About Ben Elowitz
About Ben Elowitz Ben Elowitz is co-founder and CEO of Wetpaint, a next-generation media platform company that is reinventing the media model on the social web. The company platforms attract more than 16 million unique visitors monthly. In addition to Digital Quarters, he writes Media Success, a bold and forthright newsletter for digital media thought leaders. His work has been featured in FORTUNE, TechCrunch, All Things D, The Huffington Post, Forbes, TIME, CNNMoney, paidContent, and CNBC.com, among others. Prior to Wetpaint, Ben co-founded Blue Nile (NILE), the largest online retailer of luxury goods. Ben was also an early employee at Fatbrain.com (FATB), an ecommerce company that went public in 1998 and was sold to Barnes & Noble in 1999. Ben holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science and a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. He is an angel investor in a number of media and ecommerce companies, and is a frequent conference speaker on digital media, social content, and entrepreneurship.
Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Sometimes, You Get Lucky and Just Nail It!
7 Apr2011
by Ben Elowitz
I’m not the Amazing Kreskin, and I hardly consider myself a visionary prophet. I’m just Ben. But I happen to live and breathe the digital publishing business because it’s my professional passion.
So, I was quietly surprised to read this week that Hulu’s subscription video service will surpass one million subscribers in 2011.
This forecast comes from Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, and was reported in the Wall Street Journal; it was also analyzed by Peter Kafka in All Things Digital.
I was taken aback by Jason’s announcement – not because I doubted Hulu, but because I somehow managed to predict the Hulu Plus subscriber number exactly a year ago.
Indeed, a year ago, in April 2010, I said: “I expect that the service will reach or exceed a million subscribers by the end of 2011.” (See my April 23, 2010 prediction here.)
In life, like baseball, sometimes you win; sometimes you lose; and sometimes you’re rained out.
But the W’s always feel best.
Good job, Jason!
And for the record: I continue to be bullish on Hulu. As long as it can keep its content license agreements humming, it will have a killer collection of content, plus killer experience, to offer consumers; it also has killer context to offer advertisers. And that’s a formula for great success.
by Ben Elowitz
Peter Kafka’s very interesting column in All Things Digital reveals that a number of media sites are seeing their referrals from Google decline while those from Facebook increase. Indeed, as a nice chart in Peter’s piece indicates, Google’s influence has diminished among 80 percent of the top media sites in the last year.
This isn’t surprising, and it makes perfect sense to me.
Using martial metaphors (how apt and appropriate these days!), media is the beachhead for Facebook’s entry into all Web browsing and all matching between visitors and what’s visited – and Facebook is quickly taking over that territory from Google.
Think about it.
Media is where it all starts, but certainly not where it ends.
Media sites are the most reactive to serendipity on the Web. And they’re the most “frictionless” of any product we consume online or off: The only cost is the click of a finger and a few seconds of load time. It doesn’t cost money to read a link; you don’t have to enter any shipping or billing information; you don’t have wait time while a freight company delivers it; and you don’t need a sharp implement to open it – or a place to put it.
The most viral media consumption is emotionally driven, too. And it generally offers high entertainment value, and is associated with some urgency because people want to be “in the know” in order to earn social currency. And, finally, like many products, it’s taste-based.
All of this helps explain why Facebook is gaining influence among media sites. And why, whenever Facebook offers a link to a media site that is worthy of consumption, there’s a very high probability that it will, in fact, be consumed.
Commerce sites are the next frontier for Facebook. As I mentioned above, commerce is harder, because there’s more friction, and there are more impediments that get in the way of buying / consuming.
But these are just degrees of friction.
As Facebook gets better at knowing me, who I share taste with, what products I need, and what people like – both people in general and people I’m likely to share taste with – it will be able to overcome that friction.
And, one can easily imagine Facebook doing everything it can to grease the commerce skids by facilitating frictionless login (Facebook Open Graph and Instant Personalization), payment (Facebook Credits), and more to reduce the underlying friction, so that commerce sites will follow closely behind media sites and start leaving the Google orbit.
