Journalism is in desperate need of a return to first principles, particularly on the monetization side. Want to know why everyone wrestles with the do-we-or-don't-we-optimize-for-traffic problem? Because almost all publications treat "traffic" as a homogeneous set. The ur-audience. Eyeballs are eyeballs are eyeballs in the eyes of most publications, and in the eyes of the advertisers who spend there. Sure, a lot of pubs will pay lip service to how "upscale," "educated," and ostensibly high-value their readership is -- if only to put a premium on impression costs. But the truth is, few people are being very smart about segmentation. We're still being ruled by top-level traffic analytics.
It should be readily apparent that audience size, uber alles, does not yield the best content -- nor does it yield the best audience. I would bet that 10,000 legitimately high-quality readers for a specialized blog post are worth more to advertisers than 1 million readers of a tossed-off Buzzfeed poll. The problem is, advertisers don't know that, and nobody's making an effort to educate them. Everyone's still chasing impression levels and scale, presuming that conversions will always be awful.
The pubs who break this cycle will be the ones who invest in high-quality journalism and high-quality analytics and innovative ad models. It's time for us to completely rethink the journalism ad model. Only then will we change things.
I apologize if I sound like I'm on a soapbox here. It's just that I've spent the better part of this past year wrestling with this problem at various publications, and close to a decade wrestling with it in the TV business before that. The Homogeneous Audience Theory is one of the great, untackled problems in media today. Everyone knows audiences can be segmented. Few people do it. Instead, people assume conversion percentages will always be a tiny fraction, and thus, their job is to multiply that fraction by a huge set of eyeballs. Let's reengineer that equation in favor of the conversion multiplier, by way of building more purposeful and curated audiences.
What are the first principles of journalism? What is journalism?
For all the words journalists spend on this topic, I've never seen anything which makes a whole lot of sense to regular non-journalist people, often the crux of the journalist side is some vague statement like "journalism is key for democracy". Is it? What part of it is?
Then maybe we can find ways to make a new journalism model which works without paying for the paper it's printed on and getting some nice local classified ads with your bundle.
Could it also be that the editors do not want writers to know their full worth?
If any of their writers gets a large enough following (and knows it), they could easily go rogue and blog under their same name.
It's much tougher to say "No, I will not stay late again tonight. You n'know what? My last 10 stories had over 2 million readers a piece and I've had it with this company. I'm going off on my own." when you have no idea how popular or valuable your writing is.
The New York Times factors in expenses associated with reporting stories into its employees salaries, and requires them to pay for all expenses incurred to report on something themselves. The reasoning is that, without any chance of needing to accept external money, the journalists have no motivation besides their own interest to cover a story. This, to me, sounds like the digital equivalent of that - trying to minimize sources of bias or external influence of coverage.
That being said - what you describe is certainly a convenient side effect of the policy.
A writer can approximate that already via social channels like Twitter and Facebook, though - if enough people are listening to you directly, that's the point at which your need for someone else's publishing platform diminishes.
Ten or more years ago, I worked in the 'new media' department of the UK's largest regional news group. It was a fascinating time to be a techie in a news organisation, because it was fairly obvious to us that one day the internet would eat every aspect of the business - advertising, classifieds and eventually even news itself.
The websites we had were rickety old classic ASP apps (remember when people wrote JavaScript on the server?!) One of my biggest projects was building the platform for analytics on all our pages. The only reason the business wanted this was so they could get their traffic numbers properly audited to sell advertising more easily, but we wanted to provide more value than that. We had reports showing the most popular stories by day, month, category etc, as you'd expect, and we thought perhaps this would be useful on the print side of the business too. The most wildly popular stories were exactly what you'd expect ("Stab victim vicar's child porn shame", that sort of rubbish) but obviously the front pages of the papers were all about roundabouts and fences falling down.
Every month we gave them the data, every month they ignored it when making editorial decisions. Partly just because nobody really cared about the internet or what it thought, partly, I would hope out of some sense of public service or long term gain. Rounds and rounds of job losses later, I'm not sure if they're doing anything differently.
Either way, it's fascinating that a decade on, in the face of much more data, and much more existential risk to individual news organisations, that this same argument can still play out the same way, even in businesses that are more or less _native_ to the internet.
