Blogs, media, parasitism, and symbiosis
This issue has been discussed before and I’ve written about it several times, though it doesn’t seem to go away. Robert Niles, editor of Online Journalism Review, has written a very interesting post titled Are blogs a ‘parasitic’ medium? He notes :
Over the past months, I’ve heard several journalists make the same comment at various industry forums: That blogs are a “parasitic” medium that wouldn’t be able to exist without the reporting done at newspapers.
Back in April 2006 I wrote a blog post on The symbiosis of mainstream media and blogs, in which I quoted from the Financial Times and commented on this idea of parasitism:
“The present round of chiselling may feel exciting and radically new – but blogging in the US is not reflective of the kind of deep social and political change that lay behind the alternative press in the 1960s. Instead, its dependency on old media for its material brings to mind Swift’s fleas sucking upon other fleas “ad infinitum”: somewhere there has to be a host for feeding to begin. That blogs will one day rule the media world is a triumph of optimism over parasitism.”
Cute metaphor. Yet symbiosis is far more apt than parasitism. Mainstream media in its online form largely gets attention through blogs. Blogs add immense value to the original articles, by identiyfing what’s important, pointing out flaws, adding other perspectives, making visible to all the conversations that stem from media pieces. Blogs depend on mainstream media, with its resources and editorial capabilities, for sure. Yet media is increasingly dependent on blogging for the direction of attention and layer of value-add created.
I later wrote about the collaborative space of blogs and newspapers, discussing how Technorati enables blog commentary on newspaper articles to be visible when you read the original article:
Newspapers and other mainstream media are still the primary reference points for what’s happening in the world, and the first pass of editorial commentary on that. Yet mainstream media increasingly feeds off the dialogue and news that surfaces in the blogosphere. News sites are also vastly enhanced by having the conversations that stem from their articles being visible to all. Anyone who wants to comment on a media story can have their thoughts available to readers globally, not just on a single site, but through an entire world of syndicated media.
In the Future of Media Strategic Framework, the central feature is the Symbiosis of Mainstream and Social Media, as illustrated by the circular flow of the cycle of media (click through for anthe downloadable diagram and explanation of symbiosis):
Robert uses a diverse range of interesting quotes to unpack the idea that blogs are parasitic. Ultimately, the most important reason that this is nonsense is that blogs are collectively a mechanism for us to discover what we as a society (or subset of it) find interesting and useful. Even if there were no useful content in blogs (which of course is also nonsense), their collective function of collaborative filtering is an extraordinary bound forward for the world of media.
Dan Gillmor also notes:
For the record, there are at least a dozen bloggers whose coverage of topics I care about do a considerably better job than any journalist working for a traditional media company.
while Howard Owen comments:
The best way to understand blogging is to blog. That’s why I say: All journalists should blog. You can’t get modern media without understanding blogs, and you can’t understand blogs unless you do it.
Dissatisfaction with mainstream media drives the rise of citizen journalism
Americans are unhappy with quality of journalism. That will be the key driver of the citizen journalism, or more broadly, new forms of media content creation and distribution. A survey performed in conjunction with the recently held We Media conference in Miami by John Zogby interviewed 5,384 adults nationwide, giving some pretty solid results. The figures below show that, not surprisingly, professionals (in this case the conference goers) are not quite as cynical as the population at large. However conservatives and older people are particularly contemptuous of the standards of journalism. As a result, a significant majority of Americans believe that blogging and citizen journalism will play a vital role in the future of journalism.
Source: WE MEDIA-ZOGBY poll
While I’m a true believer in the power of media creation outside the establishment, I’m still a little surprised by the broad enthusiasm of the respondents for blogging and citizen journalism. What it comes down to is dissatisfaction with the status quo, and having seen the potential for something better. This is certainly not to say that blogging in its current form is a viable alternative to mainstream news media. New models that combine professional expertise with amateur participation will absolutely become alternatives, or at least strongly complementary to existing media. My favorite example is NewAssignment.Net. David Cohn from NewAssignment.Net reviews the idea of “crowdsourcing” in journalism, and points to techPresident, which will include input from contributors across the nation.
