Chew on this bit of full RSS feed philosphy from John Gruber (@daringfireball) when you’re doing whatever you do on the weekend:
Subscribers to a full-content RSS feed are among the readers paying the most attention, but generate among the least web page views.
A reader asking for a full-content RSS feed is a reader who wants to pay more attention to what you publish. There have to be ways to thrive financially from that.
Thanks to @danielbachhuber for the tip-off.
News that Google is considering gobbling up Yelp has everyone twittering about how nothing’s safe from the search-blog-mail-chat-office-data giant. I generally avoid leaping into this kind of fray since I don’t really have a dog in the fight and don’t care to add to the hype.
But when I saw this tweet Friday afternoon, I had to come out swinging:
http://twitter.com/pachecod/statuses/6807927866
Newspaper business directories are losers. First off, I speak from experience that newspaper community-based business directories are impossibly unwieldy to manage (you never get everyone included, so you’re not really the authority) and are about 10 laps behind the big-dog search industry that is always innovating ahead of your game.
And tying a directory to a walled community is a non-starter. Think you can compete with the draw and activity of a 350-million-and-growing active community? Come down off your high horse. Now try again.
Actually, newspapers should be concerned if their advertisers aren’t calling them to ask what the news means for their business locally and how they should respond.
For years, newspapers ad reps were the captains of a local business’ strategy to reach customers, for obvious reasons. While the Web disrupted, expanded and democratized the channels, we panicked and threw stuff at both readers and advertisers with the hope that we’d get the water back behind the dam.
Meanwhile, local advertisers were bombarded with SEO snake oil and social media hype and left out in the cold by their long-time allies if they weren’t convinced by confusing print ad pricing or iffy online banner campaigns.
Seth Godin wrote this morning about how effective it is to fight the natural flow of market forces, especially in a disrupted market like newspapers:
Competition and the market are like water. They go where they want.
Google owns search; it’s a habit. Hell, it’s a verb. No local directory is going to touch that kind of reach. Instead, a complete strategy for a local business should include a Google business listing, a Facebook fan page and a branding campaign in the paper and online.
Like the proverbial reed that bends in the breeze but survives the typhoon, the local news organization’s best bet is to be the conduit for that work — the first call an advertiser makes when they hear of a new method to reach customers.
And, because technologies change, merge and shift, our advice and platforms must be flexible enough to adapt. Local business doesn’t need another business directory, they need a partner and a media hub. (I’ve been working on one version. More to come on that soon.)
So if Google buys Yelp, fine. Go out to your restaurant clients and teach them how social media works. Get them into the data stream, help them understand why it’s a good thing that people are talking about them and be available when the landscape changes. Because it will.
But you’ll be there. If you build relationships, that is.
" Returning at the end of the afternoon's work; Gathering the Herd" | Howard W. Marshall, via americaslibrary.gov
I’m really liking the link management feature from Publish2. I can collect links all week long with notes and then share my take on them in one post.
Hope you enjoy. Let me know your take in the comments.
Story structure for the Web | NewsLab
Jacqui Banaszynski suggests a “totem pole” structure to Web writing, giving each element a label, summary and link. Don’t like it? Not “storytelling” enough for you? Change your criteria, she says:
All good writing has to honor the purpose for which you are doing that writing.
Google developing a micropayment platform and pitching newspapers: “‘Open’ need not mean free”
Google, the savior of newspapers? Nah. But it couldn’t hurt either party to team up at the hub.
Of course, Google is in a prime place to serve up content and charge a fee for processing payment, delivering content, etc.It’ll be interesting to see if newspapers will get greedy. They might try if they still think they’re the big dogs in distribution. And they might.
And will Google extend this service to bloggers, too?
Yahoo Local debuts ‘Neighbors’: Yahoo drills down…
Meh. Perhaps combining local search with conversation on the Yahoo platform has promise, but I get the itchy feeling that it’s all just another social time-suck with limited practical application.
But I could be wrong.
Growthspur: Help for revenue-challenged journalists?
Interesting idea here to set up an ad selling and serving on behalf of journalists working out on their own.
It will be worth watching to see what the revenue share is, and I’m sure there’s an academic argument about whether this is enabling journalists to avoid dealing with the money problem, but it might offer more journalists (pro and am) the chance to grow those niche audiences and make a few bucks in the process.
There’s an interesting conversation on new ad models going on in the Poynter online news e-mail list that started yesterday with Steve Yelvington, who forwarded a post from his blog for discussion:
The argument goes like this: We have an audience problem. We can fix our sales incentives, train our people, tune our pricing and our packaging, and replace leadership as necessary. But at the end of the day we’re going to hit a very hard wall. That wall is /available advertising inventory/ that meets the advertisers’ needs. That inventory comes from audience, from reach (unique users) multiplied by frequency (pageviews per user). And while the reach numbers may look good, the frequency numbers suck.
Greg Harmon from Belden Associates chimed in to break down reader frequency into three groups and their mean frequency of visits:
Harmon goes on to say that cookie-based reporting tools are part of our problem because people reset them, etc., making numbers are suspect.
Vin Crosby rode in with numbers from the NAA and Nielsen//Netratings data from March through August 2007:
She (The site’s media kit says that 57.1 percent of users are female) visited only 4.05 times per month, saw only 27 pages per month, and spent a total of 20 minutes and 20 seconds on the site during all those visits. * This means the AVERAGE USER of the premier DAILY newspaper in the U.S. visits LESS THAN ONCE PER WEEK.
* It means that she probably reads LESS THAN 27 stories there all month (because NYTimes.com, the maximize its number of banner ad exposures, tends to stretch stories over more than one Web page each).
* It means that she probably spends LESS THAN FIVE MINUTES on the site in each of those infrequent visit.
* And it also means that the NYTimes.com’s average user probably reads less of that newspaper’s content in a month than the paper’s average print edition readers reads in a single day.
His conclusion:
You can claim that daily newspapers (whether in print or online) nowadays reach an ‘exclusive audience,’ but the plain fact is that newspapers are general-interest publications. You can claim that frequency doesn’t matter, but I think that advertisers (and the newspaper sites’ ad sales people’s pitches) will say different. The bottom line is that 12 years after American daily newspapers first began publishing on the Web, their sites are read FAR LESS OFTEN AND FAR LESS THOROUGHLY than their companies’ dying newsprint editions and earn only a SMALL FRACTION of those dying editions’ revenues.
Good numbers will certainly help flesh out the picture, but it only serves to drive home the point in my mind that our focus in the newsroom must shift from the print publication to what we’re able to do online.
I’m still struggling to decipher Omniture data on my reporting blog, but I seem to have the same core readers. My paper is doing a self-promo featuring reporters out working with the tagline “More reporters, more local news.” You get the picture. Problem is, it’s made up of ads in the paper–preaching to the converted.
First thing is to get reporters aggressively (and effectively) blogging to create groupies and enhance the kind of content that only lives online. Then get the ads promoting the newsroom in other places: movie theaters, TV, billboards.
As a reporter, I’m a bit uncomfortable being the center of attention, but these are desperate times.
Thoughts on this? New ad models?
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