On from the launch of the relatively impressive if not entirely unique Mirror Football website earlier this month, recently launched is the digital version of the “famous” 3am Girls - Trinity Mirror’s latest attempt at a vertical for which they possibly hope to charge in the foreseeable future in order to help stave off the UK’s largest newspaper publisher’s plummeting share price avoid laying off more journalists and closing down more newspapers: http://www.3am.co.uk/.

What can we say about the SEO of this site by looking at it for 2 minutes? The URL structure looks ok, they seem to have a hierarchical system that uses hyphen to separate words. But I can’t say the actual words they want Google to spider are too impressive. I am not sure what they will make of “Ooh”, “Gasp!” and “Phwaor!” as the links on the main navigation. All the page titles are the same as well and there is no RSS feed, but I don’t want to be too picky. Does it have any meta data then? What are those CTRs going to be like?

Let’s Google [3am] … here they are down at number 6. Well, I don’t know about you but to me the snippet’s not exactly an incentive to learn more. But we all know newspaper companies hate Google so maybe they’re not interested in traffic from search engines, which might start 80% of internet journeys but let’s not let facts get in the way of the truth.

Oh but hold on. Trinity are paying for PPC rankings for both [3am] and [celebrity gossip] so they are at least acknowledging that search exists in some form. Oh dear.

To be fair, it is early days for this site. With a decent amount of marketing more people will come and visit what is an established brand in the celebrity world and as a result the site will attract some high quality links that will push it up the rankings to a point, despite Trinity making it as hard as possible for Google to understand what the site is about. But if they want to rank for [celebrity] (450,000 exact match searches on average per month) or [celebrity gossip] (368,000 exact match searches on average per month), which I am pretty sure they do as they are bidding on PPC for both, and compete with Heat, Perez Hilton, Spike and *whisper it* The Sun then they had better smarten up their act. Because currently they are, sensibly, not charging for content so all cash will come from ad revenue which is reliant on traffic and impressions and as far as Google, the biggest traffic driver of them all, is concerned they are merely a blip on the horizon.

Rupert Murdoch seems to think that you will.

After the huge financial losses just announced by News Corp, Murdoch has decreed that, possibly from as soon as next year, he will charge for all his newspaper websites including The Times and The Sun. It isn’t clear whether this will extend to broadcast news websites such as Sky News.

It has been obvious for some time that the newspaper industry is at a crossroads. The old-new-model of drawing in as much traffic as possible to gain revenue from display advertising has been found to be unsustainable – I say old-new because, well, we’ve been here before haven’t we: back when paid for content was deemed to be a broken model and the pay-walls tumbled down the first time. In addition to News Corp, the Telegraph, Guardian and Mirror Groups have all mooted charging for content but as Michael Beecroft, head of digital trading at Mediaedge:cia Global, concedes: “In many ways the horse has already bolted, and trying to close the door on it now will be very tricky indeed.”

This model may work for some specialist content, such as the FT or the Media section of The Guardian, but in general why would anyone pay for content they can get for free elsewhere?

Murdoch, Sly Bailey and others speak about how quality journalism is not cheap but what exacly denotes “quality” and who is the judge of that other than the audience? In a world where the media landscape is increasingly fragmenting, why would you pay for frontline heavyweight news items when the BBC continue to provide that for (what is perceived to be) free? And when it comes to the so called celebrity ‘news’ that the tabloids pedal so well, why would you pay for The Sun when you can go to Perez Hilton? Why go to newspapers for sport news when you can go to Cricinfo, Football 365 or Planet Rugby?

Even most of the content from the Guardian’s Media section can also be found with a subscription to the NMA or Media Week.

Just last week, Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired said in an interview to German news website Spiegel:

“In the past, the media was a full-time job. But maybe the media is going to be a part time job. Maybe media won’t be a job at all, but will instead be a hobby. There is no law that says that industries have to remain at any given size. Once there were blacksmiths and there were steel workers, but things change. The question is not should journalists have jobs. The question is can people get the information they want, the way they want it? The marketplace will sort this out. If we continue to add value to the Internet we’ll find a way to make money. But not everything we do has to make money.”

The UK has always had more national newspapers than any other country, and the arrival of digital has just exacerbated the situation to the point where the market is unbearably crowded.

The Independent, with the lowest readership of any national, has been under threat for some time following huge losses, with the Daily Mail & General Trust rumoured to be interested in rescuing it. The failure for such a move to materialize to date probably says more about The Independent that anything else.