Uncovering the structure of influence and social opinion
An article in the Wall Street Journal titled The Wizards of Buzz zooms in on a group of people much discussed by the tech crowd over the last year, but who have not visible in the mainstream media before now. They are the people who submit stories to the social news sites. The article includes a nice sidebar describing the most prominent social news sites: Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Newsvine, and Netscape. These sites create what I call “social opinion” (as distinct from the traditional approach of status-based opinion). Each of these sites depends on people submitting what they think are the most interesting news items. Then the community at large votes on these suggestions, with the links getting the most votes going to the front page, being seen by thousands or even millions of people, and sometimes creating overnight stars. The main focus up until now has been the ‘You’ named by Time magazine as the person of the year – that is the many who vote on the stories. Yet there is only a fairly small pool of people who submit stories.
The Wall Street Journal did its own analysis of who was submitting stories on the sites, and came up with some interesting insights, including the startling fact that on Digg, 30 people (from 900,000 registered users) are responsible for one third of stories that made the front page of the site. The article names 20 of the most active and influential people who are submitting to social news sites, putting in the limelight people who are working hard for no pay, scouring the web for interesting stories, and being the first to submit them for a potential 15 seconds of fame.
Of course, influential people of all stripes can be wooed with attention, invitations, presents, money, and other nice things. Netscape, in a bid to attract some of these influencers, offered $1,000 a month to some of the top submitters on Digg to get them to switch to Netscape. No doubt PR people are already keenly courting these influencers. This research and article has helped to uncover the structure of influence in a world driven increasingly by social opinion rather than status-based opinion. What interests me in particular is how the structure of these influence networks will evolve – we are absolutely in a transition phase, and the way social opinion is formed will quickly change. Michael Arrington calls it a “crazy ecosystem”. Jason Kaneshiro focuses on the potential for these influencers to be paid – they are creating value, including being central to the very high valuations of some of these sites, so they should be rewarded. The question is, in what form does that reward come? Being written about in the Wall Street Journal is a strong reward in itself, for many. And if they are paid, who pays them, and is it overt or covert? This will be a fascinating space to follow.
Impressions of Ad:tech Sydney
A short, random collection of impressions from Ad:tech Sydney…
It was undoubtedly a big success, with very good attendee numbers (meaning all the keynote sessions and quite a few of the breakout sessions had a crowd of people standing at the back), a very positive response from all the attendees I spoke to, and all the exhibitors I chatted to saying it was very worthwhile for them to participate. It was well organized and provided both quality content and an opportunity for the industry to get together. I have long criticized the events industry – globally but particularly in Australia – at being very formulaic and non-interactive. Ad:tech is lifting the bar for this kind of event in Australia. Not to say that it couldn’t have been done better, but it certainly created value for the local industry, and I’m told Ad:tech head office is pleased with the event’s performance, including financially.
The New Media Mix keynote panel session I chaired this morning (pre-session description here) was good fun, with Harold Mitchell and Richard Kimber in particular responding to my request for some differences of opinion. The core of the discussion ended up being about what is making the shift in media, channels, and online slower than it should be. Skills and education were a prominent topic, with all panelists pointing to education as a fundamental issue in Australia’s future success, which is currently not supporting the skills and capabilities we need as a nation. Harold went on to say how he believes the nation is being fundamentally held back by low bandwidth and poor internet infrastructure, at one point sparking applause from an audience that no doubt feels likewise. I noted the very slow uptake in social media participation in Australia. Certainly I’m concerned that as a geographically isolated country, Australia is far from taking full advantage of communication technologies, meaning that it risks falling behind in a global, networked, information-based economy.
