Elephant Diaries: ‘Net Hugs

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If you’ll indulge me, a big Inkstain hug for hug for Bob Brewin:

I’m a reluctant blogger and know that good reporting will always beat any blog, as this Albuquerque Journal story illustrates. The Journal is a privately owned, independent newspaper (a rare item in these times) and is struggling to survive in an environment where all news is supposedly “free,” but someone has to pay the bills.

Earlier this month the Journal laid off seven newsroom staffers because it — like the rest of us in the news business — try to figure out how to make a buck in a world of seemingly “free” news.

Kudos to Fleck and Journal publisher Thompson Lang for continuing to do a great job in tough times.

Ah, Internet Discourse

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I’ve largely been out of the climate wars fray for years, but yesterday’s Hansen v. Pielke thread leads to a couple of observations:

  • New business model: mention Hansen and Pielke a lot.
  • The quality and usefulness of commenter contributions scales as the inverse square of their relative anonymity. (This blog in recent years has largely been a conversation among friends, whose names I know. Yesterday, reminder – wow, there are a bunch of anonymous assholes out there who don’t have much to say but have a real, um, flair for saying it anyway!)
  • Would mentioning Al Gore help my new business model? Or Bjorn Lomborg?

Oh, and did I mention Roger Pielke Jr. and James Hansen?

Elephant Diaries: The Business Model

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Here’s the ticket to big time business success on the Internet.

  1. Find some way to put your ads next to content created by someone else.
  2. Keep all of the money.
  3. Profit!

The beauty of the model of Google is the way they’ve they leveraged their investment in engineering talent to, at relatively small marginal cost, aggregate information created by others into a useful package. And slapped their own ads alongside. Peter Osnos talks about the issue this week:

[N]o one delivers more of that content online than Google does, through its search functions supported by advertising, the revenues from which go to its bottom line. The notion that “information wants to be free” is absurd when the delivery mechanism is making a fortune and the creators are getting what amounts to zilch.

This is a great business model, and I am not blaming Google for pursuing it. They have added tremendous value, for which they deserve to be financially rewarded. But it has created a problematic asymmetry.

The standard argument is that newspapers, the primary creators of most of the real-time information under discussion here, should be doing X in order to garner some of those ad dollars themselves. (Where X is “Be more Web 2.0!” or “Hyperlocal!” or “Integrate with Facebook!”) But the reality of reality of the web is that advertisers will pay substantially less for a reader on line, because ads are substantially less effective on line. The problem here is not attracing readers. Newspapers have been enormously successful at that. More people read newspapers than every before, thanks to the web. The problem is that the web advertising model will not pay for the work necessary to create the content to draw the readers.

Which means that the only way to make the web work is to figure out how to put your ads next to work done by someone else. A bit of additional marginal investment to create some modicum of value, and profit!

(I thank Jim Belshaw for bringing this to my attention.)

What Did Hansen Predict, and When Did He Predict It?

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Roger Pielke Jr. has a bit of an odd post up today taking James Hansen to task for predicting a “super El Niño” in 2006, which did not come to pass. Here’s Roger:

I’ve always thought that predictions made should not be forgotten, but evaluated and learned from.

The “prediction” in question, which I wrote about (somewhat critically) at the time, came in a draft paper Hansen circulated for comment. The “prediction” deserved criticism at the time. But to his credit, Hansen, at the time, before the paper was published, backed off, after hearing from members of the ENSO community who convinced him that the prediction was problematic. In the final version of the paper, published a few months later in PNAS, the forecast of a “super El Nino” in 2006 is gone.

There’s a significant difference between ideas shared in a draft circulated for comment and those finally published. To cite the former and ignore the latter in this case seems a bit misleading.

[update: Coby Beck has more details about the chain of events back in 2006 that I’d forgotten.]

Gas Dropoff Thingie Has Legs

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In today’s edition of Ask Inskstain, reader Scot wonders:

Have we got updated U.S. gasoline figures to see if the $4.00/gallon dropoff, uh…thingie, continues to have legs?

Great question, Scot!

Gasoline Consumption

Gasoline Consumption

Gasoline consumption in the United States continues to lag.

As for the other gas thingie, the post-July decline in gas prices is finally over:

Gas Prices

Gas Prices

Elephant Diaries: Checking in on the Comics

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Kelsey Atherton pokes at the newspaper elephant from the vantage point of the comics page:

Then, in 2007, webcomic Diesel Sweeties actually made the jump. The creator opted to create a separate print version, so as to keep his main comic and main revenue stream separate from the confines of print. Read that sentence again. This guy, who’s job primarily (though certainly not exclusively) consists of making a comic and putting it online, was making more from that than he was going to make from the previous holy-grail of webcartoonists, syndication. And in late 2008, he canceled his print comic. Too much work, his primary income was suffering, he was actually losing money, and it just wasn’t worth it to him. That club which Scotty had been kept out of four years prior? Totally not cool anymore.

Japanese Driving Less

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It’s not just us:

Japan, the world’s third-largest oil user, said gasoline sales in the country fell the most in more than half a century as record prices prompted motorists to drive less.

Sales fell 4.2 percent in 2008 to 57.3 million kiloliters (15.1 billion gallons), the biggest drop since the trade ministry started collecting data in 1952. Sales of oil-based fuels including gasoline fell 5.3 percent, the ministry said in a report in Tokyo today.

No surprise there, though it’s worth noting that the slump continued after prices collapsed, suggesting some sort of demand-side economic thingie beyond price response.

Who’s Really “Using” That Water

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David Zetland, the bad boy of water economics, offered up a fascinating argument the other day regarding the traditional argument that agriculture used three quarters of the water in the West. When a farmer irrigates her field, who is it who’s really the “user”?

When I use water to flush the toilet, that water only benefits me and is unavailable to others.**

Farmers, on the other hand, use water to grow products that benefit others. Put differently, we also use that water when we consume agricultural products.

So the right way to calculate “use” is not by looking at how much water one person (or sector) diverts but by looking at each participant’s share in the total benefit from that initial diversion.

For instance, say that a farmer diverts water to grow carrots. If he sells those carrots for $0.25/pound to the wholesaler, who sells them for $0.50/pound to the retailer, who sells them for $1.00/pound to consumers who value carrots at $2.00/pound, then we can say that the farmer and wholesaler each get 12.5% of the total value, the retailer gets 25% of the total value, and consumers get 50% of the total value.

So consumers are using 50 percent of “agricultural” water.

The numbers are merely notional here. It’s the underlying logic that’s important.