docsearls
One of the more interesting sessions at NetJ so far was the session on revenue.
“How do we make money with journalism?”
There were a few people in the crowd that pointed out that the old model of advertising was dying. Jay Rosen brought up Doc Searls’ VRM movement, though he didn’t explicitly call it that.
Dave Winer made a good point in the hallway that advertising is actually growing but we are in a transitional phase.
I also met Scott Karp from Publish2
But most of the crowd was still caught up in the idea that the model was to grow page-views and populate billboards.
It certainly is a dillemma. The choice before all media companies can be put succinctly:
Cash in today and be extinct tomorrow or plan for tomorrow and hope you are not extinct before the sun rises.
This quote [Thanks Doc] from the academic paper written by the founders of Google is interesting for more than one reason.
The first and obvious is that it seems to stand in stark contrast to Google’s most lucrative intitiative, AdWords.
The second is that search itself is a VRMish RFP (request for proposal) at its most embryonic level.
The question, then, is whether Google sold out, or has just laid the groundwork for a new era.
Scott Anderson points to this Search Engine Land post about Google moving the news sources into the search results themselves, instead of in a box on top of the results.
My reaction is that this is an unprecedented integration of the “live web,” as Doc Searls would say, into the formerly “static web search.”
It would seemingly raise the “noise level” to open this up to blogs, but then again, maybe the algorithm is smart enough to give different weight to links to blog posts versus links to static resources.
That concept of weighted links sounds a lot like heading toward a gesture-driven environment, so Steve Gillmor was probably right to say that “links are dead.”
Links, at least, are seemingly entering an era of relativity.
The Chicago Tribune has launched a new “citizen journalism” site called Triblocal, meant to cover the Chicago suburbs.
I put citizen journalisn in quotes because they actually call them “citizen contributors.” I guess they didn’t want to let the unwashed masses think they might be on the same level.
BTW, on a recent VRM call with Doc Searls, I said I thought “community” was the right word, and Doc seemed to be okay with it. It puts everyone on the same level, IMHO. Funny thing is that’s what we called it in the nineties.
It took a corporate buzzword like “User Generated Content” to get media organizations to notice.
Anyway, Triblocal uses too many graphics in places that should be text, and could look the same with some nice CSS styling.
It also crashed Firefox once already.
I couldn’t dig too deeply since I didn’t have anything real to post, but I didn’t see much eveidence of any social features.
It look like a way to post stories, photos and events, with complimentary contributions and moderation from the editorial staff.
Not too exciting. Pretty old fashioned. I guess it’s better than nothing.
We shall see.
Apr 19 2007 10:58 am |
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Mit Advertising Lab points out the struggle of RocketBoom:
“Rocketboom is searching for a new way to put fuel in its tank. Advertising is not doing it. “It’s frustrating that we haven’t worked it out by now,” said the daily video blog’s founder, Andrew Baron.
More evidence that Scott Karp is on the right track that content creation is no longer a business.
As I’ve said before, much of the value of old media was in the distribution mechanism, not the content, and now that distribution is free, content is a commodity.
If RocketBoom can’t do it, who can?
Only the enablers.
Right now, value is in the sites and services that enable users to do something, like share photos, network with others, or blog for free.
Perhaps these services will be commoditized some day as well.
That’s when the Cluetrain will have arrived. When nothing stands in between the buyer and seller, the speaker and spoken too.
Doc Searls points out that the Doomsday Clock is now five minutes to midnight.
Makes you realize how unimportant the Old Media Doomsday Clock is, although it would be interesting if they went hand in hand.
Ed Batista discusses successful relationships as put forth by John Gottman.
As I read what it takes to form a successful marriage, I couldn’t help but think that VRM and CRM need to embrace these same ideals.
This one really pops:
7. The creation of shared meaning.
In this age of empowerment, and in the same way that the Media must join the conversation, the vendors must join the bazaar.
A lot of talk lately about how page-views are dead.
Greg Yardley suggests a solution but it looks like he’s missing an important point.
It’s not just about widgets and “share” of the page, it’s the fact that a well-built Ajax application may now substitute a rich interface for what was tens or hundreds of page requests.
So now how do you calculate a CPM? By the number of clicks on a page? (I guess Ajax will report this data back to the server)
Are advertisers going to buy into the fact that a click that delivers new data to the page makes their ad on that page worth two impressions? Doubtful.
Do we need advertising engines that deliver ads in time based or action-based way so that one HTTP request can deliver more than one ad if the user is interacting with the page for an extended period? Maybe.
Or do we need to rethink advertising in general and admit that interruption based advertising is dead in general? I’d say so.
Which is why pay-per-click is so popular and why pay-per-action will continue to grow. No doubt.
By the way, it’s not just Ajax that’s causing this death of the page-view. It’s widgets, as Greg suggests, and RSS, and syndication of other sorts that make modern web marketing almost impossible to track effectively.
What can be tracked, as always, is the effectiveness of a campaign ROI, which methods like pay-per-action help immensely.
So what’s left to do in a pay-per-action world? Attention, Gestures and Intention are the gold that needs to be mined in order to create more effective marketing.
Using that gold will help us direct relevant offers to willing individuals. What could be better than that?
We can’t do it alone. CPM is one-way marketing, and one-way is dead in all things web.
That’s where VRM comes along. It stands for Vendor Relationship Management, and it refers to a new generation of tools on the way that allow the customers to assist in the marketing relationship.
Some will resist this loss of control at first, because what’s better for the customer doesn’t seem to equate to better for the vendor. But that’s wrong because the marketplace is not an equation, it’s a relationship.
A marriage doesn’t only get better for one of the spouses as the relationship grows stronger. It gets better for both.
Page views aren’t so dead as CPM is. Long live VRM.
