What good are page views if you can’t monetize them?

Bill Grueskin, Dean of Academic Affairs at Columbia University, has a must-read article at paidContent that supports the position I took in a recent post about how overrated the quest for page views has become:

What good is Web traffic anyway when the online advertising model is so badly broken? …

… It’s troubling that, even as traffic to news sites is growing, their once-lucrative home pages and article pages are displaying house ads or remnant ads with CPMs of no more than $1. At that rate, even a link from Drudge, which could refer 500,000 page views, generates only $500. …

… In other words, even if it’s true that aggregators are siphoning off users from news sites (and it’s pretty clear that they refer traffic to sites as well as drain traffic from them), does it make a big difference in a world of $1 CPMs? …

… The value of advertising online ought to be measured more by engagement than by sheer numbers, that is, more by metrics like time spent or page views per user than by the sheer number of people coming to the site, many of whom may not assign any value to the journalists who generated the content.

News website FAIL

When is an award-winning website still a really bad website? When it’s reviewed by John Temple, who gives the Arizona Daily Star site a resounding “FAIL” based on 18 criteria.

The Arizona Daily Star (azstarnet.com) had been recognized by the EPpy awards as the “best news Web site with fewer than 1 million unique monthly visitors.”  But while that may make for good promotional copy, it doesn’t mean that readers — you know, the ones who are supposedly using and interacting with the site — are being offered a useful product.

Temple administers a test created by Mark Potts to determine how well azstarnet.com is serving the typical user. Again and again, from listings of the best restaurants to comprehensive coverage of local personalities, the site fails to measure up.

Its failure on the first three criteria, including “Without using search, find continuing, in-context coverage of a  long-running local story” — underscores the usefulness of what Martin Langeveld (and I, as well) has been arguing for — wikifying the newsroom:

Wouldn’t it make sense to build all of the back story into a wiki on the topic, and to make it the responsibility of the reporter to update the wiki whenever something new happens? And once the wiki is created, why not make it available online, linked in the printed and online versions of the story, so a reader can get a summary of all the background the paper possesses, not just whatever the reporter considers relevant to the current story.

At the end of a separate post about attracting an online news audience, Langeveld emphasizes that communication, not design for its own sake, should be foremost on the mind of those who run news websites:

It’s not about how sexy-looking your site is. It’s not about having the absolute latest display technology. It’s about how you engage readers with conversations and with ways of interacting with news staffers and with each other.

Build your community, not numbers

While it’s easy to spot the news outlets that, desperate to survive in the new media ecosystem, stray outside their local focus and engage in an obvious grab for page views, others have realized they must expand their concept of business operations and provide the communities they serve something of value.

And blogging about whatever’s hot in Google Trends isn’t it — that’s just  playing a short-sighted and pointless numbers game. Sure, a site may see a spike in traffic because a blogger made sure to put up a post about whatever was most popular in Google search that day. But to what end? How long until advertisers see the stats for themselves and discover that they aren’t getting the click-throughs those misleading numbers promised, that all those eyeballs were a just an ephemeral occurrence?

WestSeattleBlog.com tries to build a relationship with local businesses by providing free seminars. Men’s Health offers an iPhone app that users can purchase in order to buy its Workouts. While the The Seattle Courant didn’t have the capital to make good on its ambitious vision, its business strategy is worth filing away for future reference:

Does your newsroom know its community?

Take about a minute and look at Mark Glaser’s 10 steps to saving newspapers in the digital age (via CyberJournalist). And then take note that the thread running through each of these steps isn’t about cutting costs as much as it is about being innovative in the effort to engage the local community.

Because I’m a good netizen, I won’t reprint the short post here and deprive CyberJournalist of the traffic, but I will say that Glaser is right on target in telling news sites to focus on what businesses want, rather than viewing them as an endless source of advertising dollars. And his recommendation to engage the community in face-to-face meetings recalls Gina Chen’s fine Save the Media post on how journalists can create communities of readers.

The last people the news industry needs in a crisis

From Newspaper Death Watch, in its commentary on a meeting of newspaper executives seeking to implement a paid content plan for their websites (emphasis below is mine):

The newspaper industry’s paid content debate sounds more and more like the desperate protests of the music industry when file-sharing began to dismantle its business model. The two industries have some characteristics in common. Both are mature, traditionally stable and highly profitable businesses with predictable growth and high barriers to entry. The people who gravitate to such industries excel at managing costs and limiting risk.

These are the last people you want to run operations at a time of crisis. Crisis demands innovative thinking, fast reaction times and tolerance for risk. One reason we’ve seen so little of this in the newspaper industry is that the people at the top have no capacity for making dramatic changes. The innovation that we’ve seen comes almost entirely from startups or skunkworks operations that publishers have had the sensibility to leave alone.

