Economic Woes Impacting MLB Season Tickets

Wait until the trade deadline approaches during the summer... as teams have battled through poor attendance, dwindling jersey sales, and so forth. Teams like the Detroit Tigers (payroll of $138m in 2008 - third behind the Yankees and Mets) will have fire sales to cope with the economic struggles.

In the last two days, local papers have covered struggling ticket sales for two high budget teams:

Detroit Tigers - 2008 Payroll of $138m, 3rd highest payroll in MLB - Season ticket woes (Free Press):

Last year, the Tigers had sold some 27,000 season tickets at this time. This year, that number has dropped to roughly 15,000. Ron Colangelo, the Tigers' vice president of communications, would not confirm or deny the 15,000 figure, saying: "We're going to let our sales and marketing efforts continue through Opening Day."

San Francisco Giants - 2008 Payroll of $76m, 16th highest payroll in MLB - Season ticket woes (Mercury News):

The Giants say they have sold fewer than 20,000 season-ticket plans, off nearly 25 percent from their All-Star Game season in 2007. But club officials believe they will avoid the catastrophic projections that are haunting other major league cities, and through walk-up sales and promotions, they are hopeful their season attendance will come close to matching the 2.8 million fans they drew last season.

"We're hanging tough," said Staci Slaughter, the club's vice president of communications. "We're in a much better position than a lot of teams."

My Starbucks Via Review (Video)

My Starbucks Via samples arrived and that gave me a chance to do an instant coffee tasting / review. The video review is below (shot using my new Flip Mino HD... awesome). Even as a Starbucks fan and supporter, I found the Via coffee quite disappointing - tasting more like coffee-flavored water than coffee.

The background noise is my dog, Manny.

Starbucks Takes to London Streets to Promote Starbucks Via

A little more than a month ago, I wrote about Starbucks new instant coffee: the Starbucks Via. My free samples have since arrived and I plan to do a review once I prepare and taste Starbuck's newest product. Though I haven't yet tasted the Via - the packaging is terrific. They are essentially single serve pouches of coffee that you can stuff in your briefcase, purse or pocket... or more likely, that hotels can lay out for morning in-room brews. Of course the taste is equally important. More to come.

But Starbucks has now Twittered (@Starbucks) that there are free samples being given away on the streets of London. So if you see this guy moving about the city, be sure to stop staring and grab some samples:

NCAA + iPhone Apps = Great Productivity

The future is here. And it's on the iPhone.

Facebook Connects Comes to iPhone, Game-Changing

The best iPhone Apps are those that engage across other properties beyond the iPhone. Zynga, SGN, Playfish and others iPhone power-developers have done a brilliant job of those. For most though, building cross-platform, socially-aware applications has proven difficult and consequently made the majority of applications 'un-sticky'.

But this will all change with Facebook's announcement that Facebook Connect is available for iPhone Applications.

Suddenly gaming becomes social. Applications that before were content delivery mechanisms now have a social graph to relate to.

It's big. In a way it is akin to what Xbox Live does for Xbox... put probably bigger because it is open and more flexible.

InsideFacebook has some screenshots:

Facebook's announcement can be read here:

Now your iPhone apps can enjoy the benefits that Facebook Connect sites and Facebook Platform apps already enjoy, including:

Making API calls so your app can access users' profiles and share information on Facebook. Publishing to Facebook via Feed forms.

Asking users for extended permissions, like offline access, so you can still interact with their data when they're offline.

Adam Carolla's Podcast: 1M Downloads... Radio, XM Officially Dead?

Last week, Adam Carolla transitioned from national radio talk show host. His contract with CBS prevents him from returning to radio (supposedly through 2009) - and in exchange, he is paid handsomely in the meantime. So Adam Carolla decided started a podcast - launching it last week. It had over 1,000,000 downloads... a staggering number:

I’m overwhelmed by your response to the podcast. In less than 24 hours, the first podcast was downloaded over a quarter of a million times, which is awesome.

This means that we’ll be able move along faster in terms of getting this project up into a new gear, and getting a little more production, more guests, and everything you guys deserve. I’m grateful to have such fantastic fans, and honored at this response.

I’ve been very busy working on this pilot with CBS, and getting all the parts in place for that, which has taken a lot of time and energy, but we’re still focused on putting a great podcast out.

Again, I’d like to thank everyone, and let everyone know that we’ll all get our shit together very soon, and bring this to a new level.

Keep up the good work.

