Month: May 2010

The backstory is just inspired…

In an age where TV ads can just be Tivo’ed away – we need to go an extra length to make people want to watch our ads. One sure way to do this is by engaging the consumer and giving him something to do. Be it replay our ad or in this case, flick the remote control at the ad – not to make it go away – but to make it do something. The Skoda guys in Poland got this and are running a really nice interactive ad stressing a special new feature on the new SkodaSuperb Estate: a remote controlled operated boot….while the video is a bit dull, the idea is just great: “let people experience the new feature with the TV’s remote control”

What they did:
Most people in Poland watch TVP1 on channel 1 and TVP2 on channel 2. They ran 2 spots simultaneously on these channels, one showed the car with the boot closed and on the other channel with the boot opened. Underneath the image of the car they showed the message: ‘To open the boot press 2 on the TV remote’ and vice versa.

A great experiment is about to get under way, and it will tell us much about the future of journalism and the willingness of readers to pay for it. In Wapping last night, News International showed off the new websites for The Times and Sunday Times which have opened to the public this morning. Four weeks from now, a paywall will go up in front of the sites and, by News international’s own calculation, more than 90% of their audience will melt away.

Both new sites look engaging and attractive. They are very different – after years of operating online under the same banner, each newspaper now wants to reassert its identity. The Times has a clean, simple look, much like the paper itself, with the accent on news, complemented by interactive graphics and video.

The Sunday Times looks far more like a magazine, emphasising the kind of material that has a shelf life beyond the day of publication. Among the special online offerings are a weekly satirical look at the news by the video artist Alison Jackson, and a culture planner, which you can use to book theatre or cinema tickets direct from the site, or even to set your Sky Plus recorder.

‘If you want a quick hit of in-depth news you go to the Times,” a Sunday Times executive explained,”if on a Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday you want to tour a little, you come and snack on what the Sunday Times has to offer.”

If, that is, you are willing to pay £1 for a day or £2 for a week’s access. This is more than just an experiment in whether people will pay for news, it’s a strike against the prevailing philosophy of online journalism, which says that the most important thing is to make your material shareable to the widest possible audience. Look at the bottom of most online news articles these days and you will see a share button encouraging you to pass on what you’ve just read to friends, via e-mail or a social network.

Go to a site like Twitter and you will see an orgy of self-promotion from journalists tweeting links to their latest stories or blog posts. Over the weekend, the social network was alive with discussion of a piece about Lady Gaga by the Times’ extremely entertaining feature writer Caitlin Moran. During the election, the Times’ chief leader writer and political columnist Daniel Finkelstein reached a far wider audience via social networks and Google searches than actually paid to read him in the paper.

Now all that will stop. Google searches will no longer turn up Times stories, and links posted on social networks will only take you to the papers’ sign-in page. News International has opted for the most extreme form of paywall – others let search engines crawl their sites, or offer non-paying visitors a few free articles to entice them in. The paper says there will be advantages to readers in thinning out the crowds. Online chats with the football or cricket writers, for instance, will be more intimate, and as comments will now be by named readers, there will be an end to the tedious anonymous ranting that plagues many news sites.

I asked Danny Finkelstein whether it bothered him that from now on none of his journalism would “go viral”, with the risk that he’d be left invisible on the sidelines as the online debate raged through news sites without paywalls. “No,” he insisted,”I want my employer to be paid for my intellectual property.”

Executives from The Times and Sunday Times weighed in with the perfectly sound argument that it was unsustainable for the two papers to go on doing what they are doing now – quality journalism is an expensive business and they made a loss of £87m last year.

It will take a lot of subscriptions to fill that hole, but the company is convinced that advertisers will find the smaller audience of committed readers more attractive than the 21 million promiscuous passers-by who flit through the free Times Online site each month at present.

While there’s been plenty of sniping from the sidelines by News International’s rivals, I suspect they are all glad that someone is at least testing the waters. If the two papers do attract enough paying customers to start eating into the company’s losses, that will give heart to the whole newspaper industry. But for Times journalists who are getting used to the idea that they can build their own brands by sharing their wares far and wide online, these are going to be a difficult, and perhaps lonely, few months.

Are you going to pay?

Do we really need 271 options for passing stories around on the web?

Just a few of AddThis’ options (click to enlarge)

If you like this story, you can hit a share button at the bottom of this page to email it to a friend. You can tweet it or post it on Facebook–or Digg it, buzz it or tag it on Mister-Wong.com.

Wait, you ask, what’s Mister Wong? Unless you are one of the 297,000 users who visited this site in February, you probably haven’t heard of the European social bookmarking service–or for that matter, many of the 49 other sharing sites listed with names like Oknotizie, Kirtsy, and Meneame.

Welcome to the long tail of web sharing. Sure, Facebook has north of 400 million users, and it’s edging out email as the way people are most likely to pass links to their friends. Twitter is also a significant channel we use to distribute the news we care about. But the Web is made up of millions of passionate communities, and not all of them live atop these two platforms.

