Compelling content is the least performing asset in a profitable web strategy. Not only is its impact marginal, the demographics of its audience is that of non-performers. Web visitors who visit your site often because they enjoy the content monetize at very low rates. Social communities that evolve around a theme are not business's. They are hobbies or labor of loves. Paid subscriptions are only viable until your audience matures enough to source their individual interests for free in any number of places. Check the renewal rates on paid subscriptions. Nonexistent.

If compelling content doesn't pay, what does?

The study was conducted last week and consisted of one hundred random*, English-speaking participants who either identified themselves as users or non-users of the Twitter service. Each group was then asked to write 100 words about what they did that day.

He found out that while Twitter users maul the grammar, they seem to spell well--once they're operating outside the cramped confines of 140-characters. But why would they (or we, since I'm a Twitterer)continue to cut corners on grammar outside the Tweet box, but improve the spelling? Ideas?

Ning, the service that lets you create your own social network, is growing quick and attracting some big names. Author Seth Godin used the platform to start a private forum for marketing experts. Rapper 50 Cent has attracted such a following on his network, Thisis50.com, that other hip hop artists have started advertising on the site to find new fans.

On Wednesday, Wyclef Jean announced to his Twitter followers that he was abandoning Clef Zone, the Ning network that he only recently created. His specific objection to Ning is unclear (we have a call out to Wyclef, who for some reason posted his phone number on Twitter the same day), but he says on Twitter that "i want my own server" and "I wanna be in full control of my vision." The performer also hints that he's concerned about the security of internal messaging on the site, saying (sic) "I DONT TRUST A SOCIAL NETWORK WERE THEY HAVE YOUR EMAILS."

Guess who responded? Ning CEO Gina Bianchini, who frequently gives her users personal attention -- particularly the A-listers. Wyclef's complaint and Gina's response are below. I'll update this post if I hear back from either party.

Update (2:15 PM Eastern): Looks like there's no hard feelings between Wyclef and Ning...

And Ning spokeswoman Morgan Seal provides this statement:

We love when people experiment with Ning. Based on the tweets you reference, it looks like Wyclef and his team decided they wanted to develop a social networking application on their own servers with their own developers. While Ning provides an easy way to create and customize your own social network and gives Network Creators full access to member data and control of their content, we fully respect and understand that Ning may not be right for everyone.

The idea is that viewers' brains respond more strongly to clear and didactic promotions. In the post, we're shown two promos. One, a dull but straight-forward 30-second spot for Entertainment Tonight, tells us exactly what we can expect (Britney in a bathing suit). Our brains, statistically speaking, respond in unison to that. Contrast that with a much choreographed promo for Nip/Tuck, which (to my eyes) is much more captivating, but opaque. Brains respond to it in many ways. The conclusion from Simulmedia, Dave Morgan's TV ad tech startup, is that advertisers will prefer the predictable brain patterns produced by clear communication.

Does that mean that TV promos will be dumbed down? Perhaps. But conceivably, promos that are both clear and funny or visually compelling will prove to be even more effective. I can only hope that researchers will eventually track down the brain waves of the audience segment drawn to weird stuff.

On Tuesday, Joost announced that it's closing its consumer video site to become a white label video platform. Initially created by Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis as a desktop application, Joost relaunched as a flash-based Web site in late 2008 to compete directly with Hulu. Even though it called Viacom and CBS investors, Joost never gained a library of exclusive shows from those companies in the way that Fox and NBC shows have driven the success of Hulu.

Instead, Joost sold itself as a social venue for Web TV. It was among the first launch partners for Facebook Connect, letting visitors alert their friends on the social network to what they're watching. It encouraged users to "tag" videos and vote on whether they liked or disliked them. And it displayed a public news feed of what other Joost users are watching at any given time.

As Mike Volpi, who's stepping down from the role of chief executive, told me in January, all of these features were designed to make Web TV more like -- well, TV. "Part of the challenge of making video social on the Internet is not just hooking it up to a Twitter feed or a social graph, but making features that recreate the Golden Era of television, of watching a program on the couch," he said then.

Apparently, that experiment failed.

While Hulu has some social elements, like the ability to review clips, those features are secondary to the site's focus on compelling content. Great new shows, I would argue, are the main reason Hulu is able to ratchet up its number of visitors, attract new partners, and explore the possibility of new revenue streams.

I was focused on the analytics, but in the Forbes interview Goel talks about how publishers should create premium content for their own sites, and differentiate it from the commodity stuff they sell through ad networks.

For the standard ad units--your banners and buttons--publishers should sell all of those through the secondary channel of networks and exchange. These units should be separate from the premium experience. Publishers have to avoid letting ad buyers get the same product their sales team is selling through a second, much cheaper channel.

That's what makes the New York Times especially impressive. In the past I've written about their programming efforts in Amazon's cloud. Now I see that they were developing data charts of Michael Jackson's music career within hours of his death. The ability to turn data quickly into analysis and editorial product is key for the future of journalism. The question is whether these datahounds will be working for media or tech companies, or combinations of the two.

