
The death of the homepage - Isofarro
http://martinbelam.com/2014/the-death-of-the-homepage-in-one-simple-graph/
======
gone35
The post is confusing and buries the lead (which is surprising coming from an
editor), but I _think_ what he is trying to say --despite the linkbaity
title-- is precisely the opposite: that the homepage is _not_ dead in the
panicky sense of the general reaction to the leaked NYT report. Instead he
seems to put forth a more nuanced claim about declining readership as a
proportion of total viewer referrals, while explicitly acknowledging the
legitimate editorial and branding role of the home page.

I had to read until the very end though, so it's easy to miss. Here are the
key excerpts:

"I don't think that New York Times graph says what everybody thinks it says.
(...) What we've been saying for years is that homepage traffic is going down
as a proportion of your overall traffic.

We started in a world where people navigated to a homepage (...) and then
clicked links and found stories. Then we moved to an SEO-driven world where
traffic started coming through the side-door via search. Now (...) Facebook
and Twitter is a massive traffic driver. All these developments should have
been pushing down the proportion of your users who ever visit the homepage.
(...)

You should be treating every article on your news site as a homepage.

And homepages are still important as a brand statement –-you are visiting our
site and this is what we have decided is important today. There's definitely
still a place for that.

Sadly it seems to me, it looks like this leaked graph is going to be taken for
evidence that 'the homepage is dead' –-but for all the wrong reasons."

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bobfunk
Seems this homepage died at least...

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lmg643
The homepage isn't dead exactly - just have different requirements. Drudge
Report is a big driver and example of this. Arts and Letters Daily is a
highbrow example. Basically, there is still demand for a curated home page,
just with a lot less fluff.

The other day, I was looking at the WSJ website and wishing they would just
put all the content on one page so I could scan it more easily. I want to see
everything they have to offer as easily as possible. Bloomberg.com is moving
in this direction - about time for the others.

As for handwringing about the content of page one at the NYT - the physical
edition of the paper is going to continue to decline in importance until it's
gone, so they would be right to stop worrying about it so much. Give readers a
page of consolidated links to all current articles - they're likely to browse.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
But half the point of newspaper lead journalism is _curation_. What is
supposed to be most important right now. I don't have time to scan every news
feed and assess the relative importance, and despite pg's best efforts crowd
sourcing the results also is not good enough.

So far the only way that works even vaguely well is to take intelligent young
people and pass them around the world, seeing the best and worst of humanity
and writing about it each day. After 30 years they get pretty good at sifting
the important stuff. We then make them editors.

There may be a better way. Maybe an algorithm. But I would like to take a
generation of two of parallel running just to be on the safe side.

~~~
dreamfactory2
The way to do it is to combine manually-selected articles and auto generated
(dynamically based on things like topic, date, time of day, popularity,
visitor's locale, visitor's behaviour, visitor's preferences, commercial
promotions, segment etc etc).

