Blogs on Kindle a Failure or Just Overpriced?

Piers Fawkes of PSFK has not been a fan of the Kindle and I can’t blame him.

Recently, their rather popular blog became available on the Kindle with a 14-day free trial and then the standard Kindle blog subscription rate of $1.99/month.  Here’s what happened:

During the first two week period of sales we added a button advertising the service to all our newsletters, website pages and RSS feeds – approximately 250,000 impressions. As some of you may remember, I penned the opinion piece ‘Kindle’s Not Working‘ last week and these sales figures surely prove statistically that Amazon’s technology is a failure when it comes to blog publishing and readership. It’s crazy to read that the tech media continues to be deluded about Kindle’s success when even with a 14 day free trial and massive awareness among our readership we can’t muster more than one $1.99 a month subscription.    LINK

Now, it isn’t really all that surprising that so few people decided to subscribe to the PSFK blog but I wonder if it has more to do with the $1.99/month pricetag combined Kindle’s failure as a rich media device – and it is a failure with no pictures, no video, etc.

Think about it.  If you are anything like me, you read a fair number of blogs.  In fact, I would say that I currently have over 50 blogs subscribed to in my GoogleReader.  If I wanted to even come close to replicating that experience on the Kindle it would cost me around $100/month or $1200/year just to read blogs that completely free online or via my iPhone.  On top of that, the Kindle is a completely inferior blog reader due to the aforementioned lack of rich media capabilities (or color, for that matter!).

So, while I am sad to hear that the Kindle will not be a revenue-generator for blogs, I think it was foolish for anyone to think otherwise given the overall picture.

Pirates Make Top Gear the Top Torrent. So…

I find the weekly list of top downloaded TV torrents fascinating.

Last week the top three shows were TOP GEAR, WEEDS and STARGATE ATLANTIS.

Unlike the classic Neilson numbers, the torrent list is much more international.  It also clearly has a bent toward a younger, more tech-savvy audience.  However, one would be wrong to ignore how important these types of fan can be to a show that is not viewed as traditionally popular at a given network.

The trick for the networks is to figure out how to lure that crowd away from the pirated torrents and toward their own streams.

Of course, that would mean real innovation and change so don’t expect anything soon.

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