Bezos Getting $175 Million Membership Value in The Washington Post

With the purchase of The Washington Post by Jeff Bezos, he is acquiring a 'membership' alone that has a value of $175 million. He is also purchasing many other assets for his $250 million.

For the last year at The Washington Post, I've argued internally that paywalls turn readers into members of The Washington Post. Paywalls turn newspapers into membership organizations. In other words, the subscriber database transforms into a very valuable digital membership database. For many internet companies this is their primary value. The membership profile of a Washington Post reader is richer and thus much more valuable than most internet memberships.

While paywall revenue is certainly valuable, the real value in a paywall is acquiring a credit card number for each member. Having a credit card on file for readers completely transforms the newspaper business model.

Paywalls turn newspapers into e-commerce operations. 

This is easily understood in looking at how digital ads will change. Any ad can now have a 'buy me now' button with a credit card on file. This substantially reduces the 'friction' in converting an ad viewer into a customer. The staff selling ads now has a much different job selling a product into a 'news app store'.

In a print newspaper you read the same ads as everyone else. When reading a newspaper online the ads (or products) are targeted based on your profile. The better the profile, the better the targeting and the value of the ad. With a credit are on file the profile is even richer. The depth of a newspaper membership is a marketer's dream.

The online profile also allows The Washington Post to be competitive in some markets again. For example, many believe that newspapers have lost the classified ad business to Craigslist. The Post's membership profile is stronger that Craigslist leading to several opportunities.

The value of a credit card on file can be approximated. In the tablet marketplace revenue comes not only from the hardware sale but from app store sales. When HP launched their ill-fated tablet, having a credit card on file was so valuable that they gave away $50 in merchandise just for putting a credit card on file in their app store. When Android was launched, Google received a lot of criticism because of the low number of customers with credit cards on file for their app store. Amazon was able to instantly create an app store because they had credit cards on file. This is ample evidence of the value of having a online profile with a credit card on file.

How did the $175 million figure come from? I believe that The Washington Post can easily get credit cards on file for one million members. This is based completely on extrapolating publicly available circulation numbers and online traffic. This is not based on any internal numbers. (In fact I have very limited access to any numbers at all in my job.) The number of subscribers and revenue from Apple's app store are available. These rough numbers suggest an estimated contribution of $175 per member to Apple's valuation. So I used this figure to value The Washington Post membership. While the $175 figure may be high, the member estimate is probably low. 


I think Bezos purchase of The Washington Post will accelerate the transformation of the newspaper business model that I think was inevitable. The biggest personnel impact will be in expanding IT department because of the importance to build the online profile. Next, as I explained above, will be a change in advertising sales.

My work at The Washington Post is coding primarily for mobile web. You see my work when you visit washingtonpost.com with your phone's browser. I've took this job just over a year ago. The views here are my own.

Personally, I'm excited to see the newspaper transformation from the inside. The Washington Post is known to foster innovation. Many people will now be interested in working here and I'm already here.

JSConf 2013 in Review

JSConf, as several others agree, is a great and important conference. It keeps getting better each of the last five years. This post focuses on this year's presentations and the cumulative effect of the talks. When possible, I'll link to the slide deck. (Videos will come in a few months.) There were too many to review them all.

First, the Web is the platform. JavaScript is the VM. Brendan Eich in his talk, JavaScript Is 18, showed the game "Unreal Tournament" running in the browser without a plugin. Written in C++, the target was ASM.js. Everything will be either written in JavaScript or compiled (built) to JavaScript. Yes, everything! His slides do a nice job of showing how the web stack has grown.

This is not saying that JavaScript replaces C++. As Brendan pointed out, ASM.js is not meant to be hand coded but a target. So if I was writing in another language, I'd want to make sure it could be "compiled" to JavaScript or I'd write it in JavaScript. Note, two days prior he gave the same talk at Fluent which is available on video. "Always bet on JS."