Google is still driving traffic to many Web sites. But that is clearly changing. And Facebook’s assault is starting to succeed.
by Ben Elowitz
Move on from the Algorithm
Early reports are in confirming the results of Google’s index changes. Yahoo’s Luke Beatty says two-thirds of Associated Content pages have lost traffic, while I’ve heard that total volume declines from Google search have reached 70% on some properties.
For sites like eHow and About.com, which get somewhere between 65%-70% of their traffic from search, the concentrated risk exposure that comes from Google engineers changing the algorithm makes for an unstable and uncontrollable business model.
Never in the history of media has there been such a precarious model for distribution, and the bad decision by SEO-focused sites to try and build a relationship with an algorithm looks worse and worse. The SEO-focused sites kowtow to the algorithm’s desires, as best as they can interpret them. They game their moves internally, based on what they think the algorithm wants, not what the customer wants. And they rely on the white hats, as well as all of the blackest hats they can stomach, just to please the algorithm.
But, unfortunately, the algorithm is capricious and unreliable.
What these companies should do is form relationships with consumers.
That means providing consumers what they want – and where they want it, which increasingly means in their Facebook or Twitter feed, and on their mobile phone.
In the end, this is the only way to create great experiences that are branded in the consumer’s mind today.
My advice, then, is simple.
SEO slaves, rise up – and revolt! Throw out the false God of the search algorithm and, in its place, focus on building valuable content and experiences. Win the audience, not the search.
by Ben Elowitz
Tim Armstrong, AOL’s CEO, has rebooted AOL with a talk-track of branded destinations, A-level journalism and sizzling original content; and early Monday morning, a full week before Valentine’s Day, his romantic media vision was considerably enhanced, when Arianna Huffington announced that she was selling Huffington Post to AOL for $300 million in cash and $15 million in stock.
For the record, that’s quite a premium price – 10 x Huffington Post’s $31 million in revenues.
Despite the cost, however, Armstrong is a very lucky man, and he received a wonderful gift from Huffington, whose hugely successful and much-talked-about Web site is a perfect match that helps “complete” AOL.
Indeed, the relationship between Armstrong and Huffington comes not a minute too soon for AOL, which is finally bringing on real creative assets and talent – including Arianna Huffington, herself, as chief editorial taste-maker.
To be honest, the media industry has been wondering whether Armstrong could actually pull off a deal like this. (True Confession: I’ve been among the doubters.)
And there’s good reason for the skepticism.
The problem, in large part, has been strategic. Since he assumed the CEO’s post, Armstrong has talked with clarity about his vision for an AOL made up of destination media brands, the way Time Inc. and Conde Nast have built their portfolios. But to date, his build-out of this city on a hill has fallen short. Instead of buildings gilded with leading journalism that attracts fame and eyeballs, his properties have largely been constructed by plumbers and mechanics laying a foundation for search engine rankings.
That’s why AOL’s recently leaked master plan, “The AOL Way,” is heavily oriented toward users’ search queries. The playbook emphasizes volume of content, page-views per post, and production cost per-piece. And, while “The AOL Way” is punctuated by periodic reminders like “quality content at scale,” the reader of the plan is left with the distinct impression that quality is a guardrail, not a compass direction for the journey to ROI nirvana.
Indeed, without a voice or a purpose other than page-views, “The AOL Way” comes off as soulless. Instead of emphasizing audience interests, an editorial point of view, or premium differentiation, it’s a volume strategy: the plan calls for the number of stories to jump from 33,000 to 55,000 a month; with median performance to go from 1,512 page-views per article to 7,000 within the quarter; all while gross margins rocket from 35 percent to 50 percent.
This Google-ingratiating strategy, at least from my perspective, is wrong-headed and short-sighted. It doesn’t do anything to help build a unique and long-lasting brand that is meaningful for audiences. And, as a result, it does very little to encourage people to eagerly and voluntarily type “AOL.com” into their browser’s destination bar. With this playbook, consumers don’t go to AOL; they merely end up there.
There’s a solid lesson here for all of us.
