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Category: News Corporation

March 26, 2010

£1 a day for the Times: your 10 year free trial is coming to an end

News International have announced that their Times and Sunday Times paywall will be either £1 per day or £2 per week. So if you’d been hoping for a radical new vision of a lean digital newspaper model you’d be disappointed, because £1 per day has been chosen purely because that’s what the print edition costs.

The overwhelming message is that News Int are satisfied to drive people back to the newspaper, rather than try to develop an independent digital content business. Murdoch, Brooks etc aren’t content to give up their print advertising revenues, and anything they can do to prolong that they clearly will.

Shouldn’t come as a surprise really. When The Sun started to dip below the 3m circulation mark News Int immediately acted by slashing the paper’s cover price (now down to 20p). There’s a track history of moving aggressively to preserve the company’s core revenue-delivering products.

So … in a few months when media commentators point to Times Online’s inevitably plummeting traffic figures and declare the project a failure, you’d be better off looking at their print circulation figures if you want to know what News Int are thinking.

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December 3, 2009

key things publishers need to understand about Google part 2

The last couple of days has seen a number of new stories in the belaboured News Corp vs Google debate, ever since the search giant modified their first click-free policy for subscription sites. Here’s a couple more things newspaper publishers don’t seem to understand about Google

1. Google gives you sales leads. As succinctly put by Josh Cohen from Google News in this morning’s Guardian:

“Each new click, each visit, each page view, each reader they get, represents a business opportunity,” Cohen said. “Think of it as a lead, whether you are a broker or a newspaper you want those people coming to the front door, you want to be able to get the opportunity to sell something new: whether that’s a subscription or that’s an advertisement, it’s a real opportunity. In any business you want as many leads as possible.”

As Cohen said, every person Google delivers to news sites represents an opportunity to monetise that traffic through either advertising or paywalls. Publishers should want that traffic, the same as any web startup selling something online desperately wants as much as traffic as possible – it’s the storefront. Failure to monetise traffic is down to the publisher and their business model, no-one else.

2. SEO is not the enemy. Yesterday, Matt Kelly from the Daily Mirror (my employer) was speaking about how the Mirror’s strategy is to develop sites that

“perform well for humans, not search engines … If that means It means putting journalism first, and SEO second, then, as a journalist, I welcome that.”

First of all, who do you think use search engines? Humans, that’s who. Lots of them, in fact – approximately 80% of all journeys on the internet begin with a search. So the goal is to create sites that perform well for humans AND (humans who use) search engines – there is no contradiction here. A well-optimised sites is engaging and useful for users,as well as being easy for them to find – what’s not to like?

Search engines are today’s newsagents. They distribute your content and display it for the users who go there. You need to have a well-optimised site that looks good in Google the same way that newspapers need a standout front page with a great picture and headline to grab people’s attention when they’re buying a bag of crisps. Good, simple, easy to understand tabloid newspaper values.

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November 30, 2009

is this new ad for the Sun funny?

Not sure. I think maybe it is, but also makes me feel a little bit queasy

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November 25, 2009

the sun’s new social network platform = lame

I work at the Daily Mirror, and that means I’m strongly obligated to scorn everything the Sun does, but even so I genuinely scorn their platform plugged into thesun.co.uk: MYsun.co.uk. It’s a fully-functioning social network, much the same as facebook, except for Sun readers/users.

At first glance it *seems* like a good idea, since it touches on buzz areas like ‘social media’ and ‘user engagement’. But I think this is really a pretty clueless ‘big publisher’ response to the social media challenge, driven more by editors and journalists than digital media experts.

4 reasons why this is unbearably lame:

1. ‘Cover what you do best. Link to the rest’. Jeff Jarvis’ famous dictum to newspaper companies, which has been almost entirely ignored by the newspaper industry. It basically means focus on what you do well and let other media owners fill in the gaps, rather than trying to replicate their content and be all things to all people. Creating a standalone social network for your users/readers, when so many other fully functioning social networks already exist goes completely against this.

2. Be open, not closed. Social media represents a big threat/opportunity for publishers, since users can share stories amongst themselves and bypass the publisher entirely. There are many clever and innovative ways publishers could integrate with social networks that are yet to be invented, that could boost engagement and relevance of the publisher’s brand. But inventing a ‘walled garden’ social network for their own users is lame. It’s also a classically News Corp move. It’s like at the bottom thesun.co.uk they have a links section with ‘news from around the web’, and all the links point exclusively to News Corp sites like Fox News and New York Post. Which are of tiny interest to Sun users!

