Last day of the year, and pulling out those excerpts that have been gathering dust in the draft box. Stay tuned for the New Medici network to go live in Q1 2010, as well as a  breakdown of media companies for last year and going forward into the new year.

via How to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions - WSJ.com

It is no secret that the odds against keeping a New Year’s resolution are steep. Only about 19% of people who make them actually stick to their vows for two years, according to research led by John Norcross, a psychology professor at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.

But those discouraging statistics mask an important truth: The simple act of making a New Year’s resolution sharply improves your chances of accomplishing a positive change—by a factor of 10. Among those people who make resolutions in a typical year, 46% keep them for at least six months. That compares with only 4% of a comparable group of people who wanted to make specific changes and thought about doing so, but stopped short of making an actual resolution, says a 2002 study of 282 people, led by Dr. Norcross and published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

via How Google Can Combat Content Farms

• Neutralize the link dilution; A.J. Kohn, who further wrote that “the introduction of SearchWiki, their measurement of short-clicks versus long-clicks, the new domain/brand SERP listing, snippet links, and use of breadcrumbs all point to a gathering movement to help determine quality without such a reliance on an ever diluted link ecosystem.”
• Do a better job ranking authority; for more on this read Clay Shirky’s post on “Algorithmic Authority.”
• Introduce a user rating system; Tony Masinelli.
• Leverage sharing networks to determine where the quality is; Alex Kessinger.

via Will the Huffington Post strategy pay off? - LAT

And despite its big jump in popularity, ad experts said the Huffington Post still gets treated like the poor relation by some advertisers. That’s because the site combines serious political analysis with cheesecake photos of the stars. It breaks real news on healthcare reform and has little-knowns riffing on pop culture.

Some Web aficionados have described this as a “mullet strategy” — sharp and well groomed content at the prominent front of a website, but with shaggy and uneven offerings tagged onto the back end.

via Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried

Right now ‘quantity’ still rules on the Web, ‘quality’ is hard to find. Perhaps that’s why Reuters is betting on the subscription model - it hopes that consumers will just subscribe to quality content, thereby removing the need to search for it. I think there’s something to that, which if true implies that Google will become less relevant in the future. Should Google be worried about that? Yes; and they are.

via Paramount Pictures Finds Long-Sought Balance - NYTimes

In an effort to create a kind of research and development arm, Paramount is also allotting about $1 million a year to produce about 10 movies in a new micro-budget division where budgets will be kept under $100,000. Building on the success of “Paranormal Activity,” the idea is to make films that can be released unconventionally — sometimes in theaters, sometimes not — without relying on expensive advertising. The investment is so small that a single success could cover the division’s expenses for the entire year, while also creating an environment where a new filmmaker might emerge or an established one could safely experiment.

via The End Of Hand Crafted Content

On one end you have AOL and their Toyota Strategy of building thousand of niche content sites via the work of cast-offs from old media. That leads to a whole lot of really, really crappy content being highlighted right on the massive AOL home page. This article, for example, is just horrendous. One of AOL’s own blogs trashes the company’s spinoff, rambles for miles without any real point, and adds a huge factual error to top things off (”the company is losing money”). Hiring a bunch of people who couldn’t keep their old media jobs and don’t have the stomach to go out on their own and then slapping little or no editorial oversight onto these masses of sub-par journalists leads to an inevitable conclusion – cheap, crappy content. And that crappy content is given a massive audience on the AOL portal.

via ‘Thinking Big’: Breitbart Signs Book Deal With Hachette/Grand Central - Big Hollywood

Andrew Breitbart, a self-described “accidental culture warrior” who used to work with Matt Drudge on the Drudge Report, is writing a how-to book called Thinking Big, aimed at frustrated non-leftists who want to fight back against what the author calls the “Democrat media complex.”

The book will be published by Grand Central, an imprint of Hachette Book Group USA, which paid Mr. Breitbart an advance worth more than half a million dollars. Mr. Breitbart will be edited by Rick Wolff, who also recently edited the autobiography of CNN founder Ted Turner.

via Gawker Media Has 400 Million Monthly Pageviews

Denton says: Just a shade off 400m pageviews in November. Damn. Close. To put that in perspective, Los Angeles Times is somewhere between 100m and 200m. New York Times is about 1bn. In web traffic, we’re somewhere in between. Not bad for a bunch of scrappy bloggers!

io9 sucked those Twilight vampires dry. The scifi site continues to run at twice the traffic of this time last year. It’s now twice the size of Boing Boing, the closest competitor — a site which has been around since the beginning of the blogs. io9’s growth means that we now have not a single site under 20m pageviews a month. (The threshold of success used to be 1m!)

Next up for Denton’s army: Grow uniques. Denton says that’s the focus for 2010:

One little footnote. Pageviews have been our standard measure of success. They’re easy to understand. The Sitemeter numbers update throughout the day. But we do need to recognize that not all pageviews are created equal. A slideshow view is not worth as much as a click from Twitter or Facebook or Digg which brings a new reader to us. Expect more emphasis in 2010 on clicks through from external sites — and the “uniques” which measure of the number of people that we reach. We can’t just satisfy our existing regulars; we have to recruit new ones.