Learning from CNN's Success

Battling for the top slot in online news are CNN.com and MSNBC.com according to an article in the New York Times by Brian Stelter this weekend.

Stelter says in 2008 "MSNBC.com's network of sites received more visitors than CNN.com's network, according to Nielsen - though CNN.com's visitors still viewed substantially more pages." CNN.com's visitors view about 1.7 billion pages a month.

What I found most interesting about this article, is that CNN.com apparently struggles with the same issues as every other news Web site. Their bounce rate is high. They have fought to develop a coordinated editorial strategy. They are searching for an elusive unique signature. Their advertisers are developing an appetite for digital only ads. Success costs more and challenges site stability.

There is an interesting line in the article which has CNN.com executive K.C. Estenson "huddled with staff members at YouTube ... to discuss a collaboration."

Add to this an article a little further on the in paper that describes how young Web users increasingly turn to Youtube.com as a search engine. Apparently they want answers to their questions in video. And they search for answers not at CNN.com, but at Youtube.com.

This raises the other old question of where a news organization should focus its attention in a world where the mechanics of publishing have changed. CNN.com's huge size may mean it is a destination for years. But smaller operations should spend more time considering themselves not as destinations, but as contributors to destination sites whose names, like Youtube, are more associated with traffic than with news.

All good food for thought. And perhaps most encouraging of all, CNN.com has apparently be profitable for eight years.