Printed Matters

The two models

There are only two ways to earn revenue on a content site: pay-for-content and advertising.

I challenge anyone to come up with an alternative to the above, and explain how it isn’t just a variation on one of those two methods.

Sugar daddy? That’s not earning revenues. Paywalls, donations, tip jars, Kachingle? Forms of pay-for-content. Targeted search ads, upsells in business directory, selling other services? Forms of advertising.

No paywalls

I’ve gone to great lengths on this blog (I’ve been tenacious, even) to argue that paywalls are the wrong way to go. They’re anti-web, they’re old, they don’t work. I’m not going there any more. I consider the case closed.

Other blogs have argued convincingly that the other forms of pay-for-content are FAIL as well: they won’t scale, they won’t last, they won’t pay enough, or you lose editorial freedom.

That leaves advertising.

Some people say online advertising won’t work either. Advertisers can measure how poorly online ads perform, so value them less than print ads, where they can’t. There’s a glut in inventory, driving the price of online advertising down. They can’t replace revenues the print product was used to making. And now the online ad market is shrinking, too.

My contention: newspapers have never really had an online advertising strategy.

For a content provider, there are two aspects to any advertising strategy: getting the eyeballs, and selling the eyeballs to advertisers. That’s it. For the advertiser, there’s more to it: getting the eyeballs to respond, closing the sale, conversion. That’s farther down the line. Sure, content providers can assist with those things, via technology. But once the eyeballs have been sold, the rest is literally none of their business.

Getting an audience and selling it.

Amass a large audience. Sell it.

That is all content providers, including news organizations, must do. And newspapers online have failed on both counts.

On getting an audience

Howard Owens gave some tips today on how to run a news site. Among them:

Web strategy designed around pull rather than push

On its own, an arcane statement. What does it mean?

Via Twitter:

@howardowens Newspapers are push. They’re delivered. Web is pull. Users need incentive to remember to visit. (e-mail and RSS, more push)

@howardowens If you’re aggregating headlines on your site, you’re expecting people to remember to come your site — pull.

Delivering stuff, whether via RSS, email or paper, is push. You push content toward users, whether they want it or not. It’s tied up with subscriptions: you subscribe to a newsletter, you subscribe to an RSS feed, you subscribe to a newspaper.

But anytime you get users to come to your site because they want something there – whether for a service such as aggregation, or to participate in the community, or for a particular piece of content, or for a feeling – that’s pull.

Why is pull better than push? Engagement. Better eyeballs. More time on site. Advertisers pay more.

SEO: king of pull

The king-daddy of pull strategies is search engine optimization. When people find your content because it was exactly what they were looking for, that’s pull. Google has become the de facto target of this important pull strategy. An utterly basic pull strategy must include strategies for getting links to your content on the pages where people actually look for stuff.

I’ve said often: newspapers need to get the basics right before they go galavanting off into video and other things for which they have no particular leverage. SEO is a basic skill, a fundament. A principle. And they have not got it right.

Examples?

I’m not picking on anyone in particular here, but this comes to mind. Metroland is a division of TorStar, most notable for its community newspaper holdings. It has a bunch of papers serving communities in York Region, just north of Toronto. Take a look at these links:

• http://www.yorkregion.com/article/88524
• http://yorkregion.com/article/88524
• http://vaughancitizen.com/article/88524
• http://www.vaughancitizen.com/article/88524
• http://www.erabanner.com/article/88524
• http://erabanner.com/article/88524
• http://www.yorkregion.com/News/article/88524
• http://www.yorkregion.com/News/Vaughan/article/88524

That’s right: they’re all the same page. And on and on, literally dozens more URLs for this article and every other article.

If you don’t know why that’s bad, get as far away from control of your newspaper’s website as you can. But here’s a hint.

I’m not saying every newspaper has it this bad. But 15 years in, and still don’t have the basics down? You FAIL. Add all the video and Flash and soundslides and podcasts you want, you still fail.

Worse, SEO is so basic it’s old hat. SMM is the new SEO. How long will it take newspapers to grasp that?

On selling your audience

Mark Potts has a nice post today about how newspapers have never tried very hard to sell web ads.

When the Knoxville News has a 35-year ad sales veteran who’s never sold Web ads until now, you really have to wonder what these papers have been thinking.

I can attest to this first-hand. When I was with a community newspaper, none of the sales staff wanted to sell online ads. Too much work. Too hard per commission dollar. Not enough commission.

They asked me how much they could sell banner ads for. I low-balled it, because I’m not a salesman. I saw how much banner ads were going for on other web properties and I assumed we couldn’t get much better.

But salespeople asking me for advice on the sale price is about as useful as me asking them whether we should validate to XHTML Strict.

Owens, from today:

A separate, online-only sales staff with no constraints

Potts, from today:

Give these pros something to sell and teach them how to do it, and that gap between print and online revenue might really start to close.

Newspapers have never really tried to sell ads online. They’ve not had even the basics right and they’ve never invested in a sales force. Sure, the online pie is shrinking right now but so is every advertising sector. It’s the recession. It’s temporary.

News organizations, by actually focusing on advertising for a change instead of wallowing in self-pity and “inventing” old business models, could help grow that pie and get a bigger share of it too.

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