Blue Screen Of Duds

Why does traditional media, including the online ones, struggle so much against user generated content (yes, as a matter of principle and whatever else you can hate the phrase for all you like) and non-traditional media generated content? Beyond the fact that most of the Youtubes are full of content produced by the traditional monsters (note to traditional media: your content discovery model is toast, find a new one or have one shoved down your throat with excessive force), the nagging little problem for the oldies is the cost structure. It is just way too expensive to produce the content they produce, while the average Joe with an N95 on the street might end up producing something that will blow you out of the water on any given day.

Once up on a time, the only way to produce and distribute content online was to pump in a lot of money. Everything would cost a fortune: the wire copies that are required to pump in the non-unique stories, the reporters who would create the unique content and the editors who would package and publish it all online. Web hosting was expensive, technical support was expensive, there was no Blogger, WordPress or even Django and to publish content online you would probably have to create and maintain a content management system of your own.

Before it became the favourite pond of sploggers, Blogger, along with a host of other publishing websites decimated the high entry cost to publishing, personal or otherwise. Of course, the quality of content on the average blog was not quite at par with something that came from a media house’s stable. Where they scored was in terms of width and variety. 200 bloggers on the same platform covers a much wider area than 20 of the best editors sitting together and the monopoly was broken.

All you need now to get published is a domain, a web hosting account and the ability to use a browser, totaling something less than $130 for a year. And if you go about it in a smart way, you can easily break even and even generate differing degrees of profit. This is why you have slew of new online publications that don’t do much of end-to-end original content. It is much easier and cheaper to let the big guys do the heavy lifting; they will just latch on to it and provide that little bit of insight and background, which is mostly not allowed in a normal reportage. There is really nothing wrong with that model, it is an opportunity that the traditional media model has brought about. Nobody should feel any shame in making a living off it.

The average mainstream online media publication (the ones that publish 24 hours or close to it) employs something in the region of 20 – 30 people in production to keep the show going. Mind you, that number does not guarantee any exclusive content; they can comfortably cover most of the day’s events, but creating exclusive content is an additional effort on top of that. Making things even more difficult for them are recent developments like Google’s refusal to index wire copies from publications anymore, while the agencies themselves charge you extra for online usage rights. It suddenly reduces the footprint these publications have on aggregators and search engines.

So, is it really that a Paidcontent or a Gawker Media will be the New York Times of 2010? I am afraid not. They do use a marginally leaner model of generating content, but they are still based on the flawed old model, which is too costly to run and it just does not scale. This is just an interim where there is a bit of arbitrage in terms of the cost vs revenue equation for the new guys, compared to the old ones, but it is not going to last forever and this is certainly not the future.

Technorati tags: new media, media, user generated content

The world of blogs is reacting to an Op Ed by Neil Henry about the decline of news and the role that internet properties like Google and Craigslist have played in this decline. This latest missive has been attributed to The Chronicle’s announcement earlier this month that they are going to let go 100 newsroom hands in an effort to save costs.

According to John Battelle, there were around 400 journalists working recently with the publication and I can only share the shock he has expressed about the number. It does not take 400 journalists to bring out any kind of media publication these days. Those numbers belong to online travel agents and their BPO operations; they don’t belong to any self-respecting news organization. As usual, the outrage is justified, but the blame certainly is not Google’s.

The blame squarely lies with the people who run traditional media, who, in the first place, should fire their sales team instead of the journalists. After all, it is not the fault of the journalists that advertising revenue is dropping alarmingly year-on-year. Can you recollect even a single sales head that was fired recently for the decline? I can’t, I’d be surprised if you can.

The sales team should have seen the trend (and that is nothing new, it is at least 3-4 years old now) and used their brains to usher in innovation. Online classifieds are a mix of fairly useless and unorganized listings, flavoured with a nice helping of spam and scams. There IS an opportunity to list and present this information better, the only problem being that they just did not bother. When was the last time you heard a senior sales executive reach out to the online classifieds segment and figured out something innovative in that space?

Moreover, newspapers cannot sit on their asses, leaning on their former glory, with a sulk that would put a menopausal depressive to shame. Get over it; you are fighting with the lolcats for my attention. Now, figure it out how you are going to do it than keep repeating this endless tripe about how someone stole your favourite rag doll.

And as a starting point, please fire your sales team. They are not pro-active, innovative and they have constantly underperformed by any desirable metric.

