Users are More in Control Than Ever in How They Use Content Sites
Monday, September 12, 2005
View Masters
By Brian Morrissey, Adweek
Content is king. The mantra is often trotted out as an indisputable truth for all media. Yet on the Web, the most successful Internet ad businesses—think Google and Yahoo!—are in the aggregation business, not the content-creation business. And this obvious yet overlooked fact could point toward the future for Web publishing businesses.
The Internet aggregators have used their tech prowess and the trend of consumer empowerment to emerge as the 800-pound gorillas, with these companies setting a daunting pace of innovation that has left traditional media companies in the dust.
The new aggregation model sends users to many different sites, rather than trying to keep them to a single property. The rise of news search engines, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed readers that pluck headlines and snippets from Web sites, and the rise of link-happy blogs have combined to put users firmly in control of their Web experience, whether publishers like it or not.
“[Readers] can slice the salami how they want,” says Len Apcar, editor in chief at NYTimes.com. “They can aggregate on their own, and there will be more and more devices to do this seamlessly. We see this as a huge trend.”
While consumer media habits have evolved, what has not changed is how media makes money. In the online world, publishers are typically paid by the number of times they show an ad, which could be depressed by consumers visiting fewer pages and having exponentially more choices. “The audience has moved far ahead of the business models, says Chuck Wilson, an analyst with Outsell, a Burlingame, Calif., research firm focused on the information industry.
Web publishers are looking to change with the times, particularly those whose print properties are seeing limited growth, banking on aggregation tools to lure in new users and turn them into loyal visitors. “I don’t think content providers will allow themselves to be aggregated out of business,” says Jim Spanfeller, CEO of Forbes.com. “If you can’t get the page views, you can’t be an ad-supported site.”
Search is the biggest driver of this trend toward aggregation, establishing itself as the starting point for users to organize their Web experience. Rather that directly visit Web sites, whether they are looking to buy a sweater or find a piece of information, consumers are more likely to use Google or Yahoo! to home in on exactly what they are looking for. E-commerce sites were the first to feel the search effect, and now aggregation is changing online media. When Outsell asked 2,000 Internet users for their top source of news information, the top two choices were Google and Yahoo!, followed by The Wall Street Journal.
At NYTimes.com, the percentage of visits starting at the site’s home page has fallen from 64 percent a year ago to about 57 percent now, with search engines responsible for the majority of indirect site visits. “That’s a really significant shift,” says Apcar. “A lot of publishers are grappling with that and recognizing the reader is in control and they aren’t.”
NYTimes.com responded by making the Times more search-engine friendly. In February, it acquired About.com, a collection of 500 niche-content sites. One of About.com’s major strengths was making its pages show up high in search engines, which the Times is applying to its own Web properties. On top of that, NYTimes.com’s pages were redesigned in May, with the intention of making each its own home page—a nod to changing user habits, says Apcar. NYTimes.com has been one of the most aggressive advertisers on search engines, looking to drive traffic to its news stories.
The company has an advertising deal with news search engine Topix.net to display its headlines, and it has been an aggressive buyer of Google and Yahoo keywords tied to news events including the Pope’s election, the London bombings and Google’s release of a new instant messenger. “You fish where the fish are,” notes Jason Krebs, NYTimes.com’s vp of sales, of the search friendliness.
The power of search engines has been felt at other Web publishers, too. CNET Networks now inserts an ad unit near the top of News.com stories accessed through Google, reading “Welcome Google user,” and listing alternative News.com stories for the search term. “It’s an opportunity to say, ‘Hang out, there’s a lot more here,’” says Joe Gillespie, CMO of CNET Networks.
In the same way, Reuters sees search as an opportunity to introduce visitors to its content and hope they become loyal readers. It has proven doubly important since Reuters stopped licensing most of its content to portals, in an effort to sell more Internet advertising on its site. “There’s a place for an aggregation model where users start from a search,” says Azhar Rafee, evp for consumer media services at Reuters.com. “The question is ‘Where do they go from there?’”
As the Web has grown in size and fragmentation, so too has the need to organize it efficiently and in a way that suits personal tastes. Really Simple Syndication technology is believed by some to be destined to become the “TiVo of the Internet,” putting consumers in complete control of their Web experience. RSS users set up a Web page to receive the bits of Web content they want, say, business news from MarketWatch, sports updates from ESPN.com and apartment listings from Craigslist.
