At the World Newspaper Congress at Hyderabad this week Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton ?took on Google and used some strong language to stir things up. He called Google a digtial vampire and a parasite. He goes on to further bash the internet content Kleptomaniacs whose business model depends on purloining the expensive journalism of mainstream media (read more about what he said over here).
The issue that i want to highlight is what gives the Newspaper industry so much courage to take on Google (Rupert Murdoch: “I think we will remove our websites from Google’s search index”). Is it foolhardy or is it based on some statistics. So here is the rub. With the rise in social media the landscape has changed dramatically. In the same conference Associate editor of Daily Mirror, Matt Kelly shared why his company is relying less and less on Google SEO. According to Matt Kelly the traffic from Google Search is now much lower than what they are getting from referrals, bookmarks and Social Media platform like Twitter and Facebook.
To quote Matt Kelly
“Crucially, traffic from search engines is ridiculously low for a newspaper website. Around 15 percent for MirrorFootball and less than 10 for 3am. That means the vast majority of traffic has either come from bookmarks, or a referral from an informed source. We get a lot of traffic to both sites from social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Not recommendations from a search engine, but from a friend. That’s how to grow a meaningful audience.”
There is a big shift that is happening from consumer consumption point. There are two distinct consumer habits that is emerging:
- More consumers are getting breaking news from Twitter [infact, Indians use Twitter as a News Service.]
- More consumer are reading content and watching video on Facebook.
These two phenomenon is like the gift from heaven for the Newspaper industry. They can now look at sources other than Google for reaching out to customers. With Facebook at 350 mn users and Twitter at more than 55 mn users the balance of power will shift. Now here is the bump in the road that is going to happen. As consumers who share the content through Twitter or Facebook can also write comments or rate the piece of the content the Newspaper industry will find it-self open to public scrutiny and public criticism. What you will see going forward is this very lively interaction between consumers (who are passionate enough about the content to share it on Twitter and Facebook) and the Newspaper journalists.
The journalists will now have to deal directly with it’s consumer. This can be both a boon as well as a nightmare. I sincerly hope the newspaper industry truly understands what is coming their way and are fully prepared for it.
[Guest article by Rajnish, Founder of altheasystems.com]
small isssue: say if timesofinida.com does not allow google to crawl the news article pages then they will have to forget revenue through text link ads.
also other content that they want to be searched on Google will have have a lower SERP positioning.
Hie Naman. Good points. The Newspaper industry needs to closely evaluate some of the points that you have raised.
Google was at fault for not separating their crawlers till yesterday, which meant that the publisher had to fill up a form. That has changed as of yesterday. They have also started to engage with publishers with Fast Flip (Albeit late). But from the publishers perspective these are half measures & to an extent they are partially right.
If you look at statistics of how the media is really using twitter (apart from the few exceptions like cnn & the biggies), they account for less than 10% of the referral traffic for sites like NYT(every lesser than google news)
On the assumption that this number is going grow up: The solution of marketing directly to consumers thru Facebook & Twitter.. is like jumping from one monkey’s back to another. Newspaper industry is undergoing a drastic change and needs to be rebuilt ground up. Band-aid solutions are not going to work.
Where publishers are in trouble is in their view that they are indispensable because of the content – which is where they fall on their face. Current news has become a commodity, tools like twitter add to the voes of real time reporting. A good portion of this is just public posturing – if they were against aggregators then they wouldnt invest in aggregators such as topix.net or post aggregated content on their site (WSJ, etc).
In-depth analysis, investigative reporting are still valuable and it costs money. Publishers need to create niches and build their value(of their reporters) instead of relying on their brand. They need to go beyond what they offer today and offer something tangible to the user.
My 2 cents.
Full Disclosure: Am a founder of a company that is working products to bridge this gap.
Arjun, thanks for the full disclosure. i went to your site and checked out the content. The problem that you are trying to solve is interesting. Best of luck to your start-up.
come on.. leave Google alone
it will take some years before newspaper sites find out the way to tackle Google
They have to tackle the internet. Not Google. For example the underdog blogs like TC, mashable, pluggd etc are drawing away people from newspapers to themselves. There is drop in sales of physical copies n plenty of us are getting unsubscribed to it.
May be in two years you will see the old media getting kicked in the butt in terms of revenues. All media, digitial, print and radio.
Brace yurselves.