’s largest sporting event and speculating that tourists/players/visiting dignitaries would have to bolt themselves in their hotel rooms to escape the marauding natives who would surely rob them of their hard-earned (cough) dollars.

As it turned out, of course, the scariest thing about the South Africans turned out to be their penchant for an absurdly grating and monotonous plastic trumpet. Meanwhile the host nation has put on a World Cup in an array of impressive stadia that has run as smoothly as any World Cup before it and has shown off many of the country’s incredible assets. Some in the media have still tried to find reasons we should be disappointed, such as the fact that Africa (the continent) produced only one team that got out of the group stage, whereas the great U.S. and England overcame Slovenia and Algeria and made it all the way to the round of 16 before being knocked out. Should we maybe see how the exciting Ghana team fares against Uruguay before we decry the state of African football?

Nike 4, Adidas 2.
Nike has yet again proved what every savvy marketer knows: You don’t need to buy the official rights to end up owning the event. The world’s biggest sports brand yet again outmaneuvered its competitors, with Nielsen finding that it had earned more than twice the share of buzz of official sponsor Adidas. The fact that this has now happened in consecutive World Cups should act as a reminder to marketers that continuous brand investment beats sporadic campaigning. Adidas did counter Nike’s amazing (and viral record-setting) Write the Future commercial with a nice Star-Wars themed commercial.

Adidas loses this game, however, for playing with its Jabulani ball, which has been criticized by a host of players and coaches for its bizarre flight and the fact that even the most talented players seem at times to have struggled with it. Herbert Hainer, Adidas boss, competing with Steve ‘don’t hold it that way’ Jobs for the oddest statement on his product, said the issue is that the ball is rounder than any other they’ve made, but I’d imagine that most footie-fans are wondering whether we really needed to change something that clearly wasn’t broken. This is the World Cup, let’s let the best the players do the fancy stuff, not the ball. Of course Adidas estimates it’ll sell 13 million of these things, so Herbert probably doesn’t really care what the players think, and I’m sure Adidas is already hatching an even rounder sphere for 2014.

Check back tomorrow for more scores.

Predictably in a business that so loves its navel, the NYT’s move spawned voluminous coverage. My cursory analysis of that coverage is about as scientific as scientology, but the pieces that bubble to the top of the search soup seem to be largely down on the idea, pointing to the lost links and, possibly more pertinently, the pointlessness of the exercise in revenue terms.

Discussing the plans at the annual shareholder meeting, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., offered no specifics about targets for increased revenue from metering, instead stressing the opportunity provided by the new system to increase “engagement,” and the “emotional connection” with Times users. The theory, at least as interpreted by Business Insider, is that if users are paying, they’ll go to the site before they go to other sites and spend longer once they get there.

This argument, like telling yourself that paying for an expensive gym will make you go more often, probably wouldn’t stand up to rigorous examination by a behavioral economist. And, while metering better recognizes the way information is spread and consumed online than more absolutist content lockdowns, history suggests it will still frustrate and drive away more users than it’ll bring into the fold. By definition most of those who are driven away will also be people who had been exhibiting some loyalty to Times’ content, rather than people who just stumble on the occasional story and never reach their story quota.

If Sulzberger really wants to increase reader loyalty and engagement, perhaps he ought to be looking at ways to incentivize loyalty among all readers, rather than – or at least in addition to – putting a pay barrier in the path of some of his more avid online readers.

One trendy idea for incentivizing reader loyalty is the application of game mechanics to web publishing. Riffing off the success of Facebook applications like Farmville, or mobile apps like FourSquare, the thought here is that users can earn points, badges, virtual currency or whatever in return for demonstrating loyalty and deeper engagement with a website. Brad Feld’s Foundry Group just led a $5-million investment in Big Door, a company that practices exactly this kind of gamification of websites.

If earning badges sounds a little lightweight for the New York Times, we might also think of this kind of approach as a loyalty marketing scheme akin to those run by airlines or hotels. (While I can’t quite work out why I care about checking in to places on Foursquare, I know exactly why I suffer an Up-In-The-Air-esque addiction to American Airlines, namely because the loyalty points I accrue translate to upgrades to business class, which makes air travel just about palatable.)