A Pew Internet & American Life Project study in November pegged RSS usage at just 5 percent, but it is growing quickly.
NYTimes.com last month served 8 million Web pages through RSS, up from 5.9 million in March and 4.3 million in February.
“RSS is going to be the conduit through which most people get their content in the future,” predicts Christopher Alden, a founder of Red Herring and now CEO of Rojo Networks, a maker of Web feed-display technology. As this happens, he believes, Web publishers will need to re-orient their business and editorial models to keep pace.
Many Web publishers do not publish the full text of their stories through RSS, instead making only headlines and snippets available. “It’s a phenomenal way to get our product samples out there,” says CNET’s Gillespie. “Publishers like WashingtonPost.com and NYTimes.com have started to put ads in their RSS feeds to develop new revenue streams.”
Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft are all trying to make RSS truly simple. My Yahoo! lets users build a Web feed list through search. Microsoft’s new operating system, due out next year, will let users add feeds with a single click. And Google has taken steps toward automating the entire process, last month releasing a “sidebar” tool that collects Web feeds automatically based on browsing history.
Along with automated aggregation, bloggers have become a major source of traffic for publishers. With most posts linking to other Web sites, the culture of linking has taken off, making some blogs important traffic generators. WashingtonPost.com’s No.1 source of outside traffic is through other Web sites.
As a way to encourage links to its site, WashingtonPost.com struck a deal for blog search engine Technorati to post links to blogs that discuss WashingtonPost.com stories. Those links have added value in search engine rankings because they come from a high-trafficked site, giving bloggers incentive to push readers to the site. “We are very much acknowledging that Web publishing, even from a nationally renowned newspaper, is not a lecture,” Little says. “It’s a conversation.”
Even subscription sites like The Wall Street Journal Online are recognizing the power of bloggers. WSJ.com has begun sending out links to free stories to bloggers, in an effort to have their stories distributed more widely. NYTimes.com is considering a revenue-sharing scheme to entice bloggers to continue to link to its opinion articles when they go behind a subscription wall on Sept. 19.
Some think the pressure put on high-cost traditional media by low-cost nimble blogs will force Web publishers to rethink how they operate. Jeff Jarvis, an influential media blogger and advisor to The New York Times, recently warned publishers on his blog: “You don’t want to build walls or fences or gardens to keep people from doing what they want to do without you. You want to enable them to do it. You want to join in.”
Web publishers are taking their first steps toward becoming more bloglike. Gillespie points out CNET is adding user-generated content with many of its properties like TV.com and GameSpot, and that its news sites increasingly link to outside sites. Some experiments by traditional media, predictably, fail badly:
LATimes.com in June was forced to shut down its “Wikitorial” experiment, which let users collaborate to create an editorial, after several obscene photos and comments were posted. The project lasted less than a day.
Still, online publishers are undeterred, knowing that they will need to adopt some of the features that have made blogs resonate with so many. WashingtonPost.com, for example, plans to add a comments feature to its news stories by the end of the year, giving readers the chance to have their own
voices heard.
“A year ago, I would have said no, to preserve the journalistic voice of the Post and not have that mired by different voices,” Little says. “I think people understand the difference now, and that’s not an issue.”
Alden believes that Web publishers should shift how they think of their business, since online media is becoming more and more different from offline media, where power traditionally derived from media’s proprietary control of content. Rather than looking to the newspaper or magazine model, he says Internet publishers should look to the conference-show model: bringing together like-minded people with a mix of content and conversation that draws on many other content sources.
“Publishers have always been in the business of aggregation, only they’ve just aggregated content from people on their payroll,” says Alden. “As information from other sources proliferates, their choice is to make that information available or let their readers down by not doing that.”
Not everyone believes the publishing model is shifting so quickly online. Forbes.com’s Spanfeller says RSS and blogs remain relatively small traffic sources, and the Web’s fragmentation would in any case further strengthen trusted editorial brands. “My hypothesis is people have a ‘lap’ of sites they go to every day or every week,” he said. “Those sites become part of their regular procedure.”
Others note that there will always be a need for high-quality content online that tends to be costly to produce, which aggregators themselves need for their own survival.
“A parasite has to exist off a healthy organism,” says NYTimes.com’s Krebs. “If there’s not a healthy organism, there’s not a parasite.”
Brian Morrissey is a senior reporter for interactive advertising at Adweek.