Kiesow 7.0

After seeing Steve Yelvington’s paywall infographic this week I was struck by two things.

1) I recognized the pattern

2) it seemed to underestimate (graphically speaking) the effect of loyal visitors we see on our own site.

Take a look:

Click on that graphic to see a slightly larger version. Basically, we see about 50% of our traffic come from the 3% of our readership representing our two most loyal cohorts: ‘daily’ and ‘loyal’ visitors. Those readers come to the site at least 5 times per week. There are not many of them, but they are persistent.

So, that upside-down and lopsided Bell Curve causes a few problems. If you wanted (hypothetically) to put up a paywall – where do you put it?

The readers on the far left are not highly engaged with your site, many are one-time visitors even if they are local. But, there are a lot of them!

The readers on the far right are highly engaged, mostly local but they are probably too few to build a subscription model with.

That leaves the happy medium – the occasional and weekly visitors who visit often enough, and generate enough traffic to be valuable both for CPM and potential premium offerings. But of course how would you target them with any premium model without risking either raw uniques of the fly-bys or the massive page view generation of the loyals?

No seriously, how would you? And that probably explains why we are hearing a lot of talk about paywalls this year, but aside from some unique instances – not much action so far.

What is it about new toys?

My flight back from Las Vegas this afternoon (Southwest 1159) was on one of the airline’s few planes that have WiFi hotspots. Apparently they are still testing out the system and it was free.

So – having a new iPhone, 5.5 hours of flight time and free Wifi – of course I had to check it out. First up was Qik:

http://qik.com/video/1880919

Not too thrilling – but my son did get to watch the live video for a while which was fun.

I also tested out Skype- which worked like a charm on my end – though Annette could not hear much over the engine noise. Need a noise-canceling mic apparently.

The VPN connection into my office network was no problem. More fun was the SimplifyMedia app for the iPhone – which let me stream my home iTunes library for awhile – till I decided to save my battery I can imagine the Slingbox app would be pretty cool as well.

In the end I spent a fair amount of time watching our flight progress on FlightExplorer.com mostly just to watch the weather we were routing around.

And of course, I had time to write a blog post…

An interesting quote from Jonathan Miller (once-upon-a-time my boss’ boss’ boss’ boss at AOL) talking about Kindle, the WSJ.com and the distribution problem in digital media:

I went from paying $14 to The Wall Street Journal to paying $10 to Amazon (for WSJ.com on the Kindle). Now the splits there, and I think this is relatively well known, are very, very much in favor of Amazon. So I became very much less valuable to The Wall Street Journal. That’s part one. Part two is they don’t know I exist. I went from being someone who’s their subscriber to being someone who is an Amazon subscriber, which The Wall Street Journal has no visibility back to and cannot manage that customer relationship. . . . So they’ve lost both the customer management and, trust me, the lion’s share of the economics.

So newspapers are mad at Google for creating an efficient distribution system that drives traffic back to them, but the same publishers are rushing to Amazon to give them 70% of the subscription revenue to get onto Kindle?

I went looking for he phone number for our local bike shop this morning. I know where the shop is but never can find the number when I need to call. (BTW – what’s a phone ‘book’?)

Google search = Merrimack bicycle shop Luckily for the owner that generic search is also the exact name of his store. Great SEO for someone who has been in business for 20 years.

First result = Google Maps Fair enough – I did search in Google. But, I wonder why we do not hear more concern about that? Local directories can be a significant source of newspaper.com revenue and here Google has gone and given itself the market. Business-wise that worries me more then them linking to us in Google News. Where is the moral outrage people?! WIN for Google.

Second and third results = Waymarking.com which appears to be a cycling enthusiasts site with reader contributed reviews. Interesting – unfortunately the location and photo in the listing is two locations ago. (The owner has moved several times in the past few years.) FAIL.

Fourth result = AOL.com The shop I was looking for was 9th on a list of apparently sponsored and featured links. At least it was listed – but unfortunately the location is a year out of date. FAIL.

Fifth result = Directory.NH.com (disclaimer: we own nh.com) This is the first genuinely ‘local’ result on the page. The Telegraph has actual real live people who maintain the site, update phone numbers and addresses, sell enhanced listings and so on. And of course the info is accurate in this case! WIN for NH.com

Results six though 100 (no I did not look at every one) seem to be the usual mix of empty SEO-grabbing directories with a few reader contributed sites in the mix. Almost none of them had the correct address (416 DW Highway) and none I saw had anything approximating business hours. Overall Web FAIL.

So, I guess the question is really about Google. How useful are it’s vaunted algorithms when dealing at the local level? Yes, Google itself got the listing correct – and that should be a concern. But, 99% of the rest of the results were garbage and there was really no way to judge right from wrong, good from bad.

PageRank works wonders on non-geographic-relevant content. When I want to know the name of the character actor in the episode of STNG that is on right now (Ray Wise) I really do want to see the result that the greatest number of people found relevant.

But, when I am searching for the address of a local business I want to see the result that has the most authority. In this case accuracy is not a popularity contest.

This would seem to be a kink in the armor and we see the same problem in Google News. Large media sites get a high ranking for nothing more than reprinting an AP pick-up of a ‘local’ story. Meanwhile the source newspaper that is providing updates, context, documents and maybe multimedia is stuck lower in the results.