AOL – like everybody else in the media business – is clearly jealous of Facebook’s gravity-defying results. But it takes time for a proper media brand to achieve such stratospheric numbers. The great brands – The New York Times, ESPN, CNN, Wall Street Journal – have shown us that you build audience loyalty one positive interaction, one ambitious story, and one rich consumer experience at a time. To be sure, Huffington Post has shown us that, building its audience to a reported 25 million uniques over a well-paced five years.
So, it doesn’t happen overnight, and it certainly doesn’t happen if you’re just playing for quick search engine results.
Looking forward, it will be interesting to see whether Huffington – a savvy and independent thought leader who has always leaned forward – chooses to embrace “The AOL Way.”
My sense is that she will continue to follow her well-honed consumer-focused instincts instead. She brings a strong point of view, a decidedly human nose for news, and a variety of social strategies for distribution – not to mention her considerable star power. And that’s a good thing for AOL.
It’s important to recognize Armstrong’s considerable achievements. He saw that AOL’s subscription model was a non-starter; he chose areas of core content concentration for AOL; and, unlike Yahoo!, for example, he pared AOL’s portfolio quite dramatically.
But the pre-Valentine’s Day courtship and consummation with Huffington will mean very little in the consumer marketplace if Armstrong doesn’t get rid of his seemingly unshakable Google obsession – and very soon.
Here’s hoping that Arianna can help nurture Tim’s AOL, and turn it into a true media destination.
by Ben Elowitz
This post originally appeared as a guest post on iMediaConnection.
Preface: Recently, I wrote a controversial post about the end of an era: The days of SEO are dead, and being replaced by a new wave that is far more important and more valuable for publishers: social media optimization (“SMO”). I received a number of requests to describe how publishers should create their SMO strategy, and I offer this post to answer that question.
* * *
The days of search engine optimization (SEO) as a critical audience-driving strategy for digital publishers are numbered. Forward-looking marketers need to educate themselves about a far more meaningful and effective way of bringing audiences to media destinations — social media optimization (SMO.)
Unlike SEO, which uses algorithms to rank top search results, SMO uses the will of the audience to determine what’s important. More significantly, SMO puts a digital face on every member of the audience. Unlike SEO, it differentiates and distinguishes individuals, making sense of their specific content wants and needs. There are no false, fruitless, or futile searches that approximate what people are seeking. Fueled by the passionate participation of real people articulating real interests, it eliminates the fuzzy proxy of an algorithm as middleman. The good news for publishers is that the editorial product is back on top above the technology, as content words replace keywords in importance.
The dramatic shift in web navigation as the social network replaces the search engine as the start page translates into the average web user spending almost three times as much time on Facebook than Google. (For those ages 12-24, it’s more than four times!) Reengineering your approach to distribution for the social web is more critical than ever before. With that said, here are the seven most important elements of an effective SMO program for any premier publisher.
1. Know precisely what the audience wants
The idea of SEO was based on appealing to search engines — if you compel Google’s attention, then Google will bring you more audience. But we are now entering the post-Google age of digital media, and in this social age, the new formula is that if you compel your target’s attention, those individuals will bring you more audience. Whereas, Google played an arrogant and reigning monarch, Facebook is a representative democracy — it listens to the audience and amplifies what it hears.
The first step is winning the attention of the audience and knowing what it wants, not just in the abstract. The key question is, what do they want from you (i.e. what is your brand good for, in their opinion), and when and how do they want it?
Fortunately, this data is abundant. You can find it in your analytics system, in customer research, in your competitors’ wins, and at any time of day on Twitter. The trick is to make use of that data to find insight.
Knowing what the audience wants means asking and observing them and then marrying those observations with creative vision. When we started our company, we asked the audience about the shortcomings of their TV viewing experience, and we found out that there was an opportunity to extend the relationship with their favorite shows by completing it with more gossip, news, photos, recaps, and other content connectors. So that is the content we produce. Then, we track what gets consumed when and by whom. We found that our users watch longer videos disproportionately in the evening, so we gear our programming to deliver those videos after the work-day ends.
Ask the audience often; it gives you need-to-know answers, and gets people immediately engaged in the conversation.