Second, because a build phase is now fairly common JavaScript and CSS are intertwined. For example, you can tweak you JS for performance, but you still have to be concerned with the performance of your CSS. Nicole Sullivan's Creating Living Style Guide reinforced this. She provided hard numbers (60% faster to first byte and 11% increase in page views) for refactoring an existing site's CSS. She suggested using Grep, CSSLint or CSSCSS to look for duplicates. Other talks like Adobe's TopCoat  and Rebecca Murphey's Optimizing for Developer Delight (in her "Build Everything" section) also emphasized this.

Third, there is math. College level stuff like linear algebra and matrix manipulations. Raquel Velez @rockbot rocked the house with her talk AI.js: Robots with Brains. She is now a contributor to the Johnny-Five library for Arduinos and was a leader for the NodeBots day. One of the talks that generated the most buzz during JSConf was Making WebGL Dance by Steven Wittens. I'm just starting to go through the slides because I was in track B during this talk. (jdalton's performance talk also got buzz.)

Fourth, responsive design took some serious hits. For most people it means one code base using media queries to use different parts of the css or js to produce different layouts. Brian Leroux who is working on Topcoat at Adobe emphasized we may never be at the point that serving one set of files provides the best experience. Adobe open sourced their research.  Topcoat has desktop and mobile versions. In DOMkata: The Dark Art of Mobile Web during CSSConf Mike Stamm, WSJ mobile web lead, showed the difficulties determining just browser width.

Angelina Fabbro presented JavaScript Masterclass: How you you go from being a good developer, to a great one? This was one of my favorite talks. I've recently started considering myself a below average JavaScript coder because about 50% of us are. It provides a new perspective. One of the reason's I attend hackaton's is to see how I am doing. She created nice checklists that are useful to figure out how you want to grow as a coder.

Boom! Promises/A+ Was Born: The story of Promises/A+ told by Domenic Denicola was inspiring (liveblog). It was an interesting analysis of the JavaScript community because it shows how to get things done starting as one person. His checklist on "What made the Promises/A+ effort work so well" is a step by step guide for anyone. I especially like how the testing was such a key part.

Angus Croll added seven more authors to his previous literary figures writing JavaScript. Hilarious presentation that forces you to examine one's own writing style.

yayQuery's appearance at JSConf was LOL for nearly a full 30 minutes. Showed Best of Video. Hilarious. In 2010 I had at the pleasure  to sit at the same table as them along with Brendan Eich. As I said then, "Clearly the next generation of javascript and funny." Rebecca Murphy, Paul Irish, Adam Sontag and Alex Sexton all continue to make significant contributions to the JavaScript community.

The day between the talks harkened back to the first JSConfs where the same people sat together all day. This year I was at a table was in the NodeBot event. Every participant (attendee) at JSConf receive an Arduino. Our team built a robot arm that typed "helloworld.js" (second video). My teammates deserve most of the credit: Bryan Hughes, Mike Surowiec and Rahul Ravikumar. Every reason to believe that they will have as much success as my yayQuery tablemates have had. Revived memories of my electrical engineering and breadboarding days. Thanks to Rick Waldron, Raquel Velez, Sarah Chipps and other for leading this.

Other talks were also significant. I missed most of the Track B talks. Also missed several of the CSSConf talks. And a few of the talks were so code heavy that I'll have to sit with the presentations to really understand them like Master the CLI with Node and schema liberation with json and plv8. Thanks to all the presenters who took great efforts to make a presentation.

Finally, thanks to all the people with kind words for my talk on JavaScript Journalism, The New Profession: Simeon Willbanks, Kevin Old, Kevin Lamping, Mark Gayler, Trevor Landau, Francesco Rizzi, Roger Raymond and many, many others including my Dad. I apologize for not mentioning others by name.  It was an honor be in Track A and thrilling to present a unique perspective on JavaScript.

