Where does local media site traffic come from, anyway?

Submitted by yelvington on August 30, 2012 - 11:30am

A group of German publishers is lobbying for a law that would require search engines to pay copyright fees to websites that are indexed. The general Internet cognoscenti reaction is "cut them off and let those arrogant fossils doom themselves," but it begs the question: How important is search traffic to news sites, anyway?

I don't have any data on national sites (and don't much care) but I have quite a bit on local media sites. Here are a couple of snapshots -- actually screenshots from Chartbeat, a service that provides real-time monitoring of concurrent usage. These are not pageview counts. These are "people looking at pages right now."

The first chart is from a larger site that had a usage spike the morning of Friday, Aug. 24.

During that spike, the blue band (links from other websites) brought in 39% of the users. Search (green) accounted for only 6%, social networking (purple) brought in 11%, and the balance came either directly (such as bookmarking the homepage) or navigating around on the website (such as clicking a link on the homepage).

The hottest item on the site that day was a sports story, which was featured on a number of sports sites and national portals such as Yahoo and AOL.

The second chart is from a smaller site that had a spike of a very different nature Thursday, Aug. 23. You'll see that search referrals soared to 20% -- still behind internal and direct navigation, but really significant on that day, at that moment.

In this case, the traffic was largely going to one specific post by a community blogger who was reacting to a Texas county judge's kooky claim that President Obama was going to invade his territory with UN backing and grab everybody's guns.

The story had hit the national airwaves and people were searching for more on Google. The blogger shrewdly used all the right proper nouns, resulting in high placement on search returns, but also a provocative phrase: "his poor impulse control is a painful embarrassment," resulting in high clickthrough by people who presumably agreed.

But over time, what you see in these graphs, especially in the orange and yellow bands, is that most of the users seem to be site loyalists, not one-hit visitors coming from search.

So what's important?

People who care about your topic. I have to say it again and again: The No. 1 challenge for local media is civic apathy. Everything you do that builds civic engagement and social capital in your community is an investment in your own future. People read about and talk about what they care about.

Having a strong, positive brand. This is something you earn by your performance every single day, not something you automatically get just because the newspaper was the Big Dog in the last century. What you do must be timely and relevant -- at all times. (We should be long past the era when print schedules drove online publication, but if you're still stuck in that rut, get out of it now.)

Effective use of social media. Even loyalists spend a tremendous time elsewhere, and you need to bring them back. This means writing effective summaries and engaging with the public in external contexts (Facebook, Twitter), not just spewing out links. You have to build your community of of social-media followers one user at a time, and you have to give them something they just have to share with their friends.

Search engine optimization. No, it's not the be-all and end-all. Yes, it's still important. It's how people discover your site. No matter how powerful your brand, you always need to invite new users to find you. Yes, much search traffic may be out-of-market and therefore not important to your core local advertising business model, so you need ad geotargeting strategies and ad-network relationships to turn it to your advantage.

Vacation's over

Submitted by yelvington on August 28, 2012 - 1:29pm

I didn't actually intend to take such a long vacation from blogging, but it happened. Perhaps it was a good thing to spare the world from hearing me repeat myself. I took a real-world vacation, too, and spent a couple of weeks in Bangkok and Phuket, Thailand, with my youngest daughter, now a high school senior. But the summer is over, the kids are back in school, and I intend to return to the keyboard.

I've also taken a bit of a vacation from conferences and seminars, but I am scheduled to be on a social media panel at the Associated Press Media Editors annual conference Sept. 19-21 at the John Seigenthaler Center on the Vanderbilt University campus in Nashville. I'm also scheduled to speak at the New England Newspaper & Press Association fall conference Oct. 11 in Natick, MA.

Anatomy of a #fail

Submitted by yelvington on May 19, 2012 - 6:32pm

I was on Facebook. It was the day after it went public and everybody on the inside became gazillionaires. I saw this "trending" story:

I clicked.

I muttered something under my breath and clicked "cancel."

Holy crap. So I went to Google News. Nothing about a plane crash.

So I ran a search.

The second item seemed to be what I was looking for. Wait, it's from May 1?

Click.

No, it's not from May 1. It's from Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2011.

OK, at least there were some sparks.