2. Build your fanbase
I can guarantee that the tactics of SMO will change over time, in much the same way that social media will change drastically. But today, Facebook and Twitter are the two significant social media distributors — Facebook is analogous to the retail side of the media economy, serving consumers directly, while Twitter drives media distribution behind the scenes on a wholesale basis. Together, these two make up the vast majority of the media distribution landscape.
An effective SMO strategy doesn’t just sit and hope Facebook and Twitter start coalescing the greatness of your website by telekinesis. Instead, it’s up to savvy publishers to get the party started. Set up a marketing drive to bring your fans to your fan page. Use Facebook’s advertising platform to help make potential fans aware of you. And, above all, build a base of influencers to a size that approaches critical mass, so that you are fully connected within the social network from the beginning, rather than sitting outside just looking in.
3. Create content worth spreading
Once you know what your audience wants, and you have a fanbase to appeal to, now comes the part that premier publishers are good at. But in the post-Google age, designing for pass-along is much more than just designing for consumption. In fact, the practices that help publishers succeed in SEO are deadly in this era of SMO. Stuff a page full of keywords from the “long tail,” match the URL to the “head” keywords, and keep the content readable by Google (careful with Flash and JavaScript technologies that are used to make compelling user experiences!), and you will find a boring website that falls flat on your users and pays negative returns in social distribution.
Instead, the way to put the social wind at your back is to publish content that is worthy of being shared — and to wrap it in experiences that your users can’t wait to share with their friends — with pride — which is the emotional fuel that powers the Like button. With your audience as the judge, it’s all about the quality of what you share with people.
I can’t think of anyone who has surrounded this idea more than the organizers of TED. With an iconic focus throughout its entire organization and community on “ideas worth spreading,” TED has created an influential community of audience and participants by focusing on incredible — world-changing — ideas and experiences. And in the process, it has built an audience of mind-blowing quality and quantity, with a top-1,000 website by the numbers, and even greater elite status if you factor in impact.
4. Package to get attention
OK, so in a social world you’re not competing for Google’s attention. No, far harder, you’re competing for attention in a Facebook feed or Twitter stream like a light bulb in Times Square at night. My homepage view on Facebook is pre-loaded with 33 posts vying for my attention; and Twitter’s endless scroll appeals to the insatiability of my appetite like the bottomless salad part of the Olive Garden experience. We crave infinity as much as it overwhelms us.
As far as Facebook and Twitter are concerned, their value proposition is more, but for publishers it’s a different story — it’s about being best. Standing out in that crowded field puts the focus not just on what you say, but on how it’s said — what are the iconic images and headlines that appear in a Facebook feed, and how do you maximize the 140 merchandising opportunities in a Tweet?
The editors at The Huffington Post have made themselves experts in both the art and science of packaging. They start with the artful side by writing compelling — even at times sensationalistic — headlines designed to grab attention, and that compounds their expert capability with a scientific approach. It’s no wonder that The Huffington Post has seen a tremendous boost from social networks fueling its explosive growth overall.
5. Design for virality
Viral distribution is about much more than the content itself — it’s also about an experience that promotes sharing. Your site, your experience, and your Facebook page all need to be designed for virality. Turn content into interactive features with sharing.
It starts with greasing the gears. Make sharing easy by:
- Including the familiar icons and social traction
- Placing them in obvious intersections where readers should want to share (middle/end of article vs. homepage)
- Pulling in social conversations relevant to your content — what are people saying on your Facebook page and Twitter, and how can they participate in that conversation right from your site?
Doing all three of these things provides a tightly integrated social experience.
The Huffington Post is one of the leaders here as well with its “hot on” feature and prolific integration of social sharing at the right points. But still more needs to be done. How do I know which stories should be hottest for me and my friends? And wouldn’t it be awesome if I could see content that my friends would like but haven’t read yet? Then I’d be the water cooler cool guy, the first person to send it to them, and we’d have a system that cues it all up for me.
6. Engage and reward your audience
This means getting involved in the conversation to incite dialogue, talk alongside your users, and ask them what they want. Closely related to this is making the conversation authentic: Engage your audience like a true fan, not a marketing PR executive.
