The secret it is out: blogging is in. It’s not just for the tech geeks/early adopters anymore (after all, I am doing it right now, and I am kind of a weblebrity). Big news sources are starting to feel the pain of everyday folks hitting the streets and writing equal if not better content on their own blogs. Not to mention it can be a great hobby to fund happy hours. While I won’t get into the journalism/news debate, as that is AGS’s realm, I will throw you a few sources on how to build the next HuffPo.
Publishers
Another installment in the paid content drama began to unfold today with the first release of a metered model deployed using Press+, the consumer face of Journalism Online. Though the first installation of Press+ is news in and of itself, there’s another aspect of the model that’s unique. Lancaster Online, the publication to roll out the system, chose to meter only a specific section of its content: the obituaries. Starting this morning, those who wish to view more than seven obituaries a month will have to pay. Or die trying.
I’ve written about paywalls before, and I think they’re a terrible for everyone. And it’s not because I’m an information hippie who thinks that all content should be free. It’s because they reflect a fundamental misunderstanding about how to capture the value of great content, and because the user experience sucks. Really bad.
Gannet just rolled out paywalls at three of their regional papers. I found out because I follow paidContent.org on Pinyadda, which, ironically, is a free publication. After I got through the painful period of disgust/anger/befuddlement/hilarity that ensues when I hear about new paywalls being erected, I went to visit the Tallahassee Democrat, one of the sites sporting the shiny new system. It didn’t go very well.
Austin’s latest piece described news as a commodity. Does it matter that you got breaking news from a Snooki tweet instead of from the New York Times? The answer is no. (A better question: are you seriously following Snooki?)
Let’s assume that the news is a commodity and the atomic unit of the news is an article. An article therefore has the following two characteristics:
- Each article has the same value.
- Their values are additive.
So, if there are 15 articles about the new Karate Kid movie and each has a value of X, the value of the Karate Kid story is 15X.
But what is the value of X?
Comparing opening weekend box office gross to the number of article mentions leading up to the film, you could ostensibly calculate the value 1 article mention has on box office reveneue.
For fun, I thought I’d put some of this data together to see the correlation between article mentions and box office numbers (see the following chart here). Although this test is riddled with inaccuracies* and thus the data holds no weight, I hope you can see the value of this methodology if done correctly (which I plan on doing for a particular industry when the time is right).
Imagine you are an exec at Hewlett Packard in charge of marketing the Tablet and you know the Tablet’s value of X. To meet your bottom line, you can assume that you’ll need 500 article write-ups in the next 3 weeks to meet your bottom line. With this knowledge, you could allocate resources for marketing more intelligently (and, more likely, start getting on the horn with every Joe Blogger out there).
There has got to be some industries where something like this would be useful. Any ideas out there?
* Inaccuracies include but are not limited to:
1) assumption that a high-powered critic’s opinion is the same as a no-namer
2) lack of consideration how long the movie has been in theaters
This post is the continuation of a half-formed thought I posted on my personal blog a few days ago. It’s about starting to understand the ways in which the digital world has changed, and is changing, the way we think about news itself. Before starting, I did a quick search for the words ‘journalism’ and ‘commodity’ on Google. Here are a couple of excepts from what I found that I think help frame the discussion:
Chase pinned a great article a few hours ago from the Media Decoder blog over on the New York Times that ruminated on a leak from Google indicating their supposed plans to roll out a “one-click payment system for content called ‘Newspass’” (if you’re unfamiliar with Decoder, you’re missing out on some great content about the future of the news industry. You can follow it here, and I highly recommend that you do).
The system, as real or fictional as it may prove to be, isn’t alone in concept or execution. A number of other entities, including Journalism Online, a venture that recently received additional backing from Rupert Murdoch, are jumping into the news payments game. While it may seen inevitable that subscription models will make their way to the web, the prospect of these products attaining long-term viability is tenuous but not completely out of the question.
While it’s easy to knock the subscription model as a legitimate revenue source – after all, it’s never been the way newspapers stayed afloat – there’s some reason to think that it may fit the online model better than the print model. Chris Anderson, in his controversial but insightful book Free: the Past and Future of a Radical Price, makes the contention that bytes (digital content) are fundamentally different than atoms (printed content). Since bytes are produced once and copied, distributed, and replicated at a price that’s always approaching zero, our traditional business models inherently fail.
