From the Web: Paypal on your phone, Amazon looms, individualized print, blogger-ranked media, employers pay for search

News from the Web and its implications to local news-gathering organizations

1. Ebay's Paypal won a deal with Blackberry to handle online payments for their app store. Pay attention to the companies that will be controlling the cash register in the virtual markets of your local community's future.
2. Recent survey shows Amazon's brand is getting stronger at the same time local news gathering organizations are getting weaker. This is a threat to local content publishers.
3. New York Times reports on MediaNews new initiative to create a individualized print edition that prints out in the home. Not a new idea, but might involve a new business model. I believe that if RSS met the right user interface, it might work.
   
4. Technorati ranks the top websites in terms of the attention they recieve from bloggers. This is relevant to the discussion of whether blogs are a hinderance to traditional media (by driving traffic based on using traditional media's content) or a complement (by linking and thus driving traffic to the original source).
5. Some employers are moving away from the job boards and going to paid search, for mixed results. Local media companies can use this to predict the trajectory of other the flight from newspaper classifieds by other commercial advertisers--to the boards, then to paid search. An opportunity for newspapers? Paid search requires copywriting skills to get good results.
   

Links and Sources

• PaidContent.org: Ebay's Paid Plans for Mobile
  


• CNET News: Amazon Customer Satisfaction Gets a Boost, But Why?
  


• New York Times: Could Customized Newspapers Bring Readers Back?


• Technorati: Since You Asked: Technorati Attention Index.


• PaidContent.org: Newspapers, Online Job Board Ad Sales Dry Up as More Employers Turn To Search

Editorial: Response to Yelvington.com's Eight Barriers to Local Content.

In a recent post on Yelvington, the author argues why paid content is a false grail. Summarizing:

1. The painful lessons of experience, i.e. it has not worked before. It certainly hasn't worked well for the PC internet. Handhelds hold promise because people are used to paying for value added service on a mobile. But no models for news content have emerged. Local media companies will have to invent new applications for handhelds, rather than re-purposing local news content.
2. The problem of scale (volume)--basically, unique visits mean nothing, the users who visit three times a week for more than one minute at a time are the key. A paid content model would require a large number of these users, because only a small percentage would opt to pay. The numbers are not there. "How can you get them to pay if you can't even get them to visit frequently when it's free?"
3. The problem of scale (breadth)--Paid content, along with enough free content for advertising...that is a whole lot of content.
   
4. Competition--It is true that re-purposing existing content to the Web is easy. Therefore, there is a sea of competition. Supposing then we differentiated with local content? That leads to the next item.
   
5. Lack of unique content, coupled with a false sense of being unique. The argument is that newspapers maintain the mindset of a decades-old but now broken monopoly, while your audience has less confidence in your brand and uniqueness. The author makes a (cheap) shot at newspapers, saying newsroom cuts in recent years has exacerbated this problem.
6. Support costs. Not a big deal in my book. Outsource it.
   
7. Your own staff--Makes the valid point that your online people will fight against paid content because they buy into Web 2.0 free and open hype. However, increasingly I talk to experienced media executives who understand sales driven online initiatives. Your online guys are the ones I try to avoid when I sell into your newspaper.
8. Relative strength of the geotargeted advertising model.--Though this was initially number 4, I saved it here for last because it is the lesson. I once heard someone say that given the difficulties of running any enterprise, always use an existing business model rather than try to invent a new one. Yelvington points out that there is so much inventory on the web that CPM of non-local advertising has been driven into the sand. Local adverting, supported by a sales team, is a substantial revenue stream. Moreover, it is an established model. What has changed, as mentioned above, is that the local monopoly is kaput and the brand has been eroded. So innovative energy is better spent creating a new mix of print and digital content that reinvigorates the brand, with a local advertising value proposition that can be sold to local businesses. "Local advertising" is itself too simplistic a term, as local news-gathering organizations are positioned to help local businesses use a broader spectrum of methods to communicate with local customers.
   

