WebProNews

80% of Consumers Would Not Pay For Content

As you've more than likely heard by now, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch in an interview last week talked about the possibility of blocking search engines from indexing News Corp. publications' content. While this may or may not actually happen, it is one of the latest (and biggest) examples of a publisher taking the position of search engines hurting them rather than helping them.

Some Bing Users Seeing Latest Posts on Publisher Searches

Bing appears to be either testing or rolling out a new feature for news sites in its search results. The feature brings up a few of the most recent posts from a news source, when that source itself is the query. I say this is either a test or a gradual roll out, because it is not happening in my own searches. TechCrunch has a piece about the feature (and a screenshot), which shows it, so evidently some people have it.

Can New Media and Old Media Get Along?

An interesting topic was discussed at the BlogWorld Expo in a session called the "Death and Rebirth of Journalism," which WebProNews attended.

Washington Post Social Media Policy Faces Criticism

The Washington Post has sent a memo to its editors/journalists outlining the publication's social media policies. They don't leave too many options for what is actually allowed to take place on social networks. This is an issue that never really seems to go away, and is brought up every time a publication's social media policies are discovered.

Obvious: People Don't Want to Pay for Online News

Paid Content UK conducted a Poll with Harris Interactive, asking respondents how much they would pay for online news, and what they would do if they're favorite news sites started charging. The findings, perhaps not so shocking, indicate that users basically don't really want to pay.

Google Unleashes DoubleClick Ad Exchange

Google has announced the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, which it refers to as a real-time marketplace for helping online publishers and ad networks/agencies buy and sell display ad space. Prices in the marketplace are set in a real-time auction. Google says it has three principles for its approach to display advertising:

Google Trying to Differentiate Between Blogs and News?

Google News is now labeling certain publications as blogs in search results. I'm not sure exactly how long it has been like this, but I noticed it for the first time today. In the past they have separated "news" and "blogs" on some results pages, but in what I'm talking about now, the results are mixed together, but some publications have "(blog)" written beside their names. You can see a few examples here:

Google News SEO Tips - Ranking in News Search

I thought that one of the more interesting topics addressed at Search Engine Strategies San Jose a while back was that of SEO and the publishing industry. This is an industry seemingly at war with entities like Google (at least partially), even though there are clearly measures publishers could take, which would make Google and Google News in particular work to their advantage.

Blog Comments Going Real Time?

Comments on blogs posts and articles have in the past generally been a good measurement of how people have engaged with content, but as the web becomes more social and "real-time," the conversation is going all over the place, and there are other ways that people are engaging in conversation about content (this is why shareability is so important by the way).

Can SEO Help Save the Publishing Industry?

At the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, WebProNews attended the session on how SEO can help save the publishing industry, a quite interesting topic, considering the controversy the industry has been experiencing of late. Do you think SEO can help publishers save their businesses? Share your thoughts here.