Moreover, The Observer, the oldest Sunday newspaper in the UK, published since 1791, is facing the threat of either closure by the Guardian Media Group or being re formatted into a weekly magazine following the same heavy losses suffered by the other papers (The Observor actually being one of the papers that is holding its weight better than others). I would find this extremely sad, no other Sunday paper quite caters for the same readership (though this may yet be its saving grace- Guardian Media Group is owned by a not-quite-for-profit organisation for a reason) but we all should come to the realization that in the next ten years a lot of household newspaper names will either change beyond recognition or disappear completely.

Ultimately we have been here before. People may be questioning the business model for free content but it is worth remembering that the model for paid content turned out to be just as unprofitable back at the turn of the decade.  The fundamental problem is that there is no longer a scarcity of content and without scarcity economics doesn’t really work. One thing is for sure though – in the words of Dylan, These Times They Are A-Changin’.

 They’ve had enough. Enough of all you freeloaders stopping by their sites and not paying. Enough of you ignoring the ads they’ve served up for you. And enough of you reading and sharing their stuff elsewhere.

Over the last couple of months the newspaper industry has seemed increasingly desperate to generate new revenue streams in particular from the internet. If you take a look at the revenue figures for newspapers it is easy to see why.

News Corp who own one of the worlds largest newspaper businesses saw Q1 operating profit drop 47% and they are not alone.

Since Murdoch initially mentioned the idea that newspapers should start charging subscriptions for their websites in May there has been a growing sense amongst the newspaper industry that a subscription model for online access to their content is the way forward.

So is subscription going to save the industry or is it yet another badly thought out attempt by an industry that doesn’t really understand what is going on around them to grab revenue where it can?

You can probably tell from my choice of words that I don’t believe this will save the industry.

Newspapers have done well up to now for two reasons, firstly the convenience of the format. Traditionally there where three primary platforms for absorbing news: TV, radio and newspapers and each of these had a very different format which where used at different times and in different ways.

Newspapers provided the ideal way to transport news. They where sized to be comfortable to read on a bus or a train, lightweight, cheap and easy to dispose of. You couldn’t take a TV to work with you; you couldn’t take a radio of a flight so the newspaper was perfect.

The second reason was the control and flow of information. In order to report news particularly news from a foreign country you had to get a reporter there, have researchers available to check facts and figures and a way to broadcast the information. This kind of operation cost a lot of money and required a large infrastructure. Newspapers where perfectly setup to take advantage of this structure and there where very few competitors.    

Internet technology and in particular Social internet technology have been eroding away the need for large-scale organization and at the same time increasing the number of devices, that news is accessible on.

Think laptops, netbooks, iPhones, your computer at home, your computer at work, in fact for a good deal of people, they are never more than a few clicks away from huge stores of information.  These stores of data are called websites and pretty much anybody can run one.

As soon as information is available on one website, it has the capability to be available on millions through technology such as RRS. Added to this platforms like twitter allow near instantaneous transmission of messages to potentially millions of people, meaning almost no information is unique.

The less unique information is the less valuable it is and information is newspapers currency. 

Much like the music industry of the late nineties and early two thousands, instead of finding ways to use this new technology to their advantage the newspaper industry is mostly trying to either ignore the problem or threatening to sue anyone they can find, usually Google.

Now that it is becoming increasingly obvious neither of these strategies is working, they are trying to fall back to the offline model of subscription.

Why not try something new, how about add-ons to their service?

An example of where they might want to start their thinking is already here have a look at Techdirt a professional online blogging network that has come up with a range of add-ons to help their newsgathering and analysis business. I am not suggesting that mainstream newspapers follow this exact model but to me at least its seems a lot better than anything they have come up with so far.

 If you want to read some more insight it is on my company website Yomego
 

Interestingly I wrote this last week and the debate has now moved on however I felt quite strongly when I read of the recent lobbying by major media companies in the US to force Google to make them appear top of its natural search results for news stories and decided to post anyway.

It is supreme arrogance, ignorance and laziness from newspaper barons who are rightly scared that they are being increasingly marginalised by users finding their content where they want rather than where these old school ‘institutions’ would have them find it. If newspapers want their sites to be top of search engines, and surely they do with 80% of internet journeys starting with a search, then they should take the steps to make sure they get there via ethical SEO techniques; by improving and optimising their architecture and content and improving the quality of their inbound links via digital PR. Asking for special treatment is just, well, cheating. The Guardian for example, has always been one of the lowest selling national UK dailies but it has tapped into a worldwide liberal audience online and its site is now one of the most read newspaper websites in the world, and consistently the most visited in the UK (although traditionally populist Sun did overtake last week according to Nielsen).  Why is this? Mostly breadth of digital content, especially blogs, and, in the case of the Guardian, the identification of a target audience- something that most national newspapers, who have more or less the same centre right agenda, will not be able to differentiate against. Say what you like about it politically, but the Guardian understands digital arguably better than any other traditionally offline media owner, arguably in the English speaking world. If print media brands want to survive in the brave new world, they need to realise that they are no longer people’s first source for news.