Links and Sources

• Yelvington.com: Eight barriers to local paid content
  

Newspapers should learn to push like Google

Google threatens newspapers because it intends to convince local advertisers to advertise on its platform rather than directly with the paper.

However, newspapers can learn from Google's strategy. Google is working hard to be a 360 degree company--no matter where you look, its there. What is your newspaper doing to be 360 degrees?

Google wants to reach you on every screen you interact with. As Jeff Jarvis puts it in his book

Most companies think centralized, and they have since the decline of the Sears catalog and the dawn of the mass market. Companies make us, the customers, come to them. They spend a fortune in marketing to attract us. We are expected to answer the siren call of advertising and trudge to their store, dealership, newsstand, or now, web site. They even think we want to come to them, that we are drawn to them, moths to the brand.

Does that sound like what you are thinking about your newspapers website? Driving traffic to the website is not enough. Jarvis reminds us that people who find specific content on your website after search, do not even remember your website's brand afterward. They just remember how they found it, i.e. Google. Yet we spend money on SEO, and in doing so we make Google search results even more valuable (which in turn makes Google Adwords even more attractive to your local advertisers.)

So like Google, newspapers need to push their content to their subscribers. But wait, we have a model for that already... it is called a print subscription. Is there a digital form? Yes, an email edition is one way. Content delivered via 3rd party widgets and applications, as well mobile applications is another.

The real test of any model for pushing content out to your audience is how well you can maintain and promote your brand in the process.

But remember that Google works hard to make the content it sends out to us as relevant as possible. That is because if you are sending info to my inbox or mobile device, it had better be damned useful, because that is my personal space. Newspapers have an even greater opportunity than Google, because contextual advertising will always fall short of local advertising.

However, I find many of the e-newsletters newspapers send out to be lacking. What attitude does your newspaper have with the emails it sends out? Is it "get as much out to them as possible"? Do you take comfort in having a CMS that automatically sends out emails without you having to do anything? Are you sending (shudder) AP articles to my inbox? Chances are that your automatically generated e-newsletter that isn't ugly and soulless.

My company is does email editions for newspaper clients, and some email technology companies provide self-service platforms that can be used for the same purpose.

Using push-tech for digital delivery

I am an advocate for newspapers using push technologies--applications where the newspaper sends content out to its audience, who have typically subscribed to the content. This is directly analogous to delivery to print subscribers.

It contrasts with pull technologies like RSS for example, where the audience uses and RSS reader that requests (pulls) the content from the newspaper's server.

The strength of push out products is that local advertisers can understand them the way they understand a print ad--it is "going out" there to people's doorsteps, or in the case of email, to the inbox that people check first thing in the morning.

My company has been working on an email edition product for some time. People tend to find us because they want to promote their website, but are surprised when they see how well it works with local advertising.

It is not spam if it is local. AP stories in your inbox are annoying, but stories about your community are useful. The key is to have local advertising focus on time-specific promotions and coupon deals. For example, you have local restaurants place a discount coupon in an email edition for days of the week when lunch crowds are lower. That coupon is placed in content sent to subscribers' emails every morning, and seen when people are thinking about what they will do for lunch.

Newspapers' opportunities in local content and advertising with push technologies will grow as content is increasingly consumed through mobile devices, such as the iPhone and the Kindle. Rather than speculating on what will be, this blog would rather keep you posted on developments as they occur. But needless to say, mobile alerts and some of iPhone applications from the likes of NYT and BBC are only the beginning.

Comparing to Pull Technology
The weakness of pull products for newspapers is two-fold. Firstly, it's tough to brand the content because it tends to be aggregated with other content--how can you tell how the end user is mixing it with other content? Secondly, for RSS in particular, it requires your audience to be pretty web-savvy. If it is tough for the average user to understand, you can be guaranteed it will be a tough sell to local advertisers.

The best thing to do with RSS and other pull technologies in my view is to send out limited stories, and force the user to click back to the website to see the whole story, so they can engage in the website's advertising. Internal advertisements, such as "click here to place a classified ad" are a good idea as well.