TheWayoftheWeb

Content and Digital Marketing Specialists

newspapers

Ads and Paywalls won’t save newspapers and magazines

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Numerous newspapers and associations of publishers are discussing the topic of paywalls for specific content or entire sites in an attempt to ‘create value by beginning to charge for it’ in the words of the American Press Institute.

Sadly for that plan, it’s not 1998 or 1898, and I’m not sure how charging for something creates value. The value that should have been created was lost when sales teams bundled online advertising as a free or low cost ‘added value’ bonus to print advertising, at a time when online adverts were capable of getting a decent click-through rate – and then not investing in helping advertisers to utilise new opportunities to better connect with their prospective customers.

The end result is that display advertising is generally decreasing in direct effectiveness and value (although there can still be branding benefits), and attempts to offer more innovative solutions generally fail because advertisers find it too much of a leap from simply booking the biggest reach at the lowest price they can negotiate. Those advertisers that are more innovative, meanwhile, have already started learning that they can create their own content and interaction directly with customers.

And the paywall debate continues to ignore the problem.

Instead it’s simply gouging consumers instead of advertisers.

I already have a paywall around newspaper content – which is one reason why I don’t buy print content. Every day I walk past racks of printed content protected by a cover price, because I can quickly access a wealth of equivalent content online, tag it and save it, interact with it, and often interact with the authors of it – whether bloggers, or increasingly mainstream media employees.

Want an example of ways to monetise a piece of content effectively – this is probably my favourite example of making the most of it.

It means investing in the content creators in your company who can connect and leverage levels of interest – whether they’re a celebrity columnist or an editorial assistant. It’s easy to forget the passion people feel for their favourite title or writers when you’re stuck inside the bubble all day.

It means creating value worth paying for and then offering people the chance to invest in it. And people need to be able to judge and justify the value for themselves – not be forced. Think forcing people works?

And it means creating value for the businesses who are looking for new customers.
I’ve seen companies move advertising budgets because a commercial person switched companies after giving them great service and helping them learn better ways to connect and make sales. If that person was able to educate more businesses, the demand from competitors and other companies would follow.

The problem is that doing all this requires more work, which could reduce the profit margin – but I’d rather have a small profit that can grow, rather than heading for losses.

U.S print ad sales dropped 28.28% in the first quarter of 2009, losing more than $2.6 billion in ad revenue. There’s a lot more analysis on Alan Mutter’s Reflections of a Newsosaur, including breakdowns by category, but losing almost a third of the value suggests U.S. print ad sales are reaching terminal velocity, and the rest of the world isn’t going to be far behind.

Online sales also fell by a record 13.4%.

That doesn’t mean businesses don’t need to sell as many widgets and doohickies than ever.

It means they can’t see enough value in print or online newspaper advertising to use a recession-hit budget.

And those that survive the recession will have had a crash course in finding alternatives which are more cost-effective and justifiable. They won’t be rushing back.

UK newspapers get it wrong again with UK’s oldest Twitter user… – Updated May 18

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Update: Techcrunch has followed up the article and revealed that the staging was done as PR by The Geek Squad, and was simply picked up by the newspapers. So rather than creating it badly, they repeated it badly.

A recent story did the rounds of UK papers and news bulletins as The Telegraph and The Sun claimed to have found the UK’s oldest Twitter user.

But as Techcrunch revealed, 104-year-old Ivy Bean happened to send her first ever tweet at the same time as the newspapers were writing their stories about her.

And her first ever tweet?

‘I’m enjoying Twitter for the first time and having my photo taken.’

Which would be one of the two messages she sent which were visible on the photos accompanying the articles.

What’s shocking isn’t that someone thought it was a good idea to ride the Twitter bandwagon with the type of story that fills empty time at the end of a news bulletin.

What’s shocking is that they were inept enough not to bother faking it a bit better – maybe starting the account a day before at least? And not taking a photo of two tweets – the first of which mentions them? Don’t they know tweets are publicly accessible, indexed by Google and archived?

Then again, they’re still running stories about the banality of Twitter written by journalists who normally use the service for a couple of days at most for research, without following or interacting with anyone.

Because obviously searching for the writers, journalists and bloggers who actually understand how the service works is far too much effort.

And when those same articles question the truth behind tweets and retweets around news and events, you might want to point to the fact The Sun managed to get Ivy’s age wrong in it’s headline – her username, IvyBean104 might have been a clue!

Newspapers continue to talk a bad game…

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Lumping together so many disaprate businesses into one homogeneous ‘newspapers’ group is always going to result in a bit of schizophrenia, but when you’re attempting to discuss an industry, it’s a bit unavoidable.

Still, a few recent bits of information point to an industry that as a whole are still running around pointing fingers without working out their own gameplan.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the position Google occupies by providing the discovery and aggregation mechanism for news content – While I disagree with some of his points, Nick Carr compiles a lot of the views in an interesting post, which is immediately countered by Nieman Labs Matthew Ingram (Whose name seems to be coming up a lot in the Nieman posts I’m enjoying the most).

Meanwhile Trinity Mirror’s Sly Bailey has talked about “Superdominant players like Google and the death of journalism as we know it.”at the Digital Britain Summit.

“We’ve become dependent on pats on the back from new kids on the block who tell us what the rules are.” – lots more via PaidContent.

However:

I don’t know whether it was Nick Carr or Danny Sullivan who first pointed out that by editing the robots.txt file, newspapers can cut their search traffic off to spit their face.