The Times could offer points for stories or videos viewed, comments, clicks on ads, newsletter signup, subscribing, joining its clubs, attending events, buying things from its store and so on. Those points would not only be a badge of honor for users, but could have practical applications such as giving money off subscriptions and purchases — thus encouraging more traffic to the Times store, which really could be a great resource if better curated — and granting the heaviest users first refusal on events and special deals (tying these users into some of its deeper, more integrated advertising deals would undoubtedly appeal to some brands). Such a scheme would also yield a lot of data from the Times on its community, potential revenue streams and allow it to really start to chart the lifetime value of a consumer.

While metering certainly isn’t as obviously punitive as putting a paywall around everything, it still feels like a publisher trying to create a certain user behavior by brandishing a stick. Am I the only one who thinks carrots might be more likely to boost user loyalty and long-term revenues?

That’s not to say it doesn’t get any play. Magazines like Wired frequently simplify the complex or enliven the intellectual with clever visualizations. On this week’s Beancast, Angela Natividad of Hypios, ended the show by advising listeners to check out this nifty World Cup predictor from Wired UK. Also on the World Cup tip, Spanish sports language daily, Marca, created this fantastic interactive schedule.

In fact, sports journalism has spawned many of the best data visualizations—perhaps something to do with the fact that reporting on sport is often a more lucrative business than reporting on, say, foreign affairs, and thus sports outlets still have the budget to commission these things. I like this simple but effective infographic from atpworldtour.com showing which rackets top tennis players use.

Or what about this from TinkerMedia, showing which Mexican wrestlers have been demasked by which of their foes.

In somewhat more meaningful news (not that lucha libre isn’t vital to humanity or anything), the recent oil crisis has brought out the best in data viz at a couple of mainstream outlets with this oil spill tracker from the New York Times and these from Fast Company and NG Oil & Gas.

But these examples are all about telling stories, not about offering readers new print edition or website configurations. With most news-focused websites sitting somewhere on a sad spectrum that runs from overfilled-imitation-of-the-printed-product to somehow-we-took-a-huge-expensive-news-organization-and-turned-it-into-a-blog, it’s a shame that so few have tried to offer readers any radical reconfigurations of their content.

There is, of course, the Times Skimmer, which I like and find more accessible than the regular home page. And a lot of news outlets now offer readers ways to configure their homepages based on certain preferences. But what if they offered homepage options that captured their trending stories in live and exciting ways along the links of Digg Labs’ Swarm or 365, or the Google News-powered Newsmap? How about The Whale Hunt as a new format for photo-based stories? Or what about this as an interactive presentation for week in review type offerings:

Click for hi-res view

Today one of the key challenges for the few news organizations who still fund expensive, original content creation is to find better ways to unearth, distribute, and market their content to generations who’ve grown up with gaming, dynamic presentation, and an expectation of interactivity. In that environment data visualization could do more than just bring their stories to life, it could bring their tired platforms to life, too.

One of my key concerns about the full RSS feed is that it is used by web scrapers to steal our content, which not only means they derive entirely unjustified benefit from our editors’ efforts but also leads to duplicate content that can hurt SEO efforts. On this front, the anecdotal evidence suggests that truncating the feed helped. In the earlier months of this year we had identified anywhere from 2-6 scrapers stealing all our content, but during May when we were truncating the feed we found no new examples. One of the perpetrators we’d already identified continued scraping the content, but was now getting just the abbreviated stories.

Of course the most common complaint from publishers about full RSS feeds is that subscribers get all the content in their readers, don’t click through to the site, and therefore aren’t monetized in any meaningful way. In the case of ATL, truncating the feed definitely increased the number of people clicking through to the site. Visits from our full feed were about 4% of our total traffic before we truncated it, but jumped to about 7% of total traffic in the month of the truncation trial. In our case this translated to something in the region of an additional 100,000 impressions, which isn’t going to make us rich, but would be worth more dollars and cents than we could make running ads in the RSS feed.

