Archive for the ‘Search’ Category

Associated Content is Yahoo’s First Big Media Move. Here’s What Should Come Next

19 May
2010

by Ben Elowitz

With yesterday’s announcement of the acquisition of Associated Content, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has sent a loud message:  Yahoo is investing in becoming a new kind of digital media company for the new age of digital media.   Cheers to Yahoo for recognizing that their “1.0” model needs an upgrade to be more effective in a 2.0 world.  The only problem is that this move gets Yahoo just one step toward where it needs to go.  It could be a powerful first step to add content and audience to their network, but will only be strategically valuable for Yahoo if it is layered with additional new investments to build true destination media sites with premium positioning.

Let’s explore what Yahoo gets from AC first, and then cover what Yahoo must do from here if it is serious about winning in media.

1. Yahoo gets commodity content at commodity cost. With Associated Content’s marketplace, first and foremost Yahoo can source commodity content – i.e. the kind of content that doesn’t need a particularly differentiated author, original reporting, or other hard-to-find talent – cost effectively.

2. Yahoo can improve time (and value) on network. In this age of deteriorating portal power, users come to portals primarily for one reason:  mail.  (According to data from comScore, 73% of Yahoo’s viewers of its most valuable real estate – the home page – are Yahoo Mail users.)  Once they arrive, however, there is far more money to be made by vectoring them to networked media properties like Yahoo Finance, Sports, and Entertainment than by serving additional pages of poorly-monetizing email.  So, by beefing up the available content in the network, Yahoo receives the benefit of extending visits at low cost.

3. Yahoo increases its audience by drawing traffic from Google. Yahoo’s made the strategic decision to move its focus out of the search game and onto media.  And so rather than just feeding them from mail and search, Yahoo needs its content properties to draw audience on their own.   The AC content marketplace can produce thousands of pages per day of content – each one baiting more search engine traffic, and all produced at modest cost.  A recent EConsultancy interview with CEO Patrick Keane revealed that the bulk-buy strategy works:  “80-90% of our audience is driven through natural search,” and according to comScore data, nearly 50% of the traffic that AC’s content sees each month is incremental to Yahoo’s core audience that comes for mail most days.

All three of these improvements have financial benefits to Yahoo – both in increasing revenues with greater reach and traffic; and in bringing down average cost of content. But they miss out on the strategic positioning that Yahoo absolutely must own if it wants to ensure a leader as a top digital media company:

Yahoo needs to be a premium destination; and the AC acquisition message undermines that positioning. Read the rest of this entry »

Online Experience for Publishers: Innovate or Die

12 May
2010

by Ben Elowitz

We need an experience revolution.Revolution Fist

Each week, we hear of major publications and traditional broadcasters who are struggling to stay afloat in a digital age with new economics and new expectations.  Despite the promise of interactivity made with the internet revolution over the last 15 years, most publishers have done little more than replicate dead trees online, with zero innovation beyond the hyperlink, the slideshow, and an embedded video now and then.

And yet we can see from the rising successes of the last decade like Facebook, Google, Zynga, YouTube, and others that what catches audience attention is interactivity.

To earn loyal audiences today, publishers need to go beyond content creation:  they need to produce compelling experiences that distinguish them and get the consumer coming back for more.  The Pew Internet & American Life Project concluded that “when asked whether they have a favorite online news source, the majority of online news users (65%) say they do not.”  In an era where the consumer’s cost to switch is the flick of a click, publishers must offer compelling, differentiated experiences to earn loyalty.  Choices abound consumers:  there are scads of publishers online in every category; content suggestions offered constantly via social networks; and blue links proffered by search engines dozens of times per day per reader.  In an environment of choice, as brand experts have known for years, nothing builds loyalty like a great experience.

And now is the perfect time to create those breakthrough experiences.  The enabling technologies for the digital customer experience have improved considerably in recent years: we now have ubiquitous broadband, flash and other streaming video, plus HTML5 and maturing mobile application platforms.   Add to that personalization, targeting and social graph access, and there are some amazing opportunities to innovate.

It’s not just consumers that are thirsty for upgraded experiences.  Advertisers are showing that they will pay more for immersive interaction over basic display ads next to text.   Video ads during full TV episodes on ABC.com, Hulu, and others, or mid-day live sporting broadcasts command many times the CPM of typical display ads. Indeed, according to Michael Learmonth at AdAge, The Wall Street Journal’s online video content is bringing in envy-inspiring CPMs at $75 – $100.

But video is not the only way to create an immersive customer experience online.  Online sites of traditional publishers like Better Homes and Gardens are experience train wrecks (to be fair, they’re not alone in that regard).   Contrast that with the much more successful (certainly from an ad rate perspective) MarthaStewart.com which has many of the same elements – a top stories slideshow, cross-promotions for the print magazine, etc., and it’s a substantially better experience due to the focus on design and usability that is expected of the Martha Stewart Omnimedia (MSO) brand.

