How to read the Wall Street Journal stories on prediction markets… FOR FREE

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Very simple. The WSJ is free if you come from big news content aggregators (like Digg or Google News). If you can manage to have your browser produce artificially a Digg or Google News referral, then you&#8217-re permitted to enter the WSJ paid content for free.

  1. Download RefSpoof, which is an add-on for Mozilla FireFox-
  2. Type &#8220-digg.com&#8221- in the RefSpoof entry box-
  3. In the &#8220-R&#8221- drop menu, on the right, check &#8220-static&#8221-.
  4. Go to the Wall Street Journal, and click on a story. (You&#8217-ll hit the pay wall.)
  5. Click on &#8220-spoof&#8221-, which is located at the left of the RefSpoon entry box. (That will create the false referral.)
  6. You&#8217-ll see that the Wall Street Journal story reloads and that the pay wall has disappeared, freeing the content.

The guy who published that trick says it&#8217-s all ethical to him. (Hummm&#8230-)

NEXT WEEK, we&#8217-ll show you how to speculate on BetFair-TradeFair and InTrade-TradeSports event derivative markets&#8230- FOR FREE. :-D Just kidding. :-D

Prediction Markets as Content, Part 2

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Cross posted from UsableMarkets

Back in April I started talking about how Prediction Markets will be part of many news organizations&#8217- &#8220-citizen-generated&#8221- content strategy going forward.

To quote myself (which seems kind of a rude thing to do, doesn&#8217-t it &#8230-?):

It seems as if no self-respecting news organization can ignore the Web 2.0 movement these days. Many now have some sort of &#8220-wisdom of the crowds&#8221- style content, in addition to RSS feeds, blogs, and so on.

Midas Oracle has covered some of the new relationships that are developing. I recently talked about MarketWatch.

Expect more to happen &#8230- and perhaps quickly, too.

That was nine months ago. Since then we&#8217-ve seen the WSJ, the FT, Reuters, CNN, and others (perhaps everyone can think of a couple or three) begin to dabble in or seriously consider prediction markets. With Inkling and InTrade in the white label prediction market business, the barriers to setting one up are obviously low enough that a certain amount of me-too-ism can easily prevail.

But there is a risk, and those of us who care about the success of the prediction market industry shouldn&#8217-t get too excited about these developments just yet.

First, it remains to be see whether these new prediction markets can attract significant numbers of users. The prediction market industry is already saturated with prediction markets and games. So, despite their powerful brands, I&#8217-m not confident that the FT or the WSJ can attract large followings (although I&#8217-d be happy to be wrong about that).

Ah ha, you may say, we don&#8217-t need a lot of users to generate accurate predictions. The MSR, and automated market makers will help solve the problem. But the problem is not one of generating accurate predictions, but about generating page views. Newspapers (even online) are advertising driven. If you can&#8217-t generate sufficient page views, and you&#8217-re paying too much to manage the prediction market on your site, then it&#8217-s vulnerable to being cut. In fact, I wouldn&#8217-t be surprised if once this US election cycle is over that some of these markets fall away.

And, if the news organizations are really interested in the predictions for predictions sake, they can always simply use someone else&#8217-s.

As always, thanks for listening.
~alex (UsableMarkets)

How to assess Justin Wolfers writings for the WSJ, the BetFair blog, the InTrade bulletin, and Midas Oracle

No GravatarRobert Scobble (who got heat from the rest of the Blogosphere for that):

  1. Are you getting content that no one else is? [&#8230-]
  2. Does that content cause conversations to happen? [&#8230-]
  3. Does that content get noticed in the niche you’re covering? [&#8230-]
  4. Even more importantly, does it get the most credible and authoritative to link to you? [&#8230-]
  5. [I]t’s not the size of your audience that matters. It’s WHO is in the audience that matters. [&#8230-]
  6. [H]ow can I take my art further? [&#8230-]

I&#8217-d say this:

  • Quality Content + Quality Marketing = Quality Audience

Previously: The official BetFair blog is such a piece of crap that one of its writers is rebelling publicly against it. + Justin Wolfers in the Wall Street Journal.

Read the previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Many people twitter on prediction markets.
  • Folks, when you have something important to say, write up a full post, not a comment.
  • Prediction Market Journalism
  • TechCrunch is 221 times bigger than Midas Oracle.
  • Earthquake measuring 9.0 or more on Richter scale to occur anywhere on or before December 31, 2008
  • Why Midas Oracle (and not TV news shows or print newspapers) will dominate the future.
  • The Six Degrees Of Separation