3. The network effect. Social networks rise in usefulness and value to users according to the size of the network. They’re a bit like railway networks in that respect, in that a network with only 2 stations is of limited interest, but a network that covers every inch of the country is terrific. Facebook is fantastically useful for users because everyone they know is on it. What’s the point of a social network like MYsun, which might (optimistically) have about 5% of your friends on it? It doesn’t really work as a social network then does it?

4. What, exactly, is in it for the users? MYsun has loads of benefits. News Corp can boost their magical database of 20m users with some highly-engaged potential customers; they can cross-promote other Sun services like SunTalk; their reporters can talk direct to consumers for quotes to run in the paper; they can use it for immediate reader feedback and research; they can even sell stuff, like holidays.

But all these benefits are for News Corp; I struggle to think of any real benefit for users in simply replicating all the things they already do with facebook

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November 19, 2009

3 key things publishers need to understand about Google

the last few weeks has seen plenty of publishers, most notably Rupert Murdoch, criticising Google for the quality of their traffic. there’s a couple of things that I think really need to be understood about Google and it’s benefits

1. Google is central to net users’ experience of the internet – it’s not the enemy. it’s not about casual users lazily trolling around looking for free stuff vs your engaged users coming straight to you. Google is central to the way people use your site, and is in fact a tool of engagement. My favourite news website is guardian.co.uk. To go there I type ‘guardian’ into my search window; if I want to look for something I remember reading on guardian.co.uk I will use Google (rather than guardian.co.uk’s own search tool); if I want to look for guardian.co.uk’s coverage of a news story I will go to Google and type e.g. ‘sarah plain autobiography guardian’ as I know this will be easier than navigating the site for the story. Am I not an ‘engaged’ user?

2. There is no low quality traffic – only low quality content. This is Rupert Murdoch’s whinge about Google:

“If they’re just search people and there are  ten, 20, 50 references on that subject and they look through and see an interesting headline and hit that… when they click it, sure, they get a page of a story that’s in my paper. Who knows who they are or where they are? They don’t suddenly become loyal readers of our content.”

So in other words, this is the seemingly-reasonable argument that Google delivers low-quality readers to timesonline.co.uk or theaustralian.com.au, as they’re just casual users who don’t value the content.

This is rubbish: the harsh truth is that this is your fault as a publisher for not producing content people value enough to become loyal to. Probably because it’s been commoditised to such an extent that it is completely undifferentiated from every other news site. There is no low-quality traffic, only low-quality content

(Obviously it’s impossible for publishers to convert more than a fraction of search traffic into loyal readers (or customers), but that’s just one of the realities of the internet. Having said that (a) the more unique and differentiated your content is, the better you will be at doing this, and (b) at some point, most of your most engaged and loyal users likely started off as search traffic)

3. Google follows logic of the mass market – if you’re not a mass-market brand don’t worry as much about Google. Again, the problem is not with Google it’s with publishers bending over backwards to get good Google SRPs. Google is a popularity contest – it doesn’t rank by what the most discerning people read, or what the best content is, or the content that was produced by high-quality paid journalists; it ranks by what most people are searching for.

Publishers realise this, and so over time, thought they were playing a very clever strategy of producing the type of content that they think will pop up in more searches. This garners traffic but produces undifferentiated, samey, generic content with interchangeable headlines and copy (and in some cases, keyword stuffing with and black-hat SEO with high-demand keywords like ‘Britney Spears’).

But if you’re not a mass market brand that produces mass-market copy, why try and compete here? Publishers need to realise that while being a well-optimised site is a great thing (from the point of view of user experience as much as being high in SRPs), it’s absolutely not the only thing.

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November 11, 2009

“the internet doesn’t exist”

happened across some excellent points, well made, by the Australian business journalist Alan Kohler (for my money one of the best business journalists on the planet) on his excellent business spectator site.

Kohler breaks down the key issues around paid content in a really simple, really persuasive analysis, that deserves to be read more:

[News Corp digital media exec Richard] Freudenstein replied: “Quality journalism comes at a price. Although they play a key role in the digital age, even the best-intentioned citizen journalists and bloggers cannot provide the same service. Journalism is not a commodity …”

Actually, it probably is a commodity now, Richard, after 15 years of publishers, including you, giving it away and, more importantly, the appearance of vast numbers of non-journalists happily producing high quality “content” for nothing or very little.

