scottkarp
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.
A recent Scripting News comment by someone named Matt (not me) brings up an interesting topic we’ve been discussing at our local newspaper website, http://stamfordadvocate.com.
Matt points out that Dave Winer shouldn’t fault the reporter for a misleading headline, because it is written by the editor and the reporter has no say.
He’s right. That’s usually true.
The problem is, that’s probably an area where newspapers need to adjust the way they work. As Scott Karp puts it, they need to decide what kind of publisher they are.
You see, what the newsroom folks call “editorial process,” means that many levels of filters and processes are applied to stories to ensure correctness, as well as fill the needed space.
Every editor must admit that they have cut parts of a story due to lack of space despite it having weakened the story. Sometimes cuts are made to strengthen an article too.
In general, these processes are not a terrible thing, whether they work all the time or not. But they aren’t necessary for something to be good journalism.
In an online world however, it could cause problems because of the immediate feedback loop, as in the case of Dave Winer and the NYTimes reporter.
No one ever said to themselves, “That New York Times editorial process got it wrong.”
They say, “That stupid reporter got it wrong.”
Now that we have come to want (and expect) the news writers and creators to answer our accusations of innacuracy, the MSM can’t hide behind the shield of “editorial process.”
As I see it, they have two choices. Either they don’t use reporters names, or loosen up on their editorial policy.
They won’t accept either. The first because of ego, and they second. . .well, for another type of ego.
You see, that would make them bloggers . . . and human.
Update:I re-read Scott’s post and think I may have mis-interpreted it. I think he is saying the flaw is in the way the ads are sold, not online advertising itself, to which I agree. (Could be the Black and Tans. I’m Italian, but my mom says we are all Irish on St. Patrick’s, so I have a Guiness and some Corned Beef to celebrate too.)
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I’m usually on the same page as Scott Karp, but not today.
Maybe it’s because I’m snowed in and it’s St.Patrick’s (Black and Tans), but what he calls a flaw of online adverting, I call a fix to a flaw of traditional advertising.
First of all, it’s not only Yahoo and the big boys getting premium rates for page views. As the producer of a couple local newspaper websites, I can say that our page-views are worth much more than $1 per a thousand.
It’s true that national advertiser can sometimes get that CPM, but it more like $4 to $18 per CPM and that doesn’t include the text ads we have on the page. Nor does it take into account that each page-view serves 2- 4 display ad impressions. And some pages are sponsored also.
All in all, I’d estimate that our cost per reach is lower than our in-print advertiser cost per reach, but not that much lower.
The fact is, I don’t think either rate is as valuable as the cost, so we are in agreement that pay-per-click is bringing down the the total value of a page view.
But that’s exactly what we want, as an industry. Wha?
Like Scott says, it’s about knowing who your users are. The value of an ad is in what value it delivers to the advertiser, not in what perceived value any salesperson can convince the advertiser that a particular buy has.
And, like I’m sure Scott knows, the internet is best at bringing the margin between cost and value together, to zero in some cases.
It’s not a flaw, it’s a virtue.
I guess that means that high traffic does not equal a business model. Popularity is not enough, though huge popularity is still enough for the time being.
I think that’s just because we are in the huge transition. We now value things by the old model, “perceived and estimated value.” We soon will value them by the new model, “true value.”
That’s where Doc’s VRM will play a large role, as well as gestures and intention.
I see VC’s as the ones placing faith in page-views, moreso than web 2.0 companies. Most Alot of them are aiming right, I think.
Who can’t resist the allure of high traffic, though.
It’s official. Tribune has sold The Advocate and Greenwich Time to Gannett for 73 million.
This is great news for the websites, for which I am Senior Web Producer.
It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean and do things right. Fingers crossed.
It’s a chance to do all the things we know newspaper websites should be doing. The timing is perfect, but we’ll see if we can execute.
I promise to do my part (if I’m here ; ) ).
Will post more later.
I’m hoping part two of the latest Gillmor Gang will prove more interesting.
If you remember the Jason and the Argonauts tale, you might know how Jason succeeded in conquest over the Seed men by casting a stone at one, who thought it was his neighbor, and letting them all kill each other.
That’s what Steve Gillmor seems to do by letting the fellas discuss the importance of Google algorithms and whether site owners can get a cut by having search engines bid for their site search.
If Steve would have put the “knockoff” Cheerios down for a sec I know what he would have said.
It’s not whether Google’s algorithms hold up, it’s whether they can garner more stock in the conversation with all their attention data.
The winners of the future are not the best technologies. We’ll all be able to plug into those the same way we plug into an electrical outlet.
The winners are the services which add value to the conversations happening throughout distributed web networks.
These networks and conversations are fluid and changing constantly in response to our gestures.
Those who don’t get this are either thinking too hard or just not enough.
In a similar way that facial and hand gestures are a meaningful supplement to spoken conversations, the gestures which we talk about with attention are the metadata of the conversations happening on the web.
That equates to economic power because markets are conversations.
