Are Operations Like Flipboard Scams Against Publishers?
talkingpointsmemo.com
talkingpointsmemo.com
It does cost money to report on things, and people who spend their time thinking about the issues and summarizing them or coralling them together. And historically those people were paid by the fees from Classified Ads [1].
What was interesting in the 'old school' was that the classifieds of the newspaper that had the most readers did best, and so they could charge the most for them, and subscribers and circulation became the variable you maximized to make your paper successful. But in the 'new school' there is no single paper, there is the web, and it has voices from all over and all of the ad revenue is going to places like Craigslist and Google so the support cost of serious news is 'gone' or its entirely subscriber based.
TPM is 100% correct in that it gets no benefit from Flipboard (or Feedly, or whatever) in showing its story if it never sees the reader.
People are willing to pay for editorial, the New York times, the Economist, and others have shown that. But how do you create their scale or markets these days? Can you even make a 'lean startup' type organization based on editorial content? That will be an interesting question for the current generation of entrepreneurs, and a vital question to Journalism/English majors everywhere.
[1] http://www.mediabistro.com/mediajobsdaily/mediamemo-google-d...
The problem is that in the absence of actual news gathering, editorializing becomes either navel-gazing or shilling for whatever bias you have. It's hard to have meaningful editorials about government spying on its citizens or companies shipping shoddy products if you don't actually have the news of such things in the first place due to a lack of revenue to fund investigative reporting.
There is of course the possibility of citizen journalism devoid of any substantial revenue model, but the passion necessary for Joe Smith to take time from his normal life to dig around dumpsters probably reveals an existing bias to begin with, so you're back to the editorial without dependable news on which to base it.
There's a reason it's a hard problem that few news organizations have come remotely close to solving.
I think that one issue here is that the news reader apps focus on user experience while most of the content providers focus on content (and frankly, provide a relatively awful user experience). I think that to have a successful news product, you have to provide both. If you look at the classic periodic news/opinion model, the magazine, you had a strong marriage of both aspects of the overall product. The confounding issue for content providers right now is that they all give the milk away for free, and so it's trivial for aggregaters to both focus on user experience AND have more quality content than any particular content provider. But if there was a shift in the content industry away from allowing aggregaters to use their content, then perhaps individual content providers could compete. However, I expect that to succeed in such an environment that the content providers would have to become desirable destinations in their own right.
Blogging :)
Also Upworthy was a very interesting example of a successful news startup: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-upworthy-grew-to-104-mill...
I think the issue here is that aggregators are trying to own the reading experience without replacing the monetary value of traffic to TPM's site, which is what's really bugging Josh, not losing direct relationship with the reader. He's fine with Google News, and he's fine with a truncated RSS feed being consumed in News360, or Flipboard or wherever as long as the main story has to be read on talkingpointsmemo.com.
This makes sense to me, and I think it's a very common problem across all content creators except the top-tier publishers who can actually make ad deals to sell inventory inside the aggregator (see TechCrunch/AOL's experience described here - http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/23/flipboards-mike-mccue-confi...). But looking at the mobile version of any article on talkingpointsmemo.com I have to question how effectively they're monetizing that traffic right now - it seems like it's all a bunch of network banner ads that I can't imagine anyone ever tapping on except by accident.
I think with the right native mobile experience, TPM can get a much larger value from a mobile reader, and if someone can provide an aggregator that delivers that to everyone, not just the top brands, it should be a no-brainer to jump on board. And I think we as an industry are pretty close to figuring out how this can work (we @News360 are certainly working very hard on this specific problem).
Its you choice. You can help a content provider you clearly value on some level, or actively choose not to. No cost you you either way.
I think "I don't care" sums it up well.
So, yes.
Click away? Well, people are not doing that. So not much use to the site in question.
What if someone invented a slick, uniform UX for free mobile apps and repackaged them for easy consumption? Would you jump at the chance to have your apps featured? What if your free apps were ad supported?
However.
I'm still not going to directly visit a hundred different websites each day to filter through a thousand articles, most of which I won't be interested in. My morning and evening commutes are packed with riders scanning Flipboard and other aggregators as they try to relax en route. It is TPM's undeniable right not to share their content with me and my fellow passengers. It's also our undeniable right to skip on to their competitors' content, probably without ever noticing that TPM is missing from our feeds.
FTFY
My prime example: Superbowl Ads. Extremely expensive, measuring response is a fool's errand, but the ads are the most expensive ads you can purchase all year.
So yes, you want attention that brings value. But that's an extremely fuzzy concept in most industries where you're selling someone else's attention.
Am I wrong about this?
And although it's just one data point, I've personally started visiting iMore because I came to recognize their content through Flipboard, found it interesting, and wanted more.
Maybe I'd glance past 100 TPM articles on Flipboard and never read them, in which case TPM isn't out the traffic. Or maybe I'd start skimming those articles because I've started to associate their icon with interesting content and convert into a regular view. The odds of that happening are admittedly low, but the odds of that happening if their content isn't available on my news consumption platform of choice is approximately zero.
But ultimately it's TPM's call. If they want to restrict it, then I completely defend their right to do so. I just don't think it's a good business idea.
I just don't think it's a good business idea.
What a publisher can sell profitably to advertisers now is a small, engaged audience - not massive numbers of people who couldn't care less and just pass through.
It isn't really interesting to observe that people want free stuff. It is interesting to unite producers to get a better price for their effort, and to tackle the behemoths who can afford to dumb content below cost. It is interesting to try to convince consumers to stop wasting their lives, and to demand better content worth a higher price.
Also, to that end, it seems to have failed. They want people on their site, and Flipboard apparently isn't doing that. All it does is use the content to keep people on their site.
Taking the article at face value, I'd say ditch it and market in a different way.
- don't allow content on Flipboard
- allow truncated content
- allow full content
A/B test and tell us the results. This article is just speculation and complaining about the variety of options you have, without any data.
Something people in a great many endeavors should keep in mind.
I like a good layout as much as the next person but when it comes to reading I just want white background, black text and a few images.
It would seem to me the case of flipboard is quite different, instead of driving traffic it actively decreases it.
To quote Andy Warhol:
"I'm confused about who the news belongs to. I always have it in my head that if your name's in the news, then the news should be paying you. Because it's your news and they're taking it and selling it as their product.
But then they always say that they're helping you, and that's true too, but still, if people didn't give the news their news, and if everybody kept their news to themselves, the news wouldn't have any news. So I guess you should pay each other. But I haven't figured it out fully yet."
and your mobile shiz is funked up.