The Mac Professional's Resource
For many years, Apple’s growth has come on the shoulders of the iPod, which has dominated the portable music player market almost since its inception. This was great for Apple as a company, but Apple’s success at bringing people to the iPod did not always translate into success for Apple hardware. iPod and iTunes ruled music, but Apple was still kicking along at less than 5% market share, even as other computer companies were enjoying record sales. Now, at least one company is saying that Apple’s computer market share is making a comeback as well.
ComputerWeek reports that Net Applications, which tracks web statistics for over 40,000 companies, reports that Apple’s browsing market share finshed at just over 8% in 2007, which represents an increase of 28% for the year. Browsing statistics are not a perfect measure of how popular computers are, especially among businesses, but the numbers seem to mirror what Apple had to say in its 4th Quarter Financial Results. Still, this is good news for Apple fans, as many have wondered if the focus on the iPod and iPhone has hurt Apple’s innovation in computer hardware by spreading its engineers too thin.
— Joe Fahs
We want to extend an easy way for MacEdition readers to ensure we can generate the type of Mac-specific content that seems to be missing in the general technology press.
There will be three levels of reader sponsorship.
We’re going to start these sponsorships as soon as technically feasible.
For your donation of $10, you’ll get a one-line notation on our sponsorship page which will last a month.
For your donation of $25, you’ll get a one-line notation which can link to a website which will last a month.
For your donation of $50, you’ll get a high-quality shirt.
For your donation of $100, you’ll get a shirt plus a one-line notation on our sponsorship page for a month.
For your donation of $500, you’ll get two shirts of your choice plus a one-line notation linked to a website which will last three months.
For your donation of $1000, you’ll get four shirts, plus a one-line notation linked to a website which will last a whole year.
MacEdition reserves the right to decline a donation if the content of the sponsorship message or link is unacceptable.
Notations on the sponsorship page will be listed in order of donation amount.
Notations will start on the day of the donation and end after the period promised at the level of sponsorship.
— Tom Ierna
MacEdition has been dormant for many years – our last published article was in mid-2003. Today we start anew.
Initially, we were a band of holdouts from the closure of MacWeek. From our inception in 2000, we strove to be the best web-based Mac publication when many Mac-only print publications were going cross-platform or worse – closing for lack of ad revenue.
So, what happened to us? A number of things:
Our content creators, webmasters, editors and copyeditors were all volunteers, so their day jobs came first. Eventually, the volunteer effort stagnated.
We failed to monetize the content created by our band of volunteers. Good content costs money because good writers have to eat. We created the site just on the cusp of the time between when advertising was mostly sold to individual companies and affiliate marketing started to take hold.
Had we hit our peak a couple years earlier, we’d probably have been big enough to keep selling directly to advertisers. A couple of years later and the shakeout of the affiliate marketing programs would have allowed us to make enough money to actually pay for content and hosting.
In 2002, Gizmodo showed that a snippets-of-cool-stuff model was where web-media was headed. Weblogs, Inc., created in 2004, expanded on this notion, and now has a large stable of sites which feature a thin column of content surrounded by hundreds of blinky ads.
On day one of MacEdition, there were several high-priced proprietary CMS systems out there. Big corporations with money bought them. Little guys with no money either had to use Blogger, hand-code their HTML or roll their own CMS with the LAMP stack. We chose the latter two, opting to hand-code while we built our own CMS, forum software and other tools.
The programming was also a volunteer effort, and while it was successful in its’ own right, when it was complete it was totally unlike anything else out there. Because it wasn’t built on MovableType or WordPress, and the forums weren’t phpBB or YaBB, that meant instead of installing new functionality built and tested by a community, we were stacking up bug reports and feature requests on the two volunteer programmers in our “staff”.
The slow fizzle of MacEdition and other early Mac-specific sites has been something we’ve been thinking on since it happened. Making this site a success will depend on fixing the three major problems above.
The only thing wrong with volunteer contributions is that you can’t always count on them. To ensure an adequate quantity of excellent content, we’ll have to pay authors, editors, designers, our hosting provider and system administrator.
We don’t want to be Gizmodo or Engadget or TUAW. By volume, most of these are around 75% affiliate ads. The content there is snack-sized. That’s not to say it’s bad – I read these sites all the time. They just don’t generate much real analysis. To pay the authors we want to pay for the pieces we want to run, we’ll have to think about other tactics aside from filling the entire page with junk.
So far, we’ve identified four streams of revenue for MacEdition. First, we’ll be reader supported. We’ll have reader sponsorships for sale, where you’ll get some cool schwag at different levels. Second, we’ll be approaching the best of the Mac products companies for monthly sponsorships. Third, we hope to use many of the media revenue tools that simply weren’t available at our inception, like Revver and YouTube’s content ads. Lastly, we’ll have a few affiliate marketing ads. Currently, the thought is to have five prominent company sponsorship slots, and three affiliate ad slots, using a mix of Google AdSense and Amazon.
Instead of coding everything only to have to support it and try to be editors, writers and graphics designers, we’re using off-the-shelf open-source software and plugins to publish the site and the forums. Features that would have taken months to roll out between 2000 and 2003 have taken days or even hours over the last month’s preparation.
January will be our benchmark for success. Our unofficial goal to classify a month’s content as successful is 10 high-quality analysis pieces, 30 blurbs and 3 podcast or videocast pieces. Back of the envelope calculations indicate that this content would cost about $10k.
Given that kind of content cost, the gross revenue goals are similarly high – $7k in reader sponsorships, $5k in company sponsorships, $2k in new media streams and $1k in affiliate marketing. We’ll probably net 30-50% from the reader sponsorships because the schwag will be high-quality American-made stuff. The new-media streams will cost money to record, edit and produce, so they’ll probably net $1k. Given past experience, $1k will be tough to hit for the affiliate marketing.
If we meet both the content goals and the revenue goals, the net profit will be slim, but everyone will get paid, and the content won’t suffer.
So, help us meet our goals – if you are a reader, click through to read about the various levels of MacEdition Reader Sponsorship . If you are a business interested in one of the 5 company sponsorships for any given month, please send us an e-mail . If you want to write for us, please let us know .
— Tom Ierna
Here’s where MacEdition related photos, images and commentary will go.
— Tom Ierna
While the world awaits the full release of Office 2008 which will finally bring Intel-native performance and file format compatibility with Office 2007, Microsoft quietly released a new beta of their Open XML File Format Converter for the Mac. The new version expires on December 31, 2008. It’s still in beta and doesn’t promise perfect results, but should help people who need to work on .docx and similar files that they might receive.
Our results have been pretty good with the original beta (it’s still easier to have the other party save their file in the older format), but the most limiting thing about this release is that it requires 10.4.8, leaving many people with Macs still chugging along with 10.3 looking for another option.
— Joe Fahs