If newspaper executives want to make a career out of bashing Google for having a popular product – they should at least frame the argument in reality. The problem is not that Google indexes our stories and content – it is that really they don’t do such a great job in providing ‘credit’ to the local sources that are likely to also be the most authoritative.

Google News itself is an attempt to remedy this problem. By segmenting and indexing media outlets the results can be assumed to be more recent and more relevant then a random search of the entire Web. But, as with directory listings the system still breaks down at the hyper-local level.

Newspapers should be going after Google to make their searches (for news and business directories especially) more geo-friendly. Just add source location as a factor in the PageRank calculation and see if we can not start driving traffic to the sources that are actually paying to create the content in the first place.

I sent a note out over Twitter earlier today trying to gather some additional responses to a Web Tools Survey I am working on: Doing a survey of news Web sites – what open-source and free tools and services do you use: http://bit.ly/oju #journ

Typical enough – but what was interesting was watching the traffic (via bit.ly):

I have noted on the chart the timing of each re-tweet (red) and, perhaps more importantly, the actual conversions of clicks to survey responses (green). In the first hour the survey received five re-tweets, 110 referrals from Twitter, and four people actually completed the survey.

You can check out the raw data here http://bit.ly/info/oju

Is it wrong to embed/share an Associated Press video?

Apparently there are some crossed lines at AP. It is a big company so not a surprise that mistakes happen. But, they look pretty silly when a regional AP rep asks an affiliate radio station to remove similar videos from their site. Especially when the videos were embedded from the official AP YouTube Channel.

Does AP know how its YouTube channel works? (CNet News)

If you are an online-type-person working at a newspaper.com have I got an offer for you.

I am working on a small research project that hopefully will turn into a case study and presentation at Poynter later this summer. The working title is: ’10 Things You Can do for Free Today.’

The project involves identifying 15 – 20 of the top ‘free’ tools being used on newspaper Web sites and then building short case study for each focused on ease of installation, use, successes and best practices. The tools most commonly mentioned so far range from Coveritlive to Qik.

If you are interested in helping out just answer a few quick questions here: Web Tools Survey

Thanks!

Reading Steve Buttry’s latest blog post this morning  Clinging to the past won’t save newspapers he summed up (with credit to Chuck Peters) the exact philosophy we have been thinking about at the Telegraph recently: Success = Attention x Trust x Convenience.

Great quote and great presentation from Chuck:

Help!

I am at a workshop at Poynter this week learning about change management and coaching/training techniques. Just for a plug for the sponsor – the event is called the McCormick Change Leadership Fellowship.

The group is working today and tomorrow on developing hour long teaching modules that could potentially be used in the future at Poynter or other journalism events and conferences. We will not be building a full presentation this week, merely creating an outline and tools that we will use during the session.

This is where I need help. My session is tentatively titled: “10 Things You Can do for Free Today.” The focus will be on finding, implementing and using free software and services available on the Web to provide internal and external tools and features for use at your paper and Web site.

As part of the session I would like to provide a mini case study from different newspapers using each of the free tools and Web services. We use most of the at the Telegraph – but having a broader cross-sample to talk about would be much more valuable to attendees – and keep me from just rambling on about myself for an hour.

So – the list of possible services is below. If you are using any of them and would be willing to submit to a short email or phone interview and share some best practices and results around these products – let me know in the comments and/or by email: damon(at)kiesow.net I am also looking for any suggestions on services or categories of services that I have not gotten on the list yet.

1. Disqus.com/Intense Debate (comments)
2. Coveritlive.com (live chat/blog)
3. PHPbb (open source forums)
4. WordPress (blog)
5. Mogulus/Ustream (live video)
6. Qik.com (live cell phone video)
7. OpenX (ad serving)
8. Twitter (SMS)
9. Google Analytics/GoogleMaps/Google Docs
10. EditGrid (collaborative web-based data)

I know there are hundreds/thousands of others out there – I am most familiar with those in terms of good journalism uses at newspapers.

Thanks!

Damon

I am totally willing to agree that the current online news business model (e.g. publish everything for free and try and make money from eyeballs/ad revenue) has some flaws. And, the only way to find a new model or mix of models is for different organizations to try different things. Each market is different, each organization is different. Eventually it will all work out.

But, reading Business Week today Jon Fine mentions this nugget (which has been noted before):

For Subscribers Only: Locking Up the News Sites

Little Rock’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which boasts a daily circulation of around 176,000, charges a monthly fee of $4.95 for full Web access. Around 3,400 subscribers are paying for that access, which comes to just over $200,000 a year, a sum that’s two zeroes shy of being meaningful for big players.

Obviously numbers are not my strong point, but this is a big paper. Can someone explain why $200,000 is a winning business model?  More to the point – how are 3,400 online subscribers (which does not count the print subs who get online access as well) enough?

Just doing the math here with round, easy numbers: $200,000 with a $5 CPM = 40,000,000 pageviews per year. So really, assuming three ads on a page they would need 13 million pageviews a year to bring in that same revenue. Increase that CPM a bit and having a paywall looks like an anchor.

Now ArkansasOnline.com has ads on the page, and these are viewed even by non-subscribers. So, they are double dipping a bit there. But still – how many readers and page views are they giving up by being behind the paywall?

Anyone have unique visitor or page view numbers to share and compare to  other non-paywall sites of similar circulation size? I wish anyone the best who tries something new but I would like to at least be able to understand the strategy.

Update: From the Neiman Lab on 04/02/09: Paying for online news: Sorry, but the math just doesn’t work.