I am seriously considering leading a JS Journalism Conf in fall 2013. Let me know if you are interested.

Other diaries and comments:
James Long
JSConf Storify by Azat
EndPoints Blog
Bryan Hughes Day 1 (with nice comment on my talk), Day 2 (about our robot), Day 3

You Should Speak At JSConf

My other JSConf posts since 2010.

ToDo After JSConf 2013

After every JSConf I have created a list of things I want to learn. For example, in 2010 nodejs topped the list. Once again this year the list is public:

1. three.js
2. BEM naming convention
3. WebRTC - see Remy Sharp
4. Casper.js, spooky.js and schoolbus.js for node - if good enough for jeb
5. vektor.js - for robots
6. asm.js - actual docs, not articles
7. topcoat.io
8. csscss
9. creative.js
10. more grunt

JSConf Differences Since 2009

JSConf 2013 is the fifth annual event. Here are 5 differences that I've noticed since then.

1. Less need for power strips. Everyone has Macs with good batteries.
2. More diversity. Keeps improving.
3. JS Everywhere continues. Almost only JS on browser 5 years ago. No robots, etc.
4. Track B room is bigger than the entire room for 2009.
5. More people have JS jobs. 

What has not changed is the humor of yayQuery, quality of the speakers or excellence of the Williams and volunteers.

JavaScript Journalism Examples

Examples of JavaScript Journalism from my presentation at JSConf 2013  are now on http://jsjournalism.com. These examples are from around the United States and one from France. The presentation will be there later today (5/29).

"They Became What They Beheld" by Edmund Carpenter or Marshall McLuhan?

One of my favorite books is They Became What They Beheld (1970) by Edmund Carpenter and photographed by Ken Heyman. The origin has been a bit of a mystery.

In the note above the copyright of the book it states:

The text owes much to Marshall McLuhan who, in fact, co-authored an earlier version. We are indebted to the authors quoted and their publishers, and to Harper's Bazaar in which some portions of the material appeared.

The obituary for Edmund Carpenter in The New York Times on July 7, 2011, included this paragraph:

His collaborations with McLuhan included numerous jointly written articles and the anthology “Explorations in Communication” (1960). The article “Fashion Is Language,” which appeared under McLuhan’s name in a special McLuhan issue of Harper’s Bazaar in 1968, was actually written by Mr. Carpenter after McLuhan went into the hospital for brain surgery. It was published in book form, in 1970, under Mr. Carpenter’s name, with the title “They Became What They Beheld.”

There is a footnote in McLuhan is Space: A Cultural Geography (2003) by Richard Cavell which states:

Edmund Carpenter suggest that he was the author of the Haper's article, though when it appeared in an altered version as part of Carpenter's They Became What They Beheld (1970), Carpenter credits McLuhan's input into the volume. See Carpenter's Remembering Explorations,' Canadian Notes and Queries 46 (Spring 1992): 3-15; reprinted in a slightly different form in Theall's Virtual Marshall McLuhan.

So I went to "The Not-So-Silent Sea," Appendix B of Virtual Marshall McLuhan where Edmund Carpenter wrote:

Harper's Bazaar commissioned Marshall to write a special McLuhan issue. He was about to undergo surgery. The fee was large & needed. Not a word had been written, not a photograph assembled. On Friday, the publisher warned me: if an acceptable manuscript wan't in his hands by 9 a.m. Monday, the contract was cancelled. It arrived on time and appeared under Marshall's name. Three years later it appeared as a book, They Became What They Beheld, under my name.

Out of curiosity I will probably buy the April 1968 issue of Harper's Bazaar from ebay. But given the above information, it is pretty clear to me that Edmund Carpenter deserves the credit for both works.

I think of these two works and Understanding Media as collaborative efforts of two brilliant men and very close friends. In the former, Carpenter completed the work, in the later, McLuhan completed the work. Collaboration is difficult in print and authorship is not always an easy definition.  

