Online news is an interesting category in the Turkish internet market.  There are 22, I repeat, 22 websites at which you can read news in the top 100 web properties in Turkey, according to Alexa. (That number includes newspaper sites, online news sites, large portals with a major "news" category and sports news.)  This is quite an anomaly.  To compare, that number is 10 in the UK.

Most of these websites either take news content prepared for an offline news outlet and repurpose it for online consumption.  Others just aggregate and shallowly edit the wire services output.  There are even others that strive to replicate a traditional news production environment to feed into pure online consumption.

What seems to be missing in the Turkish market is a born-on-the-web news property, explicitly designed and tech-enabled for online consumption, that creates a community around itself.  I think there's quite a bit of overlap between what I am trying to describe and what Umair Haque talks about in his Nichepaper Manifesto:

Nichepapers are different because they have built a profound mastery
of a tightly defined domain — finance, politics, even entertainment —
and offer audiences deep, unwavering knowledge of it.

Nichepapers aren't a new product, service, or business model. They are a new institution. They're
a living example of the institutional innovation that is the key to
21st century business. They're not the same old newspaper, sold a
different way. They are 21st century newspapers, built on new rules,
that are letting radical innovators reinvent what "news" is.

According to Umair, the model involves the following tenets: 

Commentage, not commentary.

Topics, not articles.

Scarcity, not circulation.

Now, not then.

Provocation, not perfection.

Snowballs, not sell-outs.

Tasks, not tech.

These points describe a fantastic starting point. I think there would be a prize for the property that is able to accomplish the above points in the Turkish market.  The closest example I can think of is the HuffPo.  Umair adds Talking Points Memo, Perez Hilton and, one of my favorite websites, Business Insider.

However, I am trying to define a property that is beyond Umair's
nichepaper.  They could work in niches and narrowly focused topics.  But, I suspect, in the news-hungry Turkish market, a property incorporating these principles can succeed with a broader, generalist focus, as well.  In fact, the economics of Turkish online advertising may dictate that it becomes broader focused to attain critical traffic mass enough for major advertising access.

Anyone watching the Turkish internet market would not be surprised by this press release from comScore today. 

Turkey's sheer size is a factor here but old media's lack of innovation will continue to drive the young masses online, just as Facebook demonstrated.  Monetization of this massive level of engagement is not mature yet, but will follow.

This is an exciting day for Turkish internet.

PS:  Congratulations to our portfolio company, GittiGidiyor, for its placement in the Top 15 properties list.

So we should be looking right back at Yahoo.

In another leaked memo yesterday, Yahoo's new CEO Bartz is telling other Yahoos:

While I am a bit skeptical about the relevance of Autodesk's business (software) to Yahoo's (digital media), and thus the relevance of her observations here, it's nevertheless an exciting quote for those of us in the emerging markets.  Yahoo's been largely ignoring Turkey so far and maybe that's about to change.

It's not everyday that John Battelle writes about a Turkish company, so this one's worthwhile.  Apparently, a Turkish Flash game site called Oyuncambazi.com (no link!) has been comment-spamming John's blog.  He finally blogged about it and given his high high authority on Google, this post is now the second organic return for a search on "oyuncambazi".

This is really amusing as I hate comment-spam, which costs me a couple of minutes a day, even with my low trafic blog!

Sirius XM, the digital radio co, is trading at $0.20, off its 52 week high of $3.94.  It's 95% down from that peak and about 99.7% down from its all-time high circa 2000.  Still, it's a company with $1b+ revenues, so it's not insignificant.  It's run by Mel Karmazin, who personifies old media to me.

I am not a bit surprised by the state of the company.  I never got satellite radio.  I presumed it's targeted at cars and delivered a constant, high quality signal so it was an improvement over traditional radio, but the high cost of equipment replacement and the high cost of subscription was always a barrier for me to ever become a customer.

Then I realized that the entire venture was dependent on biz dev relationships, which, for me, is the worst kind of competitive advantage for a business.  And in this case, this dependency was with car manufactureres.  The satellite radio companies were trying to get their equipment as standard accessories in cars, turning around and cutting expensive proprietary content deals, to turn and squeeze value out of customers.

This is so far from value at the edge.  So much of old media still does not get what business they are in.  I see this currently at play in Turkey, where the leading satellite TV provider, Digiturk, is trying to sell me Tivo capabilities for $500 for the box plus an increase in my $70/mo subscription.  Are they nuts?  I got my digital cable plus PVR plus unlimited local and national calls plus broadband in NYC (a very expensive city) in 2005 for less than $100/month.

Old media should look at their strategy, then at Sirius XM, and rethink.  Fast.

I had not heard that the US Army had banned YouTube in May 2007.  Its reasoning: "security and bandwidth issues".

Now the Army is announcing the launch of an alternative video sharing site, TroopTube.  The move is being called "a "retention tool" aimed at a generation of soldiers who bring laptops to the front lines."

What they don't get is that YouTube is not a video sharing site, it is a part of people's lives.  Their retention tool will not work.  It will not replace YouTube.  Just the way that USA Today they drop outside your door at hotels does not replace your NY Times, even though they both give you news.

What they also don't get, just like the Turkish courts don't, is that banning YouTube does not keep a population from accessing it.  I am sure there will be leaks of sensitive information from military ranks through the multitude of channels available for sharing information. 

YouTube, which has been banned in Turkey for months, is still the #11 most popular website in Turkey, accoding to Alexa.  It woud have been Top 5 had it not been for the ban, but still, it's way ahead of all the alternative video sites.

What a waste of taxpayer's money, in both cases.