So those are the positives from our point of view — less scraping and an uptick in traffic to the site from the feed.

There were negatives too, however. Importantly just over 100 people took the time to complain to us about the truncated feed. While publishing isn’t a business where you can please all of the people all of the time, or let a few nasty notes get to you, a hundred complaints for a b2b site is not to be taken lightly, especially when you consider that some of those people are likely among our most loyal and influential consumers. We lost RSS followers too, with about 4% unsubscribing in the month following truncation. There was also a reduction in referral traffic from other sites and social media last month. This could be a coincidence — perhaps there was simply less link- or share-worthy content in May — but it could also be a result of not getting all our content in the hands of some of the most loyal followers.

In the end, however, the chief reason we’ll now restore the full feed for ATL, is that the whole idea of trying to force people into certain media consumption habits seems futile in an era when technology has enabled people to consume whatever they want, however they want it. If pushing a few thousand more visits to ATL every week with a truncated feed is the best idea we’ve got for monetizing our content then we’re probably pretty screwed anyway, so we’ll likely be better served focusing our energies on coming up with more compelling content and platforms (newsletters, mobile apps) and so on, than in further aggravating RSS subscribers.

Now for that humble pie. I don’t regret testing the truncated feed. The ability to test and quickly change digital content platforms is one of the key things that make them so much better than the distribution methods that came before. But I really should have given more advanced notice to the ATL community that we planned to make this change. It’s not that it would’ve changed the outcome since the biggest fans of the full feed would still have told me I was an idiot. But it would’ve been the polite thing to do, rather than foisting it on them and putting up a post explaining the move a couple of hours later. For that, I sincerely apologize — you deserved more consideration. I appreciate the patience of the 96% of you who stuck with the feed for the month, and I hope you are pleased to see the full feed return.

I’m not saying that either magazines or video ads are going to die, partly because that’s simply not the case and partly because it’s the wrong argument to make. But with so few strong brand-building commercials to watch these days, it is easy to imagine that this expansive and expensive commercial from Wieden & Kennedy Amsterdam and director Alejandro Iñarritu is an endangered species. Name me one other ad of its quality since Google trotted out its simple, but beautiful little Parisian love story during the Super Bowl back in February?

Fear of taking risks, the recession, creativity-stifling marketing-department bureaucracies and ROI-measurement tools that heavily emphasize the last click or supposed ‘moment of truth’ before purchase have suffocated the brand ad. Even car commercials increasingly scan like promotions, with little to differentiate one marque from the next for the casual viewer (which also tells a sorry story about car design, but that’s another post). Ads that drive consideration, prime the pump by pushing people into the purchase funnel, create a category, or simply tell a story that reminds the consumer what a brand stands for, still seem to be getting short shrift even as we emerge from the funk of last year’s woeful economy.

When the industry does see one of its own daring to create a brand without any obvious sales patter it tends to tear the perpetrator down, and even this Nike powerplay found a few detractors among Ad Age commenters, perhaps because they fear that these $2 million beasts reinforce the ultimately damaging notion that advertising is a cost not an investment, an ego-play not a business deal. And certainly these kind of commercials don’t yield the instantly gratifying sales data that a lot of direct and digital work can boast, even if they can often later be linked to powerful sales results through econometric modeling and simple observation of the timing of revenue spikes.

Others criticize these big budget brand commercials because they feel antithetical to the digital, consumer-as-co-creator culture that we live. Indeed my friend Ana Andjelic had just such a beef with ‘Write the Future:’

“The problem is, we are today dealing with a completely different sort of culture. Yes, World Cup is a big and awesome event, but how it’s going to play out in the lives of soccer fans next month is part of the emerging digital culture, and not some symbolic inspirational culture that Nike – and other brands – are so desperate to penetrate.”

I am a fascinated student of digital culture and community, and I tend to agree with Ana more often than not, but in this case she’s wrong.