Skeuomorphism, e-editions, and tablets

Submitted by yelvington on April 3, 2012 - 12:04pm

I remember the first time I saw one of those Flash-based "page turning" interfaces. I was sitting in a conference room in Minneapolis and an excited sales guy was pitching his company's tool, which could take newspaper pages and put them online as a print replica, saving us from all that messy Web stuff. He was so earnest and proud.

I was horrified. The Web isn't print. The Internet is a new medium with unique strengths. The whole idea was just ... sacrilege.

I've changed my point of view somewhat over the years, for several reasons:

  • There's more than one way to do it. Single-product thinking is an old habit from the last century that we really need to get over. There is no requirement that publishers choose between Web, e-edition, print-derived tablet versions, and something that looks like it should be hosted by Alex Trebek. When possible, let the users choose for themselves, individually.
  • People like skeuomorphic design in general. It's why desktop computers have "desktops" of their own. And trash cans. And folders. It makes the product feel comforting and familiar, and can contribute to ease of use. Personally, I blew away my Kindle Fire's wood-grained "bookshelf" launch screen in favor of an Android launcher, but others have different preferences.
  • Some people like print. Its limitations can feel like features. It's fixed in time. It's linear. You can flip through it and feel like you've had an overview. It has a beginning and an end. It's not like the Web, where you just keep going until you're exhausted. And there is value in the editorial judgment that is reflected in page design. We don't all live on first-in/first-out real-time queues, breathlessly following the latest news.
  • I don't feel threatened by print. I understand that others do, but I'm fortunate to work at a company where that battle is over.

One thing that helped me change my mind is what happened when we built Bluffton Today in 2005 as a website focused entirely on community conversation. We didn't plan to put news online at all (the paper was daily and free at the time). When we ran into some delivery barriers in a couple of gated communities, we added a PDF-derived E-edition. I was quite surprised by the intensity of use and the positive community feedback. Users liked the E-edition and the website, and used them for different purposes.

So I haven't changed my point of view that the Web isn't print and the Internet is a new medium with unique strengths.

In fact, I think adaptive HTML5 Web layouts on the "everything just works" principle ultimately will eclipse smartphone and tablet apps. But eclipse doesn't mean replace. And so long as we're producing a print product and making a digital replica is cheap and easy, I think it makes perfect sense to offer it as a product and let the consumer choose.

We're not currently offering any Flipboard-like interfaces on our websites. It's not a matter of design, but of simple economics. While we have all the necessary data to drive an algorithmically defined interface, we have an awful lot of plates spinning already, and one more set of potentially incompatible advertising delivery challenges just isn't something we need to take on right now. Maybe later. For the moment, I'd rather focus on making HTML5 Web pages adaptive and finger-friendly for touch interfaces.

How to fail backward

Submitted by yelvington on March 13, 2012 - 12:41pm

The Harvard guys have been telling us that failing forward can be a good thing -- learning, adapting, all that innovation stuff. But there's another kind of failure: failing backward. Here's a how-to guide:

  • Delegate all the online stuff to the "online guy" because it's too technical to understand.
  • Declare you're "digital first" but change none of your measurements and incentives.
  • Remind yourself that print delivers 80% of your revenues -- as if that's a good thing.
  • Believe your own chest-thumpery about how many people you reach online while ignoring the dismal truth about frequency.
  • Continue to look down with scorn on the local TV station -- as it passes you in Web traffic.
  • Imagine the iPad will save newspapers.

Feel free to add to the list in the comments.

"Audience first" and new leadership openings

Submitted by yelvington on February 24, 2012 - 12:07pm

Today six of the largest Morris Publishing Group newspapers are posting new senior management positions: vice president of audience. Internal and external candidates are welcome to apply.

This is a major step forward in the "audience first" program that Derek May described last week.

And while it has a lot to do with the newsroom, it's not just about the newsroom. It's also about research and marketing, community and social, special publications and -- importantly -- "commercial audiences" across a wide set of products and media.

Jay Rosen has talked about "the people formerly known as the audience." That's a mouthful. We're using the simpler audience term -- but not in the passive sense of last-century mass media, rather in the active sense of audiences throughout human history. The 21st century "audience" is participatory -- like the audience before mass-circulation printing and broadcasting turned us into couch potatoes.

This audience lives somewhere. We call our places communities. That word also is worth a close look. Community has to do with sharing and social cohesion. American newspapers are local. We are responsible to, and for, that social cohesion. If your charge is audience development, you have a community mission.