In my opinion, They Became What They Beheld deserves the same respect as any McLuhan book. Highly recommended.

JSConf 2013 Speaker: JavaScript Journalism

I'm honored to be accepted as a speaker at JSConf 2013. I'll be speaking on JavaScript Journalism.

It is time that news stories told with JavaScript get recognized as a form of journalism. It took years for photo journalism to get the recognition it deserves, now is the time to recognize JS Journalism. 

Most news organizations presented election news using JavaScript. News home pages often have more JS than text. 

A bit of history. A bit of academia. A bit of current news. A few guesses about the future. But nothing about the future of newspapers.

UPDATE: Here is the slide deck and examples.

Deleting Duplicate mp3 on Mac

Using Amazon Music I download an album twice. It saved each file twice. One like "song.mp3" and the next as "song(1).mp3".

I wanted to delete all the files ending with "(1).mp3". The easiest way is to use the Mac terminal and  a shell. Here's the steps I took:
Opened Terminal
Change to the Music directory typing: "cd Music/Amazon\ MP3
Then typed: "find . -name  *\(1\)\.mp3"

If the find command listed only all the files I want to delete then I type the next line. But I must be certain because it is not reversible. Okay, are you certain?

Now delete: "find . -name  *\(1\)\.mp3 --delete"

This leaves me with a problem for itunes where there a duplicates.

Halloween Jokes 2012

When kids trick or treat at our house we ask them to tell a joke. We have the reputation as the 'joke house.' So these are the best from this year.

• Why didn't the skeleton cross the road? No guts. (a repeat joke)
• Where do ghost go to buy food? The ghostly-store.
• Why cannot you tell a secret on the farm? Potatoes have eyes and corn has ears.
• Why do spiders cross the road? Want to get food.
• Knock knock. Who's there? Joe. Joe who? Joe Biden my hamburger.
• Why no snacks at Halloween party? Everyone was a-goblin.
• Where do celebrities monsters hang-out? Maliboooo!

This were the 2006 Halloween jokes.

Barack Obama for Another Four Years

Some of my friends and family will not be voting for Obama. Many others won't be voting for him either. It surprises me that any citizen can vote against Obama. Or that anyone can vote for Romney. Here is why I am for Obama.

Our country is heading is the right direction with Obama. Being an older guy - I had a different Romney sticker on my car in 1968 - perhaps I take a longer view. History is important.

So I look at the dire situation this country was in at the time GM was facing bankruptcy. Job losses were huge. The stock market was losing value. Personal wealth and in particular home values were going negative. The world was on the brink of a depression. The Democratic team in government moved us away from this doom. So I am for Obama.

The deficit and the debt is a threat but to solve either unemployment must be lower. First, employment is heading in the right direction. Look at these charts and situation either candidate will face in January. Lower unemployment. Booming housing market. And better consumer confidence. The United States is back thanks to the last four years. So I am for Obama.

But back to the deficit and debt. People often talk about these together and they are two different problems. So I want to focus on the deficit and then the debt. First the current situation is not dire given the historically low interest rates that treasuries are now paying. Second, the deficit is being reduced because of the economic situation I just mentioned. Third, is there any reason to believe that a Republican administration can reduce the deficit? History shows us that Democrats are better able to do this than Republicans. Just look at Clinton's surpluses verus Bush's deficits. Fourth, tax cut will not reduce the deficit - see Ben Stien on Fox and Friends. So I am for Obama.

Now to the debt. Politician are right to talk about this as something that we leave our children. Politicians tend to kick problems down the road. Our current debt crisis is overwhelming a result of the previous Republican President, Vice President and Congress. Look at this one chart that shows the huge problems caused by the Bush tax cuts and the unbudgeted wars. Romney's and Ryan's support of continuing the tax cuts is the wrong direction. So I am for Obama.

