Arnon Mishkin is a partner with Mitchell Madison Group, where he consults for media companies on improving legacy businesses as well as making the internet profitable. Prior to MMG, he was a partner at the Boston Consulting Group, where he did some of the firm’s earliest work on the web.
People who
folks that continue to refer to web properties as "sites" consisting of "pages" have no clue.
People who "get" the internet know that linking is a LAZY way to marry audience to platform, like SEO. And like SEO driven traffic, wouldn't be surprised to find out that session times aren't that great. 1 mil unique visitors who are on page less than a minute and do not return aren't really traffic.
Smart people forget trying to cut corners and marry a real audience and customer base to their platform.
Traffic to the successful aggregators (SeekingAlpha.com, HuffingtonPost.com, etc.) is quite disproportionately larger than the traffic to their content providers, leaving many content providers feeling this is a "raw deal" as the aggregators get the ads dollars.
However most aggregators are not the size of SeekingAlpha and HuffPost and are not the real culprits. Here the problem lies with the ads model we have all grown dependent on. Pageviews, not just clicks, have become cheap currency when monetized on a CPM basis alone. More value can be extracted from high-quality content than just $0.01/pageview that we are all fighting each other over now.
Most professional content producers have premium content to sell as reports or subscriptions that ought to be marketed alongside the headlines/free content on the aggregators' sites. Arnon's "wadgets" suggestion could accomplish this well, as well as other monetization systems that recognize this new "syndication economy."
Andrew Waterman
Emerginvest
So it's not a "link economy" because the currency is distributed unequally and tends to accumulate to certain "winners." I guess the U.S. economy is a "fallacy" too, by your reasoning.
Were you calling for literal communism — an "equitable economic relationship" between subjects and publishers — when it was newspapers and magazines repurposing information provided by unpaid sources?
That's not to imply I'm conceding your premise, by the way. All evidence indicates that actual scrapers are low-rent operations making little if any money.
Google News, the most prominent, is not monetized; HuffPo, which publishes reams of original content alongside some scraping, is famously unprofitable; the rest are mainly spam blogs that clog up Google results and disappear as quickly as they pop up.
The latter are grasping for AdSense pennies and usually operating in clear violation of copyright law. But their clickthrough rates are so low most original copyright holders don't bother to shut them down.
i'm guessing the author would consider a twitter account as a useless tool as well.
since one can just "scan the headlines" using the (unmonetized) twitter feed most news orgs. have fallen all over each other in setting up and feeding , why would one bother to follow the embedded links to their ad supported property?
Or, you can consider that aggregators are like digital newsstands. You come in, browse the content and "buy" it or not. In newsstands, many of us browse and don't buy. Same idea with aggregators. No? The aggregator does not charge to display your "content teasers" and makes money with advertising. Do print publications charge newsstands because they are selling cafe while people are browsing/reading magazines for free? Maybe they should after all. ;)
Not sure the media industry is looking in the right direction. You said strategy?
This is so ridiculously tired. Can we just stop already?
There are thousands of businesses making money on the Web. Lots of money. The fact that newspapers cannot figure out how to be one of them is simply sad. These are lazy businesses, unable or unwilling to keep up with the competition.
What do we do with those types of businesses? Bailout! I mean, we let them fail.
While opposing the response to aggregators by some newspapers and AP, this article reveals a good deal of truth.
Here are three similar posts I wrote some time back (this article reads almost like they were used in prep of the story).
http://www.howardowens.com/7335/myth-deep-link
http://www.howardowens.com/7337/why-nobody-clicks-your-home-page-links
http://www.howardowens.com/7336/why-home-page-ads-may-be-more-valuable-story-page-ads
Many advocates of the link economy do not fully understand how links actually work.
Ya know, I've been called many things, but I can't remember someone saying I was a communist. Several of my clients would be seriously upset and several detractors would be seriously surprised.
To me an "equitable economic relationship" is one in which buyer and seller each feel they have gotten the best deal possible. I think Adam Smith himself opined on this.
In addition to not being a communist, I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand the basics of "fair use" the core test is whether the person using the content has damaged the business of the person who created it. The fact that Google News and Huffington Post have not chosen or been able to monetize the content they've scraped is orthogonal to whether they've taken traffic that otherwise would have gone to the creators of that which was scraped.
Now several of the comments suggest or imply that there are "thousands" of ad-based content businesses making piles of money from their content on the web. That is news to me. I suspect it is also news to the investors in Huffington Post, Daily Beast and others. Gawker claims they are now in the black, but I bet that has more to do with their buyer-guide sites than with the sweet commentary and gossip that they are known for.
Who are these thousands of companies and where I can I invest in them?