All of this must sit on a business foundation. The last few years have been very tough ones for American newspapers. Business has been pretty rotten for our ad customers, and generally worse for us. But things are looking up. Some people think this means print will come back. It won't. The future is digital.

But digital is a different world. In the old, mass-circulation print world, where barriers to entry were high, the local newspaper with the expensive printing press was the big dog on the block. Online, we find ourselves outnumbered and outgunned.

Forget all the newspaper industry puffery about how we're reaching more people than ever. Frequency and time spent are the important metrics.

And the reality is dismal.

In a pie chart of "where do people spend their time online," newspaper websites are nearly impossible to find.

People aren't going online to read newspapers -- or even news, from any source. They're going online to talk. To find. To discover. We're way behind Facebook, Google, Yahoo Mail, Youtube, Yahoo, Yahoo Search, Bing, Gmail, Craigslist, AOL Mail, Ebay, Windows Live, MSN ... and that's before figuring in the effect of Pinterest, the latest love of crafty women everywhere.

We don't have to "beat" the big national brands. But if we're going to survive as a business, we have to carve out a much bigger slice of the pie than we've managed to date. And to do that, we need a relentless focus on discovering and meeting local information needs.

News is part of that, of course, but it's news in that reborn participatory audience context, news that is timely, news that is personal, news that is interesting, news that is shared and spread socially, news that we get in our pockets as well as on our tablets and computers, news that is in text and photos and videos and yes, still in print.

But news is not enough.

We should be offering a toolkit for effective local living in this century, and most information needs are not related to the news, at least not as traditionally defined. We need jobs. We need to spend our money wisely (for those of you who outsource this function to other family members, it's called shopping). We want to be entertained.

As practical tools and as entertainment, "online newspapers" are close to useless. That can not be allowed to continue.

We don't have to do any of this. We could just fade into being nothing more than a sales agency for geotargeted digital advertising delivered across national networks. But that would be a sad outcome, not just for us, but for the communities that we have declared are our responsibilities.

We have chosen the path: "To become and remain the dominant convener and server of community audiences."

So the charge for this new-age audience chief is a daunting one: marshal all of our resources effectively to best serve all the local information needs of this participatory audience. It's an exciting one. We live in interesting times.

People's journalism isn't 'citizen journalism'

Submitted by yelvington on February 4, 2012 - 12:54pm

In the past week we've seen an uprising of angry people, mostly women, offended by the Susan G. Komen Foundation cutting off funding for breast cancer exams at Planned Parenthood clinics. It's just the latest example of how the global news conversation is in the hands of people, not just "the media." And it's what I had in mind over a dozen years ago when I talked about the rise of a new kind of people's journalism.

Seven years ago when we launched a blog-centered community website in Bluffton, SC, there was a lot of talk about "citizen journalism." And there was a lot of disappointment in some corners because it didn't happen quite that way.

What many meant when they said or heard "citizen journalism" was a lay practice resembling professional journalism in the Walter Williams tradition, one where "citizens" "covered" "news."

But what I meant when I said "people's journalism" is not that at all. I meant something more organic, more natural, more spontaneous, more personal, less organized, less structured, less "newsworthy" and less ... well, less reliable.

This is where we are today. We have, through forums, story commenting, blogging, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, G+, Tumblr and other venues a free-flowing conversation covering everything from today's lunch plans to the horrors of state brutality in Tahrir Square.

We can apply traditional definitions of "newsworthy" and "journalism" if we like, but there's really not much point. This new news will flow of its own accord, propelled by people's interests. There are no gatekeepers in this environment. Even brutal government supression will fail.

Professional journalism has had years to think about how to adapt to this new reality, and on the whole, it's failed. It's not a replacement. It's a new, complex model that obsoletes some of what pro journalism did in the era of mass media but creates new opportunities for adding value.

"The story" -- a slippery, ill-defined term -- can be a trap, or it can be redefined from the fire-and-forget missile of the last century into a networked living organism more suited for this one. Paul Bradshaw, a journalism prof at City University in London, has described some of the new roles in the context of an investigative team, but the process he's graphed actually applies on many less ambitious levels. It's worth a close look and careful thinking.

I think it helps to begin by understanding that community is a process of sharing, and conversation is its lifeblood. The role of the journalist in this century is to work with the forces unleashed by technology to lead to the same value outputs we've always sought: an informed public that can make wise decisions to govern itself.

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