-Adam Carolla

Consider that Corolla achieved one million downloads with: - no real promotion or advertising campaign (and no brand behind it) - a basic website based on Wordpress.com - no mobile-based website like ESPN's Podcenter (which is how I consume ESPN podcasts on-the-go) - just entered iTunes (important for access, subscription)

Adam Carolla is not alone in his success. ESPN's Bill Simmons (the Sports Guy) had over 550,000 podcast downloads last week.

These numbers are enormous. And for Adam Carolla to find such success so quickly and without a big brand or producer - talent should really ask themselves, why not follow Carolla's lead? Consider that Carolla used to start his show at the crack of dawn, talk for several hours, abide by FCC regulation... and it cost $20,000,000 annually to run. Now his podcasts are 30-60 minutes, free of censorship and available in a new format that is killing traditional radio and has rendered satellite radio useless - why subscribe to XM and Sirius when you can get Adam Carolla, Bill Simmons, The Wall Street Journal, etc portably and on-demand?

And if Carolla and others can find success in podcasting - then the supply of content will enable the medium to grow (to me, this really was the mitigating factor). But with 1,000,000 downloads and a lean staff, Carolla will certainly be able to find financial success.... which is, in turn, great for consumers.

Perez Hilton Hits 14,000,000 Pageviews Yesterday. Wow.

You might not be interested in celebrity news and gossip...You might not consider it important or meaningful... But to the web, it is significant and marks a major move in the Digital Media space.

I've written about Perez Hilton many times before and the values / perils of being a one-man brand.

But by doing 14,000,000 pageviews yesterday... Perez has clearly showed those are not issues for PerezHilton.com and his business. 14m pageviews is a staggering number for what is basically a one-man shop and blog. Those numbers cement him as a major online brand and space (obvious even a year ago). Consider that 14m pageviews is ahead of Huffington Post (max was 7.7m / day in last month) and on the heels of Wordpress.com (max was 20.8m in last month).

It is also worth noting that all three sites (PerezHilton.com, Wordpress.com and HuffingtonPost.com) are directly measured by Quantcast.

Perez Hilton's daily traffic measured against Huffington Post (to show scale):

Perez Hilton's daily traffic measured against Wordpress.com's:

Perez Hilton's Monthly Uniques

Perez Hilton's Monthly Pageviews:

Gawker Rolls Up Defamer & Valleywag... Chasing Huffington Post?

In my 20 Digital Media Projections for 2009, I stated that there would be a handful of other major sites racing into that space that Huffington Post and The DailyBeast have successfully created. Today comes news that Gawker is rolling up another of the big Gawker Media properties: Defamer. Just a couple months ago, Valleywag was rolled into Gawker.com (it now resides at valleywag.gawker.com)

At first I thought this was because Nick Denton had significantly cut staff and resourcing across the network. And while that may well have been the case at Valleywag, that doesn't seem to be the case with Defamer.

Defamer serves 6m page views a month (Gawker does 24m). That is substantial - albeit not enormous.

The roll-up to me looks more like a page out of Huffington's book: build a brand and verticalize within it. Gawker's take has always been to create unique, stand alone properties and hope that people navigate between the brands.

I would personally be more inclined to visit Gawker if it housed all of the brands (as disparate as they are)... assuming that Gawker could figure out a way to surface content that may be interesting to me via my tastes, history, and popularity across the site. I'll read more and I'll stay longer. I promise.

I am lazy. So too is the web (after all, the #1, #2 and #3 search queries are Google, Yahoo and eBay). Take advantage of it by making it easier for us.

Also good coverage of All Things D

Facebook Photo's Remarkable Growth - Did iPhone App Play a Role?

According to ComScore (and via TechCrunch), Facebook Photos is running away from the nearest competitors: Photobucket, Flickr and Picasa (in that order).

Facebook has been the space's leader for over a year, but the gap has widened and really started to open in September 2008. TechCrunch suggests that it is due to the profile redesign:

"But the tagging feature has been part of Facebook Photos for a long time. What happened in September to accelerate growth? That is when a Facebook redesign went into effect which added a Photos tab on everyone’s personal homepage."

How about two other additions to why the marked growth is occurring (although I totally agree that the timing is due to the profile redesign):

1. The iPhone App is one of the most popular and addictive. And it makes photo taking / sharing dead easy. In fact, it is easier to upload a photo than to enter your 'status update.' Based on my network's feed - photo usage via the App has grown significantly.

2. Switching cost: once you begin to upload photos onto Facebook, it becomes difficult to move them elsewhere or start uploading elsewhere. The switching costs are high and there are network effects. As Facebook grows (and it is everywhere now), there is less of a reason to share via print sites like oFoto / Kodak, Picasa, Shutterfly and so forth.