And here’s the key to rewarding your audience — it’s all about appealing to people’s emotional desire to feel important. Rewards for these folks are intrinsic to the sharing itself. For example, on Twitter, the reward is getting more followers and retweets, helping to build social capital and prestige.
You’ve also got to recognize people with your content when they do something awesome. For example, curate a trend they break on a related theme. Call out the forum/message board they run when they post the content. Engage in the conversation they start. It’s a two-way street. This will amplify their interest in you, and reinforce their desire to build reach for you.
7. Measure relentlessly
The core measurements of SEO are obscured by the fact that Google reveals scant details of quality and page rank, but SMO strategies, on the other hand, are completely measurable. On each and every page, you can measure how many people viewed it and shared it, and how many more people that brings. You can test and vary every element, from the window-frame of tools that promote sharing and sharers, to the content itself. Test rigorously, and learn what works for your property and your audience — and do more of that.
These are just seven of the most important ways that SMO can be effectively deployed. The most important thing right now is recognizing that SEO is fading away, and that we are embarking on the post-Google age of digital media, which will, once again, change all the rules of engagement — almost certainly for the better.
- In: General|Search|Social Networks
- Tags: Search, seo, smo, social media optimization
by Ben Elowitz
This article was originally published as a guest post on Business Insider.
In my recent meetings with the leaders of top digital media organizations, executives have been unanimous in their bafflement over the impending Demand Media IPO.
Strategic thinkers know exactly what I mean: Demand Media’s “formula for success” is to select topics that only a statistician would love; produce low-quality content at absurdly low cost; and then drip spider-food pages into domains with a legacy of trust from Google built under prior ownership.
Once that’s done, Demand Media financially engineers its income statement to move what everyone else has called “cost of goods” below the line into depreciation; the intent here is to optically reduce expenses by spreading them over five years.
Reactions among media executives and entrepreneurs range from serious eye-rolling to violent throwing up. It’s instinctual rejection.
But why?
Because Demand Media violates the most basic definition of what “good” media is. Indeed, the formula that has built top media properties – from Disney to Glee to The New York Times – was simple: build a great brand on quality content, and then attract a loyal audience. And the formula worked for both analog and digital media, all the way up until the Age of Google.
But Google’s algorithm (Demand Media’s great ally) broke the formula by making every audience interaction with media separate and independent. Like Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates, the Google algorithm has no memory of relationships; and for frustrated Adam Sandler publishers trying to build a loyal audience, the algorithm sets up an insurmountable amnesia.
Even worse, with every new Demand Media article, Google’s index gets more polluted, and the customer becomes even more underserved. It’s not an exaggeration, but Demand Media probably pollutes Google’s results more blatantly and thoroughly than the top black-hat spammers of the Web.
Then why doesn’t Google just downweight properties like this from its results?
There’s a good reason, and the catch is extraordinary.
Google’s network revenue, which includes its AdSense program – the advertising product that runs on affiliated publishers’ sites like Demand Media’s – accounted for $2.50 billion (30%) of total revenues in its most recently reported quarter.
So, if Google were to reduce the prominence of sites that use AdSense, its revenues and liquidity in the ad market would take a significant hit. And that would be intolerable.
On its side of the fence, Demand Media needs Google, too.
As Demand Media said in its recent S-1 filing:
“For the year ended December 31, 2009 and the six months ended June 30, 2010, we derived approximately 18% and 26%, respectively, of our total revenue from our advertising arrangements with Google … If any of our advertisers, but in particular Google, decided not to continue advertising on our owned and operated websites and on our network of customer websites, we could experience a rapid decline in our revenue over a relatively short period of time.”
The upshot here is that Demand Media is ruining Google’s search results; but Google, for its part, is actively perpetuating the rewards, encouraging Demand Media to keep its content just above a (very) low bar for high rankings.
I don’t blame Demand Media for being an opportunist and playing Google’s game.
But I certainly wouldn’t want to invest in Demand Media shares. The company is too precariously dependent for its lifeblood; and its spotty content quality has badly undermined its ability to earn brand loyalty. That’s a tough setup for a public company, and it makes for a very high-risk stock.
Google, on the other hand, bears more blame. As its quality of results goes down, so does its users’ quality of experience.