For a couple of enterprising startups intent on optimizing the traffic that comes from sharing, that’s an opportunity. Fittingly, theses services are called “AddThis” and “ShareThis.” Both provide customizable share buttons that publishers embed on their sites for free. AddThis, which is owned by widget network Clearspring Technologies, offers 271 sharing services to its publishers; ShareThis counts 50 sharing services in its portfolio. Each relies on algorithms to determine which buttons matter most to a user. If you happen to be a Mister-Wong.com aficionado, that button will pop up among your top choices as you read this story.

The companies’ founders argue that offering users more options for how to share their content can create a real traffic boost for some sites. Recently when social networking site Friendster added the “AddThis” button to its page, for example, traffic spiked 158% as Friendster users shared the content across other niche social networks. Even when that boost is smaller, web publishers are loathe to pass up a click or two when its free to download the tool.

The benefit for these startups is data–mountains of information about what content people choose to share, where they share it, and which sharing services are most likely to lead to clicks. Check out the services directory on AddThis, for example, and you can see that in the last 30 days, the rate at which people are sharing content on blogging platform Tumblr has jumped 276%. Or you can see a higher percentage of surfers tweet content in the United Kingdom than the United States. As people increasingly turn to Twitter streams, Facebook newsfeeds and other social services to navigate the web, this is crucial information for companies. Once, they aspired to rank high in a Google (GOOG) search; now they also want real estate on Facebook’s newsfeed.

However, this explosion of share buttons may not last forever. Over time, publishers will have to make a calculation about whether the extra attention they get from all the sharing options is worth sacrificing the data about where readers are posting content. Web behavior is consolidating, after all. Taken together, Facebook and Google (including YouTube, Gmail, and Google Images) accounted for more than 18% of Internet activity for the most recent week available according to Hitwise, or nearly one web visit in every five. The largest websites are growing larger and the long tail – all the publishers writing to audiences of a few readers – is growing longer. AddThis reports stories tagged on Mister-Wong have fallen five percent in the last 30 days.

Nevertheless, if you’re a Mister Wong fan, I’d encourage you to share this story using the bookmark at the bottom of this page. For now, you’ll find one.

Really nice deck. I kinda expected @faris to pop up somewhere.

Now this is super smart. However, the big but as I see it would be that every venue that you check in to would now need to have an RFID reader so you can check in without using your phone. I’m sure @iamdanw will say to watch this space as he works his clever magic.

Last week we were perusing our Google Analytics report here at the Lab and one data point stood out: A site barely two months old had inched into our top 10 referring sites for the previous month. Checking today, it’s up into our top five, passing up many more traditional traffic drivers.

The site is Mediagazer, the media-focused offshoot of the popular technology site Techmeme, and like its sibling it combines editors and an algorithm to gather the best stories on its subject from around the web. On Monday, Mediagazer debuted a feature called Leaderboard (it came first to Techmeme) which ranks news-about-news sources in terms of their prominence on Mediagazer. (We fare well on it, but I swear that’s not why we’re interested.)

I spoke with the site’s editor Megan McCarthy about how the site became a traffic-driver so quickly. McCarthy credits the site’s addictive quality: People arrive via the online equivalent of word of mouth, like social media, and once they’re there, a hefty (though undisclosed) percentage keep coming back. The site already has a core readership that checks in every day, McCarthy said. Mediagazer refreshes every five minutes, thanks to the algorithm searching the web for new content getting linked by other sites; meanwhile, McCarthy is trolling the web for links the algorithm might not have seen yet and prioritizing the ones it has. On a typical day, Mediagazer links to about 40 stories. (McCarthy would not disclose monthly traffic statistics.)

Mediagazer isn’t entering an empty space; from Romenesko to our own Twitter feed, there are plenty of people sorting through the media news of the day. Mediagazer’s scope is broader than, say, ours, including things like new TV lineups and media criticism we wouldn’t cover. Mediagazer joins the other sites run by Techmeme: political news at Memeorandum, celebrity gossip at WeSmirch, and baseball at BallBug, although those three sites are purely automated with no human intervention.

The site is also active on Twitter, sending out the links it posts, with the tweak of including the personal Twitter handle of the author who wrote the post, as you can see above. (The tweet attribution is automated, but requires a one-time setup process with the help of the human.) McCarthy said they want to let journalists know about Mediagazer — I certainly noticed the @ mentions showing up in my Twitter feed — and they want to give readers another opportunity to drill down into a subject area of interest.

“I want anyone who looks at the site to know, not only what’s going on [in the media industry], but whats going to happen,” McCarthy said.

The combination of links, frequent updates, and obsessive readers seems to create the kind of place that active tweeters and bloggers would stop by. That target audience is clear in the kind of advertisements Mediagazer serves — they seem to be primarily from companies that provide software services to bloggers. It also probably explains why we’re seeing so many Mediagazer readers coming our way.

ShareThis