WebProNews » Publisher

Newspaper Publishers Divided Over Paid Content

Frank Reed — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:39:21 +0000

So the big guys like Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller have already told us that paid content for newspapers is the wave of the future. Of course, when these two titans of the media world say jump the rest of us mere mortals are supposed to enthusiastically yell “How high?!” While, these guys have been right more often than not the rest of their industry peers aren’t so sure about paid content being the best things since colored ink for the newspaper industry.

The Center for Media Research is reporting

According to a survey conducted for the American Press Institute, reported in Media Buyer/Planner, more than half of newspaper publishers believe readers will pay to access online newspaper content. 51% of publishers say they believe they can successfully charge for content, while 49% either aren’t sure or believe paying for content will not work.

So half of the these folks say they believe it can happen which is not quite the same as saying that it is definitely the way to go and that the industry will be saved. The following bit if data from the survey shows just how out of touch this group may be over all though.

68% of publishers said they thought that, even if readers object to paying for content, they would have a difficult time finding that information in other places, while 52% said they thought it would be either very easy or somewhat easy for readers to find replacement content.

Hard to find information elsewhere? We’re talking about the Internet, right? There are always options.

There’s more in the details and, of course, it’s more fun to talk tough than to be tough.

58% of publishers said they are considering charging for content
49% said they have no timetable in mind for how that will play out

Right now we are in the all talk phase of this next generation of newspapers and everyone can sound ready to go but who will be the first to really make the move and step out as the guinea pig? That is the online equivalent of ‘breaking through to the other side’ or ‘walking the plank’. There will be no halfway reactions on this subject, so who will have the stones to be the poster child for paid content? Any thoughts?

Comments

Facebook Tests New Privacy Options

Doug Caverly — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:38:57 +0000

Facebook’s approach to privacy may soon be modified in an interesting way. A beta version of the site’s Publisher is allowing users to micromanage their settings, adopting a different approach to every photo album and status update if they please.

A post on the Official Facebook Blog explained, "If you have access to this beta version, every time you publish content into your stream you are able to control which people can access that specific piece of content. After writing a status, uploading a photo or creating other content from the Publisher, use the lock icon in the lower-right corner of the Publisher to access the drop-down menu."

Then, users can pick from traditional lists of people including "Friends and Networks" and "Friends." Or they can open up to the whole world with the "Everyone" option.

Facebook’s more business- and marketing-oriented users should appreciate this Everyone setting. Its appearance marks a departure from the so-called "walled garden" approach that Facebook previously embraced. At the same time, the other publishing alternatives might make the site more popular among the most privacy-obsessed crowds.

One important note: with regards to letting everyone play with the new options, the Facebook Blog post only said "we hope to expand this to more of you soon."

Yahoo’s Key To Kill AdSense

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:37:20 +0000

The still in testing Yahoo Publisher Network has been touted as a potential disruptive force, once it opens to more publishers.

Yahoo Publisher Network has a “US-only” requirement for webmasters currently. If that goes away, opening the service to the world, things could get interesting with Yahoo’s revenue.

Robert Nabloid at Seeking Alpha cited several ways Yahoo might rise this year. They have more room to grow than Google does, given Google’s enormous market capitalization.

“Right now Google has a monopoly on all international publishers. When Yahoo releases the program from beta, thousands upon thousands of websites from around the world will begin to use Yahoo,” Nabloid predicted. He has no holdings in Yahoo or Google.

Yahoo reigns as the most popular web destination, he noted. The continued growth of online advertising, which reached nearly $10 billion in the first half of 2007, provides Yahoo with more selling opportunities.

Though Nabloid touted the innovative thinking at the company that delivered Yahoo Answers, Yahoo has been more actively shutting services down than launching new ones. The gains they will make in services should come from this paring back of minimally used or duplicate services, like Picks and Photos respectively.

Yahoo’s work with the Publisher Network and its gains thus far won’t eclipse Google AdSense easily. Google recently published Newbie Central for AdSense, help pages aimed at first-time users of the ad service. They won’t give up billions of revenue dollars without a fight.