Ad:tech Sydney: Keynote session – The New Media Mix
Ad:tech has been the main event in town in advertising and technology for 10 years now, running conferences first in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, then Europe and Beijing. After being hit by the tech bust, Ad:tech is back stronger than ever, with close 10,000 people said to have attended its San Francisco exhibition last April. Next city on Ad:tech’s list is Sydney, where the inaugural Australian conference will be held this week. I understand there are already 350 registered for the conference, and 1000 for the exhibition – good turn-outs for this kind of event in Sydney – meaning the keynote sessions will be standing-room only.
I will be chairing two panels at Ad:tech – the keynote session on the second day on The New Media Mix, and a session on the first day on blogs as a marketing tool (more on that in a subsequent post). Other than myself, the keynote panelists will be:
* Richard Kimber, the recently appointed Managing Director South Asia for Google, and previously global head of e-marketing for HSBC.
* Harold Mitchell, Chairman of Mitchell and Partners, one of the largest media buying agencies in Australia, and one of the grand old men of the industry here.
* Foad Fadaghi, technology editor of BRW magazine, coming recently from a role as Research Director at Frost & Sullivan.
The intention will be to create a provocative conversation, bringing together some of our different perspectives and viewpoints. I will kick off by showing the Future of Media Strategic Framework as a reference point, and to introduce some of the focal issues and questions we’ll try to address duing the session.
Social media: Is the rise of social media fragmenting consumers’ attention and making them harder to reach? Or does it make the total space of media and the ability to impact people larger than it was?
User generated and advertiser generated content: Does the highly targetted nature of user generated content outweigh the lack of control over content? Do advertisers need to become creators of content outside traditional advertising formats?
Format shifting: Is the newfound ability to shift media in time, space, and format a fundamental threat to advertisers? Or does it open up opportunities to reach people in new ways?
Monetizing attention: Will the targetted, measurable nature of advertising on digital channels result in a wholesale shift of advertising dollars over the next decade? What impact will the rise of advertising aggregation have on industry structure?
New distribution channels: How far can mobile go as an advertising medium, and what will succeed in this space? Can advertising be inserted at the level of the device (phone, music or video player, PDA) rather than embedded into content?
It promises to be a fun session! I’ll report back afterwards with insights generated during the conversation.
Newspapers, search optimization, and transforming old-school editors
Last April I wrote a post about changes in newspaper headline writing. Editors were discovering that the witty, catchy headlines they wrote for their print versions weren’t working in the online versions. They weren’t easily visible in search engines, didn’t attract attention by readers using RSS aggregators, and generally meant articles were not getting read online. A very similar article appeared today on CNET, describing the travails of newspaper editors trying to make their print versions work in an online format.
The bottom line is that this is about education. The skills that have served editors and journalists admirably over the last decades need to be complemented by an understanding of how search engines, RSS readers, and social media websites such as Digg, Tailrank, Newsvine and their ilk work. In addtion, there is a new art and science of understanding the behaviors of online news readers. Some people read both print and online news in different situations, and some have shifted to read almost exclusively online. These are in fact demographically some of the most attractive readers. Training is required, and sometimes new people are needed to take the place of those who cannot or will not learn the new skills to succeed in this environment.
“We’ve had training sessions with copy editors and the night desk for the newspaper. It’s been a big education initiative,” said David Beard, editor of Boston.com and former assistant managing editor of its print sibling, The Boston Globe. “We’re regularly beating the bigger boys, like the Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal…and part of the reason is SEO.” In November, Nielsen/NetRatings ranked Boston.com, the sister Web site of The Boston Globe, as the fourth-most trafficked newspaper Web site in the country, even though its print circulation is ranked 15th by one audit bureau.
