Law 9 – Apply the 10 Percent Rule

If close to right, the value of a unique visitor is 3.5x greater for the Times than for HuffPo, in advertising. It’s 4x greater for the Guardian than Mail Online.

Algorithms will help us master this social whirl, recreating communities and circles of readers, in part inspired by the integration of game dynamics into news sites that we already see developing. What now seems like social guesswork is becoming science, and it will drive the news business in distinctly new and better-informed directions.

For Reuters, it’s a leg up in the agency world, and part of its big U.S. push (see my Thursday Nieman lab column, “The newsonomics of Reuters’ Americanization”). Reuters gets a semi-exclusive, able to exclude a handful of key competitors, including AP, from doing similar syndication. The wire offers no financial guarantees, but offers the three promises INN members, and Davis, are banking on to propel them forward, and importantly establish a new syndication leg of revenue, as non-profit funders push for funding diversification.

It sounds like a dream come true: cut costs and maintain control of the business. The risk: What will the FT — which won’t be selling digital subscriptions through Apple’s stores — miss out on? What about the lead generation Apple’s 200 million registered (with credit cards on file) users can offer? That’s one potential downside, finding its competitors, including the Wall Street Journal in iTunes, but no longer the FT. Another: what if readers — we who have been lately conditioned to believe in the miracle of sprightly presentation of apps, as compared to the mundane “online” world — don’t take the web app jump?

In this evolution, the iPad is so far our human pinnacle, though it will be followed by wonders to come. It also marks a signal change in digital usage, and especially in digital news consumption. I think of it as the likely missing link in the digital news evolution. It’s a link that, out of the blue — or maybe out of the darkness — has offered news companies, old and new, the unlikely (last?) chance to get a new sustainable business model.