~~~
lifeisstillgood
really - that sounds like a recipie for self-fulfilling prophecies and an ever
shrinking bubble of my initial interests.

~~~
dreamfactory2
Manually selected by editorial staff aka curation. This mix of manual and auto
with high granularity of content reuse is what all the big publishers either
do or want to as it drives up pages per visit (ad impressions, measure of
engagement).

------
jonalmeida
Cached version:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yZWURXy...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yZWURXyIeIUJ:martinbelam.com/2014/the-
death-of-the-homepage-in-one-simple-graph/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk)

------
Theodores
I think you have over-evangelised this blog spam from buzz feed. I think the
NYT situation is a million miles away from your conclusion that the homepage
is dead, far from it.

Walk into any British office at lunchtime and, on people's screens, you will
see the BBC news homepage (but never the BBC homepage), the Daily Mail
homepage and The Guardian homepage. People go to those places to read the
news. They might go onto Facebook, HN or a myriad of other places later.

However, outside of the offices of Trinity Mirror, nobody goes to the home
page of The Mirror or this abomination 'ampped' that you have blog-spammed
here.

As a small child I was appalled at the standard of the content in the tabloid
newspapers (I could read the short articles in the Guardian at quite a young
age). It seemed the reading age was below my own. It was and, although
initially unimpressed, over the years I have been able to better appreciate
their craft (particularly if the story is an exciting human interest one e.g.
the downfall of yet another child molesting BBC personality). Much like how
you can respect a casino for the work they put in to make sure all their
customers spend as much as possible, morals and ethics can be put aside and
respect for the craft seen for what it is with British tabloid journalism.
Done well, there is an art to it.

You might not have page 3 girls in this new 'ampputated' effort (I forget the
name), however, it is the worst abomination ever in the history of British
journalism. It isn't even journalism or what you might call news. It is a
Wordpress blog light on content with a pastiche version of the Metro/classic
tabloid print presentation.

Content is king, journalism still rules. Get it right - BBC, Guardian, Daily
Mail, (The Telegraph to a lesser extent) - and people flock in droves. They
fire up the homepage out of choice. It is where they go for news.

The also-ran, dead-zombie British press is: the rubbish from Murdoch, the
trash churned out by the idiots that work for that porn baron who happens to
own the Express, that me-too rubbish from Trinity Mirror and whatever The
Independent is these days. All of it rubbish. Nobody thinks 'I must see what
news the Mirror is reporting', do they? Or if they do, do they then hop on
over to 'myspace'? Or 'Friends Reunited'?

I am sure you have figures showing how many trillions of people read the
Mirror online, but the myspace people could probably show you similar numbers
proving they are bigger than Pinterest.

On to the NYT. The NYT is one of those bits of internet furniture like Wired,
Buzzfeed or countless other places where the homepage is no longer a
destination. They have got the secret sauce wrong and people prefer somewhere
else to go to for their news. However, they do have plenty of readers who do
find the quality beyond the homepage and those people do post whatever it is
that they find to plenty of other places.

If you follow HN you find yourself reading articles in Forbes, Wired, the NYT
all the time. But you never think to start your leisure browsing at those
places. It just does not happen.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
But ... why? Why do I go to news.bbc.co.uk to see what is happening in the
world today and not NYT.com or indiatoday.com or any one of a dozen homepages
of respected journalism?

I think it is obvious why we don't go to the national enquirer homepage or the
daily mirror page. But it is not clear why the Guardian or the bbc leads
these. Is it I have a values alignment with them? Is it because I live in the
UK? Is it because ...

the recent leak from the NYT was fascinating and I still struggle to see what
the secret sauce as you call it is.

but it's not journalism I think. that's a necessary but not sufficient
condition.

Edit: actually I think I might know. I want an editor for my news - a real
human dyed in the wools Jason Robards editor. I doubt I will see a difference
in the editor at TimesOfIndia, or the telegraph - so why do I not visit either
front page. Both in English, both mostly cover international stories I cRe
about.

What matters is an more international flavour, a recognition that while local
matters, we are almost a global society. And most important of all - they have
short urls.

oh hell I dunno.

Edit2: but saying, as the Article does "every page is the homepage" is missing
the point. Yes every page needs to have the current list if top stories -
that's called _navigation_. But which stories are top ? That's an editorial
decision that worrying about the homepage encapsulates

~~~
Theodores
Why do you come to HN? Not Slashdot? The rules are simple at HN, it isn't
particularly curated. The fonts and presentation is a tad 1990's. But, more
people visit HN than Slashdot (I liked Slashdot a decade ago).

Think again. Go back to the bean counters in head office with some outrageous
idea, a 'Pinterest' type of thing for news...

Imagine a newspaper with a non-curated homepage. Effectively the homepage was
an open ended search query. In that query you could retrieve stories and
present them simple blog style, last in, first at the top. However, in that
search query there would be different weightings. So category would be one
weighting, region would be another, favourite writer would be another and so
on.

Then, for new user, they would get default weightings with their GeoIP bearing
on the region, so, if Welsh, stories relating to Wales would get given
prominence by that weighting factor.