Firstly, a really inspiring ad like this in an environment starved of talk-worthy brand commercials becomes has a shot at being a social networking node in itself (with or without ‘like’ buttons and share tools). How else can you explain the best part of 9 million Youtube views in a week, the thousands of Facebook postings of the spot, the fact that Ana and I are among dozens and dozens of people to blog about the ad, and the fact that several of my closest, and usually very skeptical friends, have wanted to discuss the ad; how Nike’s slowly but surely taking over football from rivals who once considered this the one big fortress they could defend; and how it further fueled their excitement for the World Cup.

Secondly, the World Cup isn’t going to play out in digital culture. It’s going to play out in bars and living rooms packed with friends and booze and shouting and joy and heartache in every corner of every country all over the world — that’s what makes it so beautiful, it’s the truly global shared experience. (I am looking forward to the New York taxi cab banter almost as much as the games themselves.) Our digital tools will allow us to text dad, even if we’re 5,000 miles away, catch up with that clip from the clash between Korea and Greece on our own timeframe, or banter with the Paraguayans on a message board, but it enhances the way we experience it, it doesn’t replace it.

But the real point here is that the scarcity of good brand commercials has created an opportunity for anyone brave enough to try to make one. It might be a better bet when it comes to building brand attributes like engagement and consideration than simply becoming the latest brand to stumble around the social media sphere bringing little in the way of understanding or consumer utility but a whole lot of dollars and desperation.

Oh, and one more thing: Come on England!

For Yahoo
I think we can safely say that it depends on post-deal execution, as it usually does with these things. On the one hand that $90 million could prove to be a big ol’ waste of money: Associated’s content isn’t high-value stuff, CPM’s for lower-value inventory will inevitably keep being driven drown by the proliferation of supply and the reduction of friction in the buying process, and both Associated’s network of Joe and Jane Doe contributors and its technology platform could’ve been replicated by a company with Yahoo’s resources for a lot less than $90 million.

On the other hand if it can focus this army on providing the types of content demanded by advertisers — particularly local and niche advertisers who’ve yet to be effectively mined as a source of display revenue but could be extremely lucrative — while finding better ways of vetting the content for quality and building greater demand for brand advertising online, that $90 million could end up looking like a small price to have paid.

For media dealmakers
Dealmakers will read this as another positive indication that the media M&A market is coming back. I’ve only spoken to one lawyer and one banker on the topic, but both seemed confident this was good news for them. We’ve already seen an acceleration of the pace of dealmaking in the technology sector and the banker’s theory was that this deal would trigger more activity in the digital content space.

Obviously if you’re an entrepreneur looking for crazy multiples, you’d still rather you had invented some instantly scalable, must-have mobile software, but the fact that Yahoo — which has at times tried to distance itself from the media business — is snapping up content and talking about why it wants to be a media company must be a good sign for media owners who create original content. Right?

For media owners
Not everyone sees it that way. One person I heard speak on the topic said “if I was a traditional media owner, I’d be crying into my cornflakes right now. $90 million for a lot of stuff created by consumers. That’s got to hurt.” Obviously his point was that this isn’t the same kind of original content most media owners produce, in that it’s dirt cheap to create. In that sense, a $90 million deal is a validation of the demand media model championed by Tim Armstrong at AOL or Samir Arora at Glam Media, a model that some see as antithetical to old-school creation of content by those peskily expensive professionals. Still, at least Yahoo, AOL and Glam want to create and own content. Sure that might be content that’s created chiefly to please an algorithm, but at least it’s a vote for digital content as a display ad vehicle — there’s some (small) solace to be found there for the cornflake-criers.

For ad networks
Things are getting tough for ad networks, and this deal just underlines the increasingly tricky situation in which they find themselves. On the one hand they’re getting squeezed by the demand-side platforms that are springing up at all the media agencies, allowing the online buyers to purchase across multiple ad exchanges and publishers without giving a share to the ad networks.

