Deceptive appearance economy links
Arnon Mishkin is a partner in the Mitchell Madison Group, where he advises on improving business using the Internet and achieving profitability in the network. Previously, he was a partner in the Boston Consulting Group, where he was engaged in the company's first projects on the world wide web.
Those who are “in the Internet course” will easily explain to you that the economy of the network depends entirely on links . The more links you get, the better. Few can argue.
Therefore, when the Associated Press (AP) and newspaper owners demanded to share the income of those who link to their sites, it was clear that they simply did not understand the web and did not understand the benefits of these links.
Well, data shows that the web blogosphere is at least a whole ecosystem, not a one-way street.
Aggregators that link or cite content, and not content producers, are most useful. We examined the traffic of several aggregators that use news headlines only. In all cases, the traffic they collected was at least twice as large as the one they sent to those they referred to. In other words, a very large percentage of users just consumed the headlines as a finished product, and did not use them as a page to enter the full text. Of course, there is a rich ground for conclusions regarding the ability of content producers to earn money, because the main advantage of the additional traffic to your site is the potentially large price of advertising on your pages. (Note: I advised AP and other manufacturers, but not on this).
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Even in the best case for the manufacturer, the aggregator has as much traffic as the manufacturer. After all, the user goes to the manufacturer's website from the site of the aggregator. If you don’t believe the research data, try to remember how much on average you visit your favorite news aggregator per day, and how many times you click on the headlines of specific materials.
In general, it will not be a surprise for someone who has ever thought how people read newspapers: scan headlines, then go to the sports page, movie headings or recipes, depending on their interests. As they say, people read the news not to learn about the fire, but to make sure that there were no fires.
In the old days, newspaper people didn’t care how readers behave, because, having bought a newspaper, they had already paid for it. And now the aggregators who take the articles and create their own page take away all the margin, and there is a certain circle of readers who prefers to scan it.
And since producing content is much more expensive than quoting, economic meaning is lost.
This is not just economics; it affects the nature of journalism. Take Iran. When Shah fell in 1979, the hero of journalism was Mike Wallace, who flew to Tehran only to ask Ayatollah whether he was “abnormal,” as Anwar Sadat called him. This year after the presidential election, a blogger from the newspaper The Huffington Post, who, sitting in the editorial office, made links to all the messages from Tehran that he could find, became the hero of journalism.
Moreover, since the aggregator can use absolutely any content on the network, it can, better than any manufacturer, make its own selection, sharpen it for the needs of any reader. At the same time they rely on the world journalistic community, without paying him a penny. As a result, the aggregator can receive decent traffic and make its business profitable almost immediately.
Some will argue, pointing out that aggregators help to open previously unknown sources of information by including their materials in their area of ​​attention. Great, but can such sites monetize traffic directed to them? And will they be able to secure a normal economic existence, constantly chasing the random attention of the public?
Others will say that the site that received the links can keep a random visitor, make it a regular reader. But the opposite happens - users value not the source more, but the one who pointed it out to them.
What to do with it? I think publishers should take the following steps:
Those who are “in the Internet course” will easily explain to you that the economy of the network depends entirely on links . The more links you get, the better. Few can argue.
Therefore, when the Associated Press (AP) and newspaper owners demanded to share the income of those who link to their sites, it was clear that they simply did not understand the web and did not understand the benefits of these links.
Well, data shows that the web blogosphere is at least a whole ecosystem, not a one-way street.
Aggregators that link or cite content, and not content producers, are most useful. We examined the traffic of several aggregators that use news headlines only. In all cases, the traffic they collected was at least twice as large as the one they sent to those they referred to. In other words, a very large percentage of users just consumed the headlines as a finished product, and did not use them as a page to enter the full text. Of course, there is a rich ground for conclusions regarding the ability of content producers to earn money, because the main advantage of the additional traffic to your site is the potentially large price of advertising on your pages. (Note: I advised AP and other manufacturers, but not on this).
')
Even in the best case for the manufacturer, the aggregator has as much traffic as the manufacturer. After all, the user goes to the manufacturer's website from the site of the aggregator. If you don’t believe the research data, try to remember how much on average you visit your favorite news aggregator per day, and how many times you click on the headlines of specific materials.
In general, it will not be a surprise for someone who has ever thought how people read newspapers: scan headlines, then go to the sports page, movie headings or recipes, depending on their interests. As they say, people read the news not to learn about the fire, but to make sure that there were no fires.
In the old days, newspaper people didn’t care how readers behave, because, having bought a newspaper, they had already paid for it. And now the aggregators who take the articles and create their own page take away all the margin, and there is a certain circle of readers who prefers to scan it.
And since producing content is much more expensive than quoting, economic meaning is lost.
This is not just economics; it affects the nature of journalism. Take Iran. When Shah fell in 1979, the hero of journalism was Mike Wallace, who flew to Tehran only to ask Ayatollah whether he was “abnormal,” as Anwar Sadat called him. This year after the presidential election, a blogger from the newspaper The Huffington Post, who, sitting in the editorial office, made links to all the messages from Tehran that he could find, became the hero of journalism.
Moreover, since the aggregator can use absolutely any content on the network, it can, better than any manufacturer, make its own selection, sharpen it for the needs of any reader. At the same time they rely on the world journalistic community, without paying him a penny. As a result, the aggregator can receive decent traffic and make its business profitable almost immediately.
Some will argue, pointing out that aggregators help to open previously unknown sources of information by including their materials in their area of ​​attention. Great, but can such sites monetize traffic directed to them? And will they be able to secure a normal economic existence, constantly chasing the random attention of the public?
Others will say that the site that received the links can keep a random visitor, make it a regular reader. But the opposite happens - users value not the source more, but the one who pointed it out to them.
What to do with it? I think publishers should take the following steps:
- Assess how much benefit aggregators get from using their content, and build appropriate economic relations with them. At the same time, it is better to forbid making references at all, than to sign an unprofitable deal.
- Consider the possibilities of cooperation with other manufacturers and create your own aggregators.
- Develop new ways to use your content by other sites by the way they monetize a part of traffic from aggregators. For example, to suggest installing not purely content widgets, but wadgets, in which content is combined with advertising.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/288184/
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