*contains graphic material

The Australian newspaper in the last few weeks seems to be waging a personal War on Twitter, if not the internet in general. Recently the newspaper named an anonymous public servant behind a politics blog, in an apparent attempt to make the man uncomfortable in his job [read about it here].

What struck me most about the coverage of this in the pages of The Australian was the sheer amount of column inches devoted to it. I counted close to 20 pieces in The Oz, all full of self-justification over their treatment of a blogger whose readership probably amounted to a few hundred. How interesting was this to the average reader? It was barely interesting to me! Since then the paper has been embroiled in arguments with government politicians like Senator Bob Brown and Stephen Conroy, and taken to regularly and loudly defending itself from criticism.

Most recently The Oz has extended their war on the internet with the Editor-In-Chief Chris Mitchell suing a Tweeter @julieposetti for defamation, merely for transcribing via Twitter the words of someone else during a conference [read the story here]. (That’s right – not for defamatory statements made by Posetti herself, but for quoting/paraphrasing things said by someone else! The sheer brass neck is incredible – that a Chief Editor of a newspaper would misuse defamation laws in such a ridiculous vanity suit is just … anyway.)

The chart above shows the decline in the Australian’s readership over the past 4 years. The paper is now read by 432,000 people (Mon-Fri), placing it a sorry 8th in Australia’s major metro daily market. That’s a pretty serious indication of a lack of relevance to readers. It’s read by less people than such august periodicals as Gardening Australia and Zoo Weekly.

So I’m baffled as to why the leadership believe that constantly talking about themselves will increase their relevance and grow their readership? It’s one of the strange things I’ve observed about newspapers that as their readerships get smaller, they become shoutier – have a look at the Independent in the UK, which in the last few years began loudly editorialising on its front page(and didn’t arrest it’s circulation decline). Being chippy, defensive and self-regarding is not a good strategy to win friends. If you’re at a party and people are drifting away from you in boredom, don’t start shouting at them – think about what you’re saying, and how you’re saying it, and change it.

The ABC’s excellent website The Drum contains a particularly poorly thought out piece on Murdoch’s new iPad-only news venture [link]. The author suggests The Daily will be an overwhelming success (not mentioning how this is to be judged), and offers three reasons why:

1. It will be paperless. Granted, there is a certain enjoyment to flicking through the pages of a broadsheet that leave your fingers ever so slightly ink stained. But invariably we discard the paper, leave it behind for someone else or dispose of it in the bin. In this regard the tablet-only paper will be hassle free.

What, it’ll be paperless like the millions of other online news sources The Daily is competing with? Ummm …

2. It will be cheap. At around $5 a month or 99 cents (USD) a week, The Daily is a fraction of the cost of the yearly subscription offered by printed dailies.

Yes, but at $5 it will be roughly $5 more expensive than millions of competitors. The author acknowledges this, and goes on to say:

Without delving into the various pro and cons I am of the belief that online news will not always be free for two reasons – producing good copy is labour intensive and good journalists come at a cost, and the degree of exclusivity attached to certain stories is worth paying for.

So news won’t continue to be free because it’s expensive to produce? Unfortunately consumers couldn’t care less – they will only pay for things they value.

3. It will be exclusive. Murdoch is oft-maligned for the influence wielded over his editors and the content of their respective papers. If true, Murdoch has the ability to divert an exclusive story from print to online only. When this does happen, you can expect the sales of the app to go through the roof.

Yeah, only if readers value that exclusivity. Having exclusive content that no-one cares about is pretty useless.

But the more significant point is that NOTHING on the internet is exclusive. Anything can be reproduced  and distributed with 2 clicks. News content online is about as ‘exclusive’ as Facebook content is ‘private’.

The fact that Murdoch has been working closely with Apple’s Steve Jobs on the project is evidence enough that rollout and growth will be as seamless as possible.

*ahem* I seriously doubt Steve Jobs has had much input into this, let alone been ‘working closely’ with News Ltd’s execs.

There’s a massive elephant in the room in the debate over the business case for the NBN. How long before someone suggests abandoning net neutrality?

The typical scenario for net neutrality is this: Optus, for instance, accepts payment from Channel 9 to make it’s catchup service run faster on its network; ABC iView, who decline to pay as much as Ch9, runs much slower. So Optus make money from selling faster bandwidth to those who can pay, and hamstringing those who refuse. In other words, a 2-speed internet. For an impassioned argument about why this is bad, if that’s not already obvious, see this great Cory Doctorow piece here. In essence, though, it’s very good for ISPs as it opens up a whole new revenue stream, but very bad for customers whose choice is reduced.