CBS, the television network has decided to take a different route from the other networks in disseminating its multimedia content by taking the path of doing syndication deals all over the place. According to a WSJ report (soon-to-go-behind-pay-wall link), the move was necessitated by what the company’s Internet strategist jokingly calls, “CBS.com/nobodycomeshere,” to describe its earlier product – Innertube – that allowed users to watch the videos only on CBS.com.

Excerpt:

CBS is working on agreements with social-networking sites such as Facebook Inc. and Last.fm Ltd. to allow users to post CBS video clips to their profiles, according to people familiar with the matter.

It is an interesting way to go about trying to widen your audience, but the path being taken is not without danger. According to the article, the company aims to monetize the clips by showing ads in the clips, which raises an interesting question: why would Facebook allow CBS to control ad inventory for clips shown on its website?

Apparently, they are doing a deal with Joost and the Facebook deal could also be on the same lines – standard revenue share with the advertisements being inserted by syndication clients. It is very much possible that the WSJ reporter, Brooks Barnes, got it wrong when he implied that the ads would be controlled by CBS, which is precisely what got Photobucket into a lot of trouble with Myspace before they kissed and made up and eventually ended up in bed together.

Syndication is not a panacea for your low traffic woes and it is understandable that CBS is getting a bit desperate for an increased uptake of its videos. CBSNews.com was one of the early pioneers of promoting its video content online, but for some reason it has not taken off or done much for its traffic. If CBS hosts the videos, syndicating it would increase its bandwidth expenses, while not giving it the best of advertising revenues and in all honesty video advertising is still a bit of an unknown quantity.

If the syndication clients host the clips, then CBS won’t have much control over the advertising and revenue share deals always leave you with a bit of an aftertaste in your mouth as it eventually ends up kicking you where it hurts the most for your content producers: the loss of exclusivity and the erosion in the premium you can command based on that.

Maybe the reasons are as simple as what the CBS Interactive president said: “We can’t expect consumers to come to us, it’s arrogant for any media company to assume that.” The problem is not as much that viewers are not coming to websites with multimedia content that is hosted within the website. The network’s competitors have a much better deal in terms of traffic (Foxnews: 528 on Alexa, CNN: 61 on Alexa), while CBSNews.com lags way behind at rank 2099 on Alexa and the CBS.com domain does a more respectable rank of 1861.

It looks more like a CBS-specifc problem of users not coming to their website. Guess there is nothing like taking a path-breaking approach to fixing your problems when you don’t have much to lose in the first place.

p.s: Fox.com has a much lower ranking at 1823, but FIM also owns Myspace and a host of other high-traffic websites now, enabling them to flog their video wherever they please without having to worry about revenue shares or getting the right degree or reach or leverage.

The Wall Street Journal – Hindustan Times venture Mint’s website — Livemint — seems to have taken down its registration wall. You no longer need an account on the website to access the content. Since I don’t follow the website much, I do not know how recent a development it is, but it certainly was not the case when it launched a while ago. Could it have something to do with the fact that the site has not had any reasonable uptake since its launch? Yeah, I know the usual refrain about Alexa data, but it is worth taking a look at.

Technorati tags: mint, HT, the wall street journal

A long, long time ago…
I can still remember
How that 800x layout used to make me smile….
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people change
And, maybe, they’d be happy for a while.

Four of India’s major news websites, Times of India, Hindustan Times, Indian Express and NDTV recently went under the knife recently and got a facelift each for themselves. All of them are now a spanking 1024 pixels wide, having thrown into the dustbin the old 800 pixel wide layout that the industry has persisted with for a very very long time. There still is not much in terms of innovation in any of their efforts, it is mostly a clean up job aimed at organising the information more logically, but it is a welcome break from the ancient layouts these sites used to have and as a bonus they load up much faster too.

I particularly like Times of India’s effort, HT is pretty much a rip-off of NYT and NDTV looks like a rush job that they are still fixing in full public view, but ToI is a pretty clean and logical redesign and the new mail service I’ve seen is also quite spiffy. I think a certain Mr Pankaj Gupta is finally getting make a mark there and knowing how hard that can be, it is a laudable effort.

Strangely, the portals of Indiatimes and Rediff are still on the 800 layout. I wonder how long before see them also being changed to 1024 and from what I know the audience is not that different on the related news sites. In any case, I am only glad to see the back of the 800.