There’s no cost per unit for producing a story on the internet, as there’s no additional paper, ink, delivery costs, or distribution fees associated with each additional copy. So what we’re essentially receiving when we read a news story is not a product but a service. We may not pay for the news itself, but are we willing to pay for the service of news? If so, the subscription model makes perfect sense. We already pay for the service of television, the service of internet, the service of the health club and, increasingly, the service of mobile data. But we’re not quite ready to pay for the service of news. Why is that?
This is where both a unified payment system and some bright young entrepreneurs come into play. The payment system is an obvious but significant hurdle to paid content. It’s awfully hard to get someone to take out their credit card and type 15 digits into a web form, for reasons that relate to both financial security and user experience (have you ever forgone an online purchase because your wallet was in the other room? You’re not alone…). In order for web content to survive a subscription basis, someone needs to make this as easy as possible, and many, including Google, will try. There’s an obvious model to follow in Apple’s iTunes store, but that company has always possessed the rare superpower of being able to pry thousands of dollars from innocent, unsuspecting victims who then turn around and shower the thieves with praise. To steal a phrase from New York governor David Paterson, on planet Apple, there is no gravity and light bends right around Cupertino…
But assuming someone solves the credit card challenge, and assuming our hypothesis about news as a service is correct, there’s one fundamental problem that remains to be solved. No one has yet to make the news experience pleasurable in all the ways the internet makes possible. We’re stuck in a half-integrated world, where newspapers exist as strange islands drowning in an online sea. To make a long story short – the service isn’t that good. We’ve come to expect more of our online content, and I think we deserve it. Want to publish a print version online and make me visit your poorly designed destination site? Fine with me. Want me to pay for that service? Think again.
Let’s imagine, for a moment, a different scenario. A scenario where content is delivered to you by a hand-picked group of curators who can provide filtration, context, and added value. A scenario where you’re rewarded for providing opinions and adding perspective to content that’s judged on merit alone, regardless of the size of the publication that produced it. A scenario where publishers, advertisers, and readers all work together to create value for each other in a way that’s unobtrusive and beneficial for all. That’s the future of Pinyadda, and we’re building it, together, right now. Come join us.
Read more about Newspass here and here. Who do you think will win the news payment war? Will it be Google, Rupert, or some other upstart? Let us know in the comments.
As the news and media industry continues to be disrupted by digital technologies and the overall content landscape evolves, new types of niche content creators have started to find big success online. One area in particular that we find to be incredibly interesting here at Pinyadda is inbound marketing. Companies in any industry now have the ability to directly engage consumers and clients through media production, and the art and science of inbound marketing is becoming more important for anyone trying to reach people online.
This week’s Publisher Spotlight focuses on a top Pinyadda community member, Greg Elwell, who is an inbound marketing expert who owns and operates ZephyrMarketing.net. Greg is a Hubspot certified Inbound marketing partner and professional, who wrote one of the best posts breaking down the power of Pinyadda to date. For anyone interested in social media, inbound marketing or marketing in general, we strongly suggest you follow Greg and the Zephyr Marketing blog on Pinyadda and on Twitter. Below is our interview with Greg:
Cgarb: Tell me about ZephyrMarketing.net’s angle as an online publisher.
Greg: ZephyrMarketing.Net is primarily a blog to help local, small- to medium-sized businesses be more visible, credible and remarkable with their online marketing efforts.
Cgarb: At Pinyadda, we are fascinated with companies that create content and media to drive sales of their product or services, can you tell us a little bit about the history of how you began Zephyr?
Greg: I started Zephyr Marketing LLC about 5 years ago. Just prior to starting Zephyr I was the director of business marketing, west region for Nextel Communications.
When I first started Zephyr I was focused on building custom web sites for small businesses at affordable prices. It wasn’t long before we all realized there was much more to having a marketable web site than just having a nice looking design.
So, I then began focusing more on helping customers market their web sites through a wide range of Internet marketing techniques such as SEO, PPC, Email Marketing and eventually blogging and social media marketing.
In August of ’09 I became certified by HubSpot through passing the exam to become a Certified Inbound Marketing Professional. And, it was around this time I started actively blogging and kicking my social media accounts via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn in high gear.
I’ve always believed in eating your own dog food. If I was going to help local, small businesses adopt these modern marketing technologies I had to be engaged with them myself.
