Law 9 – Apply the 10 Percent Rule

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.

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.