Mainstream media merges with social media, including the rise of news aggregation
Alex Iskold and Richard McManus have a great piece on Read/ Write Web titled “Mainstream Media Usage of Web 2.0 Services is Increasing”. The article details how many major media organizations are regularly including “Digg this”, “Tag on del.icio.us,” and other “web 2.0” features that we’ve grown used to seeing on blogs. Alex says:
It appears that we are nearing a tipping point for the mass adoption of prominent web 2.0 services, like digg and del.icio.us. Endorsement by mainstream media opens these services up to millions of people who otherwise would either not know about them, or not take them seriously. So these are not just links, these are literally endorsements – or recognition of additional value for mainstream media.
Alex’s piece includes the following chart which shows web 2.0 functionality on major media sites.
As it happens, Future Exploration Network did a similar research exercise as part of a recent strategy project we did for a global news organization regarding the future of one of their online news sites. While we came up with some similar results to Alex, we also focused on personalization and aggregation functionality. At the moment the only major news sites that offer the ability for users to select their own news feeds from any media source are USA Today and Fox News. I haven’t yet had a chance to see the personalization features of MyTimes – the New York Times personalized news site, which is still under Beta. However I presume that it will offer this capability as well. Until very recently this open third-party aggregation functionality was only possibly from pure online properties, notably Yahoo! News, Netvibes, and of course any of a host of browser-based RSS aggregators. Big media content providers wanted to be just that – content providers. Now they are beginning to realize that providing quality content IN ADDITION to allowing readers to aggregate the best of the web creates a far stickier relationship. They can have the best of both worlds.
All of this reflects what I’ve written before about the symbiosis of mainstream media and social media – each learns from the other, integrates their best features, and feed off each other, until the boundaries between them are blurred beyond recognition.
Will micropayments transform publishing and the internet?
Micropayments on the internet have been a major topic of discussion since the mid-1990s. The internet supposedly creates a “liquid economy” in which products and services can flow easily around the planet. Yet a foundation for any business is the ability to get paid. Most transactions are done through credit cards, with Paypal a rising alternative, yet these systems are either not appropriate for very small payments, due to high transaction fees, or are not widespread enough. As such, it is almost impossible to charge for anything worth less than a few dollars. That’s fine for relatively expensive items such as books, but makes everyday content such as news, analysis, and humour very hard to charge for.
Bill Gates said today at the World Economic Forum at Davos that Microsoft is launching a points-based micropayments system. As Robert McLaws and Dean Collins have pointed out, similar systems have already been implemented by Microsoft for Xbox Live to enable simple online transactions. Not for the first time, a concept tested in the gaming community is now reaching the broader community. Mary Jo Foley harks back to Passport, Microsoft’s aborted attempted in 2001 to create a “digital wallet” amid a suite of online services. Today, as then, Microsoft’s power cuts two ways: many get exposed to Microsoft’s offerings and view them as credible, yet there is strong reticence at Microsoft’s power. The more limited scope of the current offering, where consumers buy a portfolio of points for $10 or $20, then spend them online, will make this a far more palatable offering.
As Donna Bogatin and a number of others have noted, a good micropayment system could disrupt Google’s Adwords program. Publisher may be able to make better money by charging tiny amounts to visitors to read their wares, than they can by putting up advertisements. There are two big uncertainties here. One is whether people will be prepared to pay even small amounts for content, now that an everything-is-free mentality has built up. Even if that turns out to be possible, Microsoft’s challenge is to become the de facto standard for online micropayments. In this domain more than most, network effects reign – online one micropayments systems is going to win. I believe that in the long run a micropayments system will be central to the internet. But I’m not convinced that either of the two conditions will be met for a good while. It is an idea whose time is coming, but may not yet be quite here. Publishing will definitely be transformed when micropayments are part of the general infrastructure, by creating a better business model to encourage high-quality, targetted content. Let’s see how this one pans out.