Publishers Push ACAP As Robots.txt Improvement

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 18:46:15 +0000

The Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) debuted today as a set of improvements to deficiencies seen in the robots.txt protocol currently observed by search crawlers.

Google’s courtroom bete noire Agence France-Presse, and business publishers Reed Elsevier and John Wiley & Sons, are among those who developed ACAP. The need to control content while making it available to search engine users drove the development of this protocol, which is complementary to the Robots Exclusion Protocol found in robots.txt files.

“ACAP will give content owners the confidence to allow search engines to index their content under clear terms of use,” the organization behind ACAP’s development said in their FAQ.

“To date, many aggregation websites have chosen to adopt a liberal attitude to copyright – ‘it’s OK until someone tells us it isn’t’ – which means there is an enormous amount of infringing material being hosted by major companies,” said the group.

That “liberal attitude” has been Google’s regular contention about not just online content, but that of its book search project. Google’s book scanning has angered publishers due to the search giant’s position that publishers need to actively opt-out, rather than Google proactively seeking permission to index.

Publishers consider robots.txt too simplistic with its allow/disallow choices for spiders and directories or types of content. “These simple choices are inconsistently interpreted,” ACAP claimed; search engines will likely find that opinion a surprising one.

ACAP extends what robots.txt presents to crawlers, in a standard form. For example, a time limit value can be defined, telling the crawler the publisher wants certain content to expire and be removed from an index after a given date or period of time.

From a cursory review of the technical documentation, ACAP looks like a way for publishers to establish usage guidelines that they can utilize in lawsuits against search engines. Though publishing groups have backed the standard, major search engines like Google and Yahoo are not represented in ACAP’s supporters.

This could be a step toward gearing up for a fight with the search engines to force them to comply with ACAP as they crawl available online content. We won’t be surprised if the search engines respond by disallowing the spidering of any ACAP-enhanced sites until everyone reaches a public common ground where they accept ACAP as an extension of the robots.txt standard.

follow me on Twitter

NYTimes.com Traffic Booms After Dropping Select

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 16:09:09 +0000

One has to wonder what kind of traffic and ad revenue the New York Times gave up while its Times Select subscription model was in place.

Visitorship to the Grey Lady jumped impressively in October 2007. Metrics from Nielsen Online cited in Editor & Publisher cited over 17.5 million visitors to NYTimes.com for the month. In September, the Times drew 14.6 million visitors.

Times Select operated as a subscription service from September 2005 to September 2007, when the publisher reopened that walled content to readers. They had plenty of motivation to do so, as Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer observed in August 2007:

The top website visited after www.nytimes.com last month was select.nytimes.com, receiving 8% of the site

Yahoo Publisher Network Attacked By Clones

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 17:21:28 +0000

This isn’t some Phantom Menace grabbing content from a Yahoo blog, but another blogger who’s dropped a whole YPN post into a blog and slapped ads alongside it.

Michael Mattis at the Yahoo Publisher Network blog expressed his unhappiness over some copying and pasting performed with his site’s content. Fair use excerpts are one thing, but a full snatch-and-grab has him riled.

“It

Yahoo Publisher Network Experiences Problems

Doug Caverly — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 22:12:02 +0000

The Yahoo Publisher Network is having problems, and in an online world where things often resolve themselves in a matter of minutes, Yahoo has said, “We are actively addressing the issue and expect improvements by next week.” Hey, Sunday morning’s only 80 or so hours away!

Barry Schwartz has been on top of this story since it began over the weekend, so we’ll turn to him for the details. “This has not only caused sites to load slowly due to the ads lagging some page loads,” he notes, “but it has also caused publisher’s earnings to drop over the past few days.”

And the natives are getting restless at the Digital Point Forum. One thread’s titled, “I finally called it Quits for YPN.” Another says, “YPn Earnings worst day ever.” A third – and far from the last – thread is called, “checked few of my sites, I don’t see any YPN ads at all.” Together, those three conversations have received over 1,800 views.