As new reader reads stuff the weightings get learned. If they like celebrity
nonsense then the category weighting for that goes up. Equally if they like
city news, stocks and all that stuff, then the weighting for business stories
goes up, just by their act of reading what they like to read.

In this weighting, all the stories would be in their feed, however, things
with a lower weighting would be further down the page, for that reader they
would be 'released' later. So, the top of the page would be what they are
interested in based on what they read, further down the page there would be
less important stuff to them. Miles down the page it would effectively be a
core dump of all the major news wires.

Imagine some story comes out about some Z list celebrity getting a new car.
For most people that would not feature on the homepage, but, for someone into
Z list celebrities it would.

Come back six hours later, scroll miles down that page and the story would be
there, for all to see and read if they could be bothered with the mile long
scroll. The story would effectively be deferred but not for the person that
likes such stuff.

For the city guy, that story about shares in GSK going up one penny might make
it to the top. Everyone else gets it deferred but still timeline accurate.

In this system there might be no need whatsoever to categorise stories
explicitly. Or to decide what their placement is. There might not be a need
for any content management system at all. Content management could be crowd
sourced, with people 'pinning' stories to boards where those boards are ad-hoc
de-facto 'categories'. This 'pinning' process might not be explicit, it could
be learned from search. If someone searches for the Z-list celebrity and then
goes on from that story to read about cars then that story is potentially also
a 'car' category story too.

Imagine if you liked some news worthy person, e.g. Cliff Richard. You could
have some 'like button'/'pin' that you tag to the name so you are able to
guarantee that 'Cliff Richard' always makes it to your feed, even if the story
is just him doing up his shoelaces.

You can also watch if someone actually reads a story. You can time how long
they have the story open for, you know their reading speed. You know everyone
else's reading speed. You know where the content has failed, as in, at what
point they got bored of reading it and mouse/scroll activity stopped.

I don't know if you have ever noticed, but Google don't categorise search
results. The portals and web directories that pre-dated Google did do such
things. Now just imagine, with the rich content of news, if you completely got
rid of the filing stuff in categories thing and just made it all work off
search. By default the search results would be everything that ever happened,
weighted by region, writer and a myriad of other categories. For a given
reader they or you might not even know what those categories were, they could
be devised ad hoc, based on browsing history and explicit likes/pins. Everyone
would always have a different homepage, furthermore, there would just be that
one homepage. Stories could be presented in pop-ups so you didn't have to hit
the back button.

Tying it into an ad platform could be fun. This could break away from the
tedium of today's pages where there are twenty or so bugs on the page, doing
whatever. It could be put server side. You could sell ads to people based on
what their guestimated search rating was, so, rather than show people the ad
from that shop they visited two weeks ago, show them some shop they are going
to visit next. The ad model is flawed, ads are shown for that posh camera you
bought after you bought it, not before. Or after you decided you by a new TV
instead. They don't do a good job of creating demand. Run fewer ads, tie them
to affiliate schemes as per normal but deliver new leads rather than re-
treads. Again, do what Google do, but more focused on the opportunities
present in news, leverage search and deliver the ads.

Your point regarding editors - nobody knows who editors are these days. In the
1980's everyone knew who they all were, they were household names.

You are obviously technically able, therefore, if you want to re-do how news
is done, pick up the solr search engine, create your own indexes and feed them
into the search with adjustable weightings. Those indexes, experiment with
them and see what you get out with a 'search for nothing' and what you get out
searching more generally. Instead of an explicit 'politics' category, the
'politics' tab could be just a keyword, the search goes off and does the rest.
See if you can get the search to learn, ideally to get to a point where the
results are far better than today's curated newspapers yet you have absolutely
no idea how it works. Bring some Skynet awareness to it just by giving it lots
to search and weight stories by. It doesn't have to be much more sophisticated
than the 'Pinterest' home page and they managed something...

Your bean counters are in for the long haul. They know the writing is on the
wall with where they are going and that news has to be redone, somehow.
Someone at some news company has to step outside the way things have been done
and come back with some new ideas borrowed from how search has worked for the
mainstream internets.

