Month: December 2010

Remember when Wired’s debut issue for the iPad sold more than 100,000 times in June? It looks like it will be a while before that type of performance is seen again. Digital sales dropped toward the end of 2010 for all the magazines that make those figures available to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Many magazines that are available on the iPad, such as Esquire, People and The New Yorker, have not posted their digital single-issue sales to the ABC. But Vanity Fair sold 8,700 digital editions of its November issue, down from its average of about 10,500 for the August, September and October issues. Glamour sold 4,301 digital editions in September, but sales dropped 20 percent in October and then another 20 percent, to 2,775, in November. GQ’s November edition sold 11,000 times, which was its worst performance since April (when the iPad was released) and represents a slight decline from its average digital sales of 13,000 between May and October.

After Wired’s enormous debut month, the magazine averaged 31,000 digital sales between July and September, but even that fell in October and November, with sales coming in at 22,000 and 23,000, respectively. (For comparison, the magazine sold 130,000 total print editions for October and November.)

Men’s Health, which averaged digital sales of about 2,800 in the spring, sold 2,000 times in both September and October.

All these magazines charge to buy issues on the iPad or iPhone.

Publishers are hopeful their December and January numbers will bump back up after more consumers get their hands on digital devices during the holidays. Call it an early New Year’s wish.

Spotify (v): To repeatedly and embarrassingly fail to launch in the US.

The list also got me wondering which other tech-centric verbs might – or at least should – have been coined this year. Verbs like…

Tumbl (v): To suffer increasing periods of downtime at the same time as the media anoints you the “next big thing” (Replaces last year’s: to Twitter)

Facebook (v): To continue to grow in valuation no matter how many (privacy, ad-scam or Aaron Sorkin movie) scandals surround you. (See also: to sell your soul to the devil)

Quora (v): To build a “highly praised” (and “valuable”) service despite the fact that only twelve people actually use it, just because those twelve people happen to be Silicon Valley investors and reporters. (For antonym see “to Yahoo Answers”)

Instagram (v): To take a shitty photograph, and make it shittier.

Yahoo! (v): To somehow appear even more tragic through the use of optimistic punctuation. (See also: Bebo! Digg! A!O!L!)

TechCrunch (v): To sell your company to a corporation you would criticise others for selling to, at the kind of (reported) valuation that you’d criticise others for accepting, at a time you’d… etc.

Remember their name:

Three experiments demonstrate that remembering someone’s name facilitates their compliance with a purchase request made by the rememberer. Experiment 1 shows that name remembrance increases request compliance, but name forgetting does not cause a decrease in compliance. Experiments 2 and 3 show that name remembrance is perceived as a compliment by the person remembered, which mediates compliance with the purchase request. Experimental manipulations of the likelihood of name remembrance (experiment 2) and need for self-enhancement (experiment 3) provide results consistent with a complimentary explanation for the findings.

Source: What’s in a Name? A Complimentary Means of Persuasion” from Journal of Consumer Research

Something good has come out of MySpace!

“In the last year, time spent using e-mail sites like Yahoo and Hotmail has fallen 48 percent among 12- to 17-year-olds, according to comScore, a market research firm. The statistics only include time spent with e-mail on computers, so the decline may be somewhat offset by teenagers using e-mail on their phones.”

This is the time of year when individuals (people like you and I) start thinking more about work/life balance.

Don’t do it. There is no such thing as work/life balance. By even saying there is such balance, you’re making an internal agreement that work is not a part of a healthy life, and I just don’t buy it. Like you, I put a good chunk of my waking hours against the work I do. I can’t accept that it doesn’t constitute an important and real part of my life. In the end, I’m not looking for work/life balance… I’m looking for life balance.

What does life balance look like?

Balance in your life falls into three main categories:

1. Personal. Making time to build solid relationships with your family friends and peers. Think of The Beatles: “The love you take is equal to the love you make” (hat-tip to Yosi for reminding of that lyric yesterday). Without a healthy family and friend social structure there will be nothing but loneliness. Human beings don’t thrive on loneliness… no matter what someone who is lonely tries to tell/sell you. Your personal health also falls into this category (and I’m not just talking about grabbing a workout a couple of times a week). Think about what you’re doing to develop and nurture your mind, body and spirit (even if it sounds hokey to you).
2. Business. Ensuring that you’re doing the work you were meant to do. That the work you do (day in and day out) is your art. So, when someone says, “it’s nothing personal, it’s just business,” you can proudly respond, “I spend a good chunk of my life doing business and I take it very personally!” I just saw this tweet via Rahaf Harfoush on Twitter: “@brandcowboy: You’ll always do better work for people you care about, and you’ll lose your soul taking money from people you don’t.” If you’re struggling with this, please read Seth Godin‘s book, Linchpin, over your holiday break and make some hard decisions about your future.
3. Community. Simply put: you can’t have a wealthy business and a healthy family if you’re in a weak community. The only way your community will be strong is if you contribute to it actively and regularly. A strong business and a strong social life comes from a strong community. Helping others who are less fortunate or by contributing to groups and associations who are making change in your community is critical to life balance.

Life balance is a three-legged stool.

Just like a stool, if you remove one of the legs or when one is shorter than another, everything comes crashing down. Figure out ways to find true balance without sacrificing where you’re at, where you’re looking to go and your plans to get there. Make sure that your goals (short-term and long-term) include tactics around personal, business and community.

Make rules.

If you don’t have rules about your life balance, all is (and will be) lost. Don’t have guidelines. Make rules… and don’t break them. Here are just some of my life balance rules (in no particular order):

1. Family first. Period. No exceptions. Friends next. Everything else after that.
2. Go to bed when I’m tired.
3. Wake up without an alarm.
4. Don’t stress over sleep. My body will sleep when it needs to.
5. Constantly be reading (more on that here: The Most Important Thing You Can Do…).
6. Creativity and great ideas do not keep office hours. Write as much as possible – especially when the mood hits.
7. I manage my technology. I do not let technology manage me. An example of this? I check email when I want to – not when it comes in. I turn off all email notifications (both online and mobile).
8. Don’t focus on the money. Focus on building wealth and what I’ll do to change the world once I get there (or along the way).
9. Never eat alone. It’s something I was doing long before I read the great book by Keith Ferrazzi.

Sometimes you break your own rules.

There are always exceptions to these rules and sometimes these rules have to be broken. If I’m breaking the rule, I acknowledge it and will often apologize to those in advance by explaining the situation as an exception and helping those who are impacted by it to know that I am doing so (and that it’s an uncommon occurrence). Another exception is when breaking a rule will help me to grow and expand. Rules can limit our personal growth and we have to be aware of that.

Work/life balance is a myth.