Also: Mochila signs photo agency deal | BBC traffic | MySpace TV to relaunch | Movie group sues video sites | All3Media poaches Channel 4 new media head | China's online gaming market | New .asia domain | Facebook story of the day | MySpace moving towards applications
Recruitment agency PFJ surveyed the salary expectations of its editorial candidates over ten months to March this year. These expected salaries are pretty realistic, we are told, and demonstrate some interesting differences between sectors.
Online editorial comes out top, with salaries more than double the local press after five years. Journalists starting in local papers are prepared to work for around £14K, compared to £18K online - but if you speak to the NUJ it is not uncommon for basic salaries on local newspapers to be as low as £12K.
Candidates with between 3 and 5 years experience command £24K in the local press but £35K for online titles - that's 46% more.
After five years that gap widens further - £30K compared with £45 online.
B2B pays the highest for the first three years - £26K after two years - but then online takes over. And consumer titles hover just behind B2B rates up to the most experiences posts, when they command upwards of £60K.
So why do online roles command so much more? You might assume there is a shortage of more experienced online editorial staff, who need a broad range of technical skills (not to mention aptitude) on top of core journalistic ability.
And why do the salaries compare so well when revenue models for online titles are still so uncertain? Is it down to confidence in online advertising? Or just that much of the journalism industry - particularly the local press - pays so badly?
Alex White, the outgoing director of the Association of Online Publishers, said that only 13% of its members (who include pretty much all the UK's major media organisations) said they had experienced difficulty filling online roles because of a lack of experienced or suitably trained staff in the sector. Online ad sales staff were harder to find - just under a third were looking to fill those roles.
The Association's annual census painted a very rosy picture of the industry: 48% of companies said they were looking for online editorial staff and the industry created 540 jobs in the year to January.
Mochila signs photo agency deals
Content syndicator Mochila has announced deals with three major photo agencies - Gerry, Zuma and Jupiter - to expand its content offering into photos. Selected material from the three agencies will been offer to Mozila's 1,000 media clients who are mostly bloggers seeking legitimate content to syndicate on their sites. Other content includes material from AP, the FT and New York Times. (Reuters)
BBC traffic
A sniblet on BBC audience figures for online coverage of the Blair/Brown handover this week: 174,000 people watched live coverage on the site through BBC News 24 while on TV, viewing peaked at 2.6m on BBC1 at 1.30.
MySpace TV to relaunch
MySpace is planning to revamp the video feature on its site to try and take on the mighty YouTube. MySpaceTV will be a standalone site for sharing and watching video that will be open to both MySpacers and non-members. There will be an emphasis on professional video over user content, which could mean an extension of the kind of five-minute minisodes of Different Strokes and Silver Spoons introduced last week under a deal with Sony. comScore data shows MySpace had 50.2m users in the US last month while YouTube had 57.9m. MySpace wants to close that lead and will ramp things up further by offering 17 language versions and linking with the proposed YouTube Killer that NBC Universal is working on with Fox. Copyright will be a critical point as the site tries to appeal to professional content producers over YouTube's rather more free-wheeling approach. (New York Times)
Movie group sues video sites
The Motion Picture Association of America is suing the video sharing sites YouTVpc and Peekvid claiming copyright infringement. Both sites list links to illegally copied material which, they say, is within the law. (New York Times)
All3Media poaches Channel 4 new media head
All3Media has appointed Andy Taylor as digital media director to oversee the production firm's move into digital media. Taylor has moved from Channel 4 for the role, where he was managing director of new media.
China's online gaming market
Credit Suisse predicts online gaming will grow 35% in China this year, reaching revenues of $1.37bn. Gaming makes up the largest internet sector in China and growth is expected to continue at 11% until 2017. Growth this year is credited to the recent move to a freemium model, where users play the basic game for free and par for extra features. China is the world's second biggest internet market after the US, currently at 140m web users but expected to grow a further 23% this year from 2006. (Reuters)
New .asia domain
A group of Asian internet firms will be offering the .asia domain from October this year, with the first-round of registration open only to governments and trademark owners to register names such as china.asia. This is the third region-specific domain after .eu and .cat, for Catalan sites, though there have also been calls for city domains such as .nyc and .paris. (AP)
Facebook story of the day
An anonymous Silicon Valley developer has had a rant on Valleywag, saying the applications feature is overhyped and underperforming, with few gaining more than a few thousand users. His main gripe is that Facebook has ditched the feature that allows application users to invite their friends to join in. Users can only invite a maximum of 10 friends to join in now, which has drastically cu the take up of applications, he says. Developers had diverted considerable resources to putting these tools together and aren't happy.
"It sure has worked to their advantage that the initial hype that they helped create has gotten hundreds of developers to start working on building applications for them under more or less false pretense." (Valleywag)
MySpace moving towards applications
Meanwhile MySpace looks like it will follow the lead of Facebook and invite developers to come up with applications for the site. Co-founder Chris de Wolfe told the FT: "Facebook is interesting. We'll probably offer user the choice of both," meaning both built-in MySpace tools and external applications. (FT)
