Category Archives: search

Nieman Journalism Lab: The Newsonomics of The New York Times’ pay fence

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Ken Doctor: "Though the FT and the Wall Street Journal have long operated successful pay models, the Times’ leap is a big one: The Times isn’t mainly a business newspaper. If it can succeed charging readers for “general news,” that’s a milestone for newspapers around the world. ...We know that the vast majority of visitors won’t reach the 20-article-view level and won’t bump into the fence. They are fodder for advertising, and a slim few will become more regular users over time. Then, there’s that small percentage — one to three percent — who do pay for digital-only subscriptions, in addition, of course to the print subscribers who will now get 'all-access' ... How open the Times will be to social traffic is a big consideration, as social traffic is the fastest growing source of all traffic, and represents a more engaged audience than search-driven visitors."

Nieman Journalism Lab: The Newsonomics of Google Grouponomics

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Ken Doctor on Groupon: "the remorse being expressed in newspaper buildings across America this week is the same: Why didn’t we come up with that idea? The remorse should go deeper; check out the Groupon Merchant Services page, and try to find a similar one, with similar marketing support, offered by a newspaper company online. In fact, Groupon’s whole pitch to merchants, cheerfully animated in its Grouponomics section, is a textbook lesson in selling local."

paidContent: Video: Murdoch: Newspaper Ad Model Isn’t Dead

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Rupert Murdoch continues his Project Alesia: “Search on the internet, whether it be Bing or Google, whatever, it’s free and they simply take all our expensive and we think very good content such as Wall Street Journal ... They are technologically brilliant, they are a long way ahead but they do not have the right to do it if we want to stop them.”

Google Public Policy Blog: Newspaper economics: online and offline

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Google chief economist Hal Varian: "[The] real money in search engine advertising is in the highly commercial verticals like Shopping, Health, and Travel. Unfortunately, most of the search clicks that go to newspapers are in categories like Sports, News & Current Events, and Local, which don’t attract the biggest spending advertisers. ... This isn't so surprising: the fact of the matter is that newspapers have never made much money from news. They’ve made money from the special interest sections on topics such as Automotive, Travel, Home & Garden, Food & Drink, and so on. These sections attract contextually targeted advertising, which is much more effective than non-targeted advertising. ... Traditionally, the ad revenue from these special sections has been used to cross-subsidize the core news production."

BuzzMachine: Content farms v. curating farmers

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Jeff Jarvis: "I think we may see search fall as the sole or even key means of discovery and filtering of quality content. I see three rings of discovery today: search (Google); algorithms (see: Google News, Daylife); and humans (see: Twitter). Note again that Bit.ly alone causes as many clicks a month—one billion—as Google News. Human power rises again. That’s what Fred Wilson says today when he argues that social beats search, because 'it’s a lot harder to spam yourself into a social graph.'"