In the UK there’s a lot of discussion currently about this very thing, as the gov’t has proposed allowing ISPs the possibility of ‘shaping’ broadband speeds to accomodate preferred partners. What surprises me is the lack of talk in Australia as we debate the new National Broadband Network. With discussion centring on the business case for ISPs (or lack thereof), abandoning net neutrality would significantly help with profitability. As we know, Labor aren’t averse to ISPs shaping what is and is not downloaded for political purposes (i.e. by filtering out blacklisted sites), so why not for commerce? And I can’t see the Liberals complaining too much, as a very pro-business party who don’t know, or care, much about the internet ecosystem. And of course the ISPs aren’t averse to the idea – look at what the heads of Bigpond, iiNet and Internode have to say in this piece from ZDNet. I for one am very curious to know where the government, opposition and other stakeholders stand on net neutrality.

Pippa Leary, MD of Fairfax Digital has this to say about Fairfax’s universally loathed autoplay ads [you can watch the full video on Mumbrella, which is worth it as puts some more context around Fairfax's plans for video]:

“What’s amazing is 75% of people who come to the site watch those videos to completion. We test it constantly. We ask them those questions – overwhelmingly they come back and say no, we prefer to stop it.”

*cough* bullshit *cough*. Interestingly ambiguous language around this. If by ‘watch to completion’ you mean the other 25% are turning it off, I’d say that’s an alarmingly high level of rejection and Fairfax should consider using opt in mechanic. This is what leading global news sites like Telegraph.co.uk, guardian.co.uk and New York Times all do, for this very reason.

Any UX expert will tell you that users hate autoplay video. When I worked at mirror.co.uk I know it was comprehensively rejected for this reason. Fairfax know this, and Leary’s excuses are pure BS. So why do they continue to do it? Here’s why:

1. Short-term cash-money. Obviously, they make short-term money from the pre-roll video ad impressions. One mumbrella commenter said this: “I work at Fairfax Digital and can tell you that autoplay is important to FD to enable enough video views to attach sales to. Without autoplay, and Ricky will deny it, there isn’t enough views to make revenue from.” ‘Ricky’, no doubt, means Ricky Sutton, Head of Video for Fairfax Digital. So they annoy a few users but they get ad impressions. Whether or not advertisers will continue to want to pay for these impressions remains to be seen – I would hope advertisers would wise up and pull their money.

2. Internal Fairfax boardroom politics. As noted in this Crikey piece there’s an internal struggle going on between CEO of Fairfax Brian McCarthy and CEO of Fairfax Digital (yes it is a separate company!) Jack Matthews over the strategic direction of the group. For Fairfax Digital, video makes up a big chunk of where they see their future – hence content deals with Channel 10 and the ABC for long-form content. Prior to Fairfax Digital, Matthews in fact worked in TV for the past 15 years.

If they stopped using autoplay, impressions would fall through the floor, video ad revenues would dwindle, and it could become hard to justify the entire video strategy. That would seriously expose Fairfax Digital at a time when Matthews seems to be angling to take over the top job and make video a central strategic plank.

3. Habitual newspaper business models. Giving consumers things they don’t want is the newspaper business model, going back a hundred years. It’s called bundling. Ever picked up the Saturday paper that weighed 3 tonnes, and thrown 90% of it in the recycling bin without reading it? That’s how newspapers, back when they had a monopoly on distribution, made their money. By bundling up a whole load of content into one package they could sell that package to a large number of consumers who only wanted to read a small part of it, and then sell advertising to a large number of advertisers based on total circulation/readership.

Autoplay video is the same thing – it’s bundling video into the news articles.

But that model doesn’t work particularly well on the internet. Readers can disaggregate the newspaper and only read the bits they want – they don’t like being forced to read content they don’t want, and they won’t accept being bundled products. Here was my point in the mumbrella comment stream yesterday:

“Video will be huge for news orgs in the next few years. But everyone will be doing it. Those who are good at it will win, and the majority will just flush more money down the toilet. Therefore Fairfax ought to concentrate on making video content that ppl WANT to watch, rather than ways of churning more ad impressions that just piss people off. Ignoring what your customers want is not, never has, and never will be smart business strategy. Something that people don’t want will never be an ‘exciting’ media revenue opportunity”

I get that there are strong business imperatives behind Fairfax’s autoplay video. But in my view, Fairfax is better off investing in their video strategy to produce content people want to watch, and concentrating on delivering that content to people when and where they want to watch it. That’s easy to say / hard to do, but unless they crack it they’re not going to succeed in video. For realz.

***update***

Fairfax Digital’s COO Nic Cola has admitted autoplay is about “commercial reality”. quelle surprise!

http://mumbrella.com.au/fairfax-coo-autoplay-video-is-a-commercial-reality-for-now-35946?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+mumbrella+(mUmBRELLA)