Media and advertising will be everywhere
“Add this to the endangered species: blank spaces,” opens an article in today’s New York Times on pervasive advertising. Some of the innovative ways it mentions in how advertising is filling the blank spaces in our environment include:
* Eggs in supermarkets are being stamped with CBS TV show titles
* US Airways airsick bags and seatback trays
* Chinese food cartons promoting Continental Airways
* Examining table covers in doctor’s surgeries
* Video screens in taxis
* Turnstile gates
* Interactive floor displays that respond to people walking on them
* Toyota and Unilever projecting ads on building sides
* Dry cleaning bags
Absolutely. This is how we described Media is Everywhere, one of the five ideas transforming media that we included in our Future of Media Report 2006:
In the future everything from walls and table-tops to cereal packets and clothes will be screens and video will be everywhere. E-paper will add video and audio functionality to the formerly static pages of newspapers, and books will play commercials for the author’s latest novel. If the advertisers have their way, there will be no respite outside your front door.
Implications: Consumers may respond aggressively to the commercial invasion of public and private spaces. Devices such as TV-B-Gone will be used to shut off or shut out clutter.
Opportunities: Getting messages closer to consumers. For example, since 70-80% of purchasing decisions are made in-store, ads will be in shops and malls rather than on TV at home. Producers of quality video content will reap a bonanza.
Of course there will be pushback from consumers and local government. But within whatever boundaries are created, there will be more experimentation, especially in micro-spaces, which will gradually be filled with moving images. And in time we will grow to accept media and advertising being literally almost anywhere we turn our attention.
The cost of online advertising sales and media globalization
The current issue of BRW, Australia’s largest business weekly magazine, has an interesting article on how technology is changing the Australian media landscape, which is in the throes of a major transition. The article quotes me on the issue of scale in online businesses in Australia, especially relating to the cost of advertising sales. To expand on this theme… one of the most transformational advances in the online world over the last years was the introduction of Google AdSense, which allows anyone with a website to get advertising revenue without any overheads. All you do is set up Google AdSense – or any of a number of its competitors – on your website, a trivial matter, and you can garner revenue commensurate with the audience you are reaching. Google sells advertising, aggregates it, and then allocates it across millions of websites. Thus the long tail is born. However, naturally Google prices the advertising to take a tidy profit for itself, with AdSense accounting for 39% of its revenue. Thus you can make substantially more money if you sell advertising directly, both because you are cutting out the middleman, and because you are able to sell extremely targetted advertising and sponsorship, tailored to be presented in the formats most relevant and desirable to the advertiser. The other side of this, of course, is that you then incur the cost of advertising sales. This is the primary logic behind the blog networks such as b5media, Gawker Media, and Weblogs Inc., in which you bring together a pool of blogs, spread the cost of advertising sales across the network, and get the full potentail advertising value from your sites.
The interesting piece comes when you are targetting local (read non-US) markets. I have written before about how it is a lot easier to target most non-English markets – for example French, Portuguese, Korean, and Japanese websites are each predominantly visited by readers from one country. Yet in the English-speaking space, you are immediately sucked into a global, yet US-centric, world of sites, links, and conversations. So what does an online media company based in, say, Australia, do to make good money? This is particularly pointed if the site is based on communities or social networks. There is certainly a viable – if relatively small – local market to be addressed (2006 Q2 online advertising in Australia was $A226, up 59.4% YOY). If the reach of the online media site is sufficient it can justify a direct salesforce for local advertising, and then serve AdSense or similar advertising to visitors from overseas. However in the grand scheme, only fairly large local operations can afford to do this. From these factors stem a whole array of strategic issues for local online media company operators, including local versus international target audience mix, costs of advertising for local and international visitors, and alliances for ad sales aggregation. The globalization of online media is an increasingly important and multi-faceted issue – I will write more on these topics later. I also hope to get the time to make some comments on recent events in the Australian media landscape, but with around 80 hours scheduled on airplanes over the next two weeks, nestled between an imposing set of client strategy workshops on diverse continents, a keynote, and other major deadlines, I’m not quite sure when I’ll get to it…