And the real competition isn’t just from Bing.
Earlier this month, a digital media executive told me that her 16-year-old niece prefers to search in
Facebook, since it prioritizes the content real people – i.e. her friends – like. Google’s results, she said, are useless and overwhelming. Facebook gives her the good stuff.
The unthinkable is actually happening to Google. Its algorithmic perfection is unraveling; and it has become the entrenched incumbent that is lagging in consumer experience.
And the challenge from Facebook is definitely coming.
The big question is how long Google can hold on to its revenues at the expense of its consumer experience.
Demand Media’s new shareholders will want to be the first to know. That way, they can get out front and sell.
- In: General
- Tags: commodity content, content farms, demand media, Google, ipo, seo
by Ben Elowitz
I’ve been quiet on my blog recently, which – as you may have guessed — is an indicator that I’ve been particularly busy.
Over the last several months, I’ve been out talking with leading media industry executives about the challenge we face in making digital media as successful as its analog predecessor. We can all name the roots of the challenge: the explosion of supply online, and the ease with which consumers can move from one property to another. We are now living with the results, including an extraordinary number of websites for users to choose from, and a challenge for publishers in getting and holding consumers’ attention and advertisers’ dollars.
While I’ve been on the road, 35 smart and talented people at Wetpaint have been working to address these challenges head-on: by inventing a new business model for digital media. A new model that uses technology in the most disruptive way at the core of the publishing business. Beyond just taking friction out of the workflow, my team has designed new advantages that can reduce the costs of content creation and audience recruitment by a factor of 5-10X vs. benchmark publishers, all while offering greater appeal to consumers and advertisers alike.
This weekend, we launched the first version of our publishing platform, with our first media property built on it: Wetpaint Entertainment. For consumers, it’s a breakthrough user experience – full of glossy photos, fun and interactive, and social to the core. For advertisers, it’s a rich, engaging, and premium context in which to reach core target audiences – the same audiences, in fact, that they already target with network TV buys.
But for the 35 of us at Wetpaint, it is far more: it is our first milestone in our mission to revolutionize media.
An audacious goal, isn’t it? Let me explain.
What Will Leading Media Properties Look Like?
In the four years since we launched Wetpaint, we’ve seen plenty of innovation in digital media. User-generated content, video, and social media have all risen from small fancies to widespread prominence. Meanwhile, we’ve experienced the rise of content distributors, such as Google, Facebook, and Huffington Post, to unexpected levels of audience and influence. But all the while, the precious core segments of the publishing industry – news and magazine publishing – have been suffering layoffs, closures, and an increasing sense of irrelevance under the pressures of the new digital playing field and amidst dwindling audience and advertiser interest in their brands. And with the specter of doom around the corner, no one has come up with a true replacement for their withering business model.
The question for us as an industry is (with a nod to Tim Armstrong, the CEO of Aol, for phrasing it): Who is going to be the Time Inc. or Conde Nast of the digital future? And, more importantly, how?
The answer is not so-called content farms, such as Associated Content or Demand Media. Content farms may be a valuable tactical business, but they do not produce leadership, loyalty, or destinations – much less brand premiums. Nor is the answer Facebook or Flipboard or Twitter. They are great conduits for content and attention, but they rely on content creation happening elsewhere – with few exceptions, the best they can do is surface what’s created on other platforms.
The answer is that the next generation of publishers must still create quality content – but they have to create it far more cheaply, or their business model won’t work. The editor-intensive newsrooms of The New York Times and Time Inc. are not models for a digital future; but neither is the Huffington Post, with its heavy reliance on an unpaid squad of volunteers in far-flung places.
The new leader will be defined by three key advantages:
- By creating consistently outstanding content (as judged by the audience) – without the burden of producing content the audience doesn’t value, thrown like so much spaghetti against a wall.
- By distributing content conveniently wherever and whenever consumers want it - taking full advantage of mobile, video, SMS, Facebook, email, Google, and more to meet the consumer on the consumer’s terms, not the publisher’s.
- By creating user experiences that are so compelling that they build destination brand value – realizing that most content is now a mere commodity just seconds after being published, while experiences are ownable.