It’s likely that a “Network Update” provided by Yahoo has received even more – this is where the “by next week” line comes in. As reported by Schwartz, it stated, “You may have noticed a decrease in impressions in your Yahoo! Publisher Network account recently. This is due to a partial outage that occurred during routine maintenance. . . . Thanks for your patience.”

Well, it took me about 45 minutes to research and write this story. Just 79 hours until “next week” . . .

Affiliate Summit: Contextual Advertising Options

Doug Caverly — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 20:16:58 +0000

Pick something – a Web browser, toothpaste, whatever – that you’ve set against comparable products. Maybe you gave those alternatives a fair chance, and came back to Product #1 in the end, anyway. As Joel Comm weighed various contextual advertising options at Affiliate Summit 2007 East, it seemed like that same sort of circular journey was taking place, but you won’t hear me complain; it’s always nice to have extra choices.

Product #1 is, in this case, Google AdSense. Comm led a session called “Contextual Advertising Options: Clicks Equal Cash,” and first mentioned the massive amount of money flowing through AdSense – an estimated $14 billion this year. The author of “The AdSense Code” then complimented AdSense’s design and video ads.

Yet Google’s not perfect. Comm, whose ClassicGames.com was sold and is now called Yahoo Games, is concerned about unknown payout percentages, Made for AdSense sites, and accounts being closed for invalid clicks, so he moved on to discuss the Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN).

Comm recommends using YPN if you are banned from AdSense, if your AdSense click-through rate is low on a page, or if your YPN earnings per click are higher. Otherwise, well . . . he prefers ol’ Google.

One more option, however, is Chitika. Comm notes associations between Chitika, Shopping.com, and PriceRunner, and thinks that people should consider using the service if their pages are product-related. He also gives fair warning that some family-friendly sites have been provided with porn links, though Chitika has recently conquered this problem.

So there you have it. Good luck with your comparison shopping.

Using Social Media To Market

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 13:11:13 +0000

Yahoo has some suggestions for using social media to market one’s website. With a little planning, the Diggs and Flickrs of the world can provide a boost.

Using Social Media To Market

The age-old axiom of spending money to make money may have a new corollary: spending time to make money. Investing time and effort into social media, as Louise Rijk discussed on Yahoo’s Publisher Network blog, offers a nice potential payout.

Planning is key, as one wants their message to reach a receptive target audience. A site publisher needs to set some goals and expectations for social media marketing (SMM), then research social media websites to find the best choices.

“The best social media sites for an SMM campaign are those that are supported by large public communities,” said Rijk, who listed a number of the more popular ones in an assortment of categories. It would have been nice if she had linked those names to the sites in question.

Then the effort comes into play. Rijk provided some ideas on content to create and submit. How-to lists tend to be popular with the social media crowd, for example. Uploading and tagging images or videos to Flickr or YouTube, or setting up a profile on a site like Facebook, helps get one in front of an audience.

Rijk said it is important to build trust on these sites. Contributing useful content helps with this. Spamming and other tricks will be recognized and likely backfire in the process.

One Yahoo site in particular can help with building trust and authority. Yahoo Answers has been a popular platform for Yahoo’s users. It could be a good place to kick off one’s SMM efforts, by helping others and developing trust in a name.

Google Could Be Major Publisher

Mike Sachoff — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 15:36:04 +0000

Google could at any time try its hand in the publishing industry according to a report by Outsell developed with GGReport titled "Google as a Publisher: Is Google Poised for a New Push into the Information Industry?"

"News publishers and providers, book and magazine publishers, and directory providers are all in Google’s line of fire," said Leigh Watson Healy, Chief Analyst, Outsell.

The Outsell reports say that because of Google’s technical infrastructure, patents and development processes, the company is ready to enter the publishing arena if they choose. Google’s assembled technologies cover the whole spectrum of publishing’s functions, from content acquisition to e-commerce and royalty payments.

"Google has the potential to enter certain market sectors with minimal investment and virtually no programming. If a sector does not draw clicks or advertisers, the initiative can be killed and neither financial nor technical harm is inflicted on Google. Contrast this situation with any traditional publisher wanting to shift from print to online," said Healy.