Bring on the unpaid contributors

UPDATE at the bottom

UPDATE II (June 8, 2009) — enabling the entrepreneurial journalist

Jeffrey Seglin, a professor who has written for the New York Times, makes the case that when writers write for free, they not only devalue their own work, they make it harder for others to receive compensation:

Your work has value. If you start giving it away for free, then it diminishes that value and makes it harder for others to charge for their work as well.

I think this is true. One need only spend a few moments perusing freelance writing job sites or surveying the payments correspondents are receiving from local pubs (online and print) to know just how little contributors are compensated.

Now, do I think it’s wrong for writers to contribute their work for free?

No.

But do I agree that anyone other than a new writer looking to build a portfolio is — to use Seglin’s term — a “blockhead” if he or she writes for free?

ESPN Local: One-stop home team shopping

Today I discovered ESPN Local, which aggregates stories from across the Web, organizing them by sport. A quick survey of the site reveals that most of those sources are traditional, hometown newspapers.

Because I live in the Tampa Bay area, I first chose the Tampa Bay Buccaneers Local News, which brought up a page of stories from Tampabay.com (the St. Petersburg Times‘ site), TBO.com, Lakeland Ledger, WTSP-TV and Naples Daily News.

Major League Baseball is in season, so the Tampa Bay Rays page currently has an even more eclectic array of sources, including the Edmonton Sun, Kansas City Star, Bradenton Herald, TwinCities.com, Desert Sun, The Stuart News, MLB.com, The Oregonian, Fanball and Detroit News.

Each link includes both the headline and lede graf from each source. It seems like a win for both ESPN Local and the aggregated sites that get the benefit of ESPN Local’s traffic.

And the value for fans is clear: Instead of having to add umpteen sites to an RSS feed, they can go to one site that has already done the aggregation and see every story at a glance.

Thinking outside the paid content box

In his recent post about Journalism Online’s intent in proposing a system for news sites to charge for their online content, Steve Outing notes the absurdity of asking readers to pay for content offered by outlets whose quality has diminished after laying off  thousands of journalists:

The minute paywalls go up on content on the web, all but the most devoted will click elsewhere to find alternatives. Consumer behavior will make an abrupt change online. Brill and his supporters think that newspaper content is so special that bloggers and new news players online won’t match the quality, yet newspaper quality has been sinking badly as thousands of journalists have been pushed onto the street.

Setting aside the issue of quality, news sites that intend to charge for content have their heads in the sand if they think people will pay because “Who else will provide the coverage?”

Plenty will. And plenty are, as Mark Potts pointed out during a panel in Baltimore, titled “The End of Local News? If Communities Lose Newspapers, Who Will Fill the Void?”:

Creative Loafing's Ben Eason talks to Editor & Publisher

Ben Eason, Creative Loafing’s CEO, gets some prime real estate in Editor & Publisher‘s Special Report on newspaper bankruptcy.

The most interesting part of the article is Eason’s revelation that he expects CL to emerge from bankruptcy over the summer, at which time “everyone will know the company’s real worth”:

“As time goes on, people are more realistic in what the company can produce going forward. We have an opportunity. It’s an opportunity to suggest to the creditors, to the judge, to everybody involved what we believe the company will look like going forward and then we have the opportunity to suggest what the capital structure is going to be. We are forced to value the company, not as we would like it to be, or what it was, but what it is today.”

Here's where newspapers need to invest their resources

Of the seven strategies Mark Potts lays out for the news industry to adopt, two in particular stood out for me as of particular importance. His criticism of news sites that spread themselves thin by trying to appeal to all readers is one that bears repeating. See if you agree.

I’m excerpting them here, but I recommend you read the entire post.

Vertical products: One of the most broken things about the newspaper business is the “all things to all people” model. By trying to do a little of everything, newspapers don’t really do anything well—for readers or for advertisers. New products that focus on specific, vertical audiences should be the wave of the future, but so far they’re barely even a trickle (let’s see—there’s Gannett’s MomsLikeMe franchise, and then…not much else).

New forms of advertising: Banner ads are so…1997. Interstitials, pop-ups and intrusive ads are so…obnoxious. Classifieds are so…dead. Meanwhile, Google is making money off of local search, other non-newspaper companies are pioneering things like click-per-call and pay-per-click, and various startups are perfecting cheap ways to create and sell local ads. Could it be that newspapers are having trouble making online advertising revenue grow because they’re selling the wrong kinds of online ads? Hmmm.