On the other hand, as ad networks they don’t own the media and therefore have a harder time implementing the customized ad programs and brand-integration deals that advertisers expect to be a big part of their higher-value programs. In its pronouncements on the deal, Yahoo several times referred to the fact that owning this content would allow it to do ‘creative’ things for advertisers, which speaks directly to the latter point. And, of course, creating a load more pages very cheaply will also help Yahoo if display advertising comes to be dominated by demand-side buying platforms.

I was going to tweet his statement from @breakingmedia but hesitated because I thought I must have misheard. After all, that’d be more than 10 times the current number of mobile phones in the world—an already incredible 4 and a half billion—and about four web-connected devices for every person on the planet. While those of us who live in the narcissistic media navel of New York are often tempted to imagine that everyone totes an iPhone, iPad and laptop—as well as whatever desktop is getting dusty in their study at home—it seemed a stretch to imagine the average resident of, say, India or China using four or more devices. I concluded that either I wasn’t paying proper attention or Vestberg was indulging in a little bit of corporate boosterism—Ericsson is in the business of enabling mobile connections, so 50 billion of them would be good business for the Swedish equipment manufacturer.

Then, at about the time the iPad was released, I had the chance to talk with David Haight, AT&T’s VP of Business Development, Emerging Devices Organization. Ten minutes of conversation with Haight is enough to change your vision of the future from one where everyone is carrying a wireless internet device like a mobile phone, to one where that device in your hand connects you with an internet of things all around you. Everywhere.

Haight sees the world not in two or three groups of wireless devices, but about ten. The obvious ones are the smartphones, e-readers, laptops, multimedia tablets like the iPad, and the GPS navigation devices such as a Garmin or TomTom. Then, slightly less obviously but nevertheless already familiar to us, are the gaming devices and other consumer electronics that can benefit from a network connection such as cameras and picture frames.

Beyond that, and set to start hitting the market in a big way later this year, are the home-management devices such as the Openpeak OpenTablet, which will allow families to synch and centralize their social networks, emails, calendars, music, videos, photos and so on. These will also increasingly be used to manage the home itself, and will allow remote control over heating and cooling, home security systems and so on.

Then there are cars. Most auto manufacturers are already investing in and investigating the idea of the networked vehicle, and Haight believes that your car will eventually be able to diagnose trouble or even potential trouble and report it, not only to you and your loved ones, but also to manufacturers, dealers and auto repair centers.

Haight also has a category he thinks of as people- and pet-tracking devices, which, again, are already reaching the market but look set to become increasingly sophisticated and popular in the near future. Also in this category are the health monitoring devices, which—unlike some of convenience-oriented devices above—would seem to have real life-changing potential.

“Imagine scales, or an exercise device, or heart monitor, or blood monitoring device that could keep doctors, healthcare providers, insurance companies and loved ones apprised of a patient’s condition,” says Haight. Imagine it indeed: Lives will be saved, but privacy advocates’ blood-pressure will surely skyrocket. (You thought you didn’t want people knowing what you just bought online; imagine if everyone was watching your nightly weigh-in).

While we’re on the medical kick, and if you want to get a sense of the potential of the internet of things, there are few examples I like more than the Vitality GlowCaps—launched on the AT&T network, to surprisingly little fanfare, on March 23 this year. These are intelligent caps for prescription bottles, designed to remedy the serious problem of people forgetting to take their pills. The caps use light and sound to remind people to take a pill, which can then be followed by a text or phone call if the bottle isn’t opened. Every time the bottle is opened, the adherence data is relayed to Vitality, which compiles progress reports that can be sent to caregivers, doctors and family members. Data generated by the GlowCaps can also be used to refill prescriptions automatically as pills deplete.

I know, I know; it’s a plastic cap that lights up and beeps and stuff, not a sexy iPad. But could it be that in our excitement over one particular company and its devices, we the media—and many of the brands that we work with—are kind of missing the point? Sure, your brand probably ought to be wondering whether it can create any useful apps for the major mobile platforms. That’s a given. But the bigger question might be how your product itself is going to interact with 50 billion different devices once we truly live among an internet of things.