TheWayoftheWeb

Content and Digital Marketing Specialists

newspapers

How much to launch a new title online?

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I’ve often wondered, and indeed directly questioned, why traditional publishers pondering new markets haven’t tested the water by launching an incredibly cost effective online trial for a new idea?

I suggested it quite a lot in the past – especially using external hosting and services to launch something for a total cost that’s less than a day’s pay for the lowliest of staff writers. And don’t claim that your market doesn’t use the internet – there are more than enough people from any demographic to give you a better idea of what they’ll do than a lot of panel-based research surveys of what people might claim they’d do.

How much would it cost?

Well some web hosting would cost around $60 for a year from a mainstream hosting provider.

A domain from the same place bought at the same time would be as low as $1.99 at the moment.

And having removed the potential roadblock of an uncooperative IT department, you might come up against problems getting design help?

Well, you could install WordPress and use a free theme.

Or, if you’re not happy and want something that comes with a more ‘professional’ look and guaranteed support, you can get a Premium, or Paid WordPress Theme for a good price.

For instance, for Online Race Driver, I went with the great Metro Theme from Studiopress. The cost for that theme is $59.95 – or you can buy access to all their themes for $199.95. My experience with them has been good enough I’m looking to upgrade my membership shortly.  One benefit is that although many free themes are supported by their developers and support forums etc, the paid option tends to provide a slightly better guarantee of service levels etc.

But anyway, the cost to test your next idea with a website that can be set up in about an hour or so?

About $121.

Add in free website analytics from Google, and even include your own advertising, or bung in some Adsense ads.

And that’s what I’d have suggested for anyone – there are cheaper options, such as hosted blogs, but they tend to lack a little flexibility, or the chance to test advertisers etc.

But then I found out about the Secret London Facebook Group. As reported on Techcrunch, it’s reached 182,010 members in a handful of weeks.

Started by a university graduate competing for an internship, it’s now becoming a startup with not only 180,000+ members, but already 5000 photos uploaded.

Total cost? $0.

I’m not saying that it will necessarily translate into business success, but it’s a pretty effective way of tracking interest – and Facebook Connect would allow most of those interested to also interact with any new website.

Whenever someone has an idea for a new publication, it might be worth pausing before you dismiss it – and instead investing some time and a tiny amount of cash to see if it might fly…

Hi Newspapers – can I join the party?

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Having spent a long time looking at, reading about, and experiencing firsthand the changes happening to print and digital mainstream media publishing, it’s a bit of a shock to find out I’ve gone down completely the wrong path.

Until now, I was siding with the view that complaining about Google ‘stealing’ the news and sending worthless visitors was more a sign of ineptitude and fear on the part of a traditional business model and industry which hasn’t radically changed in 100 years.

But then it struck me.

I write and publish content on two blogs.

That content is indexed by Google, even if I’m not a major contributor to Google News quite yet.

Google also supplies a lot of the advertising that appears on both my blogs.

Plus most of my blogging time is spent in Google Reader and Googlemail.

So that means if the newspapers can look for concessions from the Government, Google, Microsoft, and anywhere else they can think of, then so can I!

I can’t wait for the campaigning newspaper companies to get in touch and offer to help me as well. I might even get a call from Mr Murdoch himself.

And if cash isn’t forthcoming, I wouldn’t say no to a few links sending some more visitors my way… I don’t mind trying to make money from a much bigger pool of people…

The two digital publishing models of the near future

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Two approaches to digital content creation and publishing are taking hold – and sadly neither of them are equivalent to the way most traditional publishers are set up.

The first is the ‘battery farm’ approach – as seen by aol. and several companies targeting content creation for primarily SEO purposes. Gather as many writers and journalists as you can keep in a warehouse, and get them to churn out as much content as possible for as many places as possible. And in the case of some companies, develop and use tools to see what people are actively searching for at the time to create the right content to capitalise on that interest (e.g. Yahoo).

The second is the ‘blogger’s niche’ approach. Start projects with just one or two people trialling an idea, see if it works, and if sustainable, built into a network model which can mean virtual offices and teams spread out wherever someone has an idea for niche content which could work. This is where you’re more likely to find great writing and insight in terms of longer, more thoughtful articles by people who can wax lyrically about their subject. See the likes of b5media, Techcrunch, Mashable, etc, etc.

The problem for traditional media companies is that they’re not geared up for either of these plans. They might have large numbers of content creators, but these people are grouped around specific products in the magazine industry, for example. The groups are too small to churn out content – and aren’t geared up yet for producing content for anyone else. Meanwhile they’re too large to use the network model – only the very smallest print magazine editorial teams are anything near compact enough, and even then the infrastructure and processes already in place mean it would be easier to scrap it all and start again.

This is all assuming a business model predominantly based on advertising revenue, which requires increasingly low costs in order to drive any profits. Other production method will exist hand-in-hand with different business models. But they will need to be created around the new business model, rather than vice-versa.

Which newspaper mentions Twitter the most? (UK)

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Although Ashton Kutcher has people following him on Twitter than the entire UK news industry, in terms of online readership, the UK news industry has pretty good reach, with The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Daily Mail all attracting over 30 million unique users in September 2009.

So I thought it would be interesting to see exactly which ones were mentioning Twitter the most – and to keep it simple and relevant for everyone, I decided to only use their search functionality to work it out:

So which newspapers have mentioned Twitter the most?

Key thoughts from this simple experiment:

  • Most people would probably have put The Guardian top if asked.
  • The fact Twitter search returns and ABCe results are closely linked suggests the effectiveness of site structure and search functionality, rather than Twitter mentions being integral to driving readers! (I’m sure Martin has much more in-depth information on this as part of the team at The Guardian).
  • At least a couple of sites have seriously wonky search functionality, despite being two of many with search powered or ‘enhanced by’ Google.
  • It’s definitely skewed towards the ‘middle-class’ broadsheets regardless of political leaning, which is what most people would expect.
  • There’s a power law in full effect, with two/three sites providing most of the coverage.

Track Twitter followers for UK newspapers

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Twitter followers for UK national newspapers have been tracked for a while now by Malcolm Coles over at the Online Journalism Blog.

And there are some really interesting insights emerging – besides the fact that at 1,665,202 followers in total, the entire UK news industry has serious competition from the likes of Ashton Kutcher (3,777,896 followers )and Stephen Fry (794,146 followers).

Take out the @guardiantech account, which contributes 1.2 million followers, and things really don’t look brilliant in terms of scale for most accounts – it might look better if you aggregated all Times accounts, for example, but you’d still be in the low tens of thousands, and you’d still be part of a 400,000 (approx) total.

And although there’s reasonable growth, it’s again all skewed towards the Guardian Tech account, which is benefitting heavily from being included in the Suggested User List for new users.

The question is why news sources – which are proving to be pretty popular judging by their homepage statistics – are so much less attractive on Twitter?

I don’t think it’s the wrong location for finding news and information – in fact the opposite is true.

I do think there are potentially two reasons:

1. Perhaps the strength of major media news sources – which has been written about by many people – is in aggregating and providing context and insight into what’s going on, rather than attempting to ‘beat the crowd’ to the first tweet?

But I suspect it’s more likely to be:

2. If you simply plug in an RSS feed and then bugger off, you’ll never get anywhere.

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