Jason Kottke has taken a nice analytical approach to the competition between mainstream media (especially the NY Times) and bloggers for the attention of the public.
Googling the top eight stories of 2005, he shows that blogs and citizen media often top the mainstream media. His analysis is dead-on: citizen media is winning the race, one reason this is happening is that their stories are persistent and designed to be linked from the get-go, the NY Times is squandering its Google credit (a PageRank of 10!), and citizen media are becoming indistinguishable from the “professional” media.
His discovery that CNN (with a PageRank of a mere 9) routinely trounces the Times on Google is yet another indication of why subscription barriers and archives in paid databases may generate more cash in the short term, but can be bad strategy in networked media.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Month: January 2006
Microsoft is ending its exclusive deal with MSNBC for local and non-US news. Jupiter found in our Future of News report that MSNBC.com is the breakaway leader in US national and international news, and clearly a big part of the reason for this is the distribution that Microsoft is able to give it.
There are a couple of lessons here. One is the continuing primacy of distribution over content on the net in general and the Web in particular. Content is still staggeringly important, but there are still precious few outlets with the distribution to provide the the economies of scale necessary for worldwide news coverage. Call it the “small head” of the long-tailed market.
The second lesson is that there is little synergy between content and distribution. It’s better to the able to shop for the best deal on content than it is to be bound to a news-collection network. Remember: Wal-Mart doesn’t make anything. They use their distibution power to shop around and force their prospective suppliers to figure out how to cut costs. I’m not arguing that content producers wouldn’t like to own their distribution, but that if you separate the content and the distribution, the value of the parts will be greater than that of the merged business.
The third lesson is that we will see fewer comprehensive sources of national and international news over time. Headline news is increasingly a commodity, and in the future MSNBC.com will continue to need Microsoft more than Microsoft needs MSNBC.com.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
David Card asks if tagging is “the new, new thing or meme that runs out of steam in 6 months?“. I agree that tagging is moving against the tide of the net. The informal creation of metadata through linking is one of the great unsung assets of the Web, at least among its primary beneficiaries in the publishing business. But it works because it’s in the linker’s self-interest to create meaningful links.
In a game of tag, no one wants to be the one doing the tagging. Tagging requires a little extra unnecessary effort that most folks are not only unwilling to make, but aren’t prepared to learn. The net depends on the altruism of the few and the indifference of the many.
But I’m really going to miss those cool-looking, pointless, tag clouds.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
After two years of experimentation, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is no longer changing the layout of its pages depending on the day. They called it “dayparting”, borrowing a term from TV advertising. This was perhaps not the best pool in which to fish for metaphors.
Good theory, and we saw some gains in traffic early on. But, two years of hard-won experience made it clear that we can’t be all things to all people all the time. People might want to play games or shop or read celebrity gossip, but they weren’t coming to our site for that (well, maybe for the gossip).
SeattlePI.com is, first and foremost, a news site.
Terry Heaton has a good analysis why this doesn’t work, focusing on the fact that readers don’t come in via the home page any more, an idea I explored in our Future of News report.
The big aha! in the story is their realization that they’re a news site. But they’ve only implicitly acknowledged the real lesson in their conclusion.
Meanwhile, we’ll stick with the news-oriented layout that we’ve been using between midnight and 1 p.m. on weekdays. We’ve redesigned it a bit for the Seattle Seahawks’ history-making playoff run (which, hopefully, will last beyond tomorrow). Interest in the team is at an all-time high — at least, among our users — and we wanted to make it easier for people to find all of our Seahawks content when they come to the site.
They are, first and foremost, a local news site.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
I’ve been skeptically bored by Google’s dabbling in brokering print advertising. There are too many reasons why it seemed like a poor fit. The lead times on print are excruciatingly long by Twenty-first Century standards, publishers hate brokered advertising, publishers who don’t have enough ads can print a smaller product to maintain their ad/edit ratio, and most publishers don’t want advertisers to know what a small percentage of the rate card most of their competitors are paying. Ad rates could collapse like a house of cards if they were exposed the way that Google exposes its own rates.
Radio (and TV) advertising presents few of these problems. The biggest advantage to Google-style ad sales for broadcasters is that a minute of airtime that goes unmonetized will never be monetized. That’s why unsold airtime is already brokered. This will be a watershed year in local advertising for Google, Yahoo, MSN, and host of smaller players. Broadcasters are an important element in local advertising. And, while publishers are still handcrafting their products, broadcasting is an increasingly automated business.
There are a million ways in which Google could fail. But the upside, both in inherent potential and in the potential to outflank their competitors, is enormous. That’s reflected in the way the deal is structured, with a billion dollar payoff for dMarc if they pull it off.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Categories
A little bit of Beijing right here at home
Microsoft is now censoring US-based blogs that might (OK, probably) offend the Chinese government.
MSN is censoring Michael Anti’s blog, which has been irritating Beijing for some time. Microsoft’s excuse–“Most countries have laws and practices that require companies to make the internet safe for local users”–doesn’t square with what they did. They are censoring Michael Anti not in China, not in packets bound for China, but in America for Americans.
The Internet has always lived under the shadow of corporate censorship. So far, it still possible to find spaces where we can be free. But the noose has also been tightening for some time. In this case, we have one of the largest corporations anticipating the needs of one of the world’s most repressive governments, and taking care of business before it’s even asked to do so.
The problem isn’t Microsoft, although they do seem to be pretty forward-thinking in this regard. The truth is that Google, despite its understandable desire not to be evil, will be confronted at some point in the not-too-distant future to perform an act of pure evil or its shareholders will find a management who will. You can take that to the bank. Literally.
Corporations are amoral. Corporations are made up of people, but they are not people. Their only imperative is to maximize shareholder value. That can be a pretty good system as long as you recognize its limitations and plan accordingly.
Today’s West Virginia mine tragedy is also a media tragedy. And it is yet another illustration that newspapers are often out of date by the time they reach us. In this case, the mistake is well-known and was publicly corrected before most of us read it. But newspapers are full of stories that their readers can find in more current and often more complete versions online.
Jay Rosen uses this as an occasion to look at what newspaper should take responsiblity for. But it makes me wonder: what’s a newspaper for?
We’ve known for a while that newspapers are unsuited to covering breaking news. This is a mistake that editors and publishers are doomed to repeat until they rethink their role in the community.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.