Even still, much more can be done with today’s technology to put the consumer’s needs and interests first.  The latest example I’ve seen of true creativity in user experience design is Microsoft’s (MSFT) Glo.    There are additional signs of greatness in the tablet demo that Time Warner (TWX) built for its Sports Illustrated brand.   And The New York Times (NYT) continues to excel in their applications and interactive graphics which enjoy significant pass around (bit.ly shows over 5,000 social media clicks to a recent budget infographic and today’s “A Moment in Time” project has already generated over 100 tweets in the first 15 hours).  But too few companies are making similar efforts to distinguish themselves.  The opportunities are there, and we need to step up.

Consumers will decide which brands deserve their loyalty and content alone won’t cut it.  We are on the brink of a total revolution of experience.  For publishers, it’s reinvent or fail.

Do you know additional examples of publishers innovating?

The New Rules For Judging ‘Quality’ In Published Content

11 May
2010

by Ben Elowitz

This article by Ben Elowitz originally appeared as a guest post on paidContentEngaging Readers Online

Last week, I explained why the traditional ways of judging “quality” in published content are useless in the digital age. Judging by readers response to that piece, those dated values (which I labeled credential, correctness, objectivity and craftsmanship) are still sacred to many people. But here’s the problem: They simply aren’t enough to win audiences, drive financial success, or, for that matter, ensure viability. The demise of institutions like Newsweek proves that—and shows that publishers that don’t move beyond these anachronistic measures of success will perish.

So this week, I’m offering part two of my take on the changing definition of quality in published content. Here are the four new rules of quality that publishers must obey to flourish. The biggest difference between the old and new definitions of quality are who’s doing the judging. In the era of Publishing 1.0, when production costs were high, alternatives low and time ample, the editor deemed something quality or not. But today, content isn’t scarce at all—in fact, it is in oversupply. And it is the audience that judges quality directly, dozens of times per day.

So, according to the audience, what is quality?  It comes down to these four characteristics:

—Relevance. Read the rest of this entry »

Facebook’s Like Button: A Force Powerful Enough to Save Media from Google Search

27 Apr
2010

by Ben Elowitz

CNN.com Activity FeedThis article by Ben Elowitz originally appeared as a guest post on Huffington Post.

With its new and soon-to-be-ubiquitous Open Graph initiative, Facebook is poised to become the great network of networks that circulates the majority of traffic on the web. For publishers, that is a good thing. And for Google, that is very, very threatening.

Last week’s announcements from Facebook at the f8 conference have sparked a great deal of discussion among the tech community and privacy advocates, but have left many publishers confused amidst discussion of plugins, SDKs, and the “semantic web”. Setting aside the tech garble, the new social sharing features introduced with the Facebook Open Graph are extremely positive for most publishers (a few exceptions correctly noted by Alex Iskold at ReadWriteWeb) and should be adopted sooner rather than later.

Facebook’s Open Graph allows your readers to “like” a topic or article, thereby sharing it with their Facebook friends and in some cases, creating a permanent link in their profile. It also will allow your site visitors to see who among their friends have liked your content and any comments that have been left. Finally, Facebook can use passive browsing behavior on partner sites to recommend content to their users. The downside for publishers is that at least currently, you don’t have direct access to this user-generated content: it is stored only by Facebook and can be used by them however they like (most likely to target ads on their site, potentially from your competitors).

However, the upside for publishers is significant: in a nutshell, Facebook is re-introducing serendipity. Top media brands are experts at creating compelling content and experiences. Consumers like to share high-quality content, and the easier that process is, the more that content is passed around and the authors benefit from viral distribution. While media companies are effective at cross-promotion, such as the lead-ins in TV, many traditional media companies have failed to harness word-of-mouth marketing online to expand their audience. Rather than a TV / Preview guide of available content (Yahoo attempted this for the web in the 1990s until it became unmanageable) consumers will now get a personalized guide to online content, authored by their friends. Effectively, it’s Tivo Suggestions (based on your viewing behavior + ratings) with the added intelligence of your friends’ preferences. What remains to be seen is how aggressively Facebook will promote the passively recommended content within your news stream.

Content sharing favors well-authored, branded experiences, which contrasts with the Google referral engine which favors “relevance” to a search phrase based on a mathematical algorithm. In a Google-dominated world, high-quality content can take back seat to keyword-heavy SEO-optimized pages, or simply newer content. That said, search has never been an end-all tool: blogs have grown in popularity because they are editorialized collections of content and opinions. However, Open Graph effectively explodes the number of content critics, now enabling consumers to glean the preferences of a large number of their friends rather than the small minority who take the time to blog. Media companies can spend more time focusing on creating outstanding experiences, and less time optimizing for Google results.

Facebook has already established itself as the new rising force for serendipity, but this new Open Graph goes much farther. Instead of relying solely on proactive recommendations, Facebook is now in a position with automatic login on many sites to passively collect consumption data, and pair that with friends’ behaviors to make suggestions. The better they utilize this data, the more Google needs to watch out, as Facebook can anticipate consumer desires faster than consumers can type “google” into their browsers.


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