The Failure of Project Eyeball: A Case of Product Overpricing or Market Overcrowding?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The closure in mid-2001 by Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) of its experimental tabloid newspaper, Project Eyeball, after less than 1 year of publication, was popularly attributed to a pair of market factors: its 80-cent cover price and competition from a pair of free tabloids that entered the market hot on its heels. Although pricing and competition were doubtless important contributing factors to Project Eyeball's rapid demise, a pair of additional economic concepts emerges on closer examination of the newspaper's brief history and may provide additional clues to its failure. One is the principle of relative constancy, which held, until it was disproved in the 1980s, that the level of expenditures on media remained fairly constant as a percentage of the overall economy. The other is the influence on management practices of share prices of publicly traded newspaper companies, into which category SPH falls. Considering these factors in addition to price and competition helps to better explain the rapid demise of Project Eyeball.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".