Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
Yogaworks has opened a new studio in New York, at the corner of Broadway and Grand Street. It’s got bamboo floors, showers with impressive pressure, electronically-locking lockers and walls painted in restful Ralph Lauren colors. The only thing missing? People. On the two days we went there there were few students. What’s wrong with this yoga picture?
Disclosure: I’m not going to rag on Yogaworks too badly. They gave us two free classes. But I think the empty studios are symptomatic of a pricing and marketing approach that is not working. For you non-yogis, bear with me, because this will become a metaphor for monetizing the web, particularly web journalism. (Metaphors, like yoga positions, can be bent a lot.) Ready? Ok, take a deep breath and let it out slowly.
The new Yogaworks in New York is built on a gym membership pricing plan. They want you to pay a monthly fee plus initiation, just like Crunch Gym or Spectrum. It’s a common model in NY and I suppose the Yogaworks brain trust figures they’ll grab some gym rats seeking to convert their sweat into salvation. But it’s old school.
They don’t want walk-ins – they just want your money. Up front. I’m supposed to be hearing “Om” when I walk into a studio, but at Yogaworks Soho I hear “pay me now.”
In Santa Monica, several new studios have opened within blocks of each other. YogaCo, Bhakti Yoga Shala and Yogis Anonymous work on a different pricing plan. You pay what you want. No membership, no set fee. Walk-ins are ok. You may not get a fancy shower (actually at YogaCo, you do) but you get a sense of connection with the teacher because you are paying him or her directly. They’re not working for a corporation; it’s a collective. Donation-based yoga is an old model from India, and truth be told, the teachers don’t profit unless they get bodies on the mats. That’s because they rent the space from the studio owner, and the students are reimbursing the teacher for that rental. More students, you profit. Less, you’re in the hole. It’s a problem similar to that faced by online journalists and other content providers. Hey, what’s that sound you’re hearing? It’s the creaky gears of my metaphor turning.
Think about all that’s free to the user on the web: Google, Twitter, Facebook. Successful? Google had $21.9 billion in revenue last year. Facebook, with 300 million users, just turned profitable. Twitter? Get back to you on that. Point is, free access works on the web and it can be monetized. Free services like Pandora and last.fm have ads, but you can pay to get rid of them.
Walter Isaacson, a smart fellow, has advocated the subscription model for online newspaper content. But you lock off access, you lock out users and you get the empty studio syndrome.
My metaphor is flawed, of course. Netflix is a successful subscription model with a low price point, and yoga teachers don’t make enough money unless their classes are packed. Imagine, however, if they tried some of the web’s dumber ideas to generate cash? How about pop up ads projected on the wall during class? Or the teacher who casually mentions that she loves Manduka brand mats? Weaving ads into content is even happening on Twitter. The next Tweet you read may be a plug, which is beyond irritating. Just thinking about it, I might have to do a yoga class to calm down.
All the same, I’d rather buy my yoga salvation like music on iTunes – pay as I go, no subliminal ads, no subscriptions.
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Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
Derek Jeter is actually Superman, right? Even better if he wore a cape to games, but then he might trip over it on the way to receiving his friggin’ World Series trophy.
When I say I hate the Yankees, I know I am in good company. A quick check of Twitter reveals many thoughtful critiques of the team.
I’m just going to lie down on a psychoanalyst’s couch, preferably one made of soft baseball glove leather, and sort out my Yankee feelings. Hand me that baseball autographed by Sandy Koufax, will you? Thanks. Let me turn it over in my hands and think about this.
Reason #1. Steinbrenner fired Yogi Berra in 1985. Yogi once said, “That restaurant is so crowded nobody goes there anymore.” It wasn’t right to fire a linguist like that. But, yeah, I forgot – it’s all about winning.
Reason #2. The new Yankee stadium cost $1.5 billion including financing, the most expensive sports venue in America. Want to go online to snag a seat at Thursday’s game? How’s $3,000 sound?
“It’s always George’s philosophy: This is the Yankees, everything has to be done first-rate. We wanted … to create a stadium that, when you go in, there’s a ‘wow’ factor.” — Randy Levine, Yankees president
How about, “wow,” why does Steinbrenner have his hand down my pants? Oh, sorry, he’s just reaching for my wallet.
The Yankees did put up most of the bucks to build their palace, so somehow they have to pay for it. But does that mean I have to get a loan at Citigroup to afford a friggin’ ticket? Just cut out the mayo in your sandwich, you might be able to afford a cheap seat on StubHub.com. Makes you want to scream.
Reason #3. But wait, screaming at people is Steinbrenner’s job. Oh, you say, “It’s good to scream at people — gets them motivated!” Not true.
In the 1960s, a psychologist named Daniel Kahneman listened to some Israeli air force flight instructors talk about how they got their students to fly maneuvers.
“I’ve often praised people warmly for beautifully executed maneuvers, and the next time they always do worse,” said one flight instructor. “And I’ve screamed at people for badly executed maneuvers, and by and large the next time they improve.”
The instructor was wrong. Kahneman and a scientist named Amos Tversky studied patterns of human behavior, and learned that screaming is not a powerful educational tool. As Leonard Mlodinow put it in his book “The Drunkard’s Walk”:
The answer lies in a phenomenon called regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinary one.
