USA Today’s redesign, which emphasized its new consumer-created content features, was widely reviled by its users.
But the new features have been a spectacular success with users. In one month, USA Today’s pages per visit have doubled after a year of resolute flatness, according to Compete.com. Meanwhile, Neilsen//NetRatings says that site registrations are up 380%. Topix saw similar — but less spectacular — results with its bulletin boards. More on Topix in my upcoming report on Consumer Created Content.
It’s clear that now is the time to begin planning for adding comments to your site if you haven’t done so already. Now is a good time for clients to call us to talk about consumer created content for media sites.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Month: April 2007
Yesterday’s announcement that MySpace is becoming a news aggregator is a leading indicator of a brand-new era for the news business — and the content business in general.
The last big change was the emergence of the Web itself and the rush by media companies to move to the web. Over the last ten years, we’ve seen the media slowly adapt to this new environment as they shift their content online. The next shift could be just as profound as the last one.
A little over a year ago, in The Future of News, I advised publishers to deconstruct their sites in order to get the best audiences for their individual news items. Since then, Digg has moved from startup to one of the 100 most popular sites on the web. In 2007, publishers are trying hard to get readers to “Digg” their stories.
Now, MySpace is entering into that market with a whole new audience — one that is younger than the typical news audience and already strongly interconnected.
But this is a lot bigger than MySpace trying to swipe a bit of Digg’s mojo. This is the beginning of an era in which a whole new set of intermediaries are about to emerge in the media business. This could threaten the current Web business model of a lot of publishers, just as Web itself threatended their old business models.
I’m going to be talking and writing more about this in the coming months. It’s a scary new trend, and it’s not one that can be controlled. We need to find a way for media companies to thrive in this new environment.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
“Only two-tenths of one percent of visits to Flickr… are to upload new photos”, according to a Reuters story that says user participation on most “Web 2.0” sites isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
That’s funny, I didn’t realize that Flickr was having a problem getting people to upload photos.
Consumer created content is now the big leagues, but we still don’t understand it all that well. It’s a reasonable (and old school) rule of thumb that only one percent of any site’s readers will post content on it — but that’s plenty. That’s consistent with the Flickr number from Hitwise, if the posters are uploading once every five visits.
But just because the participation rate on any given site is low, that doesn’t mean that posting by Web users is limited to a small number of people. In a recent survey, we found that nearly a third of online consumers have posted content to a social network, blog or media site. My report on consumer created content, which goes a lot deeper into who these people are and what they think, will be out shortly.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Topix is evolving. They’ve increased their focus on geographical communities and bought the domain “topix.com”. But, most importantly, they’ve done a great deal in their new launch to empower the people who are posting to their sites.
Topix’s software does a pretty good job of surfacing locally relevant news. And their message boards are active, but they do contain a lot of aggressive and dumb comments. However, their mass-market, laissez-faire approach has resulted in steady growth in audience and intensity of use in the last year.
Now, by empowering locals to become editors for their community pages, Topix should be able to increase the relevance and interest of the stories on their community sites and create an atmosphere where people want to participate.
Rather than cherry-picking markets as Backfence did, Topix is throwing their creation on the mercies of Web. This is a bottom-up approach to widescale citizen journalism. The result is likely to be spotty. There will be great sites where Topix is adopted by the locals, and probably some places where the crazies will take over. Topix has already seen some great adoptions in some communities, just as individuals in other places have adopted Yahoo and Google groups for local communication.
Topix is evolving into a good community journalism platform for people who don’t have the skills to install WordPress or Expression Engine, and don’t want to pay a fee to TypePad, and aren’t prepared to deal with the limitations of Blogger.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.