I did quite a bit of (paid) work last year researching free labor. My conclusion is this: No, not everything is free. But in nearly every market, there's a strong possibility that someone is experimenting with a "free" business model--shifting the burden of paying elsewhere in process.

Some of these experiments fail (New York Times "Select"). Some work (Google search). But practically everyone in business should at least ask themselves this question: "Hmmm. Do you think someone somewhere might be trying to do this for free?"

Sense, which tracks tribes of mobile phone users, was looking for this financing last fall, just as the bottom was falling out of financial markets. Funders who at first seemed excited started running the other way. There was a bit of solace in late October when a major Sense investor, Kenan Altunis, won a lottery entitling him to $1 million a year for the rest of his life (not that he intended to channel it all to Sense, but it still made a good story).

In any case, does the new Sense deal, in which Intel reportedly outmuscled Sequoia, show that: a) Venture is back, b) mobile data is getting hot, c) a major BusinessWeek feature is worth (at least) $6 million, or d) other?

Now I read on TechCrunch that while the iPhone App Store has more than 50,000 applications, only a few of them are popular. To date, the enormous number of developers working on iPhone apps has been regarded as a crucial advantage for the iPhone over its rivals, including the Blackberry, Google's Android phones, Symbian and Windows machines. But if only a handful gain traction, can't developers for the competitors simply focus on replicating them?

True, it's not innovation. It simply feeds off the massive iPhone laboratory. But it could be a quick and easy way for competitors to offer consumers what they want.

If so, are SEO experts the editors of all content? I've been mulling this for a couple of months. At the risk of overstating, it seems to me that while the job for traditional editors has been to identify the interests and cravings of the public, the world is shifting towards editors who can anticipate the preferences of machines--and reverse engineer their algorithms. This is true not just for news and entertainment, but also all kinds of corporate communications.

However, the work in SEO appears to be getting more complicated as search engines broaden their focus to new types of social metrics, including Twitter retweets, and references on Flickr, blogs and social networks. So in that sense, the challenge facing SEO experts is not just to replicate relevance and popularity on a single Web page, but to project it throughout the Web.

We risk going in circles here, because perhaps the best way to make content popular throughout the Web--and to get good search results--is to anticipate the interests and cravings of the public. So maybe there still is a role for editors.

In any case, this is something I'd like to look into. Any good sources out there for SEO? If so, please leave them in comments or tweet me @stevebaker.

I just had a meeting with Rajeev Goel, CEO of PubMatic, a Palo Alto-based ad technology company. He told me that certain advertisers insist on targeting ads only to people using Microsoft's Internet Explorer--and not to those using Google's Chrome or Firefox. The reason? IE users click more on ads.

Why would that be? Goel speculates that Web-surfers who go to the trouble of downloading another browser are likely to be, on average, more discriminating about what they click. (Do you think that's true, or fair?)

He also notes that Comcast ranks as one of the top ten portals. This is because a certain group of people stick with the home base delivered by their broadband provider. More conclusions to draw about them? We didn't get around to discussing it, but I'm sure advertisers and the tech companies like PubMatic and its rival Rubicon Project, will be poring over the data. (UPDATE: Just spotted another PubMatic rival, AdMeld. Are there others?)

Well, I guess it's a problem if you spend $9.97 for 1,000 followers, and you land a pack of zombies. But for people who actually use Twitter, it makes absolutely no difference. What counts are the intelligence and information coursing through the network, not the potential for more that's still sitting it out. If you get one good idea from one follower on Twitter, the numbers are beside the point.

I remember facing similar questions when Heather and I were working on our blog cover four years ago. Here's what we wrote, which I think also applies to Twitter:

First, a few numbers. There are some 9 million blogs out there, with 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Some discuss poetry, others constitutional law. And, yes, many are plain silly. "Mommy tells me it may rain today. Oh Yucky Dee Doo," reads one April Posting. Let's assume that 99.9% are equally off point. So what? That leaves some 40 new ones every day that could be talking about your business, engaging your employees, or leaking those merger discussions you thought were hush-hush.

(Incidentally, I'll be taping a little video this afternoon to embed in that old story, which still gets lots of traffic. I'll post the script a bit later.)

The question is a no-brainer for sophisticated readers of Blogspotting, I'm sure. But 92% of random people in Times Square had trouble answering this question, according to this video put together by the folks at Google. Some answers were delightfully naive (e.g. "A browser is when you know what you're looking for and a search engine is when you search for something"). But most people simply confused the term browser with search engine.

Have a look, and a laugh.

Why would Google commission this unscientific study? Maybe they just wanted to poke fun at tourists in Times Square.

But more likely, this is a viral marketing campaign for Chrome, the browser Google introduced in September that's only managed to capture 1.8% of the market. It has a long way to go to take a bite out of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which has 66%, and steady growers Firefox and Safari.

The video serves the dual purpose of market research: knowing that the mainstream consumer thinks of browsers in terms of search might lead Google to give its search engine a more prominent role in the design of future releases.

Thanks to @zee from the great site The Next Web for spotting this video.