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As you practice anything, catching a baseball, flying fighter planes, your skill improves slowly and is not always noticeable from one day to the next. Your good days and bad days are mostly a matter of luck. A Steinbrenner will not necessarily have any effect on your performance. It’s not about the yelling, or the praise, but about the practice.
In 2002, Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. How many Nobel Prizes has Steinbrenner won? I can tell you without pausing to look it up: Zero. Why? Because he yells at people and he fired Yogi Berra in 1985.
Don’t ask me about the Mets.
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Twitter, sacred? Well, maybe. A recent blog by Stephen Dinan started the ball rolling for me by asking “When something is wildly successful, as Twitter now is, I often ask myself about its higher purpose. In other words, what might be the deeper meaning of Twitter?”
Could a string of 140 characters have a higher meaning?
In his blog, Dinan makes the case that Twitter is propagating new ideas at light speed, helping to create a new form of intimacy and allowing us to connect with our individuality while tracking global concerns.
Let’s break that down. There’s no doubt that ideas propelled at the speed of light are spreading faster than ever before. The concept of intimacy and “friendship” is also changing fast. By looking at my Blackberry I can learn what my friends thought of exploding stereotypes in Julie and Julia or exploding bodies in District 9. One friend is getting metal rods in his foot after a 80 mph racing kart crash. Ok, too much information. Point is, this kind of intimacy doesn’t involve face to face, more like face to screen. You can have involved relationships with people without ever meeting them.
Decline of civilization, ya think? Could be. But I think it’s more about people craving connection and being inventive about finding it where they can. I can’t find the town square of Los Angeles on my GPS; neither can anybody else. 
So we have to invent a town square. Mine turns out to be on a screen. Is that a strange place to find “what it’s all about?”
“I am glad I wasn’t there. I hate crowds. In a field? No in-door plumbing? My sister will tell you that camping, to me, has always meant a Holiday Inn. Music? I’m tone deaf.”
-Mathew Tombers
Tombers wrote that in a blog about Woodstock, the cultural touchstone that happened forty years ago this month. Like Tombers, I too would have stayed away, but only because I can’t deal with using a porta-potty while on acid. The iconic moment of Woodstock has come around again in a surprising way – this time instead of mud and music we have pixels and social progress.
As people seek connection on the Internet they are also trying to do work that matters. The two go together because the exchange of ideas is accelerating while we remain connected with hundreds if not thousands of people. Businesses are going green. People are looking at micro-financing to help the world’s poor. The shows I’m pitching in my company are about healing or consciousness or science and spirit. Ideas travel fast when they’re wired and there’s the sense that we’re all thinking the same thing: How can we do good?
As Lynne Twist writes in The Soul of Money, “The communications explosion has awakened our natural relatedness to one another and the awareness of the fact that we’re interconnected. It has also facilitated a truly global conversation on important issues that affect us all.”
A global conversation on Twitter? That’s technology helping us put a lot of consciousness into 140 characters.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
I’m taking a break from deep topics to write about something shallow: Social networking. But hey, I mean shallow in a good way. Social networking has a huge reach. Yes, there’s something vaguely totalitarian and Hitler-esque about having “followers” on Twitter. But Twitter has been used to get the word out about the fixed elections in Iran and to track emergency weather. Two million people are following Ashton Kutcher on Twitter. I know that Jane Fonda had a knee operation because she tweeted.
I don’t know about the usefulness of all that information, but I do know that information feeds SEO – that stands for search engine optimization. It’s the magic stuff you do to get people to find your wisdom on the web – the keywords, text and phrases you embed in your content. I’m going to share what I’ve learned recently about all this from some experts. Let’s start with
SEO guru Scott Edwards.
Scott sets up social networking sites to help people group themselves by their interests and get content they want. There are more than 200 million users on Facebook. That makes Facebook something like the fifth largest country in the world, a country without borders but formed by people who are obsessed about high school. The high school connection aside, Scott encouraged me to start Facebook pages related to projects we’re working on. Good idea. Over coffee at Peet’s he also told me about a site called fmylife.com, one of the most active on the web. People contribute a few lines about something terrible that happened to them and end with the telling initials FML.” It’s sick, but people like to contribute and it will make you laugh.
Buzzwords and buzzphrases have become important. There’s a company called Hubspot that will sell you some software that makes your content more search-friendly. They’ve done something smart – popularized a buzzphrase called “inbound marketing.” They practically own it – Google it and you’ll see Hubspot’s fingerprints all over it. That’s called having authority over a search phrase. Hubspot told me that DocuCinema has good authority, and 500 Words also has good authority as a search phrase, so I must be doing something right.
Scott and I also talked about Digg.com. This site gives people a chance to vote on sites they like – and if you make it to the front page of Digg by virtue of these recommendations, you are gold. There’s stumbleupon.com, a useful site with a funny name. When you sign up, stumbleupon asks you about your interests and tries to throw interesting websites your way. It’s a bit like wandering in the library and plucking books from the shelves. It may lead you to cuteoverload.com, a waste of time but very good if you like photos of sleeping kittens.
You can join LinkedIn, sometimes called Facebook for people with jobs, and post your resume. If you really want to geek out, you can write a blog and optimize the title of it by putting the most search-friendly word first and then go in descending order of searchability. That would make the best title for this post “Web Weave We Tangled Oh.” Hmm. Guess you can’t optimize everything.