When these three strategies perform in tandem, one can uniquely publish with high velocity, low cost, outstanding reach, and most importantly, earning huge consumer loyalty – all of which accrues not only to the metrics on a spreadsheet that indicate a healthy business, but more importantly to a brand premium that builds results year after year.
A Platform With Which To Create Leading Titles
And if a publisher were to possess a platform that can repeatably produce such titles, they would have golden egg after golden egg in the form of media titles that can serve one audience after the next.
Today we launch the new Wetpaint Entertainment, operating on our first iteration of such a platform. Our new platform is built on the idea that we can use technology and data from this morning to influence what we write this afternoon. That the editorial art can be informed by data science. And that with the fundamental changes of the last five years, we now have an environment abundant in data to inform what content will suit an audience – and empower publishers to write the content that audiences love, without chasing the red herring of ideas that sound good but won’t produce results.
While all that horsepower is brewing under the hood, what our audience will see is far simpler: whether on Facebook, on the web, or on an iPad, they’ll experience a beautiful site that entices them with rich visual imagery, fun experiences, and the most appealing content that completes their relationship with their favorite TV shows.
Today is the first milestone for Wetpaint toward a vision of revolutionizing media – for consumers and for the industry. Please, come visit and enjoy.
- In: General
by Ben Elowitz
It’s been a week of dancing for Apple and The New York Times as they played hokey pokey with an app that offers a new, fun way for consumers to experience media: First, Steve Jobs put the acclaimed Pulse News app into his Worldwide Developers Conference talk, then took it out of the app store, and then put it back in again, but only after the developers took The New York Times out of it.
But as fun as it is to watch them dance, I can’t help but notice that The New York Times missed the opportunity right in front of Sr. VP Martin Nisenholtz’s eyes: the Pulse team is exactly the kind of talent that the company should be acquiring, not shunting. The Pulse founders made an app with a great consumer experience for media, did it in just a few weeks, managed to get the attention of the premier technology tastemaker in the world, Steve Jobs, and even made some money.
Message to Martin: Instead of cutting them down and pushing them into someone else’s arms, make nice and go hire (or acquire) the Pulse team. Or, as my mother once said to my older brother when he was dating someone she actually liked, “There are better men out there than you: You better marry her before someone else does!”
- In: Apps|General|Newspapers
- Tags: app, Apple, martin nisenholtz, New York Times, pulse, pulse news, steve jobs
by Ben Elowitz
Last month, I wrote a post titled “Associated Content is Yahoo’s First Big Media Move. Here’s What Should Come Next,” in which I pushed Yahoo to acquire premium content properties to overcome the commodity signal they sent by acquiring AC. I said at the time that Huffington Post’s curation model “crowdsources content but applies a strong point of view and features premier branded names, lifting it above the commodity fold.” For Yahoo, Huffington Post is the perfect combination of premium and economical.
Now, over this last weekend, Erick Schonfeld wrote at TechCrunch that deal discussions between these two publishers are underway for a content partnership or outright acquisition. Though Arianna Huffington denies it, other sources indicate that HuffPo has been on Yahoo’s short list, and I wouldn’t be surprised if conversations have been ongoing.
While Yahoo had previously announced intentions to compete in news by hiring brand-name reporters, that direction is fraught for the big portal: the news category is difficult to lead with a heavy demand on consistently breaking news — and it would take years for Yahoo to build the credibility in original reporting to become a true audience magnet. And the prize for winning even if they do? It could be losses, not profits, as has been born out by the experience of myriad old media outlets who are now making over their businesses.
What Huffington Post represents is a far better road for Yahoo to go from portal to destination in a realistic way. HuffPo can draw audiences not by competing with the news outlets on reporting but with great access and point of view – both of which are within Yahoo’s brand and execution reach. It would serve as an anchor property with true destination draw.
Indeed, Huffington Post may be unique among the news-oriented sites of the portals, curators, and aggregators in having earned true premium positioning. They did so by emphasizing a strong and reliable point of view along with affiliation with notable brands (such as regulars Arianna Huffington herself, Bill Maher, Harry Shearer, and Rosie O’Donnell, along with guest posts from a robust range of influentials). Along the way, the site has also earned an outstanding brand and destination audience of 22 million (comScore), consistently garnering visits from both search engine referrals (14% of traffic from Google according to compete.com) and social networks (16% from Facebook).
