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August 25, 2006
Newssearch non grata
Newssearch non grata: No direct relevance to our work, but it changed the way I think... The Economist writes about a successful online newspaper and includes this observation: "The secret of making money online, according to Schibsted, is not to rely on news aggregators like Google News and Yahoo!. Three-quarters of traffic to the websites for Schibsted's VG and Aftonbladet comes through their own home-pages and only a quarter from other websites. 'If visitors come from Google to stories deep in the paper and then leave,' explains Mr Munck, 'Google gets the dollars and we get only cents, but if we can bring them in through the front page we can charge EU$19,000 [US$25,000] for a 24-hour banner ad.'" If this was the reason for the Agence France Presse lawsuit against Google News, then I'm not sure why a referrer-based redirect wouldn't have helped their revenue model. Subsequent passages describe how successful newspapers are offering localized resources, which cannot be commoditized as international storytelling is -- there's a pull from the center, but there's also a push to the edges. The article later mentions mobile news gatherers, OhMyNews from Korea, more. (I'm not keen on free papers myself -- in San Francisco, advertisers like Bay Guardian and SF Weekly end up being some of the biggest pollutants in town, and requiring even a quarter for a half-pound of paper would help reduce the mess.)
Posted by JohnDowdell at August 25, 2006 08:37 AM
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