The word ‘fragmented’ does not come near to describing the sources from where users get their content from these days. Why should we go to a newspaper website for it? Many print media owners seem to think that users will come to their site because in the pre-digital past if you wanted news you had no choice other than to use their brand. Moreover, many people only read news in the past because it was all that was available for your commute. Now all that content, and more, is on the web and the new generation of mobile phones such as the iPhone are only making it easier to read that content on the move, even if that portability is still embryonic in its development, not to mention other distractions like mp3 players and video games.

Admittedly, when it comes to big international stories, it is the larger and more established media owners that have the resource to send journalists to the front line but then those media owners need to take steps to ensure that their content is then found by search engines spiders. To ask for special treatment flies in the face of the principle of an unregulated, democratic world wide web. It’s an old media solution in a digital world. We all have to face the reality that there are too many newspapers in the post digital world, certainly in the UK. The Trinity Mirror Group has closed 27 titles in the last year alone. The recent realisation that selling ad space alone does not provide enough revenue for newspaper sites to keep their content free only complicates the issue. Digital has been cutting into the sales of national newspapers for years forcing some, such as the near 150 year old US newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, to go online only and reduce their journalist staff from 120 to just 20.  Is subscription for content the answer? That’s a whole different question.  As for the immediate future, newspaper barons can moan as much as they want but although some will have the vision to survive, some are ready for the recycling bin.

Intel, the BBC, Dell, Coca-Cola, Samsung and Cadbury’s et al presented experiences of interactive capacity and competency in their companies.
I was asked to moderate a panel of experts from the newspaper industry, the BBC, the online travel world and the global advertiser on the state of the nation of the impact digital technique has in the world of communication. A very high quality panel discussed a range of issues, including how businesses are organising themselves for effectiveness in the digital world, and what some of the challenges have been in getting them there.

Peter Ward from WAYN (the travel social network) spoke well about how his business has pushed the limits of technique from the beginning. As with many other social networking sites, WAYN enables its users to create a profile and upload photos. Users can then search for others, and link them to their profiles as friends. If you register it is possible to send and receive messages using email, discussion forums, eCards, SMS and instant messaging. Matt from the BBC spoke about how stakeholder management remains a skillset we need to excel at since the need to get so many interest groups focused on a single strategy around the consumer is as critical in the BBC’s world as it is in the world of brand communication.

Simon Shipley from Intel was firm in his belief that delivering digital work required a commitment to learning new skills. Intel has undertaken a serious programme of training internally to digital knowledge. And the ability to develop communities of interest amongst target audiences has been one area of growing effectiveness. Intel runs a programme aimed at IT Managers, a critical audience (in both meanings of the word) called the IT Manager Game. It’s proving to be more and more effective as time spent and quality of content consumed through the game play increases. It’s a completely ‘non-traditional’ activity, which makes it harder to measure in terms of media metrics, but easy to measure in terms of effectiveness of shifting perception and commitment to the Intel brand.

Anne Foster from the Newspaper Marketing Agency reflected on how the demands of advertisers had changed to reflect the audiences, and the mood in the media industry was definitely a focus on sales and ROI rather than brand. Also there were different levels of media need by category. We had talked offline about an increased interest in emotional factors influencing decision making, which, and how we are in danger of too much focus on the short term. It’s inevitable, though, in current forecast market conditions. Anne also presented a strong grip on the statistics of consumer behaviour, how they consume media and what this means.

Measurement remained a big issue for everyone. I put the question to the floor “is anyone happy with their measurement?” and the universal response (although in such an environment it’s natural for people not to give too much away) was “not really.”  There are new dynamics of measuring digital media, and dashboarding gives us a view, but there is a shortage of common currency, both in planning and measurement. For example, the current pressure on ROI and direct response means refocusing on click through, but as consumer behaviour online has adapted to the range of content and browsing behaviour, click through just isn’t enough.

So what’s the answer to that? Again, opinions varied, and the room was divided on what we’re trying to measure. My take is that if we accept the job of the marketer is to be gaining or defending ‘share’, or launching new products, services and variants, then we need to have people with the broad view as well as the detailed ability to pick targets off one by one. Share, of course, is only one aspect. Profitability is another, and sustaining profitable share is the job of everyone, not just the marketer. There is universal need to learn, however, how ‘being part of the conversation’ can be measured in these terms.