While Zephyr focuses primarily on small and medium size, B2C type businesses I had the desire, with my business marketing background, to also address inbound marketing for B2B companies. Recently, I have completed certification as an Official HubSpot Partner and have launched a new site focused on helping B2B companies leverage HubSpot’s marketing software with inbound marketing in the San Francisco Bay Area. The new web site is www.B2BInbound.com
Cgarb: Who would love your site, and what types of people need to know about Zephyr Marketing?
Greg: I get a lot of people from GenY to Baby Boomers finding practical advice and how-to information on the site. Being a boomer myself, and knowing this generation didn’t grow up in the computer and digital age, new technologies and modern marketing are many times difficult for them to grasp. So, I provide not only the why or strategic side of these, but also the how do they work, and how you can make them work for you side.
Cgarb: How is Zephyr’s content different from other sites covering similar topics?
Greg: As I mentioned above, the zephyr site appeals to people who are looking for in-depth information on inbound and social media marketing strategies and technologies. There are many whitepapers and how-to guides on how to develop a strategy and then begin using the tools effectively to grow your business.
Some of the more popular resources available in the blog or as downloads include:
- Twitter Guide for Local Business Marketing
- Planning to Set Up a Facebook Fan Page
- How to Set Up a Facebook Fan Page
- Intro to Google’s Local Business Listings
- Create a Killer Google Local Business Listing
- 16 Tips for Gaining More Fans on Facebook
- How to Start a Successful Blog
- The 6 Stages of Content Marketing
- An Inbound Marketing Traffic Calculator
- Pinyadda: A Socially Enabled Listening Tool
I’m learning constantly myself and turning what I learn into action in my life and business; then sharing it with others. I love getting new ideas and then trying them out.
But I also am careful to respect the relationship side of social media. Using social media is most effective when you build relationships and share useful, relevant content. It troubles me when I see the abuse of social media tools by those who use them as a direct response vehicle.
We are so fortunate we have the tools and access to be able to build and share our personal brand, what we’re passionate about, and work at doing good – making a difference. I like what Tim O’Reilly said at a conference last year: “Create more value than you capture.” I hope Zephyr and B2B Inbound will always be found to reflect that sentiment.
Cgarb: Do you run Zephyr and B2B Inbound all by yourself? That is pretty impressive.
Greg: The ZephyrMarketing.net site is run solely by myself. I’ve developed a process to supply what I call, “Local Business Social Media Marketing” that involves 4 phases: Planning, Building, Engaging and Managing. It’s part DIY and part managed services. I also handle the technical aspects of setting up accounts, configuring and optimizing them.
A typical solution integrates a WordPress, self-hosted blog on the Headway Theme along with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts.
Have you checked out Zephyr Marketing? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
HTML5 is really cool. It’s going to make a whole lot of things a whole lot easier for developers, and it should lead to higher quality user experiences on the internet, no matter what device we use for access. While I’m excited about all the geeky details of the specification, which is still very much a work in progress, I thought it might be worthwhile to take a look at HTML5 from a news industry standpoint. For both big publishers or independent bloggers, some of the new features are likely to have a direct impact on the ways they present content going forward.
Things are moving fast at Pinyadda HQ and we wanted to make sure to keep everyone in the loop about what we’ve been up to. Yaddapalooza was a huge success, with hundreds of people coming out to celebrate our progress and cheer for the future, and we’re super pumped to turn on the gas and really take Pinyadda to the next level. Here’s a quick rundown of the cool stuff we’ve shipped in the last few weeks:
The Newsstand
Our users needed a better way to find new people, sites, and topics to follow that allowed them to do three main things: find a known quantity (e.g. a person or site whose name they were sure of), find unknown quantities with a known criteria (e.g. sites that have content about cars), and browse content by category in a way that was intuitive and fun. We’re pretty happy with the way it came out and we’re eager to hear your feedback about how to make it even better.
New Badges
For the last couple of years, much of the focus regarding the evolution of the web has centered on the concept of the social graph. The social graph, or the digital collective set of personal connections established by users on social networking sites, has laid the foundation for deeper engagement with others online. We update our personal networks on everything from the mundane eating of a sandwich to marriage proposals, separations and births. Simply, our social lives are now hosted online for our worlds to see.
As the web has evolved, and we have evolved with it, we have started to see that “one size fits all” doesn’t apply to graphing our personal connections online, and more particularly it does not apply when hosting different types of user behaviors. This is why we manage and engage with our business connections on Linkedin and not typically on Facebook, to give one example. Considering that social media is still a very young medium, it is safe to expect that more platforms will emerge hosting different connection types and user behaviors.