Science advances our civilization. The anti-intellectual leanings of the previous Republican administration is not something I want to go back to. Embracing the anti-climate change views is just one example. Steven Chu appointment as Secretary of Energy is one example of were professionalism mattered for this administration. So I am for Obama.

Less government is a nice rallying call. But often people say this when they really mean that they don't trust government. But let's first look at less government. Government employment is down. Here is the chart showing public sector employment.  Part of the reason we have a slow recovery is because we have taken the path of less government. But you cannot want less government and then blame Obama for slow recovery too. So I am for Obama.

The social conservatives really don't believe is less government. They are against gay marriage. Defense of Marriage Act was so misnamed. They don't want individuals make decisions on abortion. Andrew Sullivan has called this out over the years. So I am for Obama.

Trust in government. Is government more efficient that the marketplace? No. But does that mean that every function of government should be privatized. Absolutely not. Look at the poor history of chartered schools. Look at the problems with military and semi-military contractors. Look a prisions. A company running a prison wants more business and not to find a way to reduce the prison population. So I trust government. I understand that you may not. But I do. So I am for Obama.

The disgrace of voter suppression and  non-existant voter fraud must be blamed on the Republicans. The voter id laws that Republican legislatures have passed is one of the most anti-democratic acts that I can remember in my lifetime. How can any candidate support this? It is unpopular to be against voter id but the Department of Justice has acted. So I am for Obama.

The other disgrace of the last few years has been the Republican Congress. During their first year of a majority in the House they did virtually nothing for job creation. They passed bills isolely for publicity and not to help the country. Their unified stance to be against anything the President recommended was selfish and echoes of the legislative problems in Congress pre-civil war. Obama has some blame as Woodward points out in his book. This situation worries me greatly. But many individual Republicans in Congress took this stand. So I am for Obama.

Libya may have been Obama's finest hour contrary to what we are now seeing in the news. I believe history will show Hillary Clinton as an outstanding Secretary of State. This is speculation and history will decide. But there should be little doubt that our relationship with our allies is improved. Our country is still paying for the reckless acts of the neocons of the previous administration who are Romney's advisors. So I am for Obama.

Even if one was opposed to any war, one must support our vets who bear the consequences. Though I have not studied this issue, it appear that this administration has supported vets better than any previous administration. So I am for Obama.

Obamacare. I am so glad to see Obama embrace this label. It maybe is legacy. It is hard to understate the positive impact of this legislation. Study the issue of pre-existing conditions. Study health insurance in other developed countries and the United States looks backwards. While I don't think it went far enough, I certainly don't want it repealed. So I am for Obama.

"Just trust me, I have a secret plan." I've heard that before. Recent news about George McGovern remind us that Nixon said the same about the Vietnam War. And we trusted Nixon? History has a strange way of repeating itself, or being so perceived. I'm not for Obama because of this, but Romney's asking for trust scares me.

Drones and privacy. I don't think either candidate speaks for where we should be going as a country related to these two issues.

One side point to keep this all in perspective. NPR pulled together an all-star team of economists to create a dream candidate based on economic policies they could all support. If enacted we could be a better country. But as you'll read, it is probably impossible to have any of these policies enacted just as single payer healthcare is unlikely.

And a final note. This is a billion dollar campaign and too much money corrupts. Lawrence Lessing's book Republic Lost details this. The ability to raise money is seen as an indicator of a successful candidate. I don't this our forefathers thought so. Obama has called for a constitutional amendment that is probably too small of a step. But it is the right direction. So I am for Obama.

Conventional wisdom is that incumbents had to run on their record. Thus, much of the above relates to the last four years. Foes argue that we need a plan for the next four years. Previous actions are the best indicator. I'd like to see the policies of the last four years continue for another four years.

I'd like to see the economy continue to recover. I'd like to see social progress continue. I'd like to see us continue our current foreign policy and withdraw from the battle field. I'd like to see Obamacare fully implemented. So I am for Obama.

I understand that you may not agree, but I hope you do.