Obviously the drop in traffic isn’t an option if you’re still selling display advertising based on scale, but there are options.

Besides picking an alternative search engine to work with (Hmmmm)…

How about using more social media to minimise search – after all, there are reports it’s driving more traffic than Google in some niche areas already.

Or instead of introducing Facebook and Twitter as middlemen, why not play around with open APIs (Hello, The Guardian) or install your own newspaper Laconi.ca?

But here’s where it gets really confused:

‘Newspaper publishers will no longer be required to supply newsagents with the newspapers they order under a shake-up of the regulations governing newspaper distribution. ‘ from Brand Republic.

Now this comes from Government Business Secretary Peter Mandelson, but I would allege that a rule change generally doesn’t happen without at least some consultation or consideration of the big players involved.

‘Small newspaper retailers are concerned that they risk becoming dependent on the larger retail wholesalers’

Hang on – small newspaper retailers are worried that they’ll be stuck with hugely dominant middlemen – doesn’t this ring a bell?

At a time when local is seen as a newspaper saviour, is it right that small newsagents are likely to suffer, and get the blame when people who might not be able to easily travel to a large supermarket on a daily basis can’t find their paper?

And incidentally, if local newsagents disappear, then newspapers and magazines (which I work on/with), are then left with large supermarkets as the dominant distributors. (I hear the sound of a bell ringing again)

And despite my questioning of it, the small percentage of online newspaper readers compared to print shown by both Martin Lengeveld and Ian Duncan, and now followed up with a great comparison by Rob Weir at the Columbia Missourian, does indicate that people migrating online can completely bypass the newspaper site they might read offline.

Is anyone else’s head hurting?

Some clarity:

There have been some well documented cases of newspaper businesses doing things rather than just talking about them.  The Guardian and the New York Times being about the biggest and best known examples.

Watch what they do, rather than just what people are suggesting. And please share other examples of innovation and change in all forms of journalism/digital publishing.

See what happens to those emerging from the wreckage.

And keep a close eye on the results, but also consider the other factors. A Finnish online-only daily might have suffered since losing the print edition, but is that down to the editorial proposition, staff cuts, tech adoption in the region, broadband access, alternative news sources, etc? Nobody knows yet.

Somehow we need to cut through the confusion.

The serendipity defence of magazines and newspapers is a myth

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There are several reasons why the print editions of newspapers and magazines will continue for a while longer in there current forms before evolving into something new to survive alongside the increasingly dominent internet and mobile content networks.

But the serendipity argument isn’t one of them, despite the fact it’s so often wheeled out. Unfortunately, when you spend some time thinking about it, it becomes clear that the argument is based on a load of old cobblers.

Serendipity

The argument is that by reading a newspaper or magazine you’ll find things you didn’t realise you would enjoy reading or needed to know.

Which is true.

But the flipside of using this argument as a justification for print publications is that using the internet/mobile to find content will only give you exactly what you want, the majority of the time.

Which isn’t true.

It’s a reasonable assertion if you only consider search as the mechanism for finding content on the internet/mobile.  Given a reasonably accurate search string, Google et al will generally give me a reasonably accurate list of returns for the thing I want.

But I don’t just use search. In fact, I’m using it less and less.

The assertion falls down as soon as you use any social tools for the simple reason that humans are not powered by algorithms. Despite the reasonable assumption that the majority of people will share content because it is relevant/appropriate to the recipient, the judgement of relevance/appropriateness is a subjective one on behalf of the sender – which means you can end up with all sorts of stuff.

And that’s only the active senders – now add in the network that shares links on social networks as a broadcast because they found it interesting, and someone in their network might be interested, but they don’t know who, or can’t be bothered to target it individually.

Then add in the lucky dips of social bookmarking tools, RSS feeds, and the entire linking ecosystem.

And it’s always been the case offline:

Think about birthdays and Christmas. Close family and friends might send you incredibly relevant, thoughtful presents, but as the distance grows between you and the sender, the random factor increases exponentially, so you can end up with all sorts of good and bad presents.

That’s the random discovery of things you never knew you’d like, by your network – not by a brand of ‘taste makers’ and distributed by a publication.

And it means basing your survival on the following assumptions:

1. People will have the time and desire for something outside of their interests when there’s a huge abundance of highly relevant material taking up their limited time.

2. People will want something outside of their interests which hasn’t be supplied by friends, family, colleagues, acquintances, or the Stumble! button.

3. Anyone who enjoys this discovery will find it engaging enough to pay before discovering whether or not it’s worthwhile, and will then find it enjoyable enough to keep paying, and perhaps engage with the surrounding monetisation – usually advertising.

Really?

There is a future for providing services which allow for assisted discovery of content – whether by human means or computers (e.g ‘related items’ or ‘things you might like’). But the days of being able to charge purely for those services are rapidly disapearing.

Microblogging event dedicated to UK Media and Journalists

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If you’re based in the UK with an interest in Microblogging and journalism, then media140 looks like an essential event.

It’s on May 20th, on the Southbank in London, and features a mix of case studies and panels with journalists from The Times, Guardian, Reuters, Sky News, Journalism.co.uk and Frontline Club. Plus prominent social media bloggers.

Topics will include:
– how to persuade journalists to take and use twitter seriously.
– what is news worthy, how do you recognise it?
– breaking the news, how you can potentially undermine your own news room
– will local community create local news through microblog technologies?
– tools of the trade, what works and what doesn’t?
– is microblogging and twitter really a game changer?

Tickets are £45 and available now. For more details, see the media140 website.

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