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.

Social 2009

One of the questions all media people are going to be considering in 2009 is how social media will support newsrooms.

Erick Schonfeld in TechCrunch reviews the Top Top Social Media Sites of 2008, with Blogger in the lead and Facebook coming in a close second place. Whatever you make of these numbers social media spaces are clearly places that news organizations can look for an audience.

Meanwhile, over on Mashable Leslie Poston looks at HOW TO: Give Back With Social MicroFunding in 2009.

Social networking in not going to bring in money the way that selling newspapers did. But it might make a growing source of revenue if social networkers can find something they value from newsrooms in their social networks. Like NPR's listening application in Facebook, or newsfeeds that are specifically focused on group topics.

Thinking about spot.us, the Bay Area social news network that allows users to fund reporting, it's hard not to imagine the spot.us idea would do well in a social networking environment.

Spot.us is aiming to gather groups of interested people around a story to fund it. Social networks have already created groups of people who are interested in the same topic. Would a Spot.us application in Facebook find revenue for stories in groups that are interested in those stories?

Obviously we won't know until someone tries it. But perhaps 2009 is the year for news organizations to look into social networks for new revenue streams.

Geography and Revenue

One of the great aspects of communities on the Internet is that they are thought communities. They are not limited by the geographical restrictions of the real world. I can be an active part of a worldwide community as easily as I can contribute to my online neighborhood yard sale.

But geographical confinement is what has kept news organizations in business since ink first hit paper, and it is still how they define themselves today. From the names of the businesses down. The Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News, The Miami Herald.

But the Web favors centralization. So to work on the Web you've either got to be very big, or have something so original that visitors can't find it anywhere else.

What the old media organizations did, and do, is bring centralized information to a local audience. They did this because that was the only way that the audience could access that information. But now that the reader, or audience, can get its international news anywhere and everywhere, there is no value in a local news organization delivering it. So a local newspaper has to do something that only a local newspaper can do. Like; local news.

This may seem amazingly obvious, but it seems to have eluded many news organizations. International news may still be a useful impulse buy, to leave by the checkout (or off on the right rail), but front and center has to be the original information that a user can't get anywhere else. That's your raison d'etre. That's were your value is to users. That's the future of your revenue.

News: No Funding Model Yet

There's an interesting article in the NY Times about crowdfunding, written by Sarah Kershaw.

She reports that Spot Us in the San Francisco Bay Area is asking its users for story ideas and the funding to cover those stories. It's an interesting idea, which like all ideas, has its weaknesses. Such as, lobbyists could buy the news they want covered. And how could you fund investigative journalism?

I find it interesting that in 2008 there's still no definitive model for a new way to fund news emerging.

There's a new reality. A huge amount of very cheap publishing is going on. Funding is migrating away from expensive methods of publishing. Consumers are using their feed readers to create their own newspapers. They've become publishers creating self built "newspapers" each with a run of one copy. The feed reader melds the publisher and the consumer into the same person. Podcasting does the same for radio. YouTube, Netflix and all the other sources of online video eliminate the need for television.

That new reality has some funding components. Newspapers and smaller online publications sell online advertising. Sponsorship and grants offer another source of revenue. Membership is a third, crowdfunding, according to Kershaw's article, is a fourth and there are more. Kershaw's article mentions Pro Publica and Jay Rosen's Assignment Zero.

The article ends quoting Rosen saying "My own feeling is that we need to try lots of things. ... we need to launch lots of boats."

This has to be true. To continue the analogy, it's as if the ocean got shallower. It's now covered in little boats crossing the water that once only the big liners could sail. And the liners are having their bottoms ripped open. They have to draw less water or run aground. They have to evolve into fleets of little boats. And little boats can be funded in many different ways.

Craigslist Revenue Grows

paidContent.org reports that Craigslist could bring in $81 million in revenue in 2008.

That's $81 million that isn't going to newspapers for classified ads. But given that the Web earns pennies where the old media earned dollars, it represents a serious blow to old media.

WBUR Online Community

In the spring of 2003, a group of six Babson University BCAP business school students conducted an online survey of 365 WBUR supporters. This was a small survey group and the results were much as you would expect.

But one piece of information did stand out:

Of on-air respondents 84% said they pledged to support the news and 15% said they pledged to support the shows.

Of online respondents 7% said they pledged to support the news and 88% said they pledged to support the shows.