Law 9 – Apply the 10 Percent Rule

The Infinity Stopper: The Internet has just gotten too big for its britches. It is spilling over into our bedrooms, through tablets and smartphones. It assaults us in elevators. It even threatens the passivity of our living-room TV experience, a particular hazard to our culture as Americans lead the world (save Serbia and Macedonia) in couch potatohood. The Infinity Stopper, though, handily offers to put a plug in some of that content, boundaries you know that any media psychologist will tell you are the must-have for 2012. Somehow, The Economist (“Yet Another Reason the Economist is Trouncing Competitors“) got one of the beta Infinity Stoppers and has been going to town with it, extending its limited print franchise into a limited (and quite successful) digital franchise. The simple secret of the Infinity Stopper: a beginning, a middle — and ta-da — an end to the stream of content. As infinity-loving tablet aggregator products now prolliferate (Google Currents and Yahoo Livestand joining Flipboard, Pulse and Zite), both The Daily and AOL’s Editions test out their own versions of the Infinity Stopper, offering a daily snapshot for infinity sufferers. Expect the sale of Infinity Stoppers to mushroom, as publishers just say “no.”

“It’s basic human psychology,” says Silas Lyons, editor of the Record Searchlight in Redding, Calif., VP of new media content and a co-chair of one of the Scripps’ task forces that pushed forward with the game dynamics idea. “We’re not trying to solve an audience problem — we’re trying to solve an engagement problem. The reader is being rewarded for consuming, sharing, commenting, and finding insight.”

It’s not just newspaper employees who suffer when a newspaper dies, as is happening to MediaNews’ papers in the Bay Area. It’s a loss felt across the community.

“People have a goal-oriented state of mind,” he says Mendez. “Something is motivating them. That intent makes the medium good at demand capture.” He says big publishers, especially, have enough data to help advertisers better target readers; they just need to use it much better. “Media is worth much more than they are getting.”

What Editor’s Picks is a response to is an intriguing question. Yes, Google still is the huge driver of traffic to news sites, much as they differentiate the value of its many fly-by referrals from the relative few that make a meaningful revenue difference, sending, it says, more than a billion referrals to news publishers worldwide each month. Yet, its behemoth standing is being challenged on multiple fronts. Facebook, Twitter and Linked In are newly proving the power of social news links. Further, in Steve Jobs’ mythical world, which is fast becoming, our own reality, search is so yesterday, replaced by a single-purpose (Apple-enabled), high-branded apps. With apps, search necessity is diminished, and we’ve already tiptoed into that world.