(remember when people wrote JavaScript on the server?!)
Wait, I'm doing that right now.
And chasing popularity is not necessarily a good thing for news. Despite the noise made on HN and the like, Snowden did not pull in the pageviews. The missing plane, however, continues to pull in readers/viewers after weeks with no new info.
It makes sense for the editors to look at that data, and give bigger assignments and more resources to those that bring in more page views, but at the same time it makes sense to hide that from the journalists so that they don't chase the page views, if page views is your business.
I personally think that things should be much more transparent, but the business model needs to be changed so that money is not made on page views but on something else that somehow rewards the quality of the work, not the quantity.
They observed that serving staff who were thinking about the tips they would be getting fared worse in their service as the servers would not be able to concentrate as well on the orders that they were taking. A similar dynamic should be at work here.
I think this has a bit to do with what a media organization's strategy is. If you're going for 'advertising supported, big pageviews', then it's critical to share that info with writers. The logical consequence of this is buzzfeed.
If your strategy is to provide a specific value to some audience, then it gets murkier. Can seeing what's popular help your editors allocate resources toward what people actually want? Sure. But it's quite possible that the boring, low pageview stories are the ones that are _useful_ to some group of people that are paying the bills by subscribing or being targeted by advertisers.
People like to rag on the old media model where a patrician editor decided what was 'fit to print' and thus defined what information got published, and it's good that we're past that. But if you just go by analytics, you end up with an organization driven by lists, quizzes, shock stories and cute animals.
I think this is awesome. I hate articles that have catchy headlines just to become as viral as possible. Stuff like "Follow these 5 tricks and you'll become rich and famous!!!" Just because the numbers go up doesn't necessarily mean it's a better user experience. I've become a firm believer over the past few years that user sentiment is far more important the pure number of users.
This lets the writer focus on writing a quality article rather than a popular one. Those are two very different things and I strongly prefer the former.
Gawker is the worst by far. They really are the web's tabloid. I officially dropped Gizmodo from my RSS feed when I saw them do an entire article on why you should by The Wire on Blu Ray from Amazon and they attached their affiliate Link. That was the entire content of an "article".
It's not ironic at all, it's the intended consequence.
Thoughtful, in-depth, well-researched articles are not only more time-consuming to write, they're more time-consuming to read and that's not what a lot of people want as they browse aimlessly on the web to fill their work breaks.
You'll get better traffic from a catchy headline and a few emotion-inspiring comments, and that can give you the page views needed to display enough ads to get some accidental clicks. The shorter the article, and the catchier the headline, the more pages they'll click. That's what the analytics will tell you.
This isn't a new concept. Since the 1950s, William Gaines of Mad Magazine fame refused to do a study of their readers because they didn't want to begin pandering to 13-year-old boys (the presumed audience). Instead, he wanted the writers and artists to do what they thought was funny.
BI and Gawker were expressly formed as "Tabloids" for online. They are supposed to be super-market-isle throwaway attention fodder. That is literally their mission.
It should be readily apparent that audience size, uber alles, does not yield the best content -- nor does it yield the best audience. I would bet that 10,000 legitimately high-quality readers for a specialized blog post are worth more to advertisers than 1 million readers of a tossed-off Buzzfeed poll. The problem is, advertisers don't know that, and nobody's making an effort to educate them. Everyone's still chasing impression levels and scale, presuming that conversions will always be awful.
The pubs who break this cycle will be the ones who invest in high-quality journalism and high-quality analytics and innovative ad models. It's time for us to completely rethink the journalism ad model. Only then will we change things.
I apologize if I sound like I'm on a soapbox here. It's just that I've spent the better part of this past year wrestling with this problem at various publications, and close to a decade wrestling with it in the TV business before that. The Homogeneous Audience Theory is one of the great, untackled problems in media today. Everyone knows audiences can be segmented. Few people do it. Instead, people assume conversion percentages will always be a tiny fraction, and thus, their job is to multiply that fraction by a huge set of eyeballs. Let's reengineer that equation in favor of the conversion multiplier, by way of building more purposeful and curated audiences.