This destination draw is critical for Yahoo. At Yahoo’s home page, 73% of monthly viewers are there to get their mail – and that usage is shrinking at (2%) per year (comscore April 2010 vs. April 2009) vs. a US internet universe which grew at 10%. As Yahoo commits to a media-company destiny, its strategy must be to create high-end destination titles that will draw premium advertising – not just keep mail users on-network longer.
For those in charge of Yahoo’s media properties, David Ko and Jimmy Pitaro, they would get two other benefits to leverage: HuffPo gives Yahoo a premium curation model prototype for it to replicate; and a DNA transplant to bring in the talent and experience to scale that model.
As far as the first, Huffington Post has shown itself to be the best of the curators, establishing a strong point of view that draws a huge audience with near-zero cost for original content. And the model – the fame and traffic of Huffington Post beget contribution from interesting people, which drives more fame and traffic for Huffington Post’s brand – is replicable in other categories, as HuffPo has shown with its entertainment category rumored to already reach an audience of 10 million monthly, according to internal measurements. This is the sort of model that Yahoo should be banking on, as commodity content alone will never make Yahoo a premier media company.
Perhaps more importantly, there is nothing to catalyze the adoption of a new direction like bringing on a talented and effective crew. An acquisition of Huffington Post brings not just a branded destination, but a whole crew of operators with a scarce and effective set of skill, approach, and attitudes. Those genetic elements are exactly what Yahoo needs to quickly set a new approach to existing properties with large audiences, such as entertainment, shine, and omg!, as well as to each new title launched.
All in all, an acquisition of Huffington Post would form the perfect foundation for Yahoo’s new ambitions as a premier media destination – and would be well worth the several hundred million dollars it would surely cost to set a bold and profitable strategy for Yahoo to be a premier media company.
- In: General|Online News|Portals
- Tags: associated content, brand, david ko, destination, huffington post, huffpo, jimmy pitaro, portal, premium, yahoo
by Ben Elowitz
What’s the point of developing a great brand if you don’t take advantage of it? In the consumer products industry, the norm is to develop a great brand, then perform line extensions. Crest lends its name to Crest White Strips so consumers will trust them more. Disney’s trademarked princesses adorn adhesive bandages to spur kids to cover imaginary wounds; and Ralph Lauren finds his way into the paint aisle of Home Depot so I can be sure my new wall colors will be fashionable.
But these sorts of licensing and line extension deals have been more scarce in publishing. And it’s great to see that change.
According to reports from Russell Adams at The Wall Street Journal, bucking its historical resistance, Glamour has decided to seek more revenue by leveraging its brand into new product lines by partnering with IAC’s Match.com for the Glamour Matchmaker dating site, with IAC’s HSN on a new jewelry line, and with Like.com for an “Ask The Stylist“ app.
This is great news, and it bucks the recent countertrend in publishing of focusing on reducing costs. While others have been seduced by the allure of commodity content, Conde Nast is instead increasing its commitment to its premium brand. That’s the right move. For the leaders in digital media, their future success will be far better served by increasing the value of their premium brands and destinations — and by leveraging that value into new territory. Smart partnerships not only create more revenues, but also create broader reach for their brands and the opportunity to move beyond serving as just titles of published properties into more meaningful sector or lifestyle brands. And that means developing long-term deep relationships with consumers — which will be even more valuable in then feeding back into premium advertising rates based on increased reach and goodwill. It’s a formula that companies like Disney have mastered, with original content, experiences, and licensed products virtuously cycling to create more and more value.
For publishers like Conde Nast, now is a great time to set their brands free to do more. As a premium publisher, they invest in creating outstanding, differentiating content and experiences for their audiences. And they are doing a benefit to their consumers by extending their credentials to other categories.
My bet: Over the next 12 months, we’ll see other publishers following Conde Nast’s lead.
- In: General|Magazines
- Tags: conde nast, glamour