And is there any standard qualification for the “quality journalist” who produces it, so I know that what I’m paying for is worth paying for?
The problem is that publishers like News Corp never did anything to define or distinguish their journalism to stop it becoming a commodity.
Everyone talks about “quality journalism” but what is it? I have my own ideas about that, but is there a definition written down anywhere that I can check against what I’m reading to determine whether it’s “quality journalism”, not a commodity, and therefore “should come at a price”?

 

The lesson for News Corp and other publishers is that there is no intrinsic ‘value’ in what they produce other than what readers and users see in it. And readers and users are pretty agnostic as to whether the person who wrote it went to journalism school and is demanding a paycheque, or they’re just an enthusiastic amateur. It may be some time before consumers are prepared to get their knowledge of the wider world from, say, trending topics on Twitter, but it is possible, and undoubtedly on the increase.

Here’s another excellent quote from same piece:

It is a colossal miscalculation to think that consumers distinguish between stuff they read on paper and stuff they read on a website, and that they have somehow decided they will pay for one and not the other.

There’s a lesson here for those who claim that consumers “demand” free news online and will never pay for access. They don’t demand any such thing, they just take it because it’s there. If all news sites started charging for access, then they’d pay as the consumer desire for news is still there, and consumers already pay for news in paper form.

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November 10, 2009

Does News Corp need Google?

So Rupert Murdoch has threatened to remove his News Corp owned newspaper websites from Google. First of all, let me preface by saying that I’m sure this will never ever happen, for the following reasons:

(1) Murdoch seems confused about his own properties’ policies on search engines. He implies that the Wall Street Journal has already removed itself from SRPs, but as lots of other people have pointed out, this isn’t the case. If you search for Kraft-Cadburys you can see WSJ pages returning high in the results – you just can’t access the article if you try and click on it.

(2) Someone in his organisation will have a word with him if this ever comes close to following through with this silly threat.

What would happen to News Corp’s traffic if it did remove itself from Google however. Over the last few months, about 22% of The Sun.co.uk’s traffic originated from search engines. I had actually expected it to be closer to 40%

the sun traffic sources

21.8% of thesun.co.uk's October traffic came from search

When you consider that the top 4 search terms for thesun.co.uk are branded terms ‘sun newspaper’, ‘thesun’, ‘thesun.co.uk’ and ‘sun’ you might assume that this traffic would find it’s way to The Sun with or without Google’s help. So you might be able to say that, conservatively, thesun.co.uk might lose between 15% and 20% of it’s traffic on day one.
That would leave it with about 18m-19m global unique users rather than it’s current 22m. According to the last ABCe results it would still occupy the same ranking for newspaper traffic, being bigger than timesonline.co.uk but smaller the dailymail.co.uk. So should it remove itself from SRPs?
erm … no. Search is such an integral part of the way people use the internet that it’s influence goes well beyond immediate referral traffic. A lot of thesun.co.uk’s traffic will come from shared links on social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter, and that’s only going to increase, but this link still has to be found by someone, and they will usually do it in Google. That’s why ~80% of all net journeys start with search. (That’s also what makes Google Chrome browser so fantastic, because it seamlessly integrates Search into your day to day browsing that you don’t even realise how much searching you’re doing)
If News Corp sites are removed from Google it might lose 20% of traffic from day one, probably less than that, but over time it would slowly lose more and more as it removes itself from the daily conversation that Google facilitates.
Google delivers a billion visitors to newspaper sites every month, and that’s not going to change no matter how much people don’t like it. You can’t uninvent the internet
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November 5, 2009

News Corporation paywalls hit ‘delay’

graph

graph from paidContent/Harris Interactive

News today that News Corp’s plan to charge for online content have hit a delay and now possibly won’t happen by next June. Not all that surprising, when you consider they’ve now had time to do plenty of research that no doubt shows what most other research on the subject shows … that is that only 5% of users would pay for content.

More likely what’s behind this delay is the realisation that (a) they need a significant chunk of fellow content publishers to partner with them and agree to move to a paywall, and (b) most other publishers will be waiting and watching to see how News Corp do before they even consider switching.

According to Rupe they’ve been talking to other publishers such as the Telegraph. It’s not surprising that the UK seems to be the centre of their paywall efforts, as this is the region that seems to be suffering most from an advertising recession. According to some recent figures I’ve seen from the IAB, the rate of online display advertising in the UK is likely to decline by about 5% in 2010, when every other country will see price inflation.

Getting other publishers on board is absolutely critical for News Corp, and this is why this Google effort could be quite important. By producing a simple, one-stop interface for consumers to get access to news by internet & smartphone, across a whole range of sites, Google can drastically reduce the transaction costs for consumers, and could be one big step on the way to making this thing work.

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