I agree with Jason Calacanis that many in the SEO business are trying to game this system, but I disagree when he says the system works. People are trying to game the system because it does not work. It just works better than the previous systems.
I can prove it Jason. I’ll write a better piece on a new cell phone than Engadget and see which shows up higher on Google.
No. Those dynamics are only part of the game.
The richer system envelops us with answers using our data and our network’s data in a chameleon like fashion, never static like Google. That’s child’s play.
Jason(Argonaut) succeeded in getting the Golden Fleece but was fickle and left Medea for another Princess.
Likewise, in the shorter term companies may succeed by amassing link attention.
The true winners won’t be seeking the Golden Fleece at all. They will be removing the barriers and letting the crystal waters flow in, filtered and clean, Pure Conversation.
Scott Karp knows why I’ve been confused lately. Very well thought out.
Now I just wish I could create a product that would solve his, my, your and soon to be everyone else’s problem.
Scott Karp says we are still in the 1.0 stage, not 2.0. Well, who knows?
One thing that caught my attention:
This is why Media/Web 2.0 needs Marketing 2.0 — we need a new economic paradigm for valuing attention, which will create a new paradigm for value creation in Media/Web 2.0 and enable the “the good stuff will rise to the top,” as Tom Glocer puts it.
So what is this new paradigm? I don’t know, but if Alex Barnett is right, it involves letting go of the Old Media paradigm completely. It involves realizing that blogging is more 1.0 than 2.0, and that the economics of Web 2.0 are still utterly 1.0.
What I’ve been noticing lately is that there is too much good stuff out there. It’s impossible for any Attention engine to possibly give me “only the good stuff.”
If I gather all the articles and posts in one week that I consider worthy of reading and limit my Attention engine to just that number, I’m still overloaded.
So, it seems to me, that an Attention engine will not only know what I’m interested in right now, but what kind of depth I might be looking for.
Check his Calendar. Got a meeting in ten minutes? Show him the unread items from the people attending. Still have four minutes? Show him a few posts relating to the topic.
Save that post about OPML feed grazers till later when he has time to enjoy it because nobody in the meeting even knows what OPML is and he usually likes to write a blog post right after he reads a good post about OPML. No time for that now. : )
Which is to say, it’s more than bubbling good content. A good Attention engine will know to hide some items that you would love to read, but just can’t afford to now.
It may be that enough time goes by that these items become irrelevant and are never shown to you, or only at some later date when you aggregate a topic for reference in an essay you are writing.
There is nothing out there right now that even comes close to this type of behavior, that I would trust to hide certain items from me.
And this is why we are so excited about feed and post grazing. It condenses and expands topics making the wealth of good content more manageable.
But even this is not enough.
I say that this is Attention 1.1, if I may continue along Scott Karp’s path of numbering.
Like the reference to Alex Barnett’s contention to let the Old Media paradigm go, Attention 2.0 will be letting go the idea that we can filter everything or even that we can humanly keep up with everthing that we would find valuable.
The River of News , Feed Grazing, and the Attention engine in general all indicate that we admit we can’t keep up.
The blogosphere and the network in general are pushing our limits of how large of a social network we can really have without being overwhelmed.
While it’s easy and natural(sometimes) to form your social network offline based upon whose company you enjoy and the fact that you are, at any given time, geographically limited to one location., there is a harder decision coming down the pike, since your judgement of other’s online largely resides in whether they have something interesting to say.
Either you or your Attention engine is going to have to make that decision. And some really great conversations are going to have to get filtered out, not just the ones you don’t want.
Some Reading Lists (*glists) will become social networks that need dynamic filtering tools added to them.
Other Reading Lists will be tools for social networks that act as the filters themselves like an email list does today.
Wrap these items up with the collective wisdom that can be distilled from them, as James Corbett has been pointing out lately with del.icio.us, and you may have arrived at Web, Media, and Attention 2.0.
But I wouldn’t upgrade until 2.1 or 2.2, because they are still finding bugs. ; )
Scott Karp of Publisher 2.0 writes,
Does “news” and information filtering really require professional “expertise” at any point in the process, or can we really just do it all ourselves? Since we know that professionals are fallible — doctors make mistakes, stupid laws get passed, lawyers want to sue everyone — let’s get rid of them altogether. Or, maybe we just embrace the idea that “news” isn’t as important as law and medicine — who cares whether we get it right?
Well, yes but a Lawyer takes years to understand the ins and outs of a court system. Same with a Doctor and the body.
While you can argue that of a news person, it is only a small subset of the editorial portion of a news organization that is needed here.
Not as many editors and a columnist is basically anyone who is an expert on a subject that can write well.
For that matter, we can trim down the photography department, meld interactive with PR etc.
I’m all for News professionals, but not the same old news organizations. Those are going away.
But the argument was more toward an editor versus the collective.
Here, while a professional can provide a much needed function to the wild, at what point does a a professional become a “good member of the news community”, and a “good member of the news community become professional quality.”
While some journalistic methodologies are not